Experiencing happiness is an important goal for many people. It’s something that really goes without saying as a fundamental reason why we set goals, why we choose the things we want to do, and why we look forward to the weekend. We all want to be feel happier! We want to be ourselves, have freedom and choice, and feel really good. In today’s episode I’m going to talk about how happiness and it’s different elements is often defined, how much control we have over our happiness levels, and what you can do to improve your happiness.

This is a two-part episode on happiness, and so next time I’m going to talk about how happiness and cognition or thinking skills are related – and that’s a really interesting topic it’s not something that I hear people really talk about, so make sure you see part 2 as well. Now let’s get into part one of happiness!

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A Research Paper…

Happiness is an emotion that we all want to feel. Of course we want to feel good and avoid discomfort. Our brain is naturally wired this way, to seek out experiences that make us feel good and stay safe. And so if we can understand happiness on a deeper level, we can work out exactly what it is that helps us feel good, and improve the experience of our lives.

In the late 1990s, there was an explosion of research on happiness. The focus in psychology prior to this had been the clinical population, so research on disordered mental health and what to do about it. But at this time there was a shift and the topic of positive psychology really blew up, and this is the study of positive emotions and how to improve mental wellbeing.

Now even though there is a huge body of research in this area, I actually want to take you through one particular research paper today, which summarises a lot of the psychological evidence we have on happiness. This paper is by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade, and it’s from 2005, and I’ll put the reference below. Even though it might seem quite old from 2005, it’s a very important paper in the literature and has been cited by over 5000 other scientific papers since then. So, I think you’ll find it very relevant and very helpful.

So I want to take you through the main points of this paper, and at the end I’ll summarise some important things that you can do in your day to day life that will help you move towards happiness.

What is Happiness?

So how do we define happiness? On the surface, happiness is a positive emotion, but when researchers have studied happiness they tend to include three parts, which overall covers something broader known as subjective wellbeing. So subjective wellbeing includes experiencing frequent positive emotion, infrequent negative emotion, and high life satisfaction.

Now the first two might seem like the same thing just put a different way, so frequent positive emotion and infrequent negative emotion, but they are actually two different things because you can be someone who has frequent positive emotion and otherwise feels fairly neutral, or you can be someone who feels frequent positive emotion and also frequent negative emotion, so this type of person has quite a variable mood and would overall have less wellbeing than the first person.

So that explains the first two parts, and then the third part of high life satisfaction describes contentment with all the aspects of your life. I think this gives us a really well-rounded picture of happiness, so you can have a think about your own life now and understand that to improve happiness, it might not be just about chasing exciting events on the weekend, for you it might be more about doing something to really change up how satisfied you are with your life, like moving cities for example. Maybe for you improving happiness is about removing something from your life that is causing frequent negative emotion, if that’s possible for you.

Hedonia and Eudaimonia

Now, you might have heard about a different way to define happiness. Sometimes we hear the term hedonia, and there is a distinction between hedonia and eudaimonia. These are historical terms that refer to different types of positive states: hedonia is really what I have just described, it’s another word for happiness or subjective well-being with the three parts that I explained. Eudaimonia is slightly different and refers to moral or ethical living, so that one can live an optimal life. They are very similar concepts, but I’m going to only focus on hedonia or subjective wellbeing in this episode, and I’ll stick to the more general term happiness.

Cultural Differences

Now there is a cultural factor that I want to mention about the concept of happiness, which I think is really important. In Western cultures, there is more of a focus on positive emotion with a minimising of negative emotion, compared with Eastern cultures where there tends to be more of a balance of positive and negative emotions. There is a different summary article by Alexander and colleagues from 2021 that mentions a couple of other research articles that focused on this cultural issue, and they found that individuals in Japan who experienced a balance of positive and negative emotions had improved ratings of physical health, but this was not the case for individuals from Western cultures, so they weren’t seeing that benefit from emotional balance.

So while there is big focus on improving happiness in Western cultures, it is not valued in the same way cross-culturally and is seen as part of a bigger picture in countries like Japan. This is important to keep in mind because there are always individual factors that govern how much someone wants to pursue happiness, and also broader influences like culture and nationality.

Why is Happiness Important?

So why pursue this and feel happier? Especially if a balance of emotions is more important to people of Eastern cultures? It seems that happiness is an important component of a good life, even if the balance is thought of a little differently cross-culturally.

In the Lyubomirsky summary article, they mention a range of benefits that are associated with happiness. Did you know that greater happiness has been found to be related to greater social measures like lower odds of divorce, more friends, and richer social interactions, also higher quality of work and higher income, more energy, an improved immune system, and even living a longer life. Some people think that pursuing happiness can be too much of an individualised or even selfish activity, but happier people are more cooperative and charitable as well, benefitting society as a whole. So there are a lot of flow on effects of improving happiness above and beyond just feeling good.

Can We Change Our Happiness?

So if we know that happiness is important and a worthy goal, then the two main questions that come from this are can we change our happiness, and does that change last?

In terms of changing our own experiences, there are a couple of pessimistic viewpoints that the summary article mentions that can interfere with an individual’s motivation to feel happier. In other words, if you have one of these problematic beliefs, then you aren’t even going to try and improve your happiness, putting you at a disadvantage.

Three Pessimistic Beliefs Holding You Back

The first popular pessimistic belief is that happiness levels are inherited, which means that your happiness is genetic and you just get what you’re given. Why bother doing anything different if it’s all just genetic. Well, the research tells us that happiness is about 50% genetic, which might seem high but that leaves 50% based on other influences, which I’ll get to. So it’s not 100% genetic. This stable cause is thought to create a happiness “set-point” which governs roughly the range of happiness which you can be expected to experience, but our happiness varies within that range.

The second pessimistic belief is that it’s just part of my personality. I’m just a grumpy person. I’m just a sad person. If you believe that your emotions are just part of your personality, and personality remains fairly stable across your lifespan, then you’ll think that you can’t change your happiness. This is thought to also be part of the factors that make up that 50% of variability in happiness that is genetic, or causing that happiness set-point, it’s a set thing that you are just born with or acquired very early, and you just can’t change it.

So again while this gives you a set range of happiness, you also need to know that not every experience of your emotions is based in your personality. There is a difference between personality and emotional traits, which are long-lasting, and state-based emotion, which is something that varies from day to day. So we can influence these state-based emotions and pursue feelings of happiness day to day, even though you have a stable personality.

And the Third One

The third pessimistic belief is that happiness is only temporary, that our feelings just go back to some baseline level over time. This concept is known as the hedonic treadmill. What happens here is that people tend to experience happiness after an exciting or beneficial circumstance, and then they get used to or acclimatise to their new situation and they don’t feel that initial pleasure anymore. This phenomenon accounts for why there is not a strong relationship between happiness and wealth, and why lottery winners have been found to be no happier than anyone else one year on. So if this were a really important factor, then there would be no point in pursing happiness because it wouldn’t last.

However, the circumstances that someone is in only explains about 10% of someone’s happiness levels. If you change your circumstances to try and be happier, not only will the happiness not last, but it only has a small effect anyway. This is why we can’t fall into the trap of saying “oh I’ll be happy when I get a new job.” “I’ll be happy when I make more money.” “I’ll be happy when I move into a bigger house.” It just isn’t a huge factor in your experience of happiness.

Intentional Action

So if 50% of your happiness level is explained by a long-standing or genetic factor, and 10% is based on circumstances, then what is the remaining 40% based on?

The remaining 40% of your happiness level is influenced by actions you choose to take. The summary paper emphasises that circumstances must be separated from actions, where circumstances are ongoing situations that are happening in the background, but actions involve some form of effort on your part. And the reason we need to separate these ideas is because the hedonic treadmill, that reduction in initial happiness, only really applies to circumstances. Isn’t that fascinating?! When you choose to do something that you think will bring you happiness, this happiness lasts over time, but it doesn’t if it’s just a change in your circumstances. So let’s explore this idea a little further.

When you choose a task that you think will make you happy, this can increase your happiness even though you might have a lower happiness set point than another person, and you might be living in unfortunate circumstances. The summary paper brings together this research and offers a few ways in which we can choose the right activities and the best way to carry them out, so we can experience that lasting happiness.

Activities That Make You Happy

The first thing to note is that activities need to be relevant to you. In the research this is called person-activity fit. The research shows that you can’t just do things that society thinks will make you happy, or something you heard from your neighbour down the street – the activity only works if it’s the right fit for you. So ask yourself, what do you want? What works for you? If you’re not sure, get curious and try out some different things. You might look to your own needs, your own values, or your own desire for low or high stimulation activities (for example, knitting vs sky-diving). Find those things that are a really good fit.

Watch the Frequency

The second thing to make sure an activity is increasing your happiness is to notice how often you are doing it. If you do something very frequently, it may lose it’s appeal, much like the ongoing nature of circumstances and that hedonic treadmill effect that occurs when your circumstances are always there. An activity is often rewarding when there is some time between each activity. It gives us something to look forward to. So try and find the optimal time between activities so you get that exciting experience each time.

Mix it Up

The next thing to think about is to vary the activities within a more consistent routine. Routines are really important for lots of reasons, it helps us stick to a task in the long term, it takes the mental load away that comes with decision making, it reduces the reliance on memory, and it can reduce anxiety. But routine can sometimes get boring, again just like being in the same circumstances day in day out. So – carry out the task in a slightly different way each time.

The example they give in the article is that you can make running a part of your routine, but vary the way in which you do it. You might like to run a different route each time, change the time of day, or change the speed of running. This adds novelty to the task, reducing the likelihood that it will get boring and your brain will adapt to the happy effects of the task.

And Maintain them Over Time

The last thing I will mention when doing intentional activities is that they need to be maintained over time. You can’t do an activity once and expect it to keep you happy for the rest of your life. The easy answer to this is that if an activity makes you happy, then you’ll be motivated to keep doing it, so maintaining the task shouldn’t really be hard. But sometimes the task itself can feel difficult in the moment, even though you know it will contribute to your longer-term happiness. For example, it might feel hard to study for a final exam, even though you are excited to finish a course and get work in that particular area. So the article suggests to think about that bigger-picture motivation. If you’re feeling like procrastination is getting in the way, you can read my post about how to beat procrastination here.

A Note on Circumstances and Activities

So there is this balance between keeping activities fresh and new and exciting, and also continuing to do them without getting bored and going down to a baseline level of happiness. The paper points out that some situations can be both ongoing circumstances, and discrete activities, and I want to give you an example that will help solidify this comparison between different situations.

Take the circumstance of “being married.” This is your ongoing circumstance, it just continues on, and according to the happiness research, you will adapt to this circumstance after that initial honeymoon period, and it’s not exciting anymore so your happiness reduces over time. However, the paper suggests that if you take intentional action to keep your experiences fresh, then you can increase your happiness again, and this might take the form of intentional attitude change, like a spouse appreciating their partner’s good qualities; or it might be intentional behaviour, like buying gifts or going on a special date. So you can see that the important factor here is taking action – action that you choose to do with intent to experience happiness.

This brings us back to the whole premise of my business, which is about living an intentional life, where we choose to fill our days with the experiences we want, so that we can craft the life of our dreams. So I love this research, and this distinction between a happiness set-point, circumstances, and intentional action is really important to understand.

Does it Last?

Now, I’ve touched on it a little already, but there is evidence that improving your happiness does last. If you keep doing enjoyable activities, these keep your happiness levels up when changes to your circumstances don’t. There are some lines of evidence that the Lyubomirsky article mentions that give us some optimism when it comes to lasting happiness.

They mention that practices like gratitude and self-reflection can improve well-being, and I might talk more about this in the second part of this topic next week. Attitude changes can improve well-being too, like staying optimistic, and avoiding social comparisons. There is also evidence that older people are happier than younger people, and this is true when you do a direct comparison between two groups AND when you follow the same people over time. The assumption in the research is that people have learned to structure their lives and follow their goals in the way that they want to. And again this is totally in line with my business, and the reason why you read this blog, that we can all make changes and live our best lives.

How to Feel Happier: A Summary

So I know some of this research might be a lot to process, so let me summarise what I’ve talked about.

I first want you to remember that happiness has three parts – feeling good, not feeling bad (which is a different thing), and feeling satisfied with your life. So knowing that, can you work on one of those three areas to help improve your overall happiness? Second, remember that your beliefs influence whether you even try and work to improve your happiness in the first place, so try and avoid some of those pessimistic and false beliefs that will keep you stuck. These were beliefs like oh well it’s all genetic, and it’s just part of my personality and I can’t change, and it’ll all go back to baseline and won’t last.

I showed you that there does seem to be a happiness set-point, but this is only 50% of the explanation of where your happiness level is, and so it is possible to make changes your happiness level. But, circumstances only really influence your happiness by about 10%, so thinking about how the grass is greener over there doesn’t do much good.

The Importance of Intention

The real gem is when you focus on intentional activities, ones that are a great fit for you personally, and ones that you can change up to keep things fresh. There is hope for us all, as we get older we’ll move towards living a life that is true to ourselves, which is actually the number one regret of the dying which Bronnie Ware made famous in her book called The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying. I want this meaningful and happy life for you, and so I’m going to leave you with my favourite quote “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life”. See you next time for Happiness part 2!

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Enjoying this content about happiness, personal growth, and time management? Come on over to Substack and say hi! There’s much more there to dive into so you can learn about your brain and structure your days with more ease and less overwhelm.

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References:

Alexander, R., Aragón, O. R., Bookwala, J., Cherbuin, N., Gatt, J. M., Kahrilas, I. J., … & Styliadis, C. (2021). The neuroscience of positive emotions and affect: Implications for cultivating happiness and wellbeing. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 121, 220-249.

Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 111-131.

Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying: A Life Transformed by the Dearly Departing.