WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?
You probably know the type: those Pollyannas who seem to have a relentlessly sunny disposition. Are they simply born happy? Is it the product of their environment? Or does it come from their life decisions?
If you are familiar with genetics research, you will have guessed that it is a combination of all three. A 2018 study of 1516 Norwegian twins suggests that around . Much of this seems to be related to personality traits, such as neuroticism, which can leave people more vulnerable to anxiety and depression, and extraversion, which encourages more gregarious behaviour. Both traits are known to be influenced by a range of genes.
Advertisement
To put this in context, the heritability of IQ is thought to hover around 80 per cent, so environmental factors clearly play a role in our happiness. These include our physical health, the size and strength of our social network, job opportunities and income. The effect of income, in particular, is nuanced: it seems that the absolute value of our salary matters less than whether we feel richer than those around us, which may explain why the level of inequality predicts happiness better than GDP.
Interestingly, many important life choices have only a fleeting influence on our happiness. Consider marriage. , on average, life satisfaction does rise after the wedding, but the feeling of married bliss tends to fade over middle age. Needless to say, this depends on the quality of the relationship: marriage鈥檚 impact on well-being is about twice as large for people who see their partner as their 鈥渂est friend鈥�.
Parenthood is . For decades, social scientists have found that people with children at home are significantly less happy than those without. More recent research, however, suggests that there are important regional differences. Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas in Austin and her colleagues have shown that , and it is non-existent in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Spain and France 鈥� where the joys of parenthood outbalance the stresses.
Glass鈥檚 analyses show that these differences can be almost completely explained by variations in paid parental leave, flexible working hours, affordable childcare and holiday leave, which together reduce the potential for work-family conflict. The effects of these policies may play out across generations. In addition to the legacy of their genes, parents鈥� own emotional well-being will influence the family dynamic, which will, in turn, shape the personality of their offspring.
Our life satisfaction, then, is a complex tapestry shaped by our genes, our health, our economic prospects, our relationships and the culture around us. While many of these things may be beyond your control, there is now good evidence that certain psychological strategies will help you to respond to your circumstances in the happiest way possible.
CAN WE LEARN TO BE HAPPY?
We know how to behave to increase the chances of a long, healthy life. If you drink alcohol in moderation, don鈥檛 smoke, follow a good diet with plenty of vegetables, take half an hour of exercise a day and aim to have 8 hours of sleep a night, you are more likely to live into your 80s.
But is it possible to prescribe a happy lifestyle too? Over the past two decades, scientists studying 鈥減ositive psychology鈥� have identified many techniques to raise our happiness from its current baseline. These methods cannot work miracles. 鈥淭hings like poverty or trauma are obviously going to affect your well-being,鈥� says . 鈥淏ut for many of us, our happiness is much more under our control than we think.鈥�
Santos would know. Her free online course, , offers lessons on the mental habits that damage our happiness.
For a taste of what it involves, consider our tendency to compare ourselves negatively with the people around us, which is now known to be one of the most common causes of dissatisfaction with our lives. By recognising when those thoughts have started to arise, we can consciously shift the reference point to something more neutral. If you start to feel dissatisfied with your current salary and keep on thinking that you would be even happier with your boss鈥檚 income, you might try to remember your financial situation before you got your most recent raise. What kinds of things can you buy now, that you couldn鈥檛 before? With this kind of counterfactual thinking, you may start to feel more content.
The use of gratitude journals, where you regularly count your blessings, work on a similar basis, says Santos. We have a tendency for 鈥渉edonic adaptation鈥�, essentially getting used to the good things in our life over time, and taking them for granted, so they no longer bring us the same joy. By making a conscious effort to recognise those things 鈥� and even imagine what our life would be like without them 鈥� we stall that process.
Other lessons in Santos鈥檚 course include the benefits of mindfulness and the value of small acts of kindness. Studies show that making the effort to , for example 鈥� be it a barista or someone in the park 鈥� can increase your sense of social connection, which .
Positive results
In 2021, Santos and her colleagues published the results of a . Overall, both groups showed some improvements by the end of their courses, which isn鈥檛 surprising 鈥� taking time to learn and grow should make you feel a bit more fulfilled with your life. However, the gains of the Science of Well-being students were about twice as large, indicating that the suggested interventions themselves had made a significant impact over the 10-week course.
These results chime with . The one in question is run by the charity Action for Happiness and, like Santos鈥檚 course, it teaches techniques such as mindfulness, the keeping of gratitude journals, ways to reappraise stressful events and tips to improve social relationships, alongside the scientific ideas behind the suggestions.
The participants were randomly allocated to take the course immediately or be put on a waiting list. Like Santos, the researchers found that people鈥檚 life satisfaction improved while taking the course and that these benefits continued for at least two months after the workshops had finished.
Overall, the gains in well-being were equivalent to finding employment or meeting a romantic partner. 鈥淚t testifies to the fact that, if you offer people a way of getting a better perspective on what鈥檚 really important and the tools to move in that direction, they will do so,鈥� says , a co-director of the Community Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics and one of the study鈥檚 co-authors. The benefits could also be seen in the participants鈥� anxiety levels, which dropped over the course, and their perceptions of social trust.
Could do better
, who has pioneered research into the social and economic factors that influence our happiness, is also passionate about this approach. 鈥淲e started educating children about the adverse effects of smoking and the result has been an enormous improvement in public health. And I think we can do the same for mental well-being,鈥� he says.
Such success stories should be accompanied by a note of caution. There is now some evidence that . Keeping a gratitude journal appears to be effective if it is used once a week, for instance, but it can slightly reduce well-being if used more than three times a week. It seems that the technique may become a burden if it is practised too regularly, particularly if someone is going through a stressful time when true blessings are hard to find.
Take our expert-led and discover how science can make you healthier and happier
More generally, it seems that . This results in them , an attitude that could exacerbate the bad feelings. It could even . Overall, the result seems to be similar to those social comparisons that harm life satisfaction 鈥� except in this case, you are competing with a figment of your imagination.
There seems little doubt that we can learn to be happier, but we should be realistic about what we can achieve and recognise that the path to a better life may be a winding road with ups and downs. You cannot eliminate every negative feeling, but with some science-backed strategies, you can shift the balance so that the troughs in your mood are shallower and the peaks are more frequent.
COVID-19 VS HAPPINESS
It is hard to forget the anxiety of early 2020, as the covid-19 pandemic swept the world. There was the fear of the disease, of course, but also serious concerns about our overall well-being. Even if we and our loved ones survived the illness, how could we cope with the isolation and uncertainty?
The pandemic has clearly been a terrible trauma for many people 鈥� and their experiences mustn鈥檛 be forgotten. On average, however, people appear to have been remarkably resilient. According to the latest , measures of life satisfaction in the UK only fell modestly on a 10-point score, from 7.16 in 2019 to 6.8 in 2020. In the US, scores rose, from 6.94 to 7.03. These small shifts seemed to be confirmed by other surveys, suggesting that it wasn鈥檛 simply an artefact of the particular methods used.
There is no easy explanation for this resilience. Richard Layard, who has been co-author of the World Happiness Reports from their inception, thinks it comes down to the role of social comparison in shaping our happiness. In general, our life satisfaction is much more dependent on relative changes in our fortunes compared with other individuals, rather than general shifts in the population as a whole (see main story). In this case, the stresses have felt less damaging because of the knowledge that other people were undergoing the same struggles. 鈥淚 think this sense of a common threat was important,鈥� says Layard.
