Happiness

by Ed Diener

  Building a society that maximizes well-being, not just economic growth, should be an aim of the nations of the world. We believe that the science of happiness has begun to provide a framework that can extend policy discussions beyond an almost exclusive reliance on income and material growth, to ask what will now create a truly better, happier society. We can't ignore money and economic prosperity, but as a society we don't want to focus on it as our only criterion of success. National accounts of well-being can provide a broader framework for evaluating improvement, and help us weigh our progress with factors in addition to money, such as societal trust, engaging work, happy children, and rewarding leisure.

  The Happiness Recipe

  As we mentioned at the beginning of this book, Cinderella was said to have lived happily ever after in the tradition of all fairy-tale endings. How can we be sure that she, and you, will "live happily ever after"? Many books about happiness give you some secret about how to get it, or a simple magic ingredient that will make you happier. Some even propose that if you just think in a positive way about things you want, they will automatically come to you. But we have seen in this book that many things lead to happiness and psychological wealth, and that you need more than one simple ingredient to live the fullest life. No single secret is likely to make you or Cinderella happy forever; no Prince Charming can ensure eternal bliss. Instead, it takes a recipe to do the trick, and happiness is an ongoing process. Here is our list of fundamental ingredients that make up the delicious dish of happiness.

  Have Direction: Important Goals and Values

  Humans are unique among animals in many respects; perhaps chief among them is the ability to live virtuously and find purpose in life. As humans, we actually require a sense of meaning to thrive. Lives that seem pointless leave us despondent and listless. We do not operate simply on instinct. We need to have values that we care about and outcomes that are worth working for. If we have goals that spring from our values, and aims we care about beyond our own momentary happiness, we are able to gain satisfaction from working for the things about which we care deeply. Recently, we taught a class in which we assigned the participants two activities. The first was a hedonistic activity. We instructed them to go out and do something fun (but legal!). Go dancing, enjoy a nice meal, that kind of thing. Next, we asked that they go out and engage in a meaningful experience, one that they themselves could find purpose in. This could include volunteering, cleaning up litter, helping a niece with homework, or any other activity that might sound rewarding, but not necessarily fun. A week later, the participants came back to us to report on their experiences. Without exception, they thought the hedonistic activities were fun. Test driving a new car and eating a fancy dessert felt good in the moment. But the positive effect seemed to wear off quickly. The vast majority of the class participants told us that if they had to recommend one of the two types of activities to a friend, they would suggest the meaningful activity. Even though the meaningful activities weren't always fun, they tended to feel good later because they resonated with deeply held personal values. Taking stock of your values, and making sure you live a life that is consistent with them, is a vital part of psychological wealth.

  Strong and Supportive Relationships

  To put it simply, other people are crucial for our happiness, as we described in chapter 4. We find meaning, comfort, and entertainment in our relationships. Some folks need lots of family and friends around; others need only a handful of strong relationships. But we all need people to love and to love us. One key to close relationships is the positive (also called Gottman) ratio - many more positive than negative interactions. So remember to be positive most of the time with others. Remember that criticism and correction are permissible if they are not too frequent, but they need to occur within an overall context of a positive relationship built on praise, support, and favors. A world without others who care about us and about whom we care would be a cold, lifeless place. As adults we need to have others and do things for them to experience psychological wealth.

  Material Sufficiency

  As much as we would like to recommend positive attitudes and spiritual growth alone, the truth is that we live in a physical world. We are shackled to this life by our bodies, and material goods therefore play a part in our well-being. Our bodies have many physical needs, and when these are not met it can detract from our happiness. In order to be at our happiest, we need good health; sufficient resources, such as food, to meet our basic needs; and adequate money to experience some of life's pleasures. In chapter 6, we showed that to be happy we don't need to be rich, but material sufficiency beyond poverty is clearly helpful to happiness. Although wealthy people tend on average to be happy, and it is a myth to believe they are not, we must be careful of materialism - valuing money and things more than we value people, love, and our society. We also must be careful that our material desires don't rise forever, or we can feel poor no matter how rich we become. Health and material sufficiency are helpful to happiness because they free the mind for other things, but they are not sufficient for happiness. And if the pursuit of wealth interferes with our relationships and other aspects of psychological wealth, our well-being and that of those around us will suffer.

  Cultivating the Spiritual Emotions

  Positive emotions make us feel good, and feeling positive most of the time is a key ingredient of a happy life. We want to feel proud of our accomplishments and loved by others. We want to enjoy our work, friends, and leisure. However, in chapter 7, we discussed how the spiritual emotions that connect us to others are particularly important because they increase the well-being of others. Furthermore, these are emotions that we can cultivate. We can develop our gratitude toward others and our love for them. We can nurture feelings of compassion for those less fortunate than ourselves, rather than developing a superiority complex. And we can develop a sense of awe at the beauty and the order of the universe. Emotions that connect us to others and things larger than ourselves are a helpful route to happiness because they are under our control - we can generate these emotions with our thoughts. The spiritual emotions are essential to psychological wealth because they help us transcend our own individual worldview and connect us to something larger than ourselves. Importantly, they are also likely to make those around us happy.

  Inborn Temperament

  Happiness, like height and depression, has a genetic component. As described in chapter 9, it helps to possess a biological predisposition to be happy. Some folks are lucky and are born with "happy genes" - that is, they tend to be extroverted and not to worry overmuch. Although happiness comes naturally for these people, they must still be careful to take the other steps to happiness - genes don't guarantee happiness, but only help it. Just as a person born with high intellectual ability does not necessarily know a lot unless she makes an effort to learn, or a child with promising talent must develop it to achieve artistic mastery, a person with a happy temperament must work to fulfill his or her happiness potential. A person born with an unhappy temperament will necessarily need to exert more effort to be happy, and sometimes even need help from others to overcome stress or depression. Remember that genes are part of the story, but not the whole story. For instance, gene expression can be changed by our environment. Although temperament can aid happiness, just as athletic ability can help us succeed in sports, it must be cultivated by the habits of mind and behavior we develop. Our happiness set point can be changed!

  Intelligent Forecasting and Wise Choices

  There is no substitute for good old-fashioned wisdom. We all know people who seem hell-bent on messing up their lives. Despite being smart, kind, good-looking, or well-to-do, these folks seem almost incapable of making good choices with regards to dating partners, saving and spending, or career choices. You probably know someone who is stuck in a job that is a bad fit for her, or someone who gravitates toward problematic romance. By contrast, most of us also know others who seem to almost always make smart decisions.
They have a strong sense of identity and personal boundaries, and they have a grasp of what long-term happiness requires. In order to be happy, we don't have to be prescient and fully understand the future. What we need is to understand some of the fundamentals of happiness forecasting, such as those reviewed in chapter 10, and then make important choices with long-term goals in mind.

  Many of the errors we make are a natural by-product of how we think. There is too much information in the world for our brains to easily digest, so our subconscious minds take little short cuts. Because of this, people consistently make forecasting errors that lead them away from rather than toward happiness. The focusing illusion, for example, causes folks to focus on a single obvious feature of a choice and overlook other important features. For instance, when you go house hunting, you might be easily taken in by a large yard or particularly cute attic room while overlooking the quality of the electrical wiring or the noise late at night from a nearby street. Another forecasting problem comes from not getting firsthand experience with the choice, but relying on your imagination. It is easy for most folks to picture themselves sunning on a tropical beach, but most people overlook the less-than-pleasant flight to their vacation island. Similarly, nobody should choose a career, such as physician, lawyer, farmer, or teacher, without obtaining relevant experience, through volunteer work, summer jobs, or talking with someone in the given profession. Finally, people need to remember the importance of ongoing activities, goals, and attitudes to happiness, understanding that no set of life circumstances guarantees long-term happiness. The use of intelligent forecasting allows each of us to make better choices to maximize our psychological wealth.

  AIM Your Mind

  Have you ever taken a long road trip on a sunny day? Perhaps you wore sunglasses for so long that you were surprised at the color of the sky when you finally took them off! Our minds work in much the same way, filtering the world around us. In chapter 11, we described how the attitudes you develop toward the world, and the accompanying mental habits, have a lot to do with how happy you are. Some folks develop the habit of noticing what could go wrong, dwelling on failures, or complaining about problems. This kind of negative interpretation of the world is a sure way to make yourself unhappy. Happy people, on the other hand, see possibilities, opportunities, and successes, and interpret most of what goes on in a positive light. When they think of the future, they are optimistic, and when they review the past, they tend to savor the high points. Positive interpretation is one of the most exciting elements of psychological wealth because it is one that you have the power to change. But, for individuals in the habit of negative thinking, reading this book alone won't be enough for a turnaround - more active work is required to become a positive thinker. New habits of thinking and responding to others must be planned, rehearsed, and practiced. Just as with a diet, or breaking a bad habit, there will be backsliding into the old ways. Pride will overshadow gratitude, and practice and effort will be needed over a period of months to break out of chronic negative thinking. With work and motivation, however, you can move upward in happiness, and become a more pleasant person for your family and friends to be around.

  We don't pretend that developing positive AIM will be easy for all of you. Some of you grew up in places where griping seems endemic and people demonstrate their intelligence by criticizing others. Some of you have spent decades of your life finely honing your skills of seeing the faults of others and complaining about them. So remember the three steps of the AIM model. Attention - attend to the beautiful, the good in others, and the things that are going right. Interpretation - sure, people are imperfect and make mistakes. But most people are doing their best to lead a good life, and people with serious problems usually deserve your compassion. Memory-take time to savor the good things in your past. Sure, there were some bad things, but isn't it time to put those behind you and move on to creating a happy life in the present? Happiness is partly under your own mental control, based on attention, interpretation, and memory.

  Living as Though Happiness is a Process, Not a Place

  Journalists often ask us whether there is anything we have learned in our studies that we apply to our own lives. The answer is yes. We integrate many things from our research into our own lives, but learning that happiness is a process, not just a set of good circumstances, has been especially helpful. Like most people, we had come to think if we could get all of our ducks in a row - a good income, success at work, a good mate, and so forth - then our happiness would be guaranteed. Like Cinderella, we got these things. And then the question became: What now? One answer is more ducks - striving for more things. But we came to realize that it is enjoying the activities and the striving that create happiness, and that getting the ducks provides only short-term boosts to happiness. If a person hopes to win a certain award, working for the award had better be enjoyable, because the award itself will produce only a short burst of happiness. In contrast, activities and striving for our goals is a lifetime endeavor.

  Think for a moment about the father and son writing this book. Think about how we might approach this long process. We might think that writing the book is a drag - we have to research, read, write and rewrite, and endlessly go over our grammar and spelling. But we might predict that the outcome is worth the toil because our book might be very successful, it might make a difference in some- one's life, it might educate people, it might lead to other professional opportunities for us. Of course, none of these things might happen, but the issue is whether writing the book is worth a lot of unpleasantness because it might lead to success. Our point here is that happiness requires exactly the opposite frame of mind - we must enjoy writing the book and promoting the book. Then, regardless of whether it is successful or not, we will have had a very enjoyable time. Of course, it would be nice if the book did well in the marketplace, but the more important thing for our own happiness is that we enjoyed working together and got joy from thinking about the content of a book that might help people. In fact, we can say that this has been our experience. We haven't argued, have had many stimulating discussions about the content in this volume, and have learned new things in authoring the book. We have enjoyed talking to others to get ideas for the book, and trying out different ideas on ourselves. With happiness as a process, not a place, the book has already been a great success for us - and any sales of the book will be a bonus. Of course, occasionally we must endure unpleasant activities and hardship to obtain certain goals. But we are saying that this should be the exception rather than the rule. If most of your goals are unpleasant to work for, you better change either your goals or your attitudes.

  Whether you are a famous movie star, the president of the United States, a Forbes list billionaire, or a Nobel Prize winner, you can be unhappy or happy. Whether you have everything you ever wanted or live a simple life, you can be happy or unhappy, because process is the key. We have asked people who have won large awards, such as the Nobel Prize, whether the award made their lives happy - they say it did for a day, a month, maybe even a year, but life continues and they must find new activities to enjoy.

  There is a temptation when envisioning a happy life to think only of desirable life circumstances - money, health, and friends - and certainly these things can help. But we hope that we have also shown you that happiness requires more - positive attitudes and working toward meaningful goals and values. Perhaps most important, you need to understand that, as we have said repeatedly, happiness is a process, not a place; a way of traveling, not a destination. Happiness requires positive attitudes about life and the world, and continuing fresh involvement with activities. A life full of meaning and values, supportive social relationships, and rewarding work is the framework for a happy life. The processes of happiness within that framework require positive attitudes, spiritual emotions such as love and gratitude, and material sufficiency.

  Changing Your Set Point

  Many things that we look to for happiness make us happy for only a sho
rt time because we grow accustomed to them. In psychology jargon, we adapt. A raise or promotion at work, a daughter marrying a great guy, winning an award - these can be real boosts, but usually don't change our long-term level of happiness. They make us happy for a month or two, and then we drop back to our old baseline. So the search is on for things that can raise our baseline, which can lead to long-term increases in our happiness. Some really good and bad things can do this - finding a wonderful marriage partner on the positive side, or losing that partner on the negative side. But even with these large good and bad events, we adapt to some extent over time.

  As we describe above, how you travel and react, your positive AIM, is the most important aspect of raising your set point. Changing your set point for happiness also requires that you understand the types of happiness, and what is possible in terms of changing them. Happiness includes life satisfaction, feelings of meaning and purpose, and positive emotions and interest. It also includes the spiritual emotions, such as love and gratitude. However, happiness is not a continual high of elation or ecstasy, and it is not an absence of all unpleasant emotions, such as worry and sadness; occasionally these are appropriate and beneficial. The search for intense highs and avoiding all negative emotions can even be harmful. You don't want to be continually elated or ecstatic, because then you could not react to new good events and activities. This is why heaven must wait; we can't experience heaven on this earth, as some try doing with drugs, because if we do, it creates a hell in which we can no longer function as healthy adult humans who can respond to the wonderful things that occur in life. Raising your set point means feeling positive most of the time, but not continual bliss.