The Science to Happiness
“People are just as happy as they make their minds up to be”-Abraham Lincoln.
Happiness is the ultimate desired mystery of the complex human mind. One could come to endless theoretical questions, such as: Do humans need to feel sadness to know happiness? Can you train yourself to be happy? Why do some things make us happy while others do not? If I buy this Ferarri, will that bring me happiness? What is the key to happiness? The science of happiness boils down to a person’s overall satisfaction with their life. In psychology, happiness is better referred to as “subjective well-being.” With the uniqueness that is entailed in every individual life being so precise and irreplaceable, the studies of happiness must follow trends, surveys, and long-term observations to determine an understandable answer. Happiness can mean various things to people, so studying a topic like this is tricky. The study of genetics, uncontrollable life circumstances, and controllable life circumstances are all extraneous variables that determine the big picture and comprise the broad topic of subjective well-being. In the world of 2022, technology, materialism, instant gratification with high accessibility to new foods, opportunities, lovers, and items are at an all-time high. “Hedonic Adaptation” has distracted most people from achieving their highest and happiest selves. Hedonic adaptation is a dangerous cycle for someone because it will cost a person time, money, personal sacrifices, intrapersonal sacrifices, and interpersonal strain. Hedonic Adaptation is a concept where a positive (or negative) event happens to a person, and there is a significant change in life satisfaction; however, as time passes by, the person returns to the same level of happiness before the event. For example, a person could believe that they will only reach happiness if they buy a new house, get a new job, marry a new lover, get a new pet, or lose 50 pounds. While they will feel that brief moment of joy, as time passes they will return to their original state. This cycle is dangerous for someone trying to achieve ultimate happiness because it is never-ending. That is why studies, like the one by Sonia Lyumbomirsky, found that your genes determine 50 percent of your happiness, your controllable life choices define 40 percent, and uncontrollable life circumstances determine only 10 percent. Happiness is not what happens to you but rather how you react to what happens to you. Other notable psychologists like Maslow in his hierarchy of needs experiment from 1970 and Freud’s Pleasure Principle from 1933 are some of the first significant researchers to find the meaning behind satisfaction; While those studies are instrumental and ground-breaking, they are outdated and used subjects as animals. In the modern era, happiness is explored greater than ever thanks to scientists and psychologists paving their way through this feeling, that is arguably the true meaning of life.
Sonia Lyumbomirsky is an exquisite example of a modern-day researcher discovering more about happiness and the root cause of what takes away happiness from people. She is an American psychologist who has dedicated most of her career to studying happiness, which is uncommon among her counterparts in her field. She works as a professor at the University of California, Riverside, and she is a best-selling author with her book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach. Lyumbomirsky says on her website: “My students and I have found that truly happy individuals construe life events and daily situations in ways that seem to maintain their happiness, while unhappy individuals construe experiences in ways that seem to reinforce unhappiness.” Lyumbomirsky is clearly saying that the happiest people focus on the moment because dwelling in the past can bring about feelings of regret, unfufillment, disappointment, and guilt. Living in the future can bring on feelings of worry, anxiousness, and uneasiness. Living in the moment is a term people call practicing “mindfulness”. Mindfulness is being thankful and absorbing as much as one can in a stimulating physical environment in the present moment. When a person walks around with a heavy heart, they are overwhelmed in their minds. A person can be here in a moment, but not really “here”. Having mindfulness is also having an attitude of gratitude. American entrepreneur, Russell Simmons, once famously said “needing nothing attracts everything.” This refers back to Hedonic Adaptation, and it displays that once a person can escape this cycle, they are more likely to achieve a blissful life; Lyumbomirsky is also no stranger to this topic. She says,
…If people become accustomed to (and take for granted) anything
positive that happens to them, then how can they ever become happier? Our
model suggests that adaptation to positive experience proceeds via two paths:
1) through diminished positive emotions and 2) through increased aspirations.
The key to achieving increased and lasting well-being thereby lies in effortful,
intentional activities that slow down or preclude the positive adaptation
process.
Lyumbomirsky is showing that much like anything else worth having in life does not come easily. She says that all events that cause this pheniominon such as a shopping spree, a summer fling, partying too much, or overendulging in sweets all have similar qualities; they are all episodic, brief, plentiful, full of distraction, but most importantly, they stem from materialism and consumerism. She says it perfectly when trying to escape Hedonic Adaptation: “...step off the hedonic treadmill and become more thrifty.” Lyumbomirsky dives deeper into the topic of consumerism and how it actively diminishes happiness with her fellow author Joseph Chancellor in their writing Happiness and Thrift: When (Spending) Less is (Hedonically) More. The title is incredible because it spins off the common saying “less is more” while showing that materialism is damaging and contaminating one's quality of life. This writing is a response to another psychology paper that is written by the same man who’s Ted Talk is discussed in the next paragraph. What the authors are saying in this work is that there is high virtue and higher satisfaction in a person once they learn to be thrifty. The authors argue that greed is damaging from beyond a person, but even to the world. This article was written in 2010, but the issue with consumurism has only become more debilitating with the rise of fast fashion, online shopping, and increased environmental damages. Both Lyumbomirsky and Chancellor say that Hedonic Adaptation is so common in the United States that it normalizes being in debt and continuous overspending. The concept of being thrifty is to be wise, mindful, resourceful, grateful, and ambitious. The easier path in 2022 is to be in credit card debt in order to obtain excess amounts of clothing, luxurious foods, properties, vehicles, and other material items that will soon fade out of trendiness and will only fufill peace for a fleeting moment in the grand scheme of life. To be thrifty is to be different. Large companies and corporations have trained Americans very well and have trained them to be spenders, live outside their means, and to be unhappy unless they are shopping or “showing off”. Ironically, the authors say that in the long-run, the happier people are the ones that do not have to worry about finances, who were smart with their money, and who avoided paying excess debts:
Studies suggest that individuals would spend less and derive more hedonic benefit by
eliminating distressing debts, stretching positive experiences through appreciation and
savoring, recycling positive experiences via variety and reminiscing, renting instead of
buying, and resolutely focusing on intrinsic goals over extrinsic ones. With a strong
financial foundation and the skills to make the most of positive changes, more Americans
would be able to thrive financially and emotionally in challenging economic times, while
contributing less to the perilous circumstances that led to these challenging times in the
first place.
Ted Talks are an exciting medium to learn more on this topic, and in research, Dan Gilbert made valuable points in his Ted Talk titled “The surprising science of happiness," which he first delivered in 2004. The simple layout of this very inspiring speech was a couple of scenarios and metaphors to show unfortunate life circumstances that Gilbert made into a 20-minute speech. Gilbert began his speech talking about time. He made jokes of trying to fit the 2-million-year evolution of humans into 20 minutes. Gilbert said that the human brain weighs three pounds and has tripled in size in the past 2 million years through evolution. He says the brain got bigger because humans gained a part of the brain called the frontal lobe and, more precisely, the prefrontal cortex. The frontal lobe and prefrontal cortex allow humans to be vastly different from other mammals because they will enable imagination and complex thoughts. Gilbert gives the example of training air pilots using flight simulators before flying an actual plane, and the brain performs the same idea: Humans can run through scenarios in their heads before actually creating or living the scenario in the present and physical world; This is why people do not make the same mistake twice or do something that could put him or her in harm’s way. Gilbert asked the audience to imagine which life they would rather live: winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic. It would be assumed that most people would not want to become paraplegics because one would lose something: control over the body. Most, if not all, of the audience, chose to win the lottery. By winning the lottery, a person would assume they would only gain through their newfound finances. He referred to a study completed by Brickman, Coates, and Janoff-Bulman, the findings at the end of this case study were shocking: both lottery winners and parapylgics shared the same amount of happiness one year after the moment their lives changed forever. Gilbert introduced his theory, “The impact bias” after this example, which is the same idea as Hedonic Adaptation. This is when the human mind fails to believe that after an event, happiness will not return to the same state it was before. The Impact Bias is an escape for humans to use so that they feel they are fulfilling their happiness, but really they are distracting their minds. Gilbert says that in his research, he has found that in most circumstances if they occurred over three months ago, it has no real impact on your happiness. Gilbert showed a quote by Sir Thomas Browne:
I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches,
adversity to prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not
one place to hit me.
Everyone has the power to reach higher life satisfaction, and it is up to the person to decide to endeavor on this journey. Gilbert then told the story of Morse Bickham, a black man who was wrongfully accused of a crime and spent over 30 years in a penitentiary. The crime was the murder of a sheriff in his home state of Louisiana. It was also rumored that this sheriff was a leader in the Ku Klux Klan. At the time, Bickham was almost 80 years old, and with great strides in forensic evidence, he was exonerated. He was released for good behavior and inconclusive evidence in the case of this crime. Bickham became famous for saying this quote in his unfortunate situation, “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.” The point of this story was that Bickham says he has no regrets, spoke of prison in a etherial manner, and labeled himself as a happy person, even though he had been targeted at a government level and wrongfully detained. He was also wrongfully accused as a person of color. Gilbert led this conversation into discussing synthetic and natural happiness. Synthetic is as it sounds: fleeting, quickly found, and plentiful. Natural happiness is not always getting what you want and still having pleasure, this was the case for Bickham. When Dan Gilbert reflected on his Ted Talk over ten years later, he reminiced in debunking the substantially aged examples and studies, such as the lottery winner and paraplegic, as it does compare two drastically different models of significant life changes that have zero relation to one another. His speech should be honored, though, that this does show how adaptive the human mind can be and that happiness is quite relative. While the findings could be deemed inconclusive or outdated, it does open up the not fully explored realm of human happiness and the reactiveness of our consciousness.
In approaching happiness, it is vital to know the different approaches and the ambiguity that comes with them. The first one is the satisfaction theorist, who believes that all a person needs to be happy are basic needs, such as food, water, air, and shelter. Activity theorists approach this concept differently as a person can only have happiness when consistently maintaining engagement in activities of life; The most famous activity theorist is Csikszentmihalyi, who first theorized this in his book Beyond Boredom and Anxiety in 1975. In his writing, he states that a person must use activities to reach happiness because it gives a person purpose. With this state of being “turned on,” he labeled it flow. Csikszentmihalyi argued that the more flow a person is in, the happier they are. A modern approach to this theory is setting and seeking goals. The path to this practice is repeating mantras, writing plans down daily, and seeking a specific outcome; This process is now called goal theorists. The final theorist of overall life satisfaction is called trait theorists. In the field of psychology and the ongoing nature versus nurture approach, these theorists are very much on the side of the nature argument. They believe that there is an installed, predetermined, unchangeable factor in a person’s brain that will choose how satisfied they are with their lives. This level of happiness is unchangeable and unexplainable. The theorists call these levels of happiness adaptation levels and determined set points. However, there is no argument in which of these three approaches is the correct one. The combination of these three, altogether, will determine how happy a person is.
As Shane Lopez and C. R. Snyder write in their book titled “The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology,” They say, “scientists that study subjective well-being assume that an essential ingredient of a good life is that the person herself likes her life.” The researchers must leave a degree of trust in their subjects because it is up to the subject to evaluate and label the happiness levels of their own lives solely through their perspective. However, the perception of a happier life is subjective. Happier people could feel pleasant emotions 51 percent of the time. For other people, it could mean feeling pleasant emotions over 90 percent of the time when both are happier than an unhappy person. When approaching this study, the authors factored in elements and found that income and age have correlations with the levels of satisfaction in a person’s life. They also found that cultural effects do not have a solid relation to happiness levels. The rest of their research focuses on “Positive Psychology” which was first used by the theorist Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy of needs. Maslow was also one of the first researchers to point out that positive psychology is not nearly as studied as other parts of psychology, when it is arguably one of the most important topics to understand. Maslow said, “Science of psychology has been far more successful on the negative than on the positive side; it has revealed just as much about man’s shortcomings, his illness, his sins, but little about his potentialalities, his virtues. His achievable aspirations, or his full psychological height.” The authors of this writing are very humble by including this quote in their published work. The human mind is debilitating in terms of what is the threshold of happiness, peace, and pleasent emotions. The truth is that there are no threashholds, and as humans studying their own minds, it is uncertain if this will ever be fully understood. Lopez and Snyder also admitted that much of the psychology that was studied in this field prior to the 2000s is invaluable because of the means of collecting evidence, the various measures used to determine happiness, and the subjectivity that different reports presented. In modern day studies of these results, they have narrowed it down to three outcomes. The three outcomes are trends in behavioral changes, psychological changes, and physiological changes.
Lopez and Snyder introduce a concept called the “broadening and building” effect that comes from a result of increased life satisfaction. Being happier attracts more opportunities and ideas into a person’s already limiting mind. This concept was first discussed by a psychologist by the name of Fredrickson. He first recognized this topic in the instance that a person is in danger. When a person feels they need to react quickly in a life threatening situation, a part of their brain will trigger into “fight or flight” mode. This is a mode that humans instinctually have in order to maintain survival. Fredrickson said that in an extremely negative situation, like almost dying, a person’s mind and thought automatically narrows in order to escape. In a near-death experience, humans have two paths, and when they choose the correct path, there is overwehlming feeling of peace and satisfaction. On the contrary, very positive sitautions do not cause fight or flight reactions. Happiness gives a person far more options in what their next move or reaction could be because they feel more optimistic traveling in a direction that may be new territory. The further a person is away from these survival instincts, the more open their minds become and they become more creative, more abundant, more social, and more intelligent. The instinctual factor is not present in a positive reaction, so these positive reactions are various, flexible, and vast. Some examples of these positive feelings are curiosity, joy, love, and excitement. The examples that the authors use in this case are prominent among children. Adults can learn so much from children because when a child has high positive emotions they make more friends, they discover new hobbies, and they continuously try new things. Having ideal experiences trigger these feelings, like curiosity, can change a person’s life drastically for the better. They could find a career that pays them well for a talent they did not know that they had before, they could build a beautiful family with a person in their life, or they could find a topic that really intrigues them and brings them purpose. Fredrickson also mentions that when people are in this positive state of mind, they build new strong connections with people that will last.
Finally, the concept of sleep is explored in the world and psychology of happiness. Authors Jung Ki Kim and Ji-eun Shin write in their article “How a Good Sleep Predicts Life Satisfaction: The Role of Zero-Sum Beliefs About Happiness” about this correlation. The authors say that there is not enough research yet in this relation, however they are eager to explore what they believe is a close tie between sleep and happiness. The authors theorized that the zero sum belief on happiness can be divided into two groups: Those who believe that happiness is finite, and others that believe that happiness is infinite. Those who believe that happiness is finite also believe that in order for them to gain happiness, they must take it from someone else. Those who believe that happiness is infinite believe that there is no threshold in happiness and that everyone is responsible for their own levels of joy. After their study, they determined that poor sleep habits directly affect the person’s overall happiness levels and found that people who get less sleep are more likely to believe that happiness is a finite resource. The authors factored in that humans are very social creatures; They point out that no matter how social a person is, they spend at least one third of their life alone and away from others, this means not engaging in body language or dialogue, and that is when they are in the state of sleep. This is an especially important detail for those who believe that happiness is given and taken from person to person. For those who determine their happiness based on others, they must recognize that they cannot ignore their happiness levels when they are asleep and alone. This study fit this concept of socialness perfectly by using 250 college students as their subjects. Contridictually, they found that appropriate sleep is vital for happiness levels, but they also found that socializing and meeting with others is draining when it comes to energy levels. Much like any other achievement in health and wellness, a balance is needed, and that balance may vary from person to person. This is why a person should never evaluate their life when they are tired because it is setting up these important thoughts for negativity and dissapointment.
Ultimately, the concept of happiness is a underevalued concept of psychology. By the use of incredible researchers like Lyumbomirsky who have dedicated their entire careers to this concept, or speakers like Dan Gilbert who are eager to share more on this topic to the masses, the different approaches that humans have to happiness like genetics and mindsets, and modern day studies performed on college students, children, and those among different circumstances like income and materialism, the concept of joy is becoming more digestible. Once the idea of happiness is discovered fully, the world would not experience life’s most devastating problems that are on the rise. With the use of mindfulness, a person will reach true nirvana. In the journey to happiness, a person must realize that no items, no location, person, job, income, look, or anything outside of who they are will fix their low levels of life satisfaction. The key to happiness is taking the hard path in order to obtain a feeling of joy that is long lasting, savoring, and fulfilling. The tools to happiness are to stay curious and open-minded because it will expand the already limited human mind. Just as Abraham Lincoln said, “People are just as happy as they make their minds up to be” was proven decades later by the leaders of the happiness psychology. Happiness is not easily attainable, if it was, most people would choose to feel that way. Lyumbomirsky showed the numbers when she said that 50 percent of happiness is predetermined by genetics and only 10 percent of happiness is determined by uncontrollable factors. That 40 percent of happiness is left to be full and it can only be made that way by you.
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