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Toward a Durable Happiness

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Toward a Durable Happiness Path:K:/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210/Application/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210-002_V4.3d Date: 4th June 2008 Time: 20:56 User ID: ibrahimm BlackLining Enabled Page Number: 21 CHAPTER 2 Toward a Durable Happiness Jaime L. Kurtz and Sonja Lyubomirsky When trying to envision a happy day, or a happy life, what images come to mind? For some people, it might be sharing a meal with good friends and family members while laughing together, telling stories, and feeling loved. For others, happiness may come from accomplishing an im- portant goal and basking in the glory of a job well done. And for others still, happiness may be the byproduct of doing good deeds, helping others, and believing that the world is a better place because of it. Although people may vary a good deal in what they think will make them happy, an over- whelming majority of U.S. residents place ‘‘finding happiness’’ very high on their list of major life goals (Diener, Suh, Smith, & Shao, 1995). How exactly do you ‘‘find happiness?’’ This question has been posed for thousands of years, and although many self-help books have attempted to offer answers, their authors have often based their conclusions, however well meaning, on their own personal, idiosyncratic experiences. Only recently has scientific evidence emerged to suggest a possible path to lasting happiness that is effective for the majority of people. By scientific, we mean that researchers have conducted rigorous experiments to determine whether par- ticular strategies for increasing happiness actually work. The present chapter reviews this evidence and provides practical suggestions that you can use to create long-term, or sustainable, changes in your level of well-being. IS HAPPINESS A WORTHWHILE GOAL? Before we offer you suggestions on how to become a happier person, it is important to establish whether happiness is a desirable goal. Of course, Path:K:/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210/Application/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210-002_V4.3d Date: 4th June 2008 Time: 20:56 User ID: ibrahimm BlackLining Enabled Page Number: 22 22 PURSUING HUMAN FLOURISHING everyone knows that happiness feels good to the person who is experienc- ing it. But some may argue that happy people are prone to be lazy, shallow, or unmotivated. However, recent evidence suggests quite the opposite. Rather than being simple and complacent, happy people are energetic, cre- ative, and productive in the workplace, cooperative, and motivated to help others. In the social realm, happy individuals have more friends, more satis- fying social interactions, and a lower likelihood of divorce. And in terms of physical and mental health, happy people have stronger immune systems, cope more effectively with stress, and, most strikingly, even live longer (Fredrickson, 2001; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). In sum, happi- ness doesn’t merely ‘‘feel good.’’ It carries a wide variety of benefits for the individual, as well as for families, workplaces, and communities. DEFINING HAPPINESS When we talk about how happiness can be increased, we aren’t just talk- ing about creating the sorts of momentary bursts you may get when your favorite team wins an important game or when you find a dollar on the street. Psychologists are quite good at boosting people’s moods over short periods of time. Techniques like giving people a piece of candy, playing pleasant music, or providing positive feedback all produce momentary increases in positive affect (Schwarz & Strack, 1999). The problem is that these increases don’t last. As we’ll explain below, people’s moods respond to and fluctuate along with changes in their environments. When some- thing wonderful happens, they report feeling happier. When something unfortunate happens, they feel sad. However, these changes are often short-lived, and people return to their baseline level of happiness fairly quickly (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). The purpose of the research described in this chapter is to create lasting, sustainable changes in people’s dispositional level of happiness. This can be thought of as how happy a per- son feels, on average, over a fairly long period of time. Most researchers define happiness as consisting of three components: frequent instances of positive affect, infrequent instances of negative affect, and a high level of life satisfaction (Diener et al., 1995). Positive and nega- tive affect are simply experiences of good feelings (e.g., excited, joyful, pleased) and bad feelings (e.g., irritable, sad, tense), respectively. Life satis- faction, by contrast, is a more global, cognitive evaluation of how content a person is with the state of his or her life. Those with a high level of life sat- isfaction would agree with statements such as, ‘‘The conditions of my life are excellent’’ (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985). It’s important to add to our description of what we mean by happiness that it is thought of as a subjective state, meaning that self-reports are the standard way of determining how happy an individual is. Although a few researchers have assessed happiness by asking friends and family to give their impressions of how happy a particular person is (e.g., Sandvik, Diener, & Seidlitz, 1993), ultimately the final judge is ‘‘whoever lives inside [the] person’s skin’’ (Myers & Diener, 1995, p. 11). Therefore, the term Path:K:/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210/Application/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210-002_V4.3d Date: 4th June 2008 Time: 20:56 User ID: ibrahimm BlackLining Enabled Page Number: 23 TOWARD A DURABLE HAPPINESS 23 ‘‘subjective well-being’’ (or simply ‘‘well-being’’) is often used as a syno- nym for happiness, as it will be throughout this chapter. CAN HAPPINESS BE INCREASED? REASONS FOR PESSIMISM Is it possible to actually become happier? You may be surprised to learn that, until fairly recently, there was very little scientific data to tell us whether or not people can lastingly boost their happiness. In fact, in previ- ous years, researchers were doubtful about the possibility of becoming hap- pier. Two reasons underlie their pessimism—first, happiness is partially determined by genetics, and, second, people tend to adapt (or get used to) most positive life experiences, and what initially brought them great pleas- ure gradually ceases to do so. Therefore, some say, any attempts to increase happiness would be futile, because people would simply return to their ge- netically determined happiness ‘‘baseline’’ following a pleasant experience. We describe the evidence for this perspective below. The Roles of Heredity and Personality The baseline level of happiness, or set point, is higher for some people than for others. In other words, some of you are naturally, or disposition- ally, happier than others. Years of research on fraternal and identical twins has led psychologists to conclude that this baseline is determined by genet- ics (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). In other words, if you had an identical twin, he or she would share your height, intelligence, and predisposition to hypertension, and your level of happiness as well. The fact that happiness has a high heritability is also consistent with the finding that a person’s level of happiness is strongly related to his or her standing on several personality traits (Diener & Lucas, 1999). Forexample,peoplewhoarehighlyneurotictendtobelesshappy,and extraverts are inclined to be happier than introverts. Traits such as these are relatively fixed, meaning that, throughout the life span, people gener- ally do not change much in where they stand on extraversion, neuroti- cism, and so forth (McCrae & Costa, 1994). Some researchers have used these findings to argue that happiness is yet another personality trait— stable and resistant to any kind of meaningful change (Costa, McCrae, & Zonderman, 1987). Hedonic Adaptation The theory of hedonic adaptation provides another source of pessimism about the possibility of lastingly increasing happiness. Simply put, this is the tendency for the emotional impact of both positive and negative events to diminish over time (Brickman & Campbell, 1971; Diener, Lucas, & Napa Scollon, 2006). To illustrate, think about a time in your life when something extremely good happened to you. It may be something you had daydreamed about and strove for, such as getting accepted into the college Path:K:/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210/Application/GWD-LOPEZ-08-0210-002_V4.3d Date: 4th June 2008 Time: 20:56 User ID: ibrahimm BlackLining Enabled Page Number: 24 24 PURSUING HUMAN FLOURISHING of your choice, winning an important race in a track meet, or successfully asking your crush out on a date. How did you feel immediately after? Most likely, you felt exuberant. You probably thought about the event constantly, replaying it in your mind, telling your friends and family all about it, and feeling certain that the joy you were experiencing would last forever. Of course, your joy did not last forever. Although thinking about your new life as a college student, your athletic prowess, or your upcoming date may have provided a burst of pleasure, later thoughts of the event gradually failed to reproduce the initial joy you felt. This is due to the process of hedonic adaptation, in which events that were initially laden with emotion gradually lose their intensity (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). From the life altering to the mundane, there is a wealth of evidence that people adapt to a variety of events. For example, people adapt to the outcome of a presi- dential election or a sporting event, the end of a romantic relationship, fail- ing to receive a job promotion, being insulted, winning the lottery, becoming paralyzed, losing a loved one, being diagnosed with a serious ill- ness, and so on (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1997; Sieff, Dawes, & Loewenstein, 1999; Wortman, Silver, & Kessler, 1993). To further illustrate, researchers Suh, Diener, and Fujita (1996) asked college students to report their level of subjective well-being and the num- ber of positive and negative life experiences that they had experienced over the past 4 years.
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