Happiness

“There are two key components to understanding psychological wealth in general, and happiness in particular. Both are vitally important and frequently discussed, but often misunderstood. The first is that happiness is more than achieving desirable life circumstances, such as health, wealth, success at work, and a happy family life. Although it is certainly logical to think that when all the pieces of life’s puzzle fall neatly into place, you will feel happy, there is more to happiness than meets the eye. Happiness, as we will show you, is much more of a process than an emotional destination. People, probably through no fault of their own, frequently overlook the process side of happiness in their pursuit of the good life. You likely can think of examples of folks who focus on potential happiness down the road – a summer vacation or remodeled kitchen – but who also forget to stop and smell the roses along the way. We make the case that while goals that produce happiness are important, understanding that happiness itself is a process is even more important.

The second principle crucial to understanding psychological wealth is seeing happiness for its functions rather than its pleasantries. Undoubtedly, happiness – by almost anyone’s definition – feels good, and most folks like to savor the experience. But happiness doesn’t just feel good; it is good for you in a number of surprising ways, helping people to function effectively in many areas of life. Understanding how happiness can be used beneficially is important to cultivating true psychological wealth.”

“A very important finding comes from Stephanie Brown and her colleagues at the University of Michigan: giving support to others is more important to longevity than receiving support. She found that elderly individuals who gave little emotional or practical support to others were more than twice as likely to die during the five years she followed them compared to people who gave to others. Even accounting for initial health and other factors, people who gave to a spouse, to friends, and to neighbors were blessed with greater longevity.”

“Don’t be concerned if you experience sporadic anger, sadness, or worry. Happiness is not the total absence of negative emotions. Brief feelings of sadness and guilt, while unpleasant to experience, can serve important purposes and help us function effectively. How then, on an individual basis, can we hope to gauge whether we are happy enough to benefit from the health effects of happiness?

One way is by considering “affect balance,” the sum total of our unpleasant moods subtracted from our pleasant emotions. Instead of ridding ourselves of all unpleasant emotions, our aim is to experience considerably more pleasant than unpleasant emotions. Researchers examined affect balance in the lives of cardiovascular patients who had previously been hospitalized. They found that affect balance tending toward the negative – that is, with relatively frequent or intense negativity compared to the amount of positivity – was the best predictor of whether the patient relapsed and was readmitted to the hospital. Experiencing negative emotions was not nearly as important as whether a person experienced more negative emotions than positive ones. Using the affect balance approach to happiness, we need to make sure that we commonly experience good feelings, and only infrequently experience negative ones.”

“Imagine that you die and because of some administrative errors in heaven you are sent to hell instead. There, at the fiery gates, you are greeted by Satan who – of course – smiles and offers you a deal. He explains that you have a choice to make that will affect how you spend the rest of eternity. If you choose the three people you love the most to take your place and live with him in hell, you can buy your way out, and be assured a spot upstairs in heaven. What would you do? Many of us – in fact, most of us – would not take the deal. We would be willing to suffer rather than let them suffer. People matter to most of us an entire amount. In refusing to turn over our loved ones to Satan, we would of course have earned the right to heaven – because caring for those we love is for most of us the core of being a good and happy person. People have been called social animals, but the happiest among us are loving and caring angels.”

“What they found was surprising: the amount of money a person made only modestly predicted whether or not she was satisfied with her income. Some people with a lot of money could not meet their desires, and others with little money were able to do so.

This brings us to the formula:

What we have (attainments) Happiness = ————————————————- What we want (aspirations)

This formula makes sense. It means that it doesn’t matter so much if you make $20,000 a year or $100,000, if you drive a new BMW or an old Chevrolet – what matters more is that your income is sufficient for your desires. Of course, we know from the bulk of the research that it is generally better to have more, rather than less, money. But individual variation in desire helps explain why some poor folks are happy and some wealthy people are not.”

“Kathleen Vohs and her colleagues were interested to discover how money, and even reminders of money, affects people psychologically. To do this, they primed the concept of money by leaving subtle reminders around the research laboratory. For instance, they placed a flying dollar as the screen saver on a computer screen in the room, or put a framed dollar bill on the wall. Amazingly, research participants who were exposed to these small monetary cues felt more self-confident than those who were not. They also were able to persevere longer at a difficult task without asking for help than folks in the no-money condition. The effects of money, however were not all positive in Vohs’s study. The people in the money-cue condition were also less likely to be sociable later on, preferring to wait for the experimenters alone rather than with others, sitting farther away from others in a waiting room, and opting for solitary rather than group activities when offered the choice. The money-primed participants were also less helpful to a confederate who appeared to accidentally have dropped his belongings, and they donated less of their experimental earnings to charity when given the opportunity to do so. Thus, the merest hint of money led to a tendency for folks to feel confident, but also to feel more distant from others.”

“Barry Schwartz, a psychologist at Swarthmore College, has studied how happy people are with their decisions. Schwartz and his colleagues have identified two decision-making styles: satisficing and maximizing. Satisficers are individuals who have a minimum threshold for what is acceptable to them, and maximizers are people who strive to get the very best out of every decision. Being a maximizer sounds appealing until you learn the results of Schwartz’s studies. Once maximizers have made a choice – whether it is accepting a job offer, signing a recording contract, or marrying their high school sweetheart – they are likely to second-guess themselves, and wonder whether they could have made a better choice. The funny thing is, although maximizers sometimes achieve better outcomes than satisficers – getting a bit more money for that recording contract, for instance – they also tend to be less happy with their achievements. In fact, they turn out to be less happy in general. Maximizers, according to a series of studies by Schwartz, are lower than satisficers in happiness, optimism, self-esteem, and life satisfaction, and higher in depression and regret!”

“In this chapter, we walk you through the nuts and bolts of a happy mindset by encouraging you to “take AIM at happiness.” AIM is our acronym representing the basic components of a positive attitude that are necessary for happiness: attention, interpretation, and memory. Because attitudes of life are central to happiness, using the AIM model is essential to your psychological wealth. When most people consider positive thinking, they tend to focus on the interpretation part of AIM. They try to recast negative thoughts in a new, shinier light, but usually overlook how vitally important attention and memory are to the happiness equation. Positive thinking is more than simply looking on the bright side; successful positivity means paying attention to success and blessings, and being open-minded to positive explanations of events, as well as recalling the good times. Although we doubt that the kind of positive attitudes suggested by self-help gurus are magic cure-alls, we do know that they can increase your happiness.”