There are many ways to view and work on our happiness. I’ve been inclined to look into this topic from a more spiritual angle, but during the lockdown I participated in an online course about the science of wellbeing out of curiosity. While the key message of this course was not that surprising to me as such, the science behind it fascinated me; all the interesting research and the many studies done around the aspects that we think make us happy (but in fact don’t) and that actually do increase our wellbeing.

I want to give a summary of my learnings from this course and dip a bit in to the research. Turns out that summarizing a 5-week course package into one blog post of reasonable length is quite challenging, so I decided to divide the course content into two parts;

• this week’s post is about what we think makes us happy, but doesn’t
• the next post is all about what actually contributes to our happiness

If you have the time, I certainly also recommend taking the course: it’s freely accessible on Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/, “The Science of Well-being” with professor Laurie Santos, Yale University.

Streets of Alberobello and a cat in Matera

The first and foremost best news is that you won’t need a personality transplant to become a happier person, as research proves that we are all capable of impacting our own wellbeing much more than we think we can. In her book “The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want” Sonja Lyubomirsky refers to her famous pie chart which demonstrates what impacts people’s happiness according to her substantial research.

Most of us believe that genetics alone define whether we can be happy or not; some people are just born with a “glass half-full” or “half-empty” mentality and that’s just how we are, full stop. Even more often we think that life’s circumstances push us to be happier or more miserable; getting into university, a car accident, winning the lottery, getting married or divorced etc. Lyubomirsky’s research shows that in fact 50 % of our sustainable happiness does come from genetics, but life circumstances impact our happiness only by 10 %. The rest, 40 %, represents our thoughts, actions and habits. This means that over and above the effects of how genetically prone we are to be happy people and all the circumstantial events life offers us, how we choose to live our lives has a significantly strong impact on how happy or unhappy we are.

The course outlines why finding happiness can feel difficult at times and describes three obstacles our minds present us with. First of all, our mind tends to send us signals about what will or won’t make us happy that are factually incorrect. This is to say that when your mind is telling you e.g. that you need excellent grades and other type of measurable success, loads of money, a perfect body and relationship to be happy, it is probably lying to you.

There’s research about how we generally think that future events will make us happier or unhappier than they actually will. For example, being turned down for a job, or getting grades at college. In the grade study (Levine et al. 2012), students were asked to predict their level of satisfaction or disappointment regarding the grades they think they will get and systematically it turns out the real-life feelings are never as strong as predicted; the good grades don’t contribute as much to happiness, and neither do the bad grades affect the wellbeing as negatively, as predicted. Also, when not getting a job another set of research participants wanted, the drop in happiness was way smaller in real life than what was predicted beforehand (Gilbert et al. 1998).

I’m especially intrigued about the research done in the field of income and its correlation to life satisfaction. Unsurprisingly, there is a much stronger correlation between increased income levels and happiness in poorer nations than in wealthier ones. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton did some research published in 2010, where they studied the life satisfaction (based on several different measures, e.g. feeling stress-free, “not blue” and feeling positive effects) and the level of income in America to see if there is a threshold up until when more salary stops affecting happiness.

This study showed that up until an annual income of about 75 000 $, life satisfaction exponentially increased when the income increased. After the threshold, satisfaction hardly increased anymore. When, however, the research participants were asked to predict their level of satisfaction based on their income, they believed they would be much happier with the increased income and that their happiness would continuously keep going up when the income increased. Similar research with similar outcomes has been done e.g. in Germany.

Looking into relationship status, there is research (Lucas et al. 2013) that proves that people who got married had a bump in happiness for the duration of 1-2 years after their wedding, after which the happiness levels were similar to the control group (people who didn’t get marred during the research period). In terms of body image, there are studies that show how people who lost weight in a weight-loss program (Jackson et al. 2014) or underdid plastic surgery (Von Soest et al. 2011) didn’t gain a sustainable increase in their happiness – in fact, they partially even became unhappier as a result of the body changes according to the studies.

In an average happiness study where ratings from the 1940s and 2015 were compared, the results are approximately the same. This is to say that even with generally more wealth and “cool stuff” accessible to people, it clearly hasn’t made a difference in the level of our overall happiness over the past 75 years. All this is not to say that money, a fit body, marriage, cool stuff and success shouldn’t be things to strive for. However, the research does give an interesting viewpoint of the fact that these things we generally like to think bring us happiness, don’t actually do – at least not as much and for as long, as we predict they will.

The Colosseum, Rome

The second obstacle our mind presents us when it comes to finding happiness in life, is that it doesn’t think in absolutes: “this makes me happy”. Rather we automatically think in regard to reference points: “compared to this or that I am happy / unhappy”. This means that when our brains constantly reflect information on what we have or feel to something we potentially could have or feel instead, there is a high risk of doing irrelevant or unrealistic comparisons.

In this area, research has been done for example amongst Olympic medal winners (Medvec et al. 1995) that demonstrates how bronze medal winners were generally happier than silver medal winners, as silver medalist often compare their position to the gold medal winner, whereas bronze medalists are more likely to reflect their success onto those not winning a medal at all.

When it comes to pay increases, we never seem to be satisfied; we tend to think the higher our salary, the bigger our requirements or what we think we want. Clark & Oswald (1996) found out that for every 1 $ we make more, we then desire an increase of 1,4 $, as our reference point is the salary we had before.

Reference points to our own lives is one thing, but we care even more where we stand in reference to other people; this is called social comparison. Interestingly, for example a study by Clark and Oswald (1996) shows that employees who earn less than their colleagues and know this, systematically are also less happy with the work they do.

Solnick & Hemenway did a famous study in 1998 that showed that when Harvard students were offered to earn

• 100 000 $, so that others on the same job level would earn 250 000 $, or
• 50 000 $, while others on the same job level would earn 25 000 $

over 55 % of the research participants chose the latter option – earning less, knowing that they earn more than others. So even if earning more would give them wider possibilities to purchase whatever they want and need, the knowledge of earning less than others would make them unhappier than actually getting less income. After knowing about this study, it’s not surprising to learn about the research Clark did in 2003, according to which unemployed people who lived in areas surrounded by other unemployed people, had higher levels of wellbeing than those who lived in areas with less unemployed people.

When it comes to social comparison and body image and looks, there is a study by Kenrick et al. (1993) where he rated women’s moods before and after looking at pictures of models. A significant drop in the participants moods was detected after they had been looking at the pics. Similarly, in another of Kenrick’s studies, husbands would rate the attractiveness of their partners lower after having looked at pictures of models, compared to how they rated them before seeing the pics. Kuhn et al. (2011) did a cool research in Holland and found out that new car purchases went significantly up amongst those who lived close to people who had recently won the lottery and a new car.  

So, it really seems like comparing our success, money, bodies and relationships to others has an effect on our wellbeing. Our happiness level is impacted negatively, when we use unrealistic reference points. In this day and age, social media inevitably plays a huge role in this regard. We spend so much time online and our minds automatcally compare what we see to what we have or don’t have - often using unrealistic reference points and affecting our moods and happiness levels negatively without us even noticing. For example, Vogel et al. found out in 2014 that there is a direct correlation between more time spent on Facebook and lower levels of self-esteem.

Pictures from road trips in Tuscany; Val d’Orcia, Pienza and Bagno Vignoni

The third obstacle between us and our happiness is our mind getting used to things and as a bonus, us not realizing this. We humans are built to adapt; when the lights get switched off, your eyes will get used to the darkness in a while and similarly, hedonic adaptation affects our minds, too. Once we get and achieve what we want, this becomes the new normal and these things stop giving us the same happiness we expect when first gaining them.

Statistically lottery winners don’t become happier people on a longer time scale, because what initially was the big change (a massive pile of money in their bank account) becomes the new normal over time. Same goes for marriages, as mentioned before - “just married!” turns to “just… married” over time, as also this partnership is now the norm.

Daniel Gilbert’s quote: “Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition” is sad but true. Do you remember that first time when you heard “I love you” from the lips of your beloved? I bet it felt different this morning when they left the house. When a kid first learns to say: “Mommy” it probably has quite a different effect than 28 years down the road. Fact is that we do get used to things and situations as our minds adapt, but we often don’t realize it.

So, to summarize, there is a lot we can do when it comes to our own level of happiness. This means we can steer our wellbeing by our own actions, habits and thoughts. However, we need to be careful on our quest to happiness, because our minds play tricks on us: they incorrectly send us messages about what will make us happy or unhappy and make irrelevant comparisons to references close to us; our own pasts and the people around us, at work, on social media and TV. Lastly, when we do achieve things and situations we desire, we don’t tend to realize that our minds adapt to these new norms, and so these things and situations don’t keep us as happy over time, as they did when they were firstly obtained.

Well, how to overcome these obstacles our mind presents us and what to do to gain and maintain happiness according to the course “The Science of Wellbeing”? Find out in my next blog post :)

^{Bacio 💋 Cass}