Though our average happiness may be influenced by the pattern of our activities, it is mainly affected by our temperament and attitudes and by the key features of our life situation – our relationships, our health, our worries about money.
When different people are exposed to good experiences (like pleasant film clips), those who are naturally happy at rest experience the greatest gain in happiness. And when they are exposed to nasty experiences, they experience the least increase in discomfort.
Happiness Improves Your Health
In September 1932 the mother superior of the American School Sisters of Notre Dame decided that all new nuns should be asked to write an autobiographical sketch. These sketches were kept, and they have recently been independently rated by psychologists to show the amount of positive feeling which they revealed. These ratings have then been compared with how long each nun lived. Remarkably, the amount of positive feeling that a nun revealed in her twenties was an excellent predictor of how long she would live.
… However we measure happiness, it appears to be conducive to physical health (other things being equal). Happy people tend to have more robust immune systems and lower levels of stress causing cortisol. If artificially exposed to the flu virus, they are less likely to contract the disease. They are also more likely to recover from a major surgery.
Equally, when a person has a happy experience, the body chemistry improves, and blood pressure and heart rate tend to fall. Especially good experiences can have long-lasting effects on our health. If we take the 750 actors and actresses who were nominated for the Oscars, we can assume that before the decision the winners and losers were equally healthy on average. Yet those who got the Oscars went on to live four years longer, on average, than the losers. Such was the gain in morale from winning.
If we compare Western countries, the richer ones are no happier than the poorer ones. … we can see that for countries with above $20,000 a head, additional income is not associated with extra happiness.
For poorer countries, things are different, because people are nearer the breadline. … This corresponds to one of the key beliefs of the nineteenth century economists – that the extra happiness provided by extra income is greatest when you are poor, and declines steadily as you get richer.
If people change their reference group upwards, this can seriously affect their happiness. There are many cases where people became objectively better off but felt subjectively worse. One is East Germany, where the living standards of those employed soared after 1990, but their level of happiness fell: with the reunification of Germany the East Germans began to compare themselves with the West Germans, rather than with the other countries in the former Soviet bloc.
… most people are not rivalrous about their leisure. But they are rivalrous about income, and that rivalry is self-defeating. There is thus a tendency to sacrifice too much leisure in order to increase income.
If we do not foresee that we get used to our material possessions, we shall overinvest in acquiring them, at the expense of our leisure. People do underestimate this process of habituation. As a result, our life can get distorted toward working and making money, and away from other pursuits.
… if money is transferred from a richer person to a poorer person, the poor person gains more happiness than the rich person loses. So average happiness increases. Thus a country will have a higher level of average happiness the more equally its income is distributed – all else being equal.
…how do we know that genes affect our happiness? The key evidence comes from the study of twins. Twins that are identical have identical genes, while twins that aren’t identical have only half their genes in common, just like ordinary siblings. As a result, identical twins are much more similar in happiness than twins that are not identical. The findings from the Minnesota Twins Registry are striking. Identical twins are remarkably close to each other in happiness, while non-identical twins are barely similar at all.
What doesn’t matter
We can begin with five features that on average have a negligible effect on happiness. The first is age: if we trace people through their life, average happiness is remarkably stable, despite the ups and downs of income and despite increasing ill-health. The second is gender: in nearly every country men and women are equally happy. Looks too make little difference. Likewise, IQ is only weakly correlated with happiness, as are physical and mental energy (self-rated). Finally, education has only a small direct effect on happiness, though of course is raises happiness by raising a person’s income.
The ‘Big Seven’
The first five are given in order of importance:
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Family relationships
Financial situation
Work
Community and friends
Health
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Personal freedom
Personal values
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Differences in family situation cause a huge difference in happiness. If someone is divorced, that person’s happiness falls by 5 points. This is more than double the effect of losing a third of one’s income. And if someone is separated (reflecting a more recent break-up of the relationship), things are even worse. Widowhood too is a major blow.
… we find that people generally become happier as a result of marriage, and this is true of both men and women. In the two or three years before marriage they are already becoming happier (some are already living together), but the year of marriage is the peak of happiness. After that first year, some habituation sets in, and people become a bit less happy. But they remain happier than they were four years before the marriage.
The pattern for divorce is similar but in reverse. Before the divorce, people are becoming ever less happy. The year of divorce is the worst. After that year men return on average to their baseline happiness, but women continue to suffer.
What about the effects of having children? There is indeed great rejoicing when children are born. Yet within two years parents revert on average to their original level of happiness.
When people become unemployed their happiness falls much less because of the loss of income than because of the loss of work itself.
Healthy members of the public generally overestimate the loss of happiness that people actually experience from many of the main medical conditions. But people can never adapt to chronic pain or to mental illness – feelings that come from inside themselves, rather than limitations on their external activities. The control of such suffering must be one of our top priorities.
If our goals are too low, we get bored. But if they are too high, we get frustrated. The secret is to have goals that are stretching enough, but not too stretching. Unattainable goals are a well-known cause of depression. But so too is boredom.
In the 1970s the economist Tibor Scitovsky wrote a book called The Joyless Economy in which he tried to explain why so many people were unhappy, even though they had plenty of money. His explanation was boredom. They had chosen comfort instead of stimulation. They had failed to find active interests that would engage them outside their work.
His diagnosis has an important element of truth. Even though many people feel under tremendous pressure, the average American or Briton still find three and a half hours a day to watch television. People no longer have to struggle to keep alive, as they have done for most of human history. So we have more choice over our goals. Getting them right is the problem.
In the same vein the great economist Lord Keynes wrote, ‘To those who sweat for their daily bread, leisure is a longed-for sweet until they get it.’
In 1999 (in Bhutan), the ban on TV was lifted, and licenses were given to more than thirty cable operators. … And so the Bhutanese could see the usual mix of football, violence, sexual betrayal, consumer advertising, wrestling and the like. They lapped it up, but the impact on their society provides a remarkable natural experiment in how technological change can affect attitudes and behaviour.
Quite soon everyone noticed a sharp increase in family break up, crime and dug taking. In schools violence in the playground increased… One could be cautious in generalising from only one episode. But this striking tale reinforces the commonsense view that TV is a major independent force in our lives and not simply a reflection of what we already are.
Social life
The typical Britain watches television for three and a half hours a day – roughly twenty-five hours a week. Over a lifetime a typical Briton spends more time watching television than doing paid work. The figures are much the same in the United States. In most European countries viewing rates are somewhat lower but generally above two hours a day. They are not figures for how long the set is switched on; they are what individual viewers say about their own viewing.
This viewing time has to come from somewhere, and it mainly comes from social life. In 1973 there were still communities in Canada that had no TV. So an enterprising research group monitored what happened when TV was introduced into a particular town. As you would expect, social life was reduced, especially for older people. And people stopped playing so much sport. Because television is so passive, it also reduced the measured creativity of people, both young and old.
Originally, television provided a common focus for the family, when there was only one set. They the children got their own sets, which hastened the demise of the family evening meal. As Robert Putnam argues, television must be one of the reasons for the decline of community life in the United States.
We should not go back to a world without television, but we can surely use our television better than we do now.
… the idea of the Noble Savage is a myth. Likewise the idea of a peaceful Merrie England in the Middle Ages. Seven hundred years ago the homicide rate in England was twenty times higher than it is now.
If monkeys enjoy status, so do human beings. We want status not only for what else it makes possible, but also for itself. We hate falling short of others, and we like to excel. We want to entertain other people as we want other people to entertain us, and we want our children to have the things their friends have. These are not ignoble sentiments of envy; the desire for status is basic to our human nature.
You can see how important it is by looking at its effect on physical health. When monkeys are put in different groups so that their rank changes, their coronary arteries clog up more slowly the higher their rank. Similarly among British civil servants, those of higher rank secrete lower average levels of stress-related cortisol – one reason why they live longer. In fact, people in the higher grades live on average four and a half years longer than those in the lower grades. In case you wondered, very little of this difference is due to differences in lifestyle – smoking, drinking, diet, exercise or kinds of housing. Likewise, as we have seen, Oscar winners on average live four years longer than Oscar nominees who lose.
So the desire for status is utterly natural. But it creates a massive problem if we want to make people happier, for the total amount of status is fixed. Putting it crudely, status is like the outcome of a race. … If my score improves, someone else’s deteriorates. My gain is his loss. In the jargon, we are engaged in a zero-sum game…
…the Buddhist concept of mindfulness has a message for all of us. It says: cultivate the sense of awe and wonder; savour the things of today; and look about you with the same interest as if you were watching a movie or taking a photo. Engage with the world and with the people around you.
…unfortunately, some people believe we are as we are, and no mental practices can change us. So how do these people account for the placebo effect? All doctors know that a dummy pill, with nothing in it, will cure a substantial proportion of their patients. Yet, if there is nothing in the pill, what is curing them? Their beliefs are curing them. They improve because they believe they can. If beliefs can cure our body, they can surely help our spirit.
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