How to achieve happiness

Science of life

Happiness is that state in which one experiences joy, pleasure and contentment. Considerable research has been carried out on how to achieve happiness and many conclusions have been reached. One important conclusion is that wealth will not, in itself, produce happiness.

Other things that do not, in themselves, correlate highly with happiness include high IQ, high levels of education, single status and living in a sunny climate. Happiness is a byproduct of a well lived life and if you pursue happiness as a primary life goal, you will not achieve it.

Traditional wisdom has long taught that wealth alone does not guarantee happiness. I understand that Arab culture has a symbol for wealth: the digit 1 followed by a large number of zeroes. The digit 1 represents health. If you remove the 1, all that remains is a bunch of zeroes. And the Bible warns us about money, specifically the apostle Paul in his first letter to Timothy. Paul’s advice is often misquoted as “Money is the root of all evil”, but what Paul actually said was – “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil”.

There is nothing wrong with money in itself, only with the love of money. When the desire for money rules your value system, trouble follows. By the way, one important tip about money is that if you have plenty of it, you will be much happier if you spend some of it helping others who have little.

Money correlates strongly with happiness only when you are so poor that you cannot afford basic life necessities such as food, clothing and shelter. Once you have enough money to buy the basic necessities, the correlation between more money and happiness is very weak. Pools winners are no happier than control groups. The economist Richard Layard wrote a book called Happiness (Penguin, 2005) and points out that happiness has not increased since the 1950s, despite the fact that, in real terms, average salaries have more than doubled, we have more cars, bigger houses, a shorter working week, more holidays and better health.

Desire

We all naturally desire to acquire grander things than we currently possess. For example, a very modest car usually satisfies you for your first car. But shortly you notice that some of your neighbours have grander cars than yours and you enviously long for a grander car for yourself – and so it goes on. Karl Marx described it thus: “A house may be large or small and as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demand for a dwelling. But if a palace arises beside the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.”

Our brains are biologically disposed towards negative thinking. This is probably because Homo sapiens evolved during the Pleistocene era, 1.8 million to 10,000 years ago, in a very hard environment. An Ice Age was followed by ferocious flooding and terrifying dangerous animals like the saber-tooth tiger were common. The human brain evolved to constantly scan the world for dangers. This was essential to ensure human survival then, but we still have this brain today and it doesn’t suit our modern world. We remember failure much more vividly than success and we ruminate over poor past performance.

We have separate brain systems for wanting and liking. The wanting part (amygdala and nucleus accumbens) is of ancient origin; the liking part (in pre-frontal cortex) developed later. The wanting part of the brain works automatically and insatiably. If not controlled, the wanting part will stick you on a hedonistic treadmill, comparing you to your neighbour in a negative fashion, keeping you dissatisfied with what have. And when we get them, we do not like many of the things we wanted as much as we expected.

Brains

The way out of this impasse is to train ourselves to be happy by deliberately appealing to the liking part of our brains with what we know (and research confirms) we will like. This will increase the amount of meaningful engagement in our lives and reduce the ancient brain’s tendency to constantly scan for threats and failures. This takes a little discipline, because the modern economy works largely by catering to the psychology of wanting, not liking.

So what makes us happy? The American psychologist Martin Seligman in his book Using the New Positive Psychology to Realise your Potential for Lasting Fulfilment (The Free Press, 2002) lists the three components of happiness – pleasure, engagement (depth of involvement) and meaning (using personal strengths to serve larger ends). Pleasure is the weakest of the three components as an aid to achieving a happy, satisfied life. Seligman reports that the biggest aids to happiness are strong ties to family and close relations with friends. Marriage and religion also correlate well with happiness. We can also boost happiness by reflecting positively on the past, savoring the present, appreciating beauty and developing spirituality.

About 50% of one’s satisfaction with life is genetically determined. However this allows us to significantly improve our happiness by manipulating the other 50%.

Based on much research the following steps are recommended to help one achieve a more satisfying life:

(a) Accept that enduring happiness doesn’t come from wealth;

(b) Invest time and energy in family and friends;

(d) Practice acts of kindness, both systematic and random;

(e) Savour life’s joys, e.g. the beauty of nature;

(f) Thank people who help you;

(g) Learn to forgive – this allows you to move on;

(h) Take care of your body;

(i) Learn to cope with stress;

(j) Manage your time;

(k) Nurture your spiritual side.

And don’t sit about overthinking things. George Bernard Shaw had some good advice: “The secret of being miserable is to have leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure for it is occupation.” But remember to include the advice (a) to (k) above in your occupation.

William Reville is an Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at UCC http://understandingscience.ucc.ie