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Is there a simple equation for happiness?

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This interesting article by Jeremy McCarthy looks at a number of formulas which have been put forward by positive psychology researchers as a solution to finding happiness.  Jeremy argues that although the equations may appear over-simplified they do succeed in making a very valid point which is easy to understand.  It is important to realise that much more of our personal happiness is under our own control than you might think.  Read on to find out why.  What would your happiness equation consist of? It’s worth thinking about….

On Happiness Equations

by  on 8:22 AM in BOOK REVIEWS, POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, QUESTIONS OF SCIENCE

Mathematics by Robert Scarth

In Martin Seligman’s book, Authentic Happiness, he uses a simple equation to describe where happiness comes from:

H = S + C + V

Where “H is your enduring level of happiness, S is your set range, C is the circumstances of your life, and V represents factors under your voluntary control.”

I hear Seligman take a lot of flack for this equation in scientific circles.  There are those who think this is an oversimplification of how happiness works, and that describing it as a simple sum is faulty math in calculating the complex relationships between the variables.

Here’s Barbara Ehrenreich, bashing Seligman in her anti-positivity opus, Bright-Sided:

I move on to one of the most irritatingly pseudo-scientific things in his book, the “happiness equation,” which he had introduced with the coy promise that it “is the only equation I ask you to consider,” as if positive psychology rests on whole thickets of equations from which the reader will mercifully be spared . . . Now I understand what he is trying to say: that a person’s happiness is determined in some way by their innate disposition (S), their immediate circumstances (a recent job loss or bereavement, for example), and by the efforts (V) that they make to improve their outlook. This could be stated unobjectionably as:

H = f(S, C, V)

Or, in words: H is a function of S, C, V, where the exact nature of that function is yet to be determined. But to express it as an equation is to invite ridicule. I ask the question that would occur to any first year physics student, “What are the units of measurement?”

Studying ’till the Sun Goes Down by Jekert Gwapo

I’m sure mathematically, Ehrenreich is correct, but she’s missing the point.  The equation is not intended to be filled in with actual numbers, as if you could calculate your happiness with the ease of pressing buttons on a calculator.  It’s simply a way to describe a complex subject in a way that is easier to understand.

The point of the equation is pretty simple:

Some of our happiness is fixed (genetically programmed, perhaps), some is influenced by the conditions we find ourselves in (where we live,health, wealth and marital status, political and cultural factors, etc.), and some is subject to change through voluntary control. Because the V can be influenced, this is the area where, according to Seligman, positive psychology should focus.

Sonja Lyubomirsky also has taken some heat for attaching some percentages to this equation and showing that about 50% of the variance in happiness can be explained by genetics (the set-point or S above), only about 10% by our circumstances (C), and that leaves a whopping 40% that is subject to voluntary influence (V).

The criticism here is somewhat better founded.  These percentages are based on variances across large populations and don’t tell us much about individuals (your personal mileage may vary.)  And there’s a bit of a leap here to assume that you can truly manipulate whatever falls outside of what’s been found in genetics and circumstance.

But these criticisms still miss the point.  Lyubomirsky is using a simple pie chart to communicate three important facts about human happiness:

A lot of it is set (maybe about half).

Some (a lot less than we think) is dependent on our circumstances.

And, there is a chunk left over that is within our power to change.

I find this not only useful, but a powerful message to share with those who may be assuming that their happiness in life is determined completely by factors outside of their control

Another man who uses simple equations to explain deep human truths is Chip Conley, the author of Emotional Equations (and one of my heroes in the hospitality industry.)

His formula for happiness is as follows:

Happiness = Wanting What You Have / Having What You Want

Emotional Equations by Chip Conley

Here, the equation brings to mind Buddhist principles of acceptance and how a shift in mindset can increase happiness more than merely attaining or accomplishing more.  Again, the math is flawed because the equation suggests that having more would cause your happiness to plummet, but once again, that’s not the point.

Conley uses equations to explore relationships.  There is a relationship between wanting and having that is described here.  Most people focus on having more, but Conley’s equation asks us to think about wanting less (or better yet, wanting and appreciating what we already have.)  His book is filled with simple equations to help readers come to terms with the factors that allow certain emotions to rise and fall through life.

For me, all of these equations are useful.  They force us to use an analytical part of our brain to consider the forces at play between variables that are unquantifiable.   To the critics of these equations, I’d like to share the same advice that Conley gives to his readers . . . “try not to let the math distract you from the bigger message.”

p.s. What would your happiness equation be?  I think mine would be something like this:

Happiness = (Meaningful Work + Joyful Play + Loving People)  * Time to Appreciate It

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References and recommended reading:

Conley, C. (2012). Emotional Equations: Simple Truths for Creating Happiness + Success.

Ehrenreich, B. (2010).  Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Picador.

Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). The How of Happiness: A scientific approach to getting the life you want. New York: Penguin Press.

Seligman, M. E. P. (2003).  Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. Free Press.

Article published in The Psychology of Well-Being 29th May 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pessimism bias – Smile or Die

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Yesterday’s blog post looked at the theory of the optimism bias.  In today’s blog post we look at the book “Smile or Die” by Barbara Ehrenreich which argues the case against aiming for a perpetual state of positivity.  Jenni Murray, who like Barbara Ehrenreich has also been diagnosed with breast cancer, is in favour of Ehrenreich’s quest for realism rather than the pursuit of a permanent state of happiness.  This video featuring Barbara Ehrenreich explains the logic behind her views. By watching the video and reading Jenni Murray’s article you will be better equipped to decide which viewpoint you agree with.  Should we aim to be optimistic, pessimistic or realistic or a combination of all three?  The decision is yours.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich

Jenni Murray salutes a long-overdue demolition of the suggestion that positive thinking is the answer to all our problems.

playtex moonwalk

Some of the 15,000 participants in the 2005 Playtex Moonwalk around Hyde Park, London, to raise money for the breast cancer charity Walk the Walk. Photograph: onEdition

Every so often a book appears that so chimes with your own thinking, yet flies so spectacularly in the face of fashionable philosophy, that it comes as a profoundly reassuring relief. After reading Barbara Ehrenreich’sSmile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World, I feel as if I can wallow in grief, gloom, disappointment or whatever negative emotion comes naturally without worrying that I’ve become that frightful stereotype, the curmudgeonly, grumpy old woman. Instead, I can be merely human: someone who doesn’t have to convince herself that every rejection or disaster is a golden opportunity to “move on” in an upbeat manner.

Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World by Barbara Ehrenreich


Ehrenreich came to her critique of the multi-billion-dollar positive-thinking industry – a swamp of books, DVDs, life coaches, executive coaches and motivational speakers – in similar misery-making circumstances to those I experienced. She was diagnosed with breast cancer and, like me, found herself increasingly disturbed by the martial parlance and “pink” culture that has come to surround the disease. My response when confronted with the “positive attitude will help you battle and survive this experience” brigade was to rail against the use of militaristic vocabulary and ask how miserable the optimism of the “survivor” would make the poor woman who was dying from her breast cancer. It seemed to me that an “invasion” of cancer cells was a pure lottery. No one knows the cause. As Ehrenreich says: “I had no known risk factors, there was no breast cancer in the family, I’d had my babies relatively young and nursed them both. I ate right, drank sparingly, worked out, and, besides, my breasts were so small that I figured a lump or two would improve my figure.” (Mercifully, she hasn’t lost her sense of humour.)

I had long suspected that improved survival rates for women who had breast cancer had absolutely nothing to do with the “power” of positive thinking. For women diagnosed between 2001 and 2006, 82% were expected to survive for five years, compared with only 52% diagnosed 30 years earlier. The figures can be directly related to improved detection, better surgical techniques, a greater understanding of the different types of breast cancer and the development of targeted treatments. Ehrenreich presents the evidence of numerous studies demonstrating that positive thinking has no effect on survival rates and she provides the sad testimonies of women who have been devastated by what one researcher has called “an additional burden to an already devastated patient”.

Pity, for example, the woman who wrote to the mind/body medical guru Deepak Chopra ”Even though I follow the treatments, have come a long way in unburdening myself of toxic feelings, have forgiven everyone, changed my lifestyle to include meditation, prayer, proper diet, exercise and supplements, the cancer keeps coming back. Am I missing a lesson here that it keeps re-occurring? I am positive I am going to beat it, yet it does get harder with each diagnosis to keep a positive attitude.”

As Ehrenreich goes on to explain, exhortations to think positively – to see the glass as half-full even when it lies shattered on the floor – are not restricted to the pink-ribbon culture of breast cancer. She roots America’s susceptibility to the philosophy of positive thinking in the country’s Calvinist past and demonstrates how, in its early days, a puritanical “demand for perpetual effort and self-examination to the point of self-loathing” terrified small children and reduced “formerly healthy adults to a condition of morbid withdrawal, usually marked by physical maladies as well as inner terror”.

It was only in the early 19th century that the clouds of Calvinist gloom began to break and a new movement began to grow that would take as fervent a hold as the old one had. It was the joining of two thinkers,Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, in the 1860s that brought about the formalisation of a post-Calvinist world-view, known as the New Thought Movement. A new type of God was envisaged who was no longer hostile and indifferent, but an all-powerful spirit whom humans had merely to access to take control of the physical world.

Middle-class women found this new style of thinking, which came to be known as the “laws of attraction”, particularly beneficial. They had spent their days shut out from any role other than reclining on a chaise longue, denied any opportunity to strive in the world, but the New Thought approach and its “talking therapy” developed by Quimby opened up exciting new possibilities. Mary Baker Eddy, a beneficiary of the cure, went on to found Christian Science. Ehrenreich notes that although this new style of positive thinking did apparently help invalidism or neurasthenia, it had no effect whatsoever on diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, typhus, tuberculosis and cholera – just as, today, it will not cure cancer.

Thus it was that positive thinking, the assumption that one only has to think a thing or desire it to make it happen, began its rapid rise to influence. Today, as Ehrenreich shows, it has a massive impact on business, religion and the world’s economy. She describes visits to motivational speaker conferences where workers who have recently been made redundant and forced to join the short-term contract culture are taught that a “good team player” is by definition “a positive person” who “smiles frequently, does not complain, is not overly critical and gratefully submits to whatever the boss demands”. These are people who have less and less power to chart their own futures, but who are given, thanks to positive thinking, “a world-view – a belief system, almost a religion – that claimed they were, in fact, infinitely powerful, if only they could master their own minds.”

And none was more susceptible to the lure of this philosophy than those self-styled “masters of the universe”, the Wall Street bankers. Those of us raised to believe that saving up, having a deposit and living within one’s means were the way to proceed and who wondered how on earth the credit crunch and the subprime disasters could have happened need look no further than the culture that argued that positive thinking would enable anyone to realise their desires. (Or as one of Ehrenreich’s chapter headings has it, “God wants you to be rich”.)

Ehrenreich’s work explains where the cult of individualism began and what a devastating impact it has had on the need for collective responsibility. We must, she says, shake off our capacity for self-absorption and take action against the threats that face us, whether climate change, conflict, feeding the hungry, funding scientific inquiry or education that fosters critical thinking. She is anxious to emphasise that she does “not write in a spirit of sourness or personal disappointment, nor do I have any romantic attachment to suffering as a source of insight or virtue. On the contrary, I would like to see more smiles, more laughter, more hugs, more happiness… and the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking”. Her book, it seems to me, is a call for the return of common sense and, I’m afraid, in what purports to be a work of criticism, I can find only positive things to say about it. Damn!

Article written by Jenni Murray in The Observer on