Tag Archives: the how of happiness

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

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