MORE than 2300 years ago, Aristotle argued that happiness was the highest good. Later, the US founding fathers considered its pursuit to be an unalienable human right. These days, you will find countless books promising to reveal the secrets of a happy life. But have millennia of philosophical and scientific enquiry taught us anything about how to achieve that?
First, let’s look at how people who study happiness measure it. One of the most common strategies is to ask people to rate statements such as “In most ways, my life is close to my ideal” and “If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing”. These aim to capture someone’s overall satisfaction with life, rather than their mood on a specific day.
Advertisement
That makes sense, says , co-director of the Community Wellbeing Programme at the London School of Economics, because asking people to sum up their general contentment is often more practical than measuring their emotional state over an extended period. The other thing, says Layard, is that general contentment fits better with philosophical definitions of happiness as an overarching quality, as opposed to transient pleasures.
Using this kind of scale, psychologists have attempted to identify the specific ingredients that contribute to happiness. Contrary to the idea that “money can’t buy happiness”, income does play a role: it is easier to feel pleased with your lot when you don’t have to worry about bills and can treat yourself to luxuries.
We are also influenced by the riches of others – . “We can be doing well, but our minds choose reference points that make us feel crappy,” says , a cognitive scientist at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. This is one reason why higher levels of inequality in a society lead to lower levels of life satisfaction.
Surprisingly, our life satisfaction may be written in our genes as well as our bank balances. According to a study of twins in Norway, around 30 per cent of the variance in people’s life satisfaction is inherited. This seems to be related to personality traits known to be partially shaped by our genes. Extroversion, for instance, is linked to greater social support, which contributes to greater happiness. Neuroticism, meanwhile, makes it harder to deal with life’s stresses.
How to be happy
DNA isn’t destiny, however: science offers many evidence-based strategies to boost happiness. Since loneliness is one of the primary causes of unhappiness, much of this advice aims to help us build stronger social bonds. Talking to strangers, volunteering and performing random acts of kindness have all been shown to leave you feeling more contented.
The trick is not to let the pursuit of happiness overwhelm you. When people were asked to write down 10 things that could make them happier in the future, or 10 things that showed they were happy now, those who performed the first task recorded a greater sense of “time scarcity” – the feeling that the years are slipping away – and their life satisfaction dropped as a result.
I call this the “paradox of happiness” in my book The Expectation Effect. The good news is that it can be solved by shifting your focus from the future to present pleasures, says at the University of Toronto in Canada – the “small shots of happiness that fill our daily lives”. Tuning in to those is a quick and easy way to feel happier, he says: “Since I’ve started taking my own advice, I find more happiness from the same things that I’ve always done by seeing them as the goal, not a stepping stone to greater happiness.”
