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Happiness Inc.

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This article by Elizabeth Weil about reluctant “happiness expert” Sonja Lyubomirsky was published in the NY Times on April 19th 2013.

If you would like to learn more about Sonja Lyubomirsky’s research you can check out her website by clicking here. If you are interested in trying out her theories she has devlopped an iPhone App called Live Happy™ in conjunction with the company Signal Patterns. You can find details of this App here. Sonja has written 2 interesting books on the subject of happiness: The How of Happiness and the more recent The Myths of Happiness.

 

 

 

Happiness Inc.

Andrew Rae
Article By ELIZABETH WEIL, Published: April 19, 2013 in NYTimes

According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, you have a happiness set point. It’s partly encoded in your genes. If something good happens, your sense of happiness rises; if something bad happens, it falls.

Emily Berl for The New York Times

The author Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, shown at home in Santa Monica. She has cemented her place in a long line of happiness-industry stalwarts.

But either way, before too long, your mood will creep back to its set point because of a really powerful and perverse phenomenon referred to in science as “hedonic adaptation.” You know, people get used to things.

With her 2007 book, “The How of Happiness,” and this year’s follow-up, “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, caused ripples in her field but also drew a wider audience, cementing her place in a long chain of happiness-industry stalwarts, from M. Scott Peck with “The Road Less Traveled” to Martin E. P. Seligman and “Learned Optimism” to Daniel Gilbert and his best-selling “Stumbling on Happiness.”

Dr. Lyubomirsky’s findings can be provocative and, at times, counterintuitive. Renters are happier than homeowners, she says. Interrupting positive experiences makes them more enjoyable. Acts of kindness make people feel happier, but not if you are compelled to perform the same act too frequently. (Bring your lover breakfast in bed one day, and it feels great. Bring it every day, and it feels like a chore.)

Dr. Lyubomirsky — 46, Russian and expecting to give birth to her fourth child this weekend — is an unlikely mood guru. “I really hate all the smiley faces and rainbows and kittens,” she said in her office. She doesn’t often count her blessings or write gratitude letters, both of which she thinks sound hokey even though her research suggests they make people happier.

For years, she even worried that the study of how to increase happiness would make her work sound too applied, too lightweight, too much like that of a life coach. For a decade, she focused instead on categorizing characteristics of happy and unhappy people with clinical, almost anthropological detachment. But friends, family members, students, reporters — everyone — kept asking: How does it work? How can you make yourself happier?

So Dr. Lyubomirsky finally turned her research toward those questions.

Now, according to Barbara Fredrickson, principal investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina, “Sonja is the queen of happiness.”

“She’s one of the few people that actually does research on happiness per se,” she said of Ms. Lyubomirsky’s ascent. “It’s a supply-and-demand issue.”

One day this winter, a young graduate student knocked on Dr. Lyubomirsky’s office door, seeking her opinion. The student was thinking of designing a study to see if expectant fathers were happier after their wives gave birth. Or maybe she should study what’s the most happiness-inducing way for a woman to tell her partner she’s pregnant? (Dr. Lyubomirsky, who is fairly practiced in this department, liked the second option.)

Later, another student fired up her laptop to discuss data that appeared off. “Look at this state of gratitude, that’s really weird,” Dr. Lyubomirsky said, puzzling over the graph. “What happened here? Was this March?” The school calendar influences student-research subjects: everybody is happier right after spring break.

Among the big dials people can tune to affect personal happiness is how much we compare ourselves to others. As Dr. Lyubomirsky has found in her lab (and many of us find around the office or at a bar), unhappy people compare a lot and care about the results. They tend to feel better when they get poor evaluations but learn others did worse than when they get excellent evaluations but learn others did better.

In one experiment, documented in “The Myths of Happiness,” Dr. Lyubomirsky asked two volunteers at a time to use hand puppets to teach a lesson about friendship to an imaginary audience of children. Afterward the puppeteers were evaluated against each other: you did great but your partner did better, or you did badly but your partner was even worse.

The volunteers who were happy before the puppeteering review cared a bit about hearing that they had performed worse than their colleagues but largely shrugged it off. The unhappy volunteers were devastated. Dr. Lyubomirsky writes: “It appears that unhappy individuals have bought into the sardonic maxim attributed to Gore Vidal: ‘For true happiness, it is not enough to be successful oneself. … One’s friends must fail.’ ” This, she says, is probably why a great number of people know the German word schadenfreude (describing happiness at another’s misfortune) and almost nobody knows the Yiddish shep naches (happiness at another’s success).

Late one afternoon at California-Riverside, Dr. Lyubomirsky grabbed her bag and walked at breakneck pace through the mystifying campus to a weekly meeting with her advisees. At a long table, she tended to her pregnancy blood-sugar needs by eating an individual-size chocolate cheesecake from Whole Foods while students recounted being cornered in front of their posters at a recent conference.

“Someone came up to me and said, ‘Oh, do you really do this for real?’ ” she recalled — meaning, write gratitude letters. “I said, ‘Um, no,’ and then he said, ‘Do other people who study this do them?’ ”

Dr. Lyubomirsky said: “Weird. Scientists should be unbiased. Just because I do a study on the effects of meditation doesn’t mean I should be meditating. I’m probably less biased if I don’t meditate.”

Science and happiness are not a perfect fit. The American philosopher William James is also considered the father of American psychology, and, as Dr. Lyubomirsky herself is well aware, once you leave philosophy aside, conclusions that psychological research lets us draw about how to be happy tend to sound a bit flat.

Dr. Lyubomirsky is a surprising apostle of mirth. Born in Moscow, she emigrated with her parents and brother to the United States at age 9 with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. Settling in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the Lyubomirsky elders didn’t adapt very quickly: both switched to jobs for which they were hugely overqualified. For years, Dr. Lyubomirsky’s mother cried every time she heard Tchaikovsky. Sonja taught herself English by watching “The Love Boat.” (She speaks without an accent.) Her brother, Ilya Lyubomirsky, an engineer, said she was “quiet and very studious as a young girl.” By high school, he said, she “blossomed socially” into “having a way with people.”

During her first semester at Harvard, she took a course from Brendan Maher, the psychology professor credited with changing psychology from a soft science based on descriptions to a hard one based on data, and decided she wanted to major in the field. After college, she moved west to study at Stanford, where her graduate school adviser, Lee Ross, took her for a walk in the school’s Rodin sculpture garden and suggested she study happiness.

“At the time,” Dr. Lyubomirsky recalled, “only one person was studying happiness: Ed Diener. Back then it was called ‘subjective well being’ and the topic was considered very fuzzy.”

To clear the haze, Dr. Lyubomirsky spent that decade trying to define what happy and unhappy people were like. According to her friend Andrew Ward, now in the psychology department at Swarthmore College, “the working assumption in those years was that happy people were rationalizing all the time.” So Dr. Lyubomirsky designed an experiment in which people ranked 10 desserts, knowing they’d get one. Each participant was then given his second or third choice and told to rank all 10 desserts again. Guess who rationalized the desserts they received? The unhappy people. As Dr. Ward remembered, “The happy people said, ‘Well, this dessert is good, and I’m sure the others are good, too!’ The unhappy people liked their desserts just fine but indicated they were extremely relieved not to have received the ‘awful’ nonchosen dessert. In other words, unhappy people derogated the dessert they did not receive, whereas happy people felt no need to do so. The implication is that unhappy people are doing more mental work.”

Dr. Lyubomirsky’s academic career took a strange turn in January 1999 when Mr. Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,” cherry-picked her and a dozen or so other psychology academics under 40 and invited them to Akumal, Mexico. There, Mr. Seligman, who part of the time wore a tie-dyed T-shirt with the word “YES” on the front, willed the field of positive psychology into being. On the beach near Tulum, the group members wrote a Positive Psychology manifesto. They defined the field as “the scientific study of optimal human functioning” and asserted “a new commitment on the part of research psychologists to focus attention upon the sources of psychological health, thereby going beyond prior emphases upon disease and disorder.” Under palm trees, they listened to talks — for instance, Laura King broke down the myth that “happy people are stupid.” One night they sang and recited poetry. Dr. Lyubomirsky performed Caliban’s monologue from “The Tempest.” Be not afeard.

These days, Dr. Lyubomirsky is not so thrilled with how the field of positive psychology has been pigeonholed. She doesn’t consider herself a positive psychologist. The term bothers her. She thinks the word “positive” is unnecessary, in the same way some are bothered by the word “gay” in gay marriage. The idea is it’s all marriage, right? “I’m really not interested in happy people,” she insisted. “I’m interested in how happiness changes over time and what strategies can increase happiness.”

At home, Ms. Lyubomirsky’s two older children — a daughter, 14, and a son, 11 — seem most consumed not with happiness but with annoyingness, ranking everybody in the family on that scale, including their 2-year-old sister. (Dr. Lyubomirsky came in first.) Three months ago the family moved out of its condominium into a spacious house. Dr. Lyubomirsky’s husband, Peter Del Greco, a lawyer who investigates securities fraud, wanted to buy a big high-definition TV. “I said to him, ‘You’re going to adapt to it.’ Of course, he still wanted it. And he adapted to it.”

Dr. Lyubomirsky doesn’t think that people will really learn not to adapt. “We’re so focused on the now,” she said. “The present is so compelling. It’s hard-wired.”

Since the move, she has decorated her new living room with Russian nesting dolls of Boris Yeltsin and Dennis Rodman. She has adapted to just about everything in the house except for the shower (it has six heads) and the ocean view. Yet she’s unconcerned. As she knows well, focusing too much on happiness, making it too much of a goal, tends to backfire. So she doesn’t dwell on it. “I remember when I was writing the chapter about relationships in ‘The Myths of Happiness,’ ” she said. “One day when I was driving home I finally thought: ‘Oh! I should do something nice for my husband this week.’ ”

Posted by Shona Lockhart on 27th April 2013

Happiness Experiment No 6: Acts of Kindness

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“Thousands of candles can be lit from one single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened.  Happiness never decreases by being shared.” Buddha

When is the last time you helped someone? Whether it was a large gesture or something small that brightened another person’s day, how did it make you feel?

The psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky instructed participants in a study to to practice acts of kindness during each week either for people they knew personally or for strangers. The acts of kindness could be carried out either openly or secretly and could be either spontaneous or planned.  The study demonstrated that the participants enjoyed a significant increase in their well-being.  The participants who were asked to constantly vary their acts of kindness and to carry them out on one single day of the week rather than spreading them over the week benefitted the most.

Try out this happiness experiment for yourself: on any day this week perform at least 5 acts of kindness beyond what you normally do.  You will see that you derive so much benefit from your generous actions that it could be argued that there is no more selfish act than a generous act. Have fun with this happiness experiment and give it a try – you will be amazed at how it makes you feel. You can watch this wonderful short video by Life Vest Inside for inspiration.

 

Posted by Shona Lockhart, 20th June 2012

Can money buy happiness or steal it?

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Continuing with our topic of whether money can buy happiness, I was interested to read this article from Sonja Lyubomirsky’s blog: The How of Happiness: The scientific pursuit of happiness. 

Sonja argues that maybe it is not money per se which adds to or subtracts from our levels of happiness, but the increased aspirations which go hand in hand with wealth and which can lead to disappointment if they are left unfulfilled.  Please read the article and decide for yourself.  I would also recommend Sonja’s book The How of Happiness which looks at actions you can take to get the life you want.

 

 

 

Can Money Buy Happiness or Steal From It?

New research reveals that money can impair savoring ability.

Published on August 30, 2010 by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D. in How of Happiness

 

This is a piece I wrote for Scientific American‘s Mind Matters column:

 

Money can’t buy you love. Worshipping Mammon foments evil ways. Materialists are shallow and unhappy. The greenback finds itself in tough times these days. Whether it’s Wall Street Bankers earning lavish multi-million-dollar bonuses or  two-bit city managers in Los Angeles County bringing in higher salaries than President Obama, the recessionary economic climate has helped spur outrage and revulsion at those of us collecting undeserved lucre.

Wealthy people have a bad rep. Sure, there are philanthropists like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, who have given billions of their net worth away and have made the world a better, healthier, safer place. But, sadly, they are an exception. American families who make over $300,000 a year donate to charity a mere 4 percent of their incomes. The statistic should not be surprising, as studies by University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and her collaborators have shown that merely glimpsing dollar bills makes people less generous and approachable, and more egocentric.

Now come a new set of studies that reveal yet another toll that money takes. An international team of researchers led by Jordi Quoidbach report in the August 2010 issue of Psychological Science that, although wealth may grant us opportunities to purchase many things, it simultaneously impairs our ability to enjoy those things.

Their first study, conducted with adult employees of the University of Liège in Belgium showed that the wealthier the workers were, the less likely they were to display a strong capacity to savor positive experiences in their lives. Furthermore, simply being reminded of money (by being exposed to a picture of a huge stack of Euros) dampened their savoring ability.

Quoidbach and his colleagues’ second study was even cleverer. Participants aged 16 to 59 recruited on the University of British Columbia campus were entrusted with the not unpleasant task of tasting a piece of chocolate. Before accepting the chocolate, however, they were obliged to complete a brief questionnaire. For half of the participants, this questionnaire furtively included a page with a picture of Canadian money (allegedly for an unrelated experiment), and for the other half, it included a neutral picture.

Although the ostensibly irrelevant photo was unlikely to have elicited more than a cursory glance, it had a pronounced effect on the volunteers’ behavior. Those “primed,” or subconsciously reminded, of money ended up spending less time consuming the chocolate and were rated by observers as enjoying it less.

How to explain these results? The researchers argue that because wealth allows people to experience the best that life has to offer, it ultimately undermines their ability to savor life’s little pleasures. Once we’ve had the opportunity to drink the finest French wines, fly in a private jet, eat foie gras with edible gold leaf, and watch the Super Bowl from a box seat, coffee at Starbucks with a friend, a sunny day after a week of rain, or an unexpected Reese’s peanut butter cup on our desks just doesn’t provide the same jolt of happiness it used to. Indeed, a landmark study of lottery winners showed just that: People who had won between $50,000 and $1,000,000 (in 1970s dollars) were less impressed by life’s simple pleasures than people who experienced no such windfall.

Of course, Quoidbach et al.’s findings may have alternative explanations. Maybe seeing banknotes triggers feelings of disgust (due to associations with greed or just with germs) or stirs up our money worries, and those feelings of disgust, anxiety, or unease may be enough to lose our appetites just a little and curb enjoyment of the chocolate bar.

Despite those possibilities, I find the researchers’ arguments compelling. In a book I’m writing, I devote an entire chapter to the costs of materialism and wealth. The single biggest culprit, I argue, is that having money raises our aspirations about the happiness that we expect in our daily lives, and these raised aspirations can be toxic. They say you can never go back to holding hands, but it’s also hard to go back to economy class (from business), to sleeping on a futon with a bunch of roommates (from your comfortable master bedroom in a split level), or to eating at chain restaurants (after regularly partaking of the cuisines of Mario Batali and Bobby Flay).

Unfortunately, raised aspirations don’t only lead us to take things for granted and impair our savoring abilities. They steer us to consume too much, tax the planet’s resources, overspend and undersave, go into debt, gamble, live beyond our means, and purchase mortgages that we can’t afford. Not long ago, I read a newspaper article that quoted the shocking statistic that 20 percent of Americans trade in their automobiles every two years. Every two years! We acquire the new Toyota Camry or Lexus SUV or Jaguar, and for the first few weeks or months, the ride is thrilling. But, as we all know too well, the thrill wears off not long after the new car smell fades.

If attaining wealth or earning pay raises so unfailingly elevates our aspirations, are we doomed never to reap money’s pleasures and rewards? Can people who make partner, write a best-seller, or invest wisely ever enjoy a simple piece of chocolate? Of course, they can. Indeed, in my mind, one of the biggest misconceptions about money is that it can’t make us happy – or rather, that the joys it offers can be only faint and fleeting. As it happens, a growing social science of money is showing how we can compensate for some of its damaging effects by getting the most out of our spending. The conclusion is that if we want to buy happiness, we need to wring as many rewarding and stretching experiences from our purchases as possible. The most effective empirically-supported ways include:

  • spending our money on activities that help us grow as a person (taking guitar lessons, investing in an entrepreneurial venture), strengthen our connections with others (dinners with colleagues, car trips with friends, roller blades for mom and child), and contribute to our communities (catering a fundraiser, donating to the needy);
  • shelling it out on activities and experiences (e.g., rock climbing expeditions, wine tasting family reunions) rather than material possessions;
  • spending it on many small pleasures (e.g., regular massages, weekly delivery of fresh flowers, or frequent phone calls to our best friend in Europe) rather than on one big-ticket item (like a new car or flat-screen TV); and
  • splurging on something that we work extremely hard to get and have to wait for (whether it’s a concert, trip, or gadget) and relish the feeling of hard-won accomplishment and anticipation as we wait.

Finally, our money will be even better spent if we take the time to appreciate the objects of our spending (the vacation, gadget, or smiles of the people we have helped); if we make efforts to inject novelty, variety, and surprise (e.g., buying activities that bring unexpected opportunities or adventures); and if we strive to compare less with others (e.g., focusing on how much I enjoyed the Paul McCartney concert rather than on how much better my neighbor’s seats were, or recognizing that my roller blades give me no less pleasure even if my sister has an even fancier pair). As researchers (including Ken Sheldon and myself) have argued, these are all factors that slow down or pre-empt the process that leads us to take our purchases for granted and allow us to derive the maximal possible happiness from them.

Both empirical research and anecdotal observations testify to the many pitfalls of thinking about money. And now we know from Quoidbach and his colleagues that merely scanning a wad of cash can impair our ability to savor life’s small delights. If this all seems like pretty strong evidence that money cannot pay for happiness, then we are not looking at the problem in the right way. The truth is that money’s pitfalls can be overcome with a little effort and forethought.

A famous Lexus ad pronounced, “Whoever said money can’t buy happiness isn’t spending it right.” Happiness is a choice. We can choose to become never-satisfied janitors of our possessions, or we can use our money in ways that improve our worlds and, as a bonus, supply us with genuine and lasting well-being.

Article originally published in Psychology Today on 30th August 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wish yourself a happy New Year at any time of the year

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Like many people I started the year with many good intentions and quickly found that life got in the way.  I wrote this article at the beginning of 2012 with the aim of featuring it in my brand new blog about positive psychology, which I had great intentions of setting up in January. We are now in May and thanks to my decision to sign up for the Thirty Day Challenge with  http://www.screwworkletsplay.com/  I have finally set up my blog The Happiness Experiment. It is never too late to have a happy New Year and it is never too soon to start your own journey to happiness.  This article shares some insight in to my own personal journey to happiness and future articles will share some more of the lessons I have learned along the way.  I continue to experiment daily with the lessons of positive psychology and would encourage you to try some experiments too. We are all responsible for our own happiness and like me you have the ability to significantly increase your  own well-being and to flourish – as Mahatma Gandhi so rightly said you can “be the change you want to see in the world.”

An experiment in happiness: “Be the change you want to see in the world”

 

January is traditionally the time of year when newspaper and magazine articles abound with New Year, New You features.  Headlines such as “Make 2012 your best year yet”, “10 secrets to living a happier life” make us believe that this will be the year when everything will be different and circumstances will coincide to make 2012 the year when we finally attain the happiness we have been seeking.

This year I was in the fortunate position of being ahead of the curve as I had just completed Tim Le Bon’s 10 week positive psychology course at City University in December.  This meant that in January I could skip the articles and forget the usual New Year resolutions we all beat ourselves up about for having abandoned in February, as I was already armed with everything I needed to carry out my own happiness experiment in 2012.

The positive psychology course could have been subtitled “10 weeks to happiness” as most of the participants had made significant improvements to their happiness levels by the end of the 10 weeks. We left armed with a range of simple tools and interventions which, if mastered and used regularly, can have a very positive impact on your life.  When I began the course in October I was in a similar position to many of the other students in that I had done some reading on the subject of positive psychology but had not put a great deal of what I had read in to practice – the course proved to be the catalyst for change which we all needed.

The course was a great mixture of gaining an academic understanding of the current principles and theories of positive psychology (a relatively new branch of psychology begun in 1998 by Professor Martin Seligman) and of having the opportunity to apply these ideas in our personal and working lives.  I have always been interested in the theories and benefits of optimum nutrition, popularised by Patrick Holford.  This is a way of living a life of optimum physical health by taking personal responsibility for one’s own physical well-being through lifestyle and nutrition choices rather than abdicating responsibility to health practioners.  Positive psychology, in my view, gives us the opportunity to achieve optimum mental health and the resilience to bounce back from life’s challenges without resorting to a medically prescribed “happy pill”.  In the same way as optimum physical health is not merely absence of illness, optimum mental health is not merely the absence of negative emotions or depression.   Both theories aim to help us achieve a similar outcome – a life in which we are positively flourishing and thriving and living life to the full.

We initially looked at the “happiness formula” formulated by Professor Seligman and his team which is:    H = S + C + V

The level of happiness that you experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) that you do.

It was a revelation to me to discover that 50% of our happiness is determined by genes (S), 10% by life circumstances (c) and 40% by our intentional voluntary activities.  Like many of the other participants I had always assumed that our happiness levels were due to a combination of our personal circumstances and to having a naturally positive outlook on life. 

I read two books related to this subject which were instrumental in changing my attitude to our ability to determine our own happiness levels.  The first one “The How of Happiness” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, contains 12 practical happiness inducing activities which are simple to implement and demonstrates that having the possibility to influence our happiness levels by 40% is hugely significant.  The pessimists on the course were secretly thinking that if we can only influence our happiness levels by 40% it is not worth trying!

The second book was “Positivity” by Barbara Fredrickson which illustrates that even those who are genetically pre-determined to be die-hard pessimists can improve their positivity ratio by using her broaden and build theory and by focusing on achieving the crucial tipping point of 3 to 1 positive versus negative experiences.  One of the first interventions we were asked to complete on the course was to write a daily gratitude journal of three good things and how your behaviour caused the positive thing.  I have realised that when you appreciate what you have, what you have appreciates in value. I now not only practice this personally every day but have introduced this positive intervention in my workplace as well.

Other topics we covered looked at 3 different routes to happiness; the pleasant life (a hedonistic approach in which temporary pleasures can elate us for a while but as we quickly habituate ourselves to them their effect diminishes), the engaged life (made up of flow experiences which use our signature strengths) and a meaningful life (in which we have a sense of purpose and connectedness and use our signature strengths in the service of something that you believe is larger than you are).

I was in a similar position to many other students in that taking a hedonistic approach to life presented me with no particular problems.  However I had always had a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that there had to be a scientific explanation to the fact that the first cup of coffee in the morning always made me much happier than any subsequent cups.   I have always tried to live a meaningful life and giving back to communities less fortunate than ourselves (particularly the bottom billion in Africa) is hugely important to me and a great source of pleasure.

However I gained 3 important insights from this topic. The first one was that although I was familiar with the concept of “flow”, having read Mihály Csikszentmihály’s book on the subject, I did not choose to put this in to practice in my daily life and did not always live an engaged life.  The second insight was the concept of signature strengths which was a completely new concept to me and which illustrates how we can become significantly happier by focusing on our strengths. Having previously always focused on my weaknesses, this was a revelation.  Once you have taken the easy strengths tests which are available online, you can think of ways to use your signature strengths in different ways and situations. The third insight was the importance of making giving personal.  I became a convert to the idea of acts of kindness practiced at a very personal level (another of our interventions from class) and was inspired to watch the film “Pay it forward”.  I have now set up an Acts of Kindness challenge in my workplace and try to think of little things I can do on a daily basis to “Pay it forward”, such as leaving a surprise bunch of flowers for my dog walker.

We also looked at the concepts of hope, optimism and luck and at the importance of having a positive explanatory style in relation to the situations and events which life throws at us.  We focused on how optimists are capable of seeing good things as permanent, pervasive and personal and bad things as temporary, specific and temporary whereas pessimists do the opposite. Optimism can be learned and your explanatory style can be worked at.

The concept of hope and the importance of perseverance and taking the long view were brought home to me by watching “Shawshank’s Redemption” a film recommended on the course recommended. I also read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” and learned that if you can survive the horrors of concentration camp life and still be hopeful and optimistic about the human race, then everything is possible.  This quote from the book was really enlightening: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose - one’s own way”.

The concept of luck as a route to happiness was not something I had previously considered, but reading Richard Wiseman’s “The Luck Factor” which demonstrates that there are 12 key principles  which affect our luck and that we are all in control of these 12 principles.  I recently started putting one of the first principles in to practice, “lucky people build and maintain a strong network of luck”. This basically means that the bigger your network, the more opportunities come your way, so it is a great idea to constantly think of new ways to meet people.  It is not about having hundreds of “friends” on Face book but having a network of friends and contacts with whom you are on first name terms.  As a practical example I recently moved house and decided to invite all my new neighbours to a “Pot Luck” party as a way of getting to know people quickly rather than spending years not knowing who lives in the same street.  I am applying one principle of this book each month both in my personal life and at work. The principles can also be found on this website: http://www.theluckfactor.com/

Other aspects of the course which I will be focusing on in 2012 are lessons about savouring, mindfulness and meditation which we practised briefly in class.  This made me aware how little we live in the present and how important it is to master this skill if we want to be happy.  I will be signing up for a course on Mindfulness in the near future and intend putting this in to practice in my daily life.   We also learned about the significant role which positive relationships play in our happiness and of the importance of emotional intelligence in our overall well-being.  These are concepts which I will be studying further now that the course is over.

10 weeks is, of course, only a short period of study and I would not claim to have mastered all the concepts we were taught or indeed to have put everything in to practice yet.  It is now a month since the course finished and I still feel that I derived so much personal benefit from the course that I want to both continue studying this subject and to pass my knowledge (limited though it is at this stage) on to others.  I am implementing the teaching in my personal and work life and am already reaping the benefits.

I have never previously struggled with being hopeful about the future, but I have at times struggled with being optimistic about today.  Above all this is what Tim le Bon’s 10 week positive psychology course has taught me; that if we want to change our happiness levels we have to make that change happen.  To quote Mahatma Gandhi “Be the change you want to see in the world”.  If you would like to learn more, I would recommend you look at the course reading list as a starting point, sign up for the next 10 week course and start to take massive action.  Try out your own happiness experiment and this time next year you could be ahead of the curve too.

My personal top 10 lessons from the course

1. Be grateful and keep a positive attitude

2. Take the long view – post-traumatic growth is possible

3. Be kind and make generosity personal

4. Always stay inspired

5. Focus on strengths and use them creatively

6. Share knowledge about positive psychology

7. Never stop learning but take MASSIVE action

8. Be hopeful about the future and optimistic about today

9. Meet new people, try new experiences, learn new skills and get involved

10. Make a difference and be the change you want to see in the world.

 Article written by Shona Lockhart, 25th January 2012