Could You Honestly Say You Are Truly Happy in Life?
Picture this. You finish up a manic period of work and dash to the airport to catch a flight for your annual holiday – seven days at a 5-star all-inclusive resort. The food is excellent, and the drinks keep flowing. You’re with your partner or best friend, wandering up and down white sand beaches, splashing in the crystal blue and turquoise waters of the ocean. You get massages and even head out for several spectacular day trips. Too soon, your time comes to an end, although you sneak in a few free drinks on the flight back to hold on to the holiday vibes for a little bit longer.
How do you feel upon your return? Hopefully relaxed, maybe a bit zen, and more than anything happy? Maybe you bound into work on Monday morning, keen to pick up your work and chat to your colleagues about your trip. But what happens on day two or three? How about after five days or two weeks? As your tan and holiday glow begin to fade, most likely you begin to feel like your normal old self again. Most likely, you return to your normal happiness levels.
What is the Happiness Set Point?
Psychologists would say that you are returning to your happiness set point – a psychological concept which describes how our happiness goes up and down in response to good and bad events in our lives, but that in between those highs and lows, we each return to our own base level. This is how happy you are on a day-to-day basis. As Dr. Robert Puff explains, even if you win the lottery, your feelings of happiness will soar sky-high and then return to the same normal level they are at most of the time for you. On the flip side, in his book The Resilience Project, Hugh van Cuylenburg describes his time teaching poor kids in India, “I met a kid who was nine years old and slept on the floor like everyone else. But I remember thinking to myself, ‘I have never in my life seen joy like this before. This kid’s the happiest person I’ve ever met. I’ve never seen anything like him. How incredible. How is it this kid’s so gleefully happy?’” As Puff points out, this is because long-term happiness comes from your internal environment and not the external world.
The average person will spend most of their time in the in between moments – not riding the highs and lows. So having a higher happiness set point is critical to living a happy life overall. It’s the difference between looking back on your life and thinking, “yes, I was truly happy in life,” or only being able to say, “there were some moments of happiness in my life.”
We all know people who have low happiness set points: they’re the ones who are natural pessimists… the Debbie Downers of the world. Maybe you are naturally wired to be more negative or more pessimistic than most. What can you do if you sit at a four out of ten, verses say a seven out of ten? Can you raise your happiness and satisfaction levels so you are consistently happier, day in and day out? Can you raise your happiness set point?
Thankfully the answer is yes. You can become a happier person – if not, this site wouldn’t exist!
In 2005, researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon M. Sheldon, and David Schkade proposed a simple pie graph which showed that there were three primary factors that influence a person’s happiness levels. They showed a person’s happiness set point is influenced by three major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness, happiness-relevant circumstantial factors, and happiness-relevant activities and practices.
In short, the graph shows that 50 per cent of our happiness is determined by our genetics, so it’s out of our control. Also, and 10 per cent is determined by our life circumstances, which can often be influenced but are also sometimes out of our control. Finally, 40 per cent of our happiness levels are determined by our activities. These are completely within our control and this means that what you choose to do and spend your time on can impact your happiness levels.
Although this graph has been criticised by many (including the authors) for oversimplifying happiness, positive psychologists still tend to agree that whether it’s 15 per cent or 40 per cent that’s within our control, we still have some control. Many researchers since then have showed that introducing happiness interventions under the ‘intentional activity” category can sustainably increase happiness.
What this means is that even though you can’t change all the determinants of happiness, you may never move from a 4 to an 8 on a happiness scale, but you might move from a 4 to a 6 – which is worth the effort in my book.
Happiness can be successfully pursued. For some happiness may feel like a natural state, but for others it is not easy, for many people it is hard won. The key lies in our habits and behaviours. Puff writes that if you eat fast food multiple times per week and spend most of your time watching Netflix and scrolling through social media, you shouldn’t expect to feel any increase in your happiness levels.
Happiness for no Good Reason
To achieve that sustained happiness, it’s important not to focus on the external ‘stuff’ that many people mistake for drivers of happiness, such as getting promoted, losing 5 kilos or finding Mr or Mrs Right. Instead, we need to focus internally. Happiness comes from within.
In her book Happy for No Reason, Marci Shimoff describes it as bringing happiness to the external environment rather than trying to suck the happiness from the outer environment. So, no matter what’s happening around us, maybe we’ve had a good day, maybe we’ve had a bad day, in the end, it doesn’t matter as our underlying and prevailing feelings are ones of happiness and peace. Regardless of whether you get promoted or find Mr Right, you’re happy anyway.
To find that sustained happiness, we need to prioritise those intentional activities that positively impact our happiness levels. The person who is consistently happier than their happiness set point – the person who is just happy for no good reason – often is happy because of good habits.
Neuroscientists who study the brain show that we start to form new neural pathways in the brain as we form new habits that increase our happiness level. As we continue to build our new happy habits those neural pathways get stronger and stronger, at the same time, the neural pathways for the old negative habits get weaker.
Getting started on Your Happiness Journey
So how do you get started on creating happiness habits? There are many models for happiness from Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model to Dr. Tal Ben Shahar’s SPIRE model and more. In short, they all show that happier people prioritise activities in the following three broad categories:
Meaning and Purpose: Firstly, they have meaning and purpose in their lives and this is often tied to a strong sense of identity and self. This is about having something to get you out of bed in the morning, and about having goals, plans and commitments.
Community and Connection: Secondly, they have strong community and connection. They have a core group of people they can talk to and depend on. They also tend to have a wider community network, through activities like church, regular volunteering and practicing kindness.
Health and Wellbeing: Thirdly, they practice and prioritise positive habits for a healthy body and mind. It could be getting out into nature for walks, going to the gym, or playing on a sports team, or it could be meditation, drinking water, and making sure they get 8hrs of sleep. The activity itself is less important, the main point is that resilient people prioritise their preferred self-care habits, even when life gets busy.
Why not Start with Introducing a Gratitude Practice into Your Week?
A really easy and scientifically proven activity which can start to change those neural pathways for the better is practicing gratitude. We’re all wired to look for the negative, it’s evolutionary. After all, the person who focused on the pretty flower over the stalking lion wouldn’t have lived long enough to pass on their genes. However, as stalking lions are no longer a priority in 21st century life, practicing gratitude can help you change that wiring.
Gratitude works by helping you to find the good in your day and focus on that, rather than always or only focusing on the bad. It only takes a minute a day, but it balances out the things that went wrong that day, the negative news, the anger on social media and everything else that it just life nowadays.
Also, it is really easy to do: A 2003 study by Emmons & McCullough showed that keeping a gratitude journal weekly for only 10 weeks, or daily for only two weeks, led to more positive moods, optimism about the future, and better sleep.
So why not get started today? What have you got to lose?
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