Toward Lasting Happiness

When envisioning a happy day or a happy life, what images come to mind? For some people, these images might be of eating with friends or family members, when they are together, laughing, telling stories, and filled with feelings of affection. Others might consider happiness to be the realization of important goals and taking pride in doing something to the best of one's ability. And still, for some individuals, happiness might be a byproduct of performing good deeds, such as helping others and believing that the world will be a better place because of it. Although they differ greatly on what brings them happiness, the vast majority of residents of the United States consider happiness to be one of the primary goals of their lives (Diener, Suh, Smith, & Shao, 1995).

How exactly do you find happiness? This question has been posed for thousands of years, and although many self-help books have tried to suggest answers to this question, the results obtained from them are often based on the author's own personality and individual experience. Only recently has scientific evidence, effective for most people, emerged in offering a possible path toward lasting happiness. By scientific, it is meant that researchers have conducted rigorous and precise experiments to determine whether specific strategies actually lead to an increase in happiness. The present article reviews the evidence and offers practical suggestions that can be used to create a sustainable and long-term change in the level of well-being[1].

Is Happiness a Worthwhile Goal?

Before offering suggestions on how to be a happier person, it is important to establish that happiness is a desirable goal. Of course, everyone knows that happiness feels good to the person experiencing it. But some might claim that happy people are lazy, shallow, or unmotivated. Nevertheless, new scientific evidence is completely contrary to this claim. Instead of being naive and indolent, happy people are energetic, creative, and highly productive at work, and diligent and motivated in helping others. Happy individuals in society have more friends, experience greater satisfaction in social interactions, and are less likely to separate or divorce. And happy people, in terms of physical and mental health, have a stronger immune system, cope with stress more efficiently, and even live longer (Fredrickson, 2001; Lyubomirsky, King, & Diener, 2005). In sum, happiness is not just feeling good. Happiness has extensive and numerous benefits for the individual as well as for the family, workplace, and society.

Defining Happiness

When we talk about how to increase happiness, we do not mean merely creating fleeting types of elation. You might experience these fleeting types of elation when your favorite team wins an important game or when finding a one-dollar bill on the street. Psychologists have been relatively successful at boosting people's moods over a short period. Techniques such as giving candy, playing pleasant music, and providing positive feedback all increase transient positive emotions. The problem is that these increases do not last. As I will explain further, people's moods react and fluctuate along with changes in the environment. When something very good happens, people feel happier. When something unfortunate occurs, they become sad. But these changes are short-lived, and people quickly return to their baseline level of happiness (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). The goal of the research described here is to create durable and sustainable changes in the level of people's tendencies toward happiness. This can be contemplated as how, on the whole, a person feels happy over a long period of time.

     Most researchers define happiness with three components: a high frequency of positive affect, a low frequency of negative affect, and a high level of life satisfaction (Diener et al, 1995). Positive and negative affect are experienced in good and bad feelings, respectively. In contrast, in evaluating an individual’s contentment with their life situation, the “life satisfaction” component is a more comprehensive measure. Those who have a high level of life satisfaction agree with statements such as “the conditions of my life are excellent” (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985).

     To the description of happiness we have presented, we should add that what we mean by happiness is a subjective state, in the sense that self-reporting is a standard method for determining individuals’ happiness. Although some researchers assess a specific person’s level of happiness by asking friends and family, the final judgment ultimately belongs to “the one who lives inside the individual.” Therefore, the term “subjective well-being” is often used synonymously with happiness, as it is throughout this article.

Can Happiness Be Increased? Reasons for Pessimism

Is becoming happier really possible? You might be surprised to learn that until recently, there was very little scientific data to answer the question of whether people can increase their happiness in a lasting way. In fact, researchers were previously very skeptical about the possibility of becoming happier. Two reasons formed the basis of this pessimism: first, that happiness is partly dependent on an individual’s genes, and second, that people have become accustomed to, or tend to gradually cease enjoying, the most positive experiences in life and what initially brought them pleasure. Therefore, some say any effort to increase happiness is futile because, after a pleasurable experience, people return to the set-point of happiness that their genes have determined for them. We will explain the reasons in favor of this view below.

The Role of Heredity and Personality

The baseline level of happiness, or its starting point, is higher for some individuals than for others. In other words, some of you are naturally or innately happier than others. Years of research on identical twin siblings have led psychologists to conclude that the happiness baseline is determined by genetics (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). In other words, if you and your sibling are twins, you have shared equally in height, intelligence, susceptibility to stress, and also level of happiness.

The fact that happiness has high heritability is also consistent with the finding that individuals’ level of happiness is strongly linked to certain personality traits. For example, neurotic individuals tend to be less happy, and extraverts tend to be happier than introverts. Such traits are relatively stable, meaning they do not change much over a lifetime. Using these findings, some researchers argue that happiness is a stable personal trait and resists any meaningful change (Costa, McCrae, & Zonderman, 1987).

Hedonic Adaptation

The hedonic adaptation hypothesis provides another source of pessimism regarding the possibility of increasing lasting happiness. Simply put, in positive and negative emotional impressions, there is a tendency toward fading over time. For example, think of a time in your life when something extremely good happened to you. This event might be something that was previously a dream for you, like being accepted into the university you wished for, winning an athletic competition, and so on. How do you feel immediately afterward? You likely feel elated and vibrant. You might constantly think about this event, replay it in your mind, talk to your friends and family only about this event, and feel that the pleasure you experienced will surely last forever.

Of course, the pleasure you experienced will not last forever. Although thinking about your new life as a university student, or the skill you acquired in a sport, may fill you with pleasure, gradually and on subsequent occasions, thinking about this event cannot provide the initial pleasure you felt. This leads to the process of hedonic adaptation, in which events that are initially full of emotion gradually lose their intensity (Brickman & Campbell, 1971). There is abundant evidence of these shifts toward an unexciting life, demonstrating people's adaptation to various events. For example, people gradually adapt to the results of a presidential election, or a sporting event, the end of a romantic relationship, winning the lottery, becoming paralyzed, losing a loved one, and so on (Brickman, Coates, & Janoff-Bulman, 1978; Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1997; Sieff, Dawes, & Loewenstein, 1999; Wortman, Silver, & Kessler, 1993).

In 1996, Suh[2], Diener[3], and Fujita[4] asked students to provide a report of their level of subjective well-being and a number of their positive and negative experiences over the past four years. Although many students had experienced significant events in their lives—such as losing a family member, starting or ending a romantic relationship, getting engaged, getting married, earning academic degrees, finding a job—if more than six months had passed since the event occurred, there was no significant relationship between the number of positive and negative events mentioned above and the students' reports of happiness. These studies show that, despite the great joy or sorrow initially associated with an event, the duration and persistence of these emotional reactions are surprisingly short-lived. In other words, in the pursuit of living happier, changing life circumstances such as relationships, jobs, and schools is probably not a successful method in the long run.

Happiness Cannot Be Consciously Attained

Sometimes when people reveal their conscious goal of living happier, they end up achieving the opposite result. Research by Ariely[5] and Loewenstein[6] in 2003 showed that if people are asked to feel as happy as they possibly can, this leads to a kind of decrease in individuals' momentary happiness compared to people who were not asked to do so.

Constantly evaluating and monitoring happiness levels has been similarly detrimental. It seems that happiness is often a by-product of a pleasurable experience, and perhaps cannot be a conscious goal in itself. Or, as Nathaniel Hawthorne[7] eloquently put it, "Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you."

Reasons for Optimism: The Sustainable Happiness Model

Some researchers, using the findings explained in the preceding lines, support the claim that the pursuit of increased happiness is a futile endeavor (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). Fortunately, neither the fact that happiness has a genetic component nor the fact that we adapt to positive life events means that becoming happier is impossible. Recent research indicates that a person's level of happiness is not unchangeable and that one can enhance one's level of happiness by engaging in self-determined activities. As elucidated above, the sustainable happiness model states that happiness has three constituent elements: a "set point" that is genetically determined, life circumstances, and voluntary activities. The implication of the model is that a high percentage of your happiness is determined by effortful activities and awareness; therefore, an "increase in happiness" can be successfully achieved.

The Set Point

The largest part of this three-component pie is devoted to the "set point." Literally, it refers to the point at which a person's level of happiness is situated or fixed. People tend to have a level of happiness to which they gravitate after a major event. This set point is higher for some individuals than for others. In other words, some are born happier than others. On the other hand, you may be acquainted with people who are usually sad. They see the glass as half empty and find it difficult to enjoy everyday life. Psychologists would say that these two sets of people have different set points for well-being. Years of research in a field called behavioral genetics have led psychologists to conclude that the set point for happiness is determined by genetics (Lykken & Tellegen, 1996). For example, identical twins are remarkably similar in their general level of happiness, even when they are thousands of miles apart, whereas fraternal twins do not bear a striking resemblance to their siblings. Because it is generally impossible to willfully raise your happiness set point by altering your genes, it is clear that we must look elsewhere for the key to a lasting increase in happiness.

Circumstances

You might be surprised to learn that less than ten percent of people's happiness depends on circumstances (Argyle, 1999; Diener et al., 1999). By circumstances, we mean the factors that shape the backdrop of your life. For instance, if you were to write your autobiography, it would contain a great deal of information about your life circumstances. It would include demographic information (such as age and gender), personal experiences, changing life situations (like education, financial status), physical appearance, and so on.

Researchers claim that changing life circumstances in order to increase happiness is an unreliable method. Although you might feel you would be happier if you had more money, lived in a better climate, or had a nicer appearance, studies show that people quickly adapt to changes in income and financial status (Diener & Oishi, 2000; Lucas, Clark, Georgellis, & Diener, 2003.) People who are more attractive are not always happier (Diener, Wolsic, & Fujita, 1995). And, assuming basic needs are met, a wealthy person is only slightly happier than their poorer counterpart. What is the reason for these counterintuitive findings? The reason happiness does not depend heavily on life circumstances is most likely that factors such as income, beauty, and marital status are exceptionally prone to adaptation, and people generally do not dwell on them. Instead, these circumstances tend to be present in the background of your emotional life.

This is truly good news. Imagine the difficulty if the key to achieving happiness lay in the realm of life circumstances. For many of these circumstances are relatively stable and exceedingly difficult to change. Fortunately, you do not need to undergo plastic surgery or relocate to the California coast to become happier. As I will explain in the next section, the keys to lasting happiness are far less costly and much more attainable than you might imagine.

Voluntary Activity

This third component shapes forty percent of our happiness. This part of the lasting happiness model, which constitutes people's voluntary activities, is the very reason researchers are hopeful about the possibility of a lasting increase in

Why does “expressing gratitude” increase happiness? There are several possible reasons: First, feeling grateful for what one has counteracts the adaptation effects mentioned above and changes one’s outlook on life. For example, think for a moment about the pleasant but enduring things in your life that you encounter daily (such as a beautiful tree outside your window, your favorite local restaurant, or your best friend). No matter how pleasant and enjoyable these things are, over time or due to adaptation, people tend to no longer appreciate them. But when you have a “grateful mindset,” your primary attention is directed toward these possessions, you enjoy them, and you appreciate them more. In other words, such activities help you understand and create a kind of positive focus on your current experience.

     The happiest people are those who have strong social support (Myers, 2000). Therefore, the second reason for the benefit of expressing gratitude is that it can help foster important social bonds. More precisely, when you feel grateful toward certain people in your life, you also tend to spend more time with them and treat them better (Emmons & Shelton, 2002).

Visualizing Your “Best Possible Self”

The second activity that increases happiness is achieved by creating a sense of optimism. This activity involves thinking about your life in the future and visualizing your “best possible self” within it (BPS; King, 2001). For example, a female university student visualizing her ideal life ten years from now sees herself as a successful journalist, married to a distinguished and intelligent man, with healthy children, owning a villa outside the city, and traveling to other countries every summer.

An important point to note is that visualizing your “best possible self” is more than mere daydreaming; it is meant as a form of self-deception exercise. While goals and fantasies are vitally important, they must be attainable and reasonable (Diener & Fujita, 1995). Otherwise, you might set yourself up for failure. For example, it is relatively unlikely for someone to envision their future as the next Bill Gates[12]. The goal of this activity is to organize life goals and think optimistically, not fantastically, about how to achieve them.

Empirical Evidence

In one study (King, 2001), participants were asked to write for twenty minutes each day for four days about how they would like their lives to be in the future. Individuals who wrote about their best possible future selves experienced an increase in positive mood immediately after writing and for several weeks, compared to those who mostly wrote about mundane topics.

Recently, research has been resumed to examine the effects of this activity over a longer period. One study lasted four weeks (Sheldon & Lyubomirsky,

2006). and another lasted eight weeks (Lyubomirsky et al., 2007). For example, in the four-week study, participants in the “best possible self” condition were instructed to write about desirable images of their future, while those in a control condition were asked to recall their daily events. As predicted, after four weeks, reports from those in the “best possible self” condition indicated an experience of increased positive affect compared to the other participants (see also Lyubomirsky et al., 2007). Thus, visualizing your best possible self appears to be a consistently effective method for increasing happiness.

Why Is This Method Effective?

Essentially, the “best possible self” activity cultivates an optimistic mindset, because it leads you to imagine that you will achieve your most important goals in the future. It thus creates a kind of positive image of the future. For example, the female student we previously assumed might, after finishing the writing exercise, think: I am a professional writer, my journalism professor said I will succeed in this field, and I can achieve my goals in journalism. The writing exercise makes goals appear more attainable and fosters a person’s motivation and sense of autonomy.

In fact, optimistic individuals show greater persistence in the face of difficulties, because they believe their goals are attainable. Also, if someone truly believes their long-term goals are achievable, they will cope better with minor problems. For instance, the girl mentioned above, if she fails a difficult journalism exam, will be disappointed, but with the new perspective, she will minimize this problem and confidently believe that if she perseveres, a similar opportunity will arise in the future. The writing exercise allows people to give their goals greater detail and solidity. The physical act of writing helps structure and logically organize the story, whereas merely thinking about one’s future life (without writing down thoughts) may lead to confusion and disorder in one’s current thoughts (Lyubomirsky, Sousa, & Dickerhoof, 2006; Pennebaker & Graybeal, 2001). When your desired future is ordered with a sense of structure and coherence, the steps you take toward success will be more under your control.

Performing Acts of Kindness

The third method that provides lasting changes at the level of well-being involves performing acts of kindness. This may be surprising because prosocial (altruistic) behavior can easily be interpreted as a form of self-sacrifice. Helping others usually seems time-consuming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Nevertheless, abundant evidence shows that prosocial behavior yields positive outcomes for both the recipient and the benefactor.

Empirical Evidence

In a recent study (Tkach, 2005), the effects of acts of kindness were systematically examined over a period of several weeks. In one of the studies, participants chose acts such as doing a roommate’s laundry, helping a classmate with assignments, and holding the door open for strangers. Overall, performing such acts increased the participants’ happiness. Of course, those studies were not all that simple. The studies also differed in a) the frequency of acts of kindness and b) the variety of acts of kindness performed by participants. In contrast, the control group merely listed neutral life events from the previous week.

The results showed that the frequency of acts of kindness had no effect on individuals’ “well-being.” However, the variety of acts of kindness (even after one month had passed) had a significant impact on increasing people’s happiness. Individuals who did not perform various types of acts of kindness experienced a sharp decline in “well-being” at one stage of the study and only returned to their baseline state at the end of the study. Part of the effect of variety on future well-being can be explained by the concept of hedonic adaptation mentioned earlier. Imagine performing one type of act of kindness for several weeks (holding the door open for the person behind you). Initially, you might enjoy people’s surprise and appreciation of your behavior, but over time, these reactions may seem predictable and bland, and you may not achieve happiness from performing this activity. However, by varying acts of kindness, you will surely be filled with happiness with each one you perform and will also witness different audiences and unpredictable reactions.

Why Does Performing Acts of Kindness Increase Happiness?

Apparently, performing acts of kindness is an effective method for increasing happiness. This is because it changes your perception of yourself, allowing you to view yourself as a useful, kind, and worthy person (Bem, 1972). For example, after you volunteer to be a math tutor for a student over the weekend, the image you have of yourself in your mind is no longer of a person who sleeps until late noon on holidays; rather, you see yourself as someone who wakes up on a cold holiday morning to help a math student.

Performing acts of kindness also makes you more aware of your own abilities and talents and allows you to benefit from them more (Seligman, 2002). A math tutor might realize they have a special skill for simplifying and explaining abstract concepts. As Seligman (Seligman, 2002) noted, enhancing abilities and skills leads to a kind of feeling of authenticity and validity, which is closely related to happiness.

Furthermore, you feel good when you observe the effects of your own kindness. Seeing the remarkable progress of a math student due to your help, or receiving a heartfelt thank you, can increase your happiness. But beyond these, performing acts of kindness can create strong social connections and foster continuous growth in social benefits. Helping others leads to a greater connection with the community. This action causes you to interact directly with people you had never met or did not know well. Volunteers serving in care homes may learn remarkable things from the fates of their patients. Working in a refugee shelter may acquaint you with the challenges faced by the people around you. Therefore, it would not be surprising that reports from volunteers indicate a deep bond with their community (Putnam, 2000).

Choosing a Happiness-Inducing Activity

In this section, recommendations are provided for better use of happiness activities. Regarding the activities we have mentioned, many things can be done; the important thing is that the activities maintain their passion, novelty, and meaningfulness. So our suggestion is to think about the frequency of performing these activities. As a rule of thumb, once a week is good and is also consistent with our findings above. Repeating these activities more frequently inadvertently turns them into predictable and boring tasks. You should also think about ways to create variety in such activities. If the activity you have chosen is expressing gratitude, think about how you can keep this feeling fresh. You could focus on one aspect of your life each week.

As everyone who has achieved great successes acknowledges, most meaningful successes in life are not easily attained. Accepting this, one must remember that increasing the level of happiness also requires effort. Research has shown that individuals who were more successful in increasing their level of happiness pursued their intentional activities for weeks or months (Lyubomirsky et al., 2007; Sheldon & Lyubomirsky, 2006). This means a commitment to both starting and continuing happiness activities, just as achieving any other goal requires a long-term commitment.

The activities described above are not equally effective for everyone. Therefore, it is important to choose an activity that fits your personality and goals. Fit here means that the activity feels natural and authentic to you. For example, upon reading the descriptions above, one type of exercise might spring to mind because it seems very practical and reliable to you. Another person might feel that this activity is somewhat irrational, foolish, and unnatural. This is because your personality, abilities, interests, and values provide the context for enjoying and benefiting from certain activities more than others. For instance, very shy people might feel more comfortable writing in a gratitude journal than performing acts of kindness, which they might believe require awkward interactions with strangers. In short, happiness-inducing activities are truly effective only when this sense of compatibility and fit is present.

Results

As evidenced by what has been discussed in the present article, people can bring about long-term changes in their level of happiness. By employing specific intentional activities such as expressing gratitude, visualizing one's best possible future self, and performing acts of kindness, people's happiness increases for weeks and even months on end. When these activities are performed fully and consistently (meaning the activity is done at the appointed time, is varied, and fits the individual's activity), they lead to changes in how people think and act in their daily lives. It may seem surprising, but our suggestion is that maintaining lasting happiness does not require a comprehensive overhaul of one's life circumstances, but rather the constant and painstaking reconstruction of daily behaviors and thoughts. Overall, recent research has shown that the path to achieving happiness is much closer than people believe.

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[1] well-being

[2] Suh

[3] Diener

[4] Fujita

[5] Ariely

[6] Loewenstein

[7] Nathaniel Hawthorne

[8] Seligman

[9] Steen

[10] Park

[11] Peterson

[12] Bill Gates

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PDF file of the original English text

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Toward Lasting Happiness

Authors: Jaime L. Kurtz and Sonja Lyubomirsky

Translator: Ali Kalani

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