Photo by Dominic Alves
True Happiness
It’s February again, and for people up north that can be a time of grey doldrums. For those of us lucky enough to live in the south, it’s actually the beginning of spring. In my front garden the daffodils are springing up, bright yellow spots of sun on the still dormant soil. My mother used to plant daffodils all down the hills of the ravine behind our house, so that come spring she would see them dancing toward the stream. One of the wonders of daffodils is that they spread underground, so that year after year, more and more daffodils emerge.
What has this got to do with career paths? For me, it’s about happiness, and the way the bright yellow flowers spread. I’ve written before about how happiness can make you more productive at work, and this is actually emerging now as a field of study. Martin Seligman’s work was the beginning of serious scholarly inquiry into what actually makes us happy, and gave birth to the new field of positive psychology. I’m a big fan of Seligman and some of his followers because the emphasis is on normal people (rather than pathological people) and how we can be happy.
“Why bother being happy?” Seligman asks in one of his most famous books, Authentic Happiness (2002). He answers this question by recognizing the role that positive emotions have to play in our lives. Negative emotions (sadness, fear, anger) are signals of external threat causing us to constrict both our hearts and our heads and move into survival modes. But positive emotions are expansive: when we feel happy, delighted, loving, kind, or grateful, our minds are more creative, unrestrained, open to new ideas and new experiences. Seligman illustrates this with several experiments that show when good feelings are induced prior to asking subjects to complete a difficult task, those people invariably solve the problems more quickly and creatively than those that have been pushed towards negative emotions first. Amazing.
Seligman also believes in “learned optimism” as an approach to being happier. Simply put, learning to be more optimistic about yourself and your future helps create hope, confidence and resilience. In terms of work productivity, happier people get more done, get better evaluations from their supervisors, and earn higher pay. In one experiment, trying to figure out whether happiness or productivity comes first, adults and children who were put in a good mood before attempting laboratory tasks or word problems selected higher goals for themselves and persisted longer in performing the tasks. Happier people showed greater evidence of self-control and coping abilities when something bad happened. Finally, happy people are more “other-centered” and connected socially than unhappy people given them more resources to draw on in times of trouble.
Some people, notably Sonya Lyubomirsky, have asked, “Is there a natural set point for happiness for any individual human being that does not actually vary much? Or is there a way to increase a happiness set point?” In a paper titled “Pursuing Happiness: The Architecture of Sustainable Change” (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, and Schkade, 2005), the authors propose that “a person’s chronic happiness level is governed by three major factors: a genetically determined set point for happiness (50%), happiness-relevant circumstantial factors (10%), and happiness-relevant activities and practices (40%).” They conclude that the first two cannot be changed much, but that the third category can be used to create “the best opportunities for sustainable increasing happiness.” In other words, adopting new behaviors can actually increase your level of happiness.
So what exactly does it mean to engage in “happiness-relevant activities and practices? Boiling a series of academic experiments back down to the essence, these are the simple answers:
- Set a goal, and make it yours (own it);
- Make it fun-if it becomes a burdensome habit, stop;
- Keep a balance between challenge and ease;
- Always remember the big picture (why this is important to you).
Martin Seligman asserts that happiness lies “at the intersection between pleasure and meaning” so whether at work or at home, the goal overall should be to engage in activities that are both personally significant and enjoyable, whether this is writing an article, designing a building, or playing with children. Except in extreme circumstantial instances (recent car wreck victims for instance) our level of happiness is often determined by what we focus on.
So, back to the daffodils: in helping yourself become sustainably happier, you will no doubt be contributing to the spread of the happiness in others, just like those bulbs. You can contribute to the wellbeing of people around whether you are at work, at home, at school or at a place of worship. That is a meaningful life goal to me. As an added perk, you will likely become more productive, too.
