How Happy Are You?

By M H Ahssan

Have you ever wondered what makes people happy? Why do millionaires often seem wretched when slum-dwellers in Kolkata profess to be content? Here’s what modern science can teach you about turning that frown upside down

It does not look like a picture of the pursuit of happiness. In the photograph, social psychologist Robert Biswas-Diener is sitting on the ground somewhere in Kenya, his back straight, hands in his lap, the fingers of one wrapped fiercely around the opposite wrist. His short-sleeved shirt is half off. A Maasai warrior sits facing him, calmly poking a red-hot stick into Biswas-Diener’s exposed pectoral muscle. Which he did again and again.

“They’re a culture of bravery,” says Biswas-Diener, who travels the world to study happiness. “They do all these rituals of burning and sacrifice as a show of pain tolerance. I went to see a male circumcision on a 15-year-old, and it’s pretty horrific. But the kid held completely still, almost as if he was asleep. The Maasai really do prize this capital of courage. They didn’t necessarily have a lot of respect for my project. So I said, ‘Sure, I’d be willing to have this ritual burning.’ ”

Biswas-Diener’s reaction was to clench his jaw as the burning stick seared his flesh, allowing one eyebrow to jut wildly skyward. The Maasai warriors submitted in turn to that odd instrument of torture, the attitudinal survey. It turned out that they were happy, despite having little or no formal education, few possessions other than their cattle, and nothing but spears to fend off hungry lions.

What makes people happy? Why do millionaires often seem wretched, whereas slum-dwellers in Kolkata profess to be content? Why do we find satisfaction in activities that are painful in the actual experience, like running a marathon, or being branded in a tribal ritual? If real happiness lies in our relationships with family and friends, as research suggests, how do we cultivate these relationships—and not let these people drive us nuts?

Over the past few decades, a small army of scientists has been working to tease out the elusive nature of happiness. The results of their work can at times seem dauntingly complex, as when two economists offer this formula for happiness: r = h[u(y, s, z, t)] + e. At other times, it can seem blissfully simple, as when the same two authors conclude, “The more sex, the happier the person.”

The good news about happiness is that it seems to be a skill that we can acquire and develop. Studies indicate that even severely depressed individuals can increase their sense of well-being. Moreover, some of the most effective techniques are relatively simple and cost nothing.

Let’s start with a list. I sat up all night making mine, and it was infinitely more gratifying than the more familiar 1 am pastime of making “to-do” lists. It was a list of things that, at one time or another, have made me happy. When I was a kid, for instance, I loved to circle a berry tree in our backyard while still my pajamas, stuffing my face till my hands and feet and lips were purple with crushed berries. Sounds dumb? But the truth is that my list was full of trivial stuff: driving my first car with one arm out the window and Hey Jude playing loud on the radio; walking to my flat in Dublin carrying a pint of milk with the cream rising to the top and a loaf of brown bread still warm from the oven; sitting on a porch with a gin and tonic, looking out at the bay, while my daughter played nearby on a swing. Nothing you would put on your list of “99 Things to Do before I Die”.

But maybe it’s not about big things, after all. We often stake our happiness on things that we know, deep down, will quickly leave us feeling empty—acquiring the next big promotion, the slick new car, the hot date. We act as if all hangs on, say, our team winning this Saturday’s big match. But Saturday afternoon comes and goes, says Harvard researcher Daniel T Gilbert, PhD, and all the emotions stirred up by the game get “pushed, pulled, dampened, exacerbated, and otherwise altered by post-game pizza, late-night parties and next-day hangovers”.

In one experiment, Gilbert and other researchers asked participants how bad they would feel if they failed to win the big date. B-a-a-ad, they thought. But when they actually lost, they generally shrugged it off.

So the researchers upped the ante. They asked participants what quantity of a mood-enhancing drug they would want to ingest to make themselves feel better if they lost. A ton, they predicted. But on losing, they actually opted for a much smaller imaginary dose. We have, says Gilbert, a kind of “psychological immune system” for explaining away bad news.

This is, of course, a good thing. It enables us to find our way back to our familiar emotional baseline, even after a devastating event, such as the loss of a parent. Curiously, Gilbert suggests that we may also benefit from our inability to predict what will make us happy. Exaggerating the impact of future events may help us drum up the energy for Saturday’s game. It may explain what Gilbert refers to as “our willingness to marry despite the responsibilities and constraints… or to raise children despite the pooping and howling”.

On the other hand, it may also help sustain the illusion that we could be happy if we were just a little richer, say, or a little more physically attractive. Research has repeatedly shown that increasing your income, or even winning the lottery, is unlikely to make you much happier, once you get beyond the basic minimum.

The psychological immune system is also good at explaining away even extraordinarily good events, so that they quickly seem ordinary “and perhaps even a little dull”, Gilbert says. Thus, people who pin their hopes on the next big thing often end up on what researchers call “the hedonic treadmill”, chasing goals that, once attained, don’t seem to matter much.
People also fool themselves about what made them happy in the past. In one experiment, test subjects’ memories of their vacations were much happier than their feelings during the actual holidays. This flawed memory made them more willing to repeat the vacation experience. The “peak/end rule,” put forth by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, PhD, provides a possible explanation. Kahneman points out that there are 20,000 or so three-second “moments” in the average waking day. Keeping track of them all is just too damned hard. So, as a sort of shortcut, people’s memories of an event are disproportionately influenced, according to Kahneman, by the peak moment and the ending.

Scientists are beginning to understand the mechanisms that make happiness possible—and they’re figuring out how to tinker with them. The peak/end rule, for instance, has practical implications: we’re far more likely to feel happy about some past experience, and far more willing to go back for more, if the experience ended on a positive note. The moral is simple: whatever you’re doing, if you want to do it again with the same people anytime soon, send ’em away smiling.

At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, a volunteer slides his head into the doughnut-hole opening of a magnetic resonance imaging machine, which pings and squeals, constructing a picture of his brain in 30 slices. The MRI is recording the life of the patient’s mind, measuring activity in areas of his brain at any given moment. This gives neuroscientists a way to measure something as intangible as happiness. It also helps explain why things often look gloomier than they are.

Being negative is natural. We evolved to accentuate the negative, to notice the one dumb thing that goes wrong rather than the five or 10 things that go right. For instance, when researchers show people a paper on which is printed a grid full of smiling faces and one angry face, the test subjects instantly zero in on the angry face. Reverse the pattern and it takes them much longer to pick out the solitary smile.

Why be negative? Because focussing on what can go wrong helps us deal with danger. An angry face grabs our attention more than a smile does because it represents a threat. Psychologists say “negativity bias” was built into our minds evolution, because early humans who wandered up to the local watering hole a little too casually tended to be eaten by predators. Staying alive to enjoy your moment of happiness meant having a quick eye for the unhappy possibilities.

On the other hand, if we spent all our time being skittish, we’d never leave our beds. We’d never go to work. Or if we did, we’d shut the door and hide under our desks to avoid all the problems, a behaviour not unknown among new managers. So evolution has also equipped our brains with the opposite tendency, a “positivity offset”, simultaneously encouraging us to approach rather than to withdraw, and thus enabling us to ask somebody out on a date, or apply for a big job, or elbow our way to the bar.

Every human being has an emotional set point, an individual tendency to approach or withdraw, according to University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson, PhD, and the MRI is a way to index it. Activity in the left side of the prefrontal cortex is associated with a whole package of approach behaviours, including the way we point, move towards an object, handle it, and then give it a name. The right side of the prefrontal cortex, on the other hand, specialises in withdrawal behaviours, particularly detecting threats and backing away from them.

So what does all this have to do with happiness? Davidson has found that people with a distinctly higher level of activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex rarely experience troubling moods, and tend to recover from them quickly. At the other extreme, people with a significantly higher level of activity on the right side of the brain are the most likely to have clinical depression or an anxiety disorder over the course of their lives.

But Davidson’s most interesting finding is that people can shift their emotional set points. In a study at a Wisconsin company called Promega, volunteers undertook a regimen of traditional meditation techniques (sitting quietly, breathing deeply, becoming calm and mindful). After eight weeks, MRI tests showed that they experienced a 10 to 15 per cent shift in the ratio of brain activity, away from the right side, bastion of negativity and withdrawal, and over to the positive-thinking left side. The subjects themselves could feel the change.

“I don’t react as much if my buttons are being pushed,” says Promega employee Michael Slater. “Instead of reacting, I ask why this is bugging me, and then I choose what to do about it. It maybe takes half a second. It’s not a big internal dialogue.” Davidson suggests that becoming more positive is an important step: “This culture is obsessed with certain practices, such as going to the gym to achieve demonstrable effects on the body. But there is every evidence that if we care for the mind in the same way we care for the body, positive emotions like generosity, happiness, and compassion can be trained up. They are skills, not fixed characteristics.”

If being negative is natural, why tamper with it now? “We’re no longer living in a hunter-gatherer society,” says University of Pennsylvania psychologist Tayyab Rashid, PhD. “We have basic security.” For the students who go to him suffering from depression, the negatives have piled up and become an impediment. They talk about how screwed up they are, how their mothers were very controlling, how their fathers were never at home, how the world is falling apart. “I listen,” says Rashid. But he also asks them to write a 300-word true story, with a beginning, middle and end, about an instance in which they exhibited strength. “They’re resistant at first.” Another paper. Just what a college student needs. Couldn’t we cut to the Prozac?

Instead of meditation—or medication— Rashid employs a repertoire of exercises developed by researchers in the thriving specialty known as positive psychology. For instance, in the “blessings” exercise, patients take time each night to write down three good things that happened that day. “The brain is wired to be negative. So we don’t remember the good things as well,” says Rashid. Writing them down helps change that.

Next, Rashid has his patients write a letter of thanks to someone who has played an important part in their lives. Then they arrange to visit with their benefactor and read the letter aloud. The face-to-face experience of saying “thank you” is life changing for some people, Rashid says. The “very raw expression of goodwill” tends to open up channels of communication and strengthen relationships. In experiments by psychologist Robert Emmons, PhD, at the University of California at Davis, these techniques helped test subjects boost their optimism, vitality, alertness and other building blocks of happiness.

If expressing deep gratitude seems a little too raw, particularly for emotionally inhibited Western males, Rashid says he understands: he grew up in Pakistan, as the youngest of five children. When their father’s business collapsed, one of the older brothers went to work as a labourer, putting in 20-hour days, six days a week. No one in the family had ever gone beyond high school, but the elder brother sent Rashid to private school and then to an American university. When Rashid eventually earned his doctorate, the brother came to the US for graduation. Rashid had his letter of gratitude ready—and could not read it aloud. “He would have been embarrassed,” Rashid says. “But I gave him the letter, and he responded with lots of tears and hugs. The expression was there. But no spoken words. And it cemented our relationship.”

These exercises are all aimed at spurring people to savour their own lives before it’s too late. It is the Warren Zevon lesson, articulated when the songwriter and performer was dying of cancer. Asked what his condition had taught him, Zevon replied, “How much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

We are most likely to achieve happiness, it seems, when it is completely off the agenda. It shows up when we become so totally absorbed in an activity that time hardly seems to exist, and everything flows in the moment. “The surgeon can’t afford to feel happy during a demanding operation, or a musician while playing a challenging score,” writes Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist who first proposed the concept of “flow”. “Only after the task is completed do we have the leisure to look back on what has happened, and then we are flooded with gratitude for the excellence of that experience— then, in retrospect, we are happy.”

The key to happiness, Csikszentmihalyi suggests, is figuring out what gives you that feeling of flow. For me, it happens when I’m writing, or rowing a boat. For you? Eating Thai food or revising a bank statement are all legitimate contenders. But wait. We naturally think of happiness mainly in terms of pleasures. And yet some of these things sound suspiciously like work. In fact, some researchers suggest that flow— and happiness—often occurs when we set difficult goals for ourselves and go about achieving them—even at a cost of much pain.

Carnegie Mellon University economist George Loewenstein, PhD, describes mountaineering as “long periods of stultifying boredom punctuated by brief periods of terror”. So, what’s the appeal? Loewenstein writes that it’s almost impossible to fake it when you’re climbing a mountain. In addition to the potential for living in the moment, this makes it “an ideal venue for self-signalling”, he says. He suggests that a sense of well-being depends on the need not just to build a good name and impress other people, but also “to impress oneself”. Science underrates the importance of such motives, says Loewenstein, because it hasn’t yet figured out how to measure them.

Our happiness depends finally on other people and on the strength of our connections to them. When Biswas-Diener found that the Maasai in Kenya and slum-dwellers in Kolkata were relatively happy, one key factor was that they had a strong sense of their place in a social network. Homeless people in California, lacking such a network, were deeply unhappy.

When Biswas-Diener’s father, the psychologist and happiness researcher Ed Diener, examined the traits of the happiest people in his studies, he also found that, without exception, they had strong social relationships. A person does not need a vast circle of friends, or many party invites, to be happy. It may just be the people you play carrom with. But everybody needs somebody. When I look at my little happiness list, these connections are everywhere: I see myself climbing into my mother’s arms when I was three; I see my little daughter riding out for the first time on her bike; I see the time my sons appeared together in their high-school production of a famous musical; I see us all lying around on a beach, our noses buried in books; I see my English teacher from first year in college, rumoured to be a death-camp survivor, walking on a city street. “Hello,” I said, “How are you?” And I can still feel the way she beamed at me, lifting her chin to indicate the sky. “The sun is shining!” she explained. Then she passed contagiously by, and I’m not sure why, 30-odd years later, her happiness still makes me so happy.

But this is perhaps too high-minded a note to end on. So bear in mind this final piece of useful advice about one of the most important ways we connect with other people: when in doubt about what will make your significant other happy, have sex with her. In a study, researchers asked 900 working women in Texas to log their activities of the previous day and rank them according to happiness. They rated sex as the activity that produced the most happiness. (The least happy part of the day was commuting to work.) Oh, what the heck, do it twice. Send her off on that commute with a big fat grin.

From the world of happiness research, this is perhaps the ultimate take-home.