Happiness Is...

No, I won’t quote Peanuts, for those of you old enough to get the allusion to the comic strip. But Charles Schultz, the creator of Peanuts, was clearly on to something with that ellipsis. As poet Alexander Pope said long before Snoopy, “Who thus define it, say they more or less/Than this, that happiness is happiness?” However indefinable or idiosyncratic, the subject of happiness has become a hot topic in psychology, moving beyond clichés about sunny sides or silver linings. So let’s hear from a number of writers who focus on the theme of happiness. After all, as some sage should have said, “As with all things, the only reason to read about happiness is the hope that we will thereby become happy.”

First the bad news: at least half of your happiness was decided before you were born. According to University of California, Riverside professor Sonja Lyubomirsky in The How of Happiness, “Growing research… suggests that each of us is born with a particular happiness set point that originates from our biological mother or father or both, a baseline potential for happiness to which we are bound to return, even after major setbacks or triumphs.” Other researchers have come to the same conclusion, including Harvard’s Jerome Kagan in The Long Shadow of Temperament and the developers of Five Factor psychology. (The factors form the acronym OCEAN: Openness to new experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism — all of which remain stable throughout life. So puritanical Malvolio, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, will never become the high-spirited Sir Toby, nor Sir Toby Malvolio, whatever life sends their way.)

More bad news: some of your happiness depends on the place you live, especially if you stay in one place for most or all your life. In The Blue Zones, journalist Dan Buettner visits places where people display exceptional longevity and extended wellness (which may not be the same as happiness, but are certainly proxies for, or contributors to, our elusive theme). None of these places is distinguished for affluence or outstanding health care. Their achievements may be genetic, since their populations are homogeneous (although research suggests genes account for only 25 percent of longevity), or environmental, since many of these people live almost entirely on local food and water. But most of us are not ready to move (or to have been born) in Okinawa, Sardinia, Costa Rica, or the Seventh-Day Adventist community in Loma Linda, California.

And the final bad news: we are terrible at understanding what events or circumstances in general make people happy. We are also poor at remembering what made us happy in the past and at predicting what will make us happy in the future. This frustrating human flaw is the focus of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who warns us even before page one of Stumbling on Happiness, “This is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you’ve bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why.” 

At this point it seems as if we’re pretty much out of luck. But hold on…. Challenging as it is to define or control our happiness, the goal is far from impossible, as these same writers and many others report. So let’s look at happiness, starting with one of the things we want most: to raise happy children. In The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, psychiatrist Ned Hallowell offers a clear prescription for raising children to have a greater capacity for and chance at happiness. 

Hallowell’s first contention is that “connectedness in childhood is the key to a happy adulthood (and a happy childhood as well!).” This view is repeated, for those currently without children, in one of Hallowell’s other books, Connect. Much research supports his thesis, which is echoed by almost every writer mentioned hereafter. Beginning with strong human connections, Hallowell proposes a five-step cycle of self-reinforcing actions: joy in play leads to repeated practice of what we enjoy, then to the desire to master what we have begun, and the recognition by others of our growing mastery makes us more eager to practice and achieve further mastery.

That happiness is a byproduct of intense engagement was discovered by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi, whose book Flow is foundational in the field. When Czikszentmihalyi asked subjects when they felt happiest, he found a common pattern: we are most happy when deeply engaged in doing something that challenges us to use all our abilities, and that we feel we can master. In these moments of flow, time almost seems to disappear, and we find ourselves having what Abraham Maslow called a “peak experience.”

Evidently there are things we can do to increase happiness. In fact, the How of Happiness, which gave us the bad news that we can’t change our predisposition to be happy, offers two types of good news. First, only 10 percent of our happiness depends on external circumstances. To be rich, healthy, and disaster-free has only a tiny effect on reported happiness. Lottery winners and paraplegics are about equally happy a year after their supposedly life-changing experiences. That leaves 40 percent, a considerable percentage, alterable by “what we do in our daily lives and how we think.” Lyubomirsky offers many actions proven to increase happiness in those who practice them, and advice on how to select ones that fit your inclinations. Among the activities are many proposed by previous authors: building social connections, including those made by helping others, increasing flow experiences, and committing to personal goals. One heartening piece of evidence for the power of giving is that among a group of people with multiple sclerosis, those who learned to counsel other bearers of the illness increased the happiness of those they counseled, but increased their own happiness far more.

We can also make choices like those that apparently contribute to the happiness of the people profiled in The Blue Zones. Among adoptable factors are, again, maintaining close social connections, having a purpose in life, and giving back to others. We can also adopt the life habits of blue-zone places, from diet to physical activity. (After reading about Sardinian centenarians who have walked five miles a day all their lives, I am pushing toward that goal myself. Their habit of drinking red wine doesn’t hurt either.)

A somewhat different strain of research is represented by Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness and Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality. (Ariely is what boarding schools call a triple threat: he holds simultaneous positions at Duke in the business and medical schools and in the Neuroscience Center.) Gilbert’s book, which has a style the New York Times termed “goofball brilliance,” can make the reader laugh on almost every page — clearly contributing to happiness — even as he demonstrates for more than 200 pages how terrible we are at making choices that lead to happiness. In the end, Gilbert offers a shard of practical advice: “Find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating, and ask them how they feel…. Use other people as surrogates for our future selves.” Many of us do this when waiting in line at a movie or a roller coaster, but not otherwise. Both Ariely and Gilbert make several similar points: we quickly get used to a new situation, good or bad. So, rather than going on a shopping spree that hurtles us up a peak and then makes a quick descent, we should spread out the activity of obtaining material possessions. And we should often choose experiences, whose remembered pleasure does not decay with time, over objects, whose presence does. 

But the best news comes last, from University of Pennsylvania’s Martin Seligman, the father of the positive psychology movement. After his seminal Authentic Happiness, Seligman offers in Flourish a new view of well-being or flourishing, a happiness that is not merely an emotional state, but a set of behaviors that fulfill us at the highest level. The “Core Features” of well-being will sound familiar: engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement. Seligman reinforces what our other writers have said, noting, for example, that Forbes magazine’s richest Americans, Pennsylvania Amish, and northern Greenland Inuits report exactly the same level of life satisfaction. Like Lyubomirsky, he offers practical guidance on how to enhance these elements in our lives, from visiting people who helped you in the past and thanking them, to keeping a journal of “what went well” to remind yourself of the positive parts of your life. He also describes the remarkable work now being undertaken in training the entire U.S. Army to achieve greater resilience in adversity through these methods. 

Like many of you, I can recall giving reading assignments and hearing students complain, “They could have said what they’re saying in a lot fewer words.” As I completed this piece, I recalled an occasion when that claim proved true. At a conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts, brain researcher Marian Diamond, still teaching and publishing at age 85, was asked what kept her so vibrant. She replied with five words: “Diet, exercise, novelty, challenge, and love.” As Rabbi Hillel said, “That is the whole law and the prophets; the rest is commentary.”

Editor’s Note: This column marks Richard Barbieri’s 100th review for Independent School, along with numerous other articles and essays throughout the years.