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Picture the scene: you’re sat down relaxing one day, when your phone rings. You answer – it’s a good friend of yours. She explains that she needs to predict how happy someone will be in ten years time. She heard that you read a book about happiness, and wants your help. She’s rushed – it’s very important and you only have time to offer one suggestion. What one piece of information is the best way to predict someone’s happiness, ten years down the line?

Really think about this. What would you suggest? Their income level? Whether they’re married? How good their health is? What line of work they’re in? Which country they live in?

The surprising truth is that the most accurate single predictor of how happy someone will be in ten years time, is how happy they are right now. What’s the one thing that stays with you for all this time, and doesn’t change at all? No, not taxes. It’s your genes: the DNA code inside every one of your cells. Your genes are the recipe for how to build you, and research has shown that about 50% of the variation we see in happiness is down to variation in genes.

There’s a common misunderstanding that if something is said to be ‘genetic’, then it is also fixed and unchangeable – this isn’t true. When people talk about genes vs environment, an analogy could be building a house. Genes are the blueprint for a house, and environment is how and where it is built.

Take that blueprint, and give it to different contractors, build it in different locations, different weather conditions, and it will come out differently each time. The houses won’t be completely different – they do have the same blueprint after all – but changes will have to be made. Likewise, a gene doesn’t dictate how something will definitely end up in the real world. Genes are more like instructions for the living things that host them, telling them how to respond to different stimuli they might come across.

For example, at some point in evolution, muscles developed the ability to grow bigger and stronger when they are being worked harder than normal. This helped us adapt to our physical environments, which allowed us to survive. The recipe for this system is contained in the genes. Put simply, it probably goes something like this: “If muscle is under x amount of stress, increase it’s size by y.”

There’s a genetic element to muscle growth. The genes will ‘tell’ the organism how much they should grow by; how much of certain hormones to release, how much protein to synthesise, what stress threshold the muscles need to be under for this process to begin, and things like that. This is all genetic, and so some people find it easier to build muscle than others. But there’s also an environmental element – if you don’t exercise, the genes won’t get activated, no matter how ‘good’ they are. There isn’t a ‘big muscles gene’, but rather, there are genes for a system that makes muscles easier to build – if conditions are right.

Likewise, there isn’t a ‘happiness gene’. It just means that some inherited traits and characteristics are leading us to experience a certain range of happiness levels, if conditions are right. Maybe they trigger more activity in the left hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with positive emotions. Or maybe our inherited personality leads us to do certain things. As an example, social relationships are a source of happiness. Extraversion is a personality trait that leads people to be more sociable. And extraversion happens to be strongly heritable. So while there’s a genetic side to happiness, don’t worry. ‘Genetic’ doesn’t mean ‘fixed’.

Refs:

Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7, 186-189.

Tellegen, A., Lykken, D. T., Bouchard, T. J., Wilcox, K. J., Segal, N. L., & Rich, S. (1988). Personality similarity in twins reared apart and together. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 1031-1039.

Daniel Nettle’s book, Happiness, devotes a chapter to explaining the distinction between wanting something, and liking it once you get it. Wanting and liking are separate. We can want something but not enjoy it, or we can not want something but then find we like it when we get it. Combined with our poor judgements of our future emotions, this can lead people to some pretty strange decisions.

It is mainly through studies of drugs that we know this. In one study, heroin addicts were asked to press a lever 3,000 times to receive one of three possible injections – a low dose of morphine, a moderate dose of morphine, or just saline. Then they were asked to rate how much they enjoyed each shot. The group that received saline wouldn’t not press the lever again; they did not find the injection to be pleasurable and weren’t interested. In the group that received a moderate dose, they found the injection pleasurable and went on to work the lever for another shot. But the group receiving only a low dose was the interesting one. They too press the lever again, to get another shot – even though they did not find the dose high enough to be pleasurable. It was enough to trigger the wanting system, but not the liking system.

People are not always looking for pleasure. We also look for status, power, creativity, meaning, and lots of other things. The implication is, something that gives us a little advancement in one of these areas, (say, a job that gives us a higher status at work), might activate the wanting system, but not the liking system (for example, we realise we don’t like management or responsibility).

Why would the wanting system lead us to strive after things that we won’t? Well, the brain doesn’t much care how happy you are, as long as you’re surviving. We might not like our higher status job, but it boosts our ability to survive. Millions of years ago there was no welfare state, no agriculture, no civilisation. We roamed in tribes where higher status individuals had higher chances of survival. Although life is very different now, we have the same instincts.

Unless we’re able to consciously realise the times when something we want isn’t something we like, we might end up making the same mistakes over and over.

The principle of adaptation is quite interesting, and is related to the progress principle. Hedonic adaptation means that very often it is changes in circumstances, not absolute conditions, that affect our happiness. Many people today feel they could not live without their x, where x is a new versatile solution for modern living, a new type of phone, say. But of course, they could. They have simply gotten so used to living with that phone, that they find it hard to imagine life without it. They have adapted to it. The happiness we experience is based on a comparison between our current state, and the one we have adapted to. If you take the phone away suddenly, they will be unhappy, but over time, they will adapt to not having it too.

Lottery winners, perhaps the luckiest people of all, become extremely happy after winning. They are suddenly free of financial problems, their sex appeal immediately increases, and they can do or buy almost anything they want. But over time, they adapt to the high life, and their happiness returns to just about where it was before.

Quadriplegics experience something similar after losing the use of their limbs. Their happiness understandably takes a considerable dip. But over time, they being to adapt to their situation; their goals and expectations change, and their happiness returns to almost (but not quite) the same level it was originally.

In many ways, unfortunately, hedonic adaptation is in direct competition with the way modern life is set up. The deal is simple; you get the money, the clothes, the big house, and the nice car, and then bang! Well done champ, you made it, you’ll be happy forever. But then the new car is released, the new clothing line comes out, and you want a house with a pool and an ocean view. Your expectations rise, what was once a luxury becomes a necessity, and you find yourself wanting more again, like a hamster on a treadmill (this idea is often called the hedonic treadmill, in fact). There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better life for yourself and your family, but much of what you think will bring you that, won’t, because you’ll adapt to it. Meanwhile, if you’re spending a lot of your time working just to chase after these things, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to do other things that will have a stronger impact on your happiness.

Refs:

Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery Winners and Accident
Victims: Is Happiness Relative. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-
927.

The progress principle is the science behind the famous saying “it’s the journey, not the destination, that counts.” In other words, more happiness will be achieved in the steps that lead up to a goal than in the final step of reaching the goal itself. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt explains the logic behind this. Say it takes 10 steps to reach a goal. Why would going from step 9 to step 10 bring more happiness than all the other steps combined?

To give a personal example, I really wanted to get a first in my psychology degree, but I’d screwed up the first year and a half, work-wise, so I needed to make up for that. I worked hard in the final three semesters, my marks got better and better, and my average started to rise up to the magical 70% target. The final grade I got, for my dissertation, pushed me just over the 70% mark. But when I got that result back, I wasn’t jumping for joy. If I felt anything it was more like relief at that point. In fact, thinking back on the experience, I scarcely remember getting my final grade.

This isn’t always the case, and some goals will have you jumping around. But speaking generally, happiness results from taking a step in a beneficial direction, but not from standing still at any particular point. The feeling of the final step is weaker than the previous steps, because the part of the brain associated with positive emotions (the left prefrontal cortex, as we discussed earlier) reduces its activity once you reach a goal. This isn’t such a bad thing; we need the progress principle so that we stay motivated to pursue goals. If all the happiness came at the destination rather than the journey, where would our motivation come from?

The results are in.  And the result, of the happiness battle of the sexes, is……

A draw!  I know, boring!  But unfortunately, men and women usually score approximately equal in happiness studies.  There’s the odd study that puts men slightly higher, and the odd one that puts women slightly higher, but most studies fail to find a difference in happiness and gender.

What these studies all measure though, is the average.  What is interesting is that women experience more unhappiness and negative emotions; more sadness, anxiety, shame and guilt.  This is balanced out by their experience of stronger and more frequent positive emotions.  So women experience a greater range and intensity of emotion than men, but when averaged out, it’s about the same.

There are other differences too.  Another study investigated the link between happiness and gender by following a group of people over the course of their lives, and found that women tend to be happier in early life, and men tend to be happier in later life.  The authors suggest two reasons for this.  Firstly, women are more likely to have met their goals for their ‘goods and family life’ goals (the stuff and the family they want) earlier in life, while men reach them later.

The second explanation is the proportion of men and women in marriage or committed relationships tends to change as people get older, because the husband tends to be older than the wife.  And as we’ve already seen, marriage is a potential cause of happiness.

So when it comes to happiness, the sexes come out equally.  This saddens me, for it disputes one of my earliest scientific predictions.  When I was 6, I hypothesised that “boys rule and girls drool.”  Alas, my theory fails to find support once again.?

Refs:

Diener, E, Suh, E. M., Lucas, R. E., Smith, H. L. (1999). Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress. Psychological Bulletin, 125(2), 276-302

Nolen-Hoeksma, S. and Rusting, C.L. (1999). Gender differences in well-being – In Kahneman et al (1999) Well-Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, New York: Russell Sage Foundation

Plagnol, A. C. & Easterlin, R. A. (2008). Aspirations, Attainments, and Satisfaction: Life Cycle Differences Between American Women and Men. Journal of Happiness Studies.

Autonomy refers to the amount of control you feel you have over your life. How much of your life are you in control of? How much are you able to change? You probably have full control over many things. For example, your living room. You can paint it and arrange it however you desire. Some say you can even use Feng Shui to channel powerful chi energies, ostensibly using only your couch and television set. How’s that for control?

Let’s try another example: how your time is spent between 9-5 each day. How much control do you have over that?

In terms of happiness, autonomy is a huge factor – one of the biggest. Some researchers studied the happiness of 900 Texan women as they went about their day. Here’s how the results roughly looked:

There’s a general upward trend, but the happiest times are clearly lunchtime and after work; the times of day when you are free to do as you please.

Autonomy might be everyone’s favourite goal. Millions of people go to work every day, dreaming of a time when they don’t have to. We’d love to win the lottery, so that we’re free to do anything. We covet retirement as the holy Mecca of freedom, and want it as early as possible.

And we’re right in pursuing this goal. A nursing home called Arden House, rated one of the best in the US, was the stage for an experiment in autonomy. One group of residents were given more autonomy – plants to water, choice over how the rooms were arranged, and a reminder of their responsibilities towards themselves. A second group was given plants that were watered by the staff, and a speech stressing the staff’s responsibilities over them. The high autonomy group then became happier than the low autonomy group. More than that, eighteen months later, the high autonomy group had more people left in it! (15% mortality versus 30% in the low autonomy group).

But there’s more to autonomy than having physical agency to do things. In Switzerland, many policy decisions are made by referendum, but some areas have greater right to demand a referendum than others. A study found a link between the extent of this right and the happiness of the people. In fact, the difference in happiness between the most autonomous area and the least was about the same as doubling a person’s income.

Speaking of income, money is the first thing to come to mind when people think of autonomy. When you think of rich people, do you think of Monaco, beaches, yachts and cocktails? Or do you think 80 hour weeks, pressure, stress and, well, cocktails again?

The potential is there, true. The more money you have, the more control you can have over your life. But autonomy and money don’t necessarily walk hand-in-hand down the beaches of Monaco. Autonomy is more important. We know this because it accounts for twenty times more of the variation in happiness than income. Not only that, but people with low income but high personal control are far happier than rich people with low personal control (statistically, the difference is 7.85 out of ten compared with 5.82).

One thing is clear from all this; if you can come up with ways to increase the control you have over your life, you’ll get happier – even if you don’t have as much money coming in. You can even become happier than you would be if you got rich, but had to work unreasonable hours to earn your money. Good news!

Now, if you’ll excuse me for a moment, I have a strange urge to rearrange my living room…

“A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book”- Irish Proverb

“It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.”- Gandhi

It’s quite a curious topic, health. I notice that some people want it, while some people aren’t bothered. Or at least, there are other things they would rather have instead of it. It’s quite interesting to find out where people put health in their list of priorities.

Most people put it below taste; that’s common. They eat for pleasure first and function second.

Comfort is another common priority over health. It’s much easier to sleep in for an extra hour than get up and do some exercise. I would know, I’ve done it a million times. I’m sure your familiar with the process; at the relevant time, your alarm goes off, screeching it’s awful, high-pitched message into your sensitive morning ears. Reluctantly, you wake up. Then, all of a sudden, your bed becomes 100x more comfortable, and you can’t seem to leave. Strange, how that happens isn’t it? I have found that this is a universal feature, built into all mattresses.

But, after a while, you learn to get past it. However, doing so takes effort. Health often requires that you give up certain pleasures and comforts right now, in exchange for another pleasure that only comes to you further down the line.

It’s this ‘further down the line’ part that’s the problem. It’s against human nature to defer gratification, because we’re programmed to conserve energy. Our bodies are evolved for use in an African Savannah; if you manage to find the same amount of comfort there as you do in a centrally-heated house with a double bed, duvet and a magical mattress that gets more comfortable between 6-7 every morning, then you’re on to something good!

Simply put, if you find a warm, safe place, your body will tell you to stay there. It doesn’t know that you’re not an active hunter-gatherer, that you can be in this safe, comfortable place whenever you want. It doesn’t know that if you don’t get up now, the only possibility of physical effort will be if the lifts are still jammed at the office.

It takes a while to subvert this instinct, especially when the payoff isn’t really defined to us. We have a vague, wispy concept of something called ‘health’, but what does that really mean to us? Maybe being ‘fitter’, more able to run around. Maybe less chance of some disease coming further down the line (and we can change later, plenty of time for that). The benefits that come right now are harder to figure out.

I won’t bother listing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. But all of these things should directly or indirectly lead to happiness, surely. And to a point, they do; people who suffer illnesses or disabilities report that they are less happy than people who don’t. No surprise there, but what is surprising is the adaptation to chronic disability. Over time, people gradually become more accustomed to it, and happiness starts to move to its previous level; although it does not quite return to where it was previously. That finding was based on serious disability (where people had to stop working).

And the relationship works both ways; being happy is good for your health. Happy people have stronger immune systems, resist the flu more easily, and take less time to recover from surgery. Part of the reason for this is probably lowered stress. The “stress hormone” cortisol increases blood pressure, and reduces the immune response. But when happy, you get the opposite effect; blood pressure and heart rate fall.

Amazingly, self-reports of happiness can also be used to predict how long a person will live. In 1932, new nuns coming into the American School Sisters of Notre Dame were asked to write an autobiographical portrait of themselves. These were stored away, until some psychologists came along and decided to rate them for how much positive feeling they revealed. In 1991 the psychologists caught up with the nuns, and over the next nine years, 21% of the happier nuns died, while 55% of the least happy died. Remarkably, how happy a person is in their 20s is a powerful predictor not only of general health, but of how long they will live.

This doesn’t mean you can lie in your bed instead of exercising! It just means that maybe there’s some truth to that Irish proverb after all.??

Refs:

Rosenkranz, M et al (2003). Affective style and in vivo immune response: Neurobehavioural mechanisms. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100, 11148-52.

Ryff, C & Singer, B. (2003). The role of emotion on pathways to positive health. In Davidson et al Handbook of Affective Science. NY: Oxford.

Danner, D., Snowden, D. & Friesen, W. (2001). Positive emotions in early life and longevity: Findings from the nun study. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 804-13.

“Happiness is neither within us only, nor without us; it is the union of ourselves with God.”- Blaise Pascal

“When a man is freed of religion, he has a better chance to live a normal and wholesome life.”- Sigmund Freud

Are religious people happier than atheists? Freud, as you read in the quote above, did not believe so. He wasn’t a big fan of religion, seeing it as a neurosis, creating guilt and suppressing sexuality. However, Freud was also not a big fan of putting his ideas to the test. Luckily though, other people are, and now that happiness can be reliably measured, we can finally put this idea to the test.

The research, it turns out, actually contradicts what Freud believed – there does indeed appear to be a link between religion and happiness. Several studies have been done, but to give an example, one study found that the more frequently people attended religious events, the happier they were; 47% of people who attended several types a week reported that they were ‘very happy’, as opposed to 28% who attended less than monthly.

In practical terms, religious people have the upper hand on atheists in several other areas. They drink and smoke less, are less likely to abuse drugs, and they stay married longer. After a stressful even like bereavement, unemployment, or illness, those who worship don’t take it as hard and recover faster. All of the above are likely to be beneficial to a person’s happiness. Additionally, religious people, as a result of their beliefs, have a greater sense of meaning, purpose and hope in their lives.

Could this be divine intervention? Alas, these studies can’t inform us as to whether there is a God, only that people who believe in one tend to be happier. There are variables that need to be controlled for – religious people have communities that provide social support, and a belief system that provides structure to their lives and may alleviate some fears to a degree, such as the fear of death. So all we know for sure is that religious people tend to be happier than non-religious people.

Come on, you didn’t expect all the answers, did you?

Refs:

Myers, D. G. (2000). Funds, Friends and Faith of Happy People. American Psychologist. 55(1), 56-67.

“There was never a child so lovely, but his mother was glad to get him to sleep.“?- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You can learn many things from children. How much patience you have, for instance.”?- Franklin P. Jones

The link between children and happiness is one of the more controversial areas of happiness research.  Studies show that spending time with children brings about roughly the same amount of happiness as doing housework.  In other words, not so much! More than that, the overall effect of children on happiness is slightly negative.  

The main study of children and happiness tracked the mood of 900 Texan women as they went about their day.  The activities they did were then put in rank order, based on mood.  Taking care of the children also caused about the same happiness as surfing the web and checking emails.  Incidentally, the study did find some more predictable findings: the activities that brought the best moods were sex, socialising and relaxing, and the ones bringing the lowest moods were commuting and working.

To most people, this is indeed a controversial finding, and one that goes against every intuition they have. But to me, it makes perfect sense. I’m a 28 year-old male with my feet firmly planted in bachelorhood. I see children as noisy annoying little things that have ruined one too many cinema experiences. But other people go nuts for them, picking them up, responding to every utterance the little things make with equally nonsensical replies, putting pictures of them everywhere, and generally saying “aaaaaawwwwwww” a lot.

I don’t get it, personally. Maybe one day I will, but I do see that there’s a discrepancy between what the research says and what people intuitively believe. Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, proposed three reasons that the scientific research contradicts our intuitions:

1) Expected Value. We put a lot of value on things that are expensive and that we put a lot into. That’s why selling a product too cheap can be a bad idea – it might be seen as low quality. Because people put so much of everything into raising kids, it is natural to assume that there’s a big payoff from it – whether or not there actually is.

2) Selective Memory. Gilbert puts it best: “One ‘I wub you, Daddy’ can erase eight hours of ‘no, not yet, not now, stop asking’.” In other words, you can have many lows, but when you think back, you tend to just remember the highs.

3) Huge Time Investment. So much time is spent raising kids. If you spend that much time doing any one thing, you’d have to pass on doing a load of other things that might make you happy; so of course your day-to-day happiness would take a slight hit. The positive implication is though, could you spend so much time doing any other one thing and still be as happy? That’s his implication, by the way, not mine; I can think of lots of things!

If I could add a fourth one, it would be that this measurement of happiness is based on a specific definition of it, which we talked about in a previous article. The results might have been different if other measurements were used; for example, one that takes into account how much meaning you feel your life has. Perhaps children give your life a greater sense of meaning and purpose; even if they don’t bring more pleasure overall. 

Refs:

Kahneman, D., Krueger, A. B., Schkade, D. A., Schwarz, N., & Stone, A. A. (2004). A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: The day reconstruction method. Science, 306, 1776-1780.