To give a personal example, I really wanted to get a first in my psychology degree, but I’d screwed up the first year and a half, work-wise, so I needed to make up for that. I worked hard in the final three semesters, my marks got better and better, and my average started to rise up to the magical 70% target. The final grade I got, for my dissertation, pushed me just over the 70% mark. But when I got that result back, I wasn’t jumping for joy. If I felt anything it was more like relief at that point. In fact, thinking back on the experience, I scarcely remember getting my final grade.

This isn’t always the case, and some goals will have you jumping around. But speaking generally, happiness results from taking a step in a beneficial direction, but not from standing still at any particular point. The feeling of the final step is weaker than the previous steps, because the part of the brain associated with positive emotions (the left prefrontal cortex, as we discussed earlier) reduces its activity once you reach a goal. This isn’t such a bad thing; we need the progress principle so that we stay motivated to pursue goals. If all the happiness came at the destination rather than the journey, where would our motivation come from?

In this sense, there are no ‘negative’ emotions. As an example, eyewitnesses to a violent attack can often describe the weapon used in detail, but remember little about what the assailant looked like. When there’s a dangerous maniac around, you need to know that he’s carrying a knife, and where exactly that knife is at all times; not whether he matched his shoes with his belt that day. The problem of course, is that in some people, these unpleasant emotions are triggered too often, or in situations where they aren’t needed.

On the other hand, positive emotions have the opposite effect. Rather than narrowing our attention and potential behaviours, they broaden it. Instead of reducing the number of thoughts that enter your head, or the restricting your behaviours, these repertoires are increased. So when your happier, you’re more creative, flexible and you look at the bigger picture rather than the little details. This makes uplifting moods more useful for tasks like brainstorming, where you have to come up with new ideas. It also makes them less effective for tasks like proofreading, where attention to detail is essential. By understanding how our mood influences our perceptions, we can make sure our emotions are appropriate for the task at hand (such as through our choice of background music; something upbeat for creative tasks, and something more downbeat and thoughtful for tasks that need attention to detail).

Refs;

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The Role of Positive Emotions in Positive Psychology. American Psychologist. 56 (3), 218-226.

“The things you own, end up owning you”
- Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

I’ve seen Fight Club about 58 times. It’s my favourite film. I love it so much I even had the above quote engraved onto the back of my iPod.

In the film, Brad Pitt’s character Tyler Durden is a pretty heavy anti-consumerist. He is disturbed by the way people look for self-esteem and happiness in material things, and senses a better way.

Was he right about materialism? Some researchers have been looking into the effects that materialism has on people. Here are five things everybody should know:

1) High importance of money = low satisfaction with life

Seven-thousand people, in 41 countries were surveyed about the importance they place on money, and on love. When these were correlated against life satisfaction it looked approximately like this:

As you can see, unsatisfied people (to the left) thought money way important and love wasn’t, and satisfied people (to the right) thought the opposite. (1,4)

2) Materialism is associated with mental health problems

People who value financial success highly are more likely to report symptoms of depression and anxiety. Likewise, materialists have lower levels of self-actualisation and vitality, (2) and are more likely to be visited by ghosts at Christmas time. (3)

3) Material goals can never be fulfilled

First you want the iPod. Then the clothes, the car, the big house, the boat, the bigger house, the bigger boat. You get stuck on a hedonic treadmill; today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities, as your income and consumption rise, so do your desires and expectations. It’s like moving to a higher weight division in boxing – you can do it, but there’s always a bunch of bigger guys there waiting for you.

And if you combine high material aspirations with low income, you’re like a flyweight fighting a heavyweight. This is the worst combination of income and materialism you can have, in terms of well being. (4)

4) You seek self-esteem in things

Another study found a way to manipulate how important people think money is: they had people write out a list of their inadequacies. Once their failings had been literally spelled out for them, they thought money was more important. Their self-esteem had lowered, and they thought money could fill the gap.

The problem with this, is that you’re rooting your self-esteem in things outside of your control. It’s unstable. So if you lose a load of money from, say, I don’t know, a stock market crash, you’re more likely to feel bad about yourself, feel unpleasant emotions, and so on. (5)

5) Materialists live avoidance-based lives

It seems that the link between materialism and poor quality of life can be explained through something called “experiential avoidance.” This refers to the tendency to avoid negative experiences, thoughts, and behaviours, rather than to seek out good ones. Experiential avoiders are focused on getting away from what they don’t want, as opposed to moving towards what they do want. (6)

When the road to their goals and values is paved with the occasional negative experience, they tend not to walk the path, preferring to develop avoidance strategies. Ultimately, living in fear of negative thoughts, experiences and behaviours is associated with a number of negative mental health consequences, and is emotionally draining. This isn’t a black and white thing, and experiential avoidance may not be the defining feature of a person; but it tends to be more pronounced in people who have strong material desires.

Unanswered Questions

As satisfying as it would be to say that materialism causes all the above ailments, the evidence isn’t clear. All the above studies are correlational, so they can’t tell us what is causing what. It could be that people develop unhappiness, mental health problems or experiential avoidance first, and then turn to material goals as a way of coping, as in point 4. Clearly though, if this is the case, materialism doesn’t seem to be the answer.

The Solutions

How can we reduce materialism?

1) Gratitude

Grateful people are consistently found to be less materialistic, and when people are told to express more gratitude, they find themselves becoming less materialistic. The exact instructions given in one study, if you wanted to try this, were as follows:

Please put your pen or pencil down, close your eyes,
and consciously disengage from unpleasant mental and
emotional reactions by shifting attention to the heart.
For a few minutes, focus on sincerely feeling apprecia-
tion for what you have been given in life. Now, in the
space below please write about your experience and
about some of the things that came to mind.

Simpler gratitude exercises have been tested, such as each day writing down three good things that happened that day, and why they happened.

Why does it work? Gratitude, as I mentioned before, tends to make people happier. It could be that more satisfied people don’t seek well being in possessions as much. (7)

2) Meditation

The difference between what you want financially, and what you have, is called your “aspiration gap.” The bigger your aspiration gap, the lower your well-being. Consumer culture tells you that, rather than reduce this gap, you should fill it with things. Another path, which is popular in Eastern philosophy, is to reduce your desire, learn to want what you have. (8)

One way to do this is through mindfulness meditation. I’m not qualified to give a run-down of how to meditate, but there are some good resources online: John Kabat-Zinn walks you through it in this video. Or you can Google and find another that you like.

3) Watch Fight Club 58 times.

Worked for me.

Recommended Reading:

• Fight Club: A Novel

References:

(1) Diener, E. and S. Oishi: 2000, ‘Money and happiness: Income and subjective well-being across nations’, in E. Diener and E.M. Suh (eds.), Subjective Well-beingacross Cultures (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA).

(2) Kasser, T., & Ryan, R. M. (1993). A dark side of the American dream: Correlates of financial success as a central life aspiration, journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 410-422.

(3) Dickens, C. (1843). A Christmas Carol in Prose.

(4) Diener, E., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2009). Will money increase subjective well-being?: A literature review and guide to needed research. The science of well-being: The collected works of Ed Diener (pp. 119-154). New York, NY US: Springer Science

(5) Unpublished study, reported in (4)

(6) Kashdan, T., & Breen, W. (2007). Materialism and diminished well-being: Experiential avoidance as a mediating mechanism. Journal of Social & Clinical Psychology, 26(5), 521-539.

(7) Lambert, N., Fincham, F., Stillman, T., & Dean, L. (2009). More gratitude, less materialism: The mediating role of life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4(1), 32-42.

(8) Brown, K., Kasser, T., Ryan, R., Alex Linley, P., & Orzech, K. (2009). When what one has is enough: Mindfulness, financial desire discrepancy, and subjective well-being. Journal of Research in Personality

It is mainly through studies of drugs that we know this. In one study, heroin addicts were asked to press a lever 3,000 times to receive one of three possible injections – a low dose of morphine, a moderate dose of morphine, or just saline. Then they were asked to rate how much they enjoyed each shot. The group that received saline wouldn’t not press the lever again; they did not find the injection to be pleasurable and weren’t interested. In the group that received a moderate dose, they found the injection pleasurable and went on to work the lever for another shot. But the group receiving only a low dose was the interesting one. They too press the lever again, to get another shot – even though they did not find the dose high enough to be pleasurable. It was enough to trigger the wanting system, but not the liking system.

People are not always looking for pleasure. We also look for status, power, creativity, meaning, and lots of other things. The implication is, something that gives us a little advancement in one of these areas, (say, a job that gives us a higher status at work), might activate the wanting system, but not the liking system (for example, we realise we don’t like management or responsibility).

Why would the wanting system lead us to strive after things that we won’t? Well, the brain doesn’t much care how happy you are, as long as you’re surviving. We might not like our higher status job, but it boosts our ability to survive. Millions of years ago there was no welfare state, no agriculture, no civilisation. We roamed in tribes where higher status individuals had higher chances of survival. Although life is very different now, we have the same instincts.

Unless we’re able to consciously realise the times when something we want isn’t something we like, we might end up making the same mistakes over and over.

There are probably thousands of different forms of meditation, but the most popular and researched kind is called “mindfulness meditation.” This is an exercise used to focus the mind on one object, usually the sensations of your own breathing but any other stimulus can be used – an area of the body, and object, a sound – anything. The aim is to focus your attention on this thing, and when your attention wanders – as it will – you simply become aware of that, and bring your attention back to the object.

This is a very simple exercise, but don’t mistake simplicity for ease – our modern brains have a million and one things to think about, be it work, friends, bills, or whatever – and they would much rather be processing, planning, and reflecting than they would be to observe your breath. However, the effort is worth it – mindfulness meditation has been used for a long time as an effective remedy for stress and anxiety, increases cortical thickness in the brain, and improves mood. As an additional bonus, it can also improve your immune response.

One of the foremost authorities and researchers on mindfulness meditation is Jon Kabat-Zinn. He’s been a big factor in bringing mindfulness meditation to Western medicine and popularising it more generally. Here’s a video of Kabat-Zinn explaining mindfulness in depth, and from about the 25 minute mark onwards he talks you through how to do it, so you can get your first practice experience of it right now:

Lottery winners, perhaps the luckiest people of all, become extremely happy after winning. They are suddenly free of financial problems, their sex appeal immediately increases, and they can do or buy almost anything they want. But over time, they adapt to the high life, and their happiness returns to just about where it was before.

Quadriplegics experience something similar after losing the use of their limbs. Their happiness understandably takes a considerable dip. But over time, they begin to adapt to their situation; their goals and expectations change, and their happiness returns to almost (but not quite) the same level it was originally.

In many ways, unfortunately, hedonic adaptation is in direct competition with the way modern life is set up. The deal is simple; you get the money, the clothes, the big house, and the nice car, and then bang! Well done champ, you made it, you’ll be happy forever. But then the new car is released, the new clothing line comes out, and you want a house with a pool and an ocean view. Your expectations rise, what was once a luxury becomes a necessity, and you find yourself wanting more again, like a hamster on a treadmill (this idea is often called the hedonic treadmill, in fact). There’s nothing wrong with wanting a better life for yourself and your family, but much of what you think will bring you that, won’t, because you’ll adapt to it. Meanwhile, if you’re spending a lot of your time working just to chase after these things, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to do other things that will have a stronger impact on your happiness.

Good moods contribute to good health. (Photo: Mr. Theklan)

This series is discussing the idea that not only does success bring happiness, but happiness also brings success. Previously, we found that happiness helps people to have better careers and better relationships. Today, we’ll see that they also have better health, too.

The authors of the paper put the question this way: “Is happiness associated with superior physical and mental health?” I like the sound of that! Superior physical and mental health – that has a nice ring to it, that’s definitely something I want. In fact, that’s what I want on my gravestone: “Here lies Warren Davies. Had superior physical and mental health.”

As with the previous two articles, I’ll show some of the findings from cross-sectional/correlational studies first (comparing happiness with health at one point in time):

Mental Health and Happiness

• Happier people have fewer symptoms of psychopathology (eg., depression or schizophrenia)
• The absence of positive emotion is a distinguishing feature of depression
• Happier people are less likely to suffer from social anxiety or phobia
• Happy people are less likely to use drugs
• Unhappy teens are more likely to show delinquent behaviour

Physical Health and Happiness

• Happy people have smaller allergic reactions
• In one study, positive mood was associated with fewer visits to the hospital, less medication use, and other positive outcomes in people with sickle cell disease
• Optimism is associated with less pain in ageing war veterans
• Optimistic women are less likely to deliver low-birth weight babies

Just like before, the above findings can only tell us that “happiness” and “superior physical and mental health” tend to occur together in people. They can’t tell us what causes what, because measurements were only taken at one point in time. Plus the mental health findings are pretty obvious – no one’s getting a Nobel Prize for those discoveries!

So, here are the longitudinal study findings to save the day (studies trying to find out if more happiness now means better health later):

• Happiness measures taken from 5,000 people were reliable predictors of how many days were missed due to illness, and days spent in hospital, over the next five years
• People with higher positive mood had lower incidences of stroke 6 years later
• Happy hockey players experience fewer sports-related injuries over the ensuing season
• Happier people were found to be less likely to die in automobile accidents (!)

There are a few more findings, but you get the point. No doubt good health is a source of happiness, but interestingly, happiness is a source of good health and a long life too. I’ll look at the reasons this might be in the next article, but it appears there are both direct and indirect effects.

So now you know the different ways that happiness can improve your success in life, as well as the other way around. Generally speaking, happier people do better at work, earn more, have more friends, are luckier in love, and enjoy better health.

Reference: (1) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Deiner, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131/6, 803–855

Happier people tend to be luckier in love. (Photo: Brandon Christopher Warren)

This series is discussing the idea that not only does success bring happiness, but happiness also brings success. Last time we found that happiness helps people to have better jobs and earn more money; today we’re going to see whether they enjoy better relationships too.

Romance, Marriage and Happiness

• One of the strongest findings in happiness research is the positive correlation between social relationships and happiness
• Happy people tend to have more friends and more social support
• Happy people are more satisfied with the friends they have and less prone to jealousy of other people
• On the other hand, loneliness has a negative correlation with happiness, and a positive correlation with depression
• Happy people are good for society – they spend more time volunteering

More Evidence

Just like last time, the above evidence in cross-sectional, which means you can’t determine from it what is the cause and what is the effect. You need longitudinal evidence for that – studies that track a variable over time.

Although studies tracking happiness and relationships over time are sparse, there are a few. One paper reported that happier people received more emotional and tangible assistance from others, over a year after the happiness measures were taken.

In terms of romance, it’s a two-way street – if you’re happier, you’re more likely to find a partner and get married, and when you get married, you receive a boost in happiness that lasts over the long term. For example, college yearbook entries for a sample of women were analysed for how much positive emotion they conveyed. Amazingly, this could be used to predict how satisfied they were with their marriages, 31 years later!

These findings fit into the authors’ theory that happiness is a signal to expand as well as a result of successful expansion – it’s a kind of dry way of putting it, but when you get married you effectively double your resources. You pool tangible possessions, money, you both have access to more emotional support, meet new people from the other family and so on. So it makes sense that marriage would bring happiness. Oh yeah, plus there’s all the love, sex and mushy stuff too. Let’s not forget that.

So far so good for the theory – happiness can be a cause of social and romantic success, not just a result of it. Next time we’ll ask whether happiness improves our health.

Reference:

(1) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Deiner, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131/6, 803–855

Happy workers tend to be successful workers. (Photo: redteam)

Let’s look at happiness from a different perspective. Most people see happiness as a response to good things happening; a natural assumption to make, considering that when good things happen, it makes us happy. But the evidence is piling up that happiness is also a cause of good things happening. And by ‘good thing’, I don’t mean that people smile at you more because you’re cheerful, or some other pleasant but ultimately feebly benefit. I mean a better career, more chance of finding love, better resistance to disease, and many other things.

How is happiness supposed to bring success?

Happiness is a signal that things are going well. You’re safe, you have access to the resources you need, and you’re making progress towards your goals – life is good. When things are good, it makes little sense to put walls around you and carefully guard everything you have (a hallmark of ‘negative’ emotions). It’s a better time to expand, take on new goals and challenges.

Imagine you’re really rich. A multi-millionnaire if you like. Someone comes to you with a proposal for an investment. It’ll cost you £10k, and it’s risky, but the return could be pretty good. Do you do it? Probably! £10k is small change to you, you wouldn’t even notice the loss. That’s an extreme example, but basically it’s a similar principle with happiness. It encourages a person to expand, because the mind thinks opportunity is knocking. Therefore happy people should get more success, because their emotional state essentially makes trying to succeed more appealing.

Now the researchers in this field aren’t saying that the direction of causality is only from happiness to success. This wouldn’t even logically follow. If you got some success, your resources and abundance would increase, which according to this theory is one of the reasons you get happy in the first place! So if it’s true that happiness contributes to success, it can only be true that success contributes to happiness as well. So you could get a kind of upward spiral.

This series of posts is based on a huge analysis done in 2005 (1), see the footnotes for more information on the researchers. They pulled together a huge amount of evidence together to see if this perspective on happiness holds up, and find that it does in three areas: work, love and relationships, and health. Here we’ll look at work, but first let’s make sure we know what we’re talking about.

What do they mean by ‘happiness’?

The definition of happiness in this study was slightly different to the one normally used in studies (life satisfaction or subjective well-being, see what is happiness?). The definition here, is the experience of frequent positive emotions, and less frequent (though not completely absent) negative emotions.

Why this different definition? Because in this framework, it’s positive emotion that leads us to pursue new goals and opportunities in the moment – rather than how pleased we are with life generally.

So technically they are saying that success comes from from a happy state, not a happy disposition, but, a person with a happy disposition will be in a happy state more of the time.

What is success?

What do you think success is? You might see success as lots of money and a family. A man in the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia might see success as living to the age of thirty and marrying a woman with a 10″ ceramic plate in her lip. So success means to do well relative to the goals valued by the society you’re in.

As this study was done in the US, the researchers decided to use work, love and health as the markers of success.

Work

If you’re reading this from anywhere outside of a Western culture, let me assure you, we love to work! Well, most people complain about work, but they still get up at 7am every morning to do it. There’s very little I’d choose to get out of bed for at 7 in the morning, and yet I’ve woken up at that time and earlier, thousands of times, to go to work.

Work gets a bad rep, but it’s pretty normal human behaviour; even back in hunter/gatherer times we had to, well, hunt and gather. We assume we did anyway, based on the tools and other goodies we’ve dug up. I’ve never actually met a 40,000 year old person so I don’t really know for sure, but it’s a safe bet. Work is just the name given to activities which allow people and groups to build their resources. In modern life, we get tokens called ‘money’ in exchange for work, which we can exchange for the work of other people. Work also (potentially) allows us to do something meaningful, and produce the things our society needs.

Plus, as we live in a meritocracy, the better we are at work, the more we produce for society, the more money tokens you get and the more good stuff we can exchange them for. That’s one of the reasons we want to do well at work. So are happy people more successful at work than their unhappy colleagues, generally speaking?

Happy Workers are Successful Workers

Here are some interesting findings about happiness in the workplace. Happier people:

• Are more likely to get job interviews
• Are more likely to receive positive evaluations once on the job
• Are more productive
• Handle managerial roles better
• Have less ‘job burnout’
• Tend to be more satisfied with their jobs
• Earn more money

It seems clear that happiness and success go hand-in-hand at work. But these are all correlational studies, and you’ve probably heard the catchphrase “correlation does not mean causality.” In other words, they may go together but we don’t know which is the cause and which the effect, or whether both are an effect of something else altogether.

So more evidence is needed. The next step is longitudinal evidence. This is where something is measured at time 1, then something else (or the same thing) is measured at time 2. In this case, the researchers looked for studies that measured happiness first, then symptoms of success months or years down the line.

They found a few. For example. after a job interview, happier people are relatively more likely to get a second interview three months down the line. In another study, people with more positive emotion at age 18, were more likely to be financially independent, and generally doing well in their career. The researchers also found that doing well in their career made the participants happy too – so the link between happiness and career is a two-way street, as expected.

Happy people also earn more money tokens! One study found that happier Australians were more likely to receive an income increase in the near future, compared to their less happy mates. A similar result was found with a Russian study panel. Yet another study found that students who were more cheerful in their first year of study were earning more money some 16 years later.

In other words, more happiness now = more money and better career later.

So, in terms of career and money, it seems that happiness is not just a consequence, but also a cause. The idea that happiness causes success gets some support from the workplace. Next time, we’ll look into love and relationships.

This series was based on the below paper published in Psychological Bulletin by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King and Ed Deiner – three big names in positive psychology. It was a huge effort, they analysed 225 studies with over 275,000 participants in total! All three researchers have books out so if you like the stuff in these articles, stick their names into Amazon and see if there’s something you like!

All the points in this article came from the reference below. If you’re looking for the original studies, get the pdf of the above reference and do a Ctrl+F (or Apple+F) to search for the finding you’re looking for. Then find the study in their reference list.

Images:

Roads and ‘Success’ by Toban Black, Happy Workers by Taras Kalapun.

Happiness sometimes comes before success. (Photo: tandemracer)

Just like Santa Clause, happiness brings gifts with it too – and you don’t have to be good all year to get them! In the last three articles, I’ve discussed a paper arguing that happiness leads to success, through a better career, better relationships and better health. This works in part through behaviour – positive moods promote positive behaviours – ones that are friendly to success. The evidence suggests six broad categories of behaviour that result from happiness. Here they are:

1) Positive Perceptions of Self and Others

Happy people are optimists, who tend to have higher self-esteem. They think well of themselves and the different areas of their life; family life, romantic life, education, leisure, and so on. This positive attitude spills over onto other people too – happy people tend to like other people more.

So what comes first, happiness or high self-esteem? You’d think it was self-esteem, but in fact it’s a little of both. Self-esteem does bring happiness, but being satisfied with your life also brings self-esteem and confidence.

2) Sociability and Activity

Happy people tend to be more extraverted – more outgoing, active and energetic. Positive emotion is described my some researchers as the ‘glue’ that holds the different aspects of extraversion together. Happiness is associated with more formal and informal social activity, including voluntary activities, time with friends, learning new skills and taking classes, and even being more informed about politics. Happier people seem to be more informed and interested in learning new things.

If people are induced into a positive mood (they usually do this with uplifting videos), they are more likely to start conversations with a ‘stranger’ (who was actually a confederate, working undercover for the researchers). So there you go, if you want to be more social, cheer up. It works.

All those new skills and contacts would certainly be useful in trying to become successful, plus people with a larger social network tend to be luckier, too.

3) Likability and Cooperation

Are cheerful, upbeat people fun to be around, or just plain annoying for being so cheerful? The former is actually true – happy people are liked more than unhappy people. They are also perceived more favourable by people – they are seen as more intelligent, competent, friendly, assertive, less selfish and more moral. People in happy moods are also more approachable and inviting to others.

My favourite variation on a classic saying goes like this: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know – and how much they like you.” Success involves other people, being likeable and well thought of can only be beneficial.

4) Prosocial Behaviour

A great deal of research now supports the idea that happy people are more generous and charitable. They just have a greater interest in helping other people. This goes hand-in-hand with the authors’ original idea that happiness indicates conditions of abundance, so to speak.

Why is prosocial behaviour helpful to success? It makes people more likeable, strengthens social bonds and networks, and brings future profits through the principle of reciprocity (you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours!).

5) Physical Well-Being and Coping

Positive moods are associated with healthy behaviour both long and short-term – happy individuals are less likely to take drugs and eat unhealthy food in the future, and recent positive moods are associated with less cigarette and alcohol use, as well as better quality sleep and more exercise. One study exposed participants to the cold virus, and people who generally have a more positive emotional style were less likely to develop a cold from it.

Another interesting finding, is that happy moods help you resist temptation when you’re trying to quit something (eg, smoking, junk food). If you’ve ‘given in’, then before you continue your indulgence, do something to bring your mood up. Watch an uplifting film, a sitcom you like, count your blessings or do some other self-help technique.

According to researchers, this replenishes the deflated ego, giving you more will power. Just don’t use a pick-me-up that reminds you of the thing you’re trying to abstain from! (eg if you’re quitting junk food and you normally eat in front of the TV, don’t watch TV to boost your mood).

Happiness also seems to have a direct effect on health. Although there is little evidence at present, concepts related to happiness like humour and optimism have been shown to increase immune system efficiency. One study found higher antibody activity on days with more positive moods than negative moods.

A happy disposition also leads to better coping during life’s difficult times, probably through the increased optimism and hope that tends to come with happiness.

6) Creativity and Problem Solving

The studies that exist on happiness and creativity suggest that the two tend to come together in people. There is a need for more research in this area, but is seems that it is moment-to-moment happiness that is beneficial to creativity, rather than happiness as a trait. In other words, if you take a person who is usually in a bad mood and cheer him up, he should be more creative while his mood is good – even though his disposition might be as grumpy as the dwarf of the same name.

Of course, you can always bring up the ‘troubled artist’ stereotype to challenge these findings – and in some studies, people in sad moods are more creative than people in a neutral mood – but it’s the cheerful ones that usually show the most creativity. But it’s a valid challenge to the idea, and the apparent conflict might just be due to different definitions of creativity.

The reason that happiness is good for creativity may be that it broadens your perception and thinking somewhat. This is in opposition to ‘negative’ emotions, which narrow your potential thoughts and actions down as a survival instinct, eg. fear makes you escape or hide, anger makes you retaliate against a transgressor, and so on.

When it comes to complex problem solving, however, the findings are quite mixed. In some mental tasks, negative moods are more effective, in others, positive ones are. The difference seems to be because good moods increase a person’s reliance on heuristics (heuristics = rules of thumb, stereotypes, or mental shortcuts) – rather than slowing down and thinking the task through carefully and analytically. So positive emotions are perhaps better when there is existing knowledge and heuristics that can be applied to a task.

Why would good moods increase your use of heuristics? Perhaps because if things are going well for you, it makes sense to use heuristics you’ve already used, because these are probably what got you the success in the first place.

But don’t start listening to your Radiohead albums before you do your evening Sudoku puzzle, thinking that the intense depression will help you out. If you’re in a positive mood you can still access your analytical side; you just have to do it deliberately.

Conclusion

The point of these four posts was to hopefully give you perspective on happiness that you might not have taken before. In summary:

• It’s an action signal just like other emotions
• The actions it signals are ones that help you move towards goals
• Therefore, good moods are not solely a result of a consequence of success (although they certainly are that), they are part of the cause of success.

Remember – ‘happiness’, in the paper I got this information from, is defined by frequent positive emotions and infrequent (but not absent) negative emotions – a slightly different definition than I’ve used previously.

Even though ‘negative’ emotions are not that pleasant to experience, it’s easy to imagine that they serve a useful purpose, that when you’re scared it’s to keep you safe, to keep you from doing things that your mind associates with danger. If you didn’t have fear, you’d get into a lot of trouble.

Likewise, happiness has a purpose too. It’s not just there so that you can feel good! It’s a signal, information about your circumstances. You’re progressing well towards your goals, you have resources, allies and security. Because of this, happiness nudges your behaviour in a certain direction. Unlike fear, though, the direction is towards goals, not away from them.

Your mind then opens up a few mental resources for you; makes you more interested in goals, more creative, and gives you a positive outlook on any negative things that might be going on, so that they don’t interfere with your advancement.

Happiness is not a guarantee to success, of course, but the point is that it plays a measurable role. It’s one piece of the puzzle.

References:

(1) Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Deiner, E. (2005). The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success? Psychological Bulletin, 131/6, 803–855