Why life outside the office might be the missing piece in professional engagement.
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Psychologists have discovered that young adults who are more outgoing and emotionally stable go on to lead happier lives.
The study looked at data from 2,529 people born in 1946.
They first answered a series of questions about their personalities at 16 and 26 years of age.
Forty years later, in their early sixties, they were asked about their well-being and satisfaction with life.
Dr Catharine Gale, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“We found that extroversion in youth had direct, positive effects on wellbeing and life satisfaction in later life.
Neuroticism, in contrast, had a negative impact, largely because it tends to make people more susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression and to physical health problems.”
High extroversion is linked to being more sociable, having more energy and preferring to stay active.
High neuroticism is linked to being distractible, moody and having low emotional stability.
Increased extroversion was directly linked to more happiness.
Greater neuroticism, meanwhile, was linked to less happiness through a greater susceptibility to psychological distress.
Dr Gale said:
“Understanding what determines how happy people feel in later life is of particular interest because there is good evidence that happier people tend to live longer.
In this study we found that levels of neuroticism and extroversion measured over 40 years earlier were strongly predictive of well-being and life satisfaction in older men and women.
Personality in youth appears to have an enduring influence on happiness decades later.”
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Gale et al., 2013).
Mainstream games could function as everyday resilience tools.
The considerable benefits to health and well-being of gardening.
The considerable benefits to health and well-being of gardening.
People who have access to a private garden enjoy greater well-being.
Using the garden is linked to higher well-being, more physical activity and more frequent visits to nature.
People who have balconies, yards and patios are also more likely to get sufficient physical activity.
Research has also found that gardening is one of the most rewarding daily activities that people can pursue.
It makes people at least as happy as other activities commonly linked to higher well-being, such as exercise and eating out.
Vegetable gardening, in particular, provides a bigger boost to happiness compared to ornamental gardening.
Doctors should prescribe gardening for mental health problems, dementia and cancer, one report has urged.
Dr Sian de Bell, the study’s first author, said:
“A growing body of evidence points to the health and wellbeing benefits of access to green or coastal spaces.
Our findings suggest that whilst being able to access an outdoor space such as a garden or yard is important, using that space is what really leads to benefits for health and wellbeing.”
The conclusions come from a survey of 7,814 people in England.
The results showed that the benefits to health and well-being of having a garden were similar to the benefits of living in an affluent area compared to a poor area.
This study found similar benefits for both gardening and just spending time in the garden.
Dr Becca Lovell, study co-author, said:
“Gardens are a crucial way for people to access and experience the natural environment.
Our new evidence highlights that gardens may have a role as a public health resource and that we need to ensure that their benefit is available equally.”
For those without gardens, though, even modest reminders of nature can help boost mental health.
Nature can be experienced on a walk close to home, in the back yard or even indoors.
All have been shown to improve mental health and well-being and reduce anxiety.
Experiencing nature mindfully can help increase its effect, as can sharing memories of nature, thinking back to natural places that induce calm and sharing these stories with others.
Nature can help stop rumination — thinking about the causes and consequences of depressing events — a process common in depression.
The study was published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning (Bell et al., 2020).
Mental well-being, in practice, looks less like a series of discrete exercises and more like an embodied mindset.
People significantly underestimate how happy they were in the past.
People significantly underestimate how happy they were in the past.
When you look back over your life, can you remember how happy you used to be, say, five years ago?
The chances are that you were much happier than you recall.
Research suggests that people were usually happier than they remember.
In other words, we seem to forget how happy we used to be.
The conclusions come from a study which looked at data from tens of thousands of people in Germany, France, the U.S. and the U.K..
The results showed that people’s present feelings interfered with their evaluation of the past.
Dr Alberto Prati and Professor Claudia Senik, the study’s authors, explained:
“Happy people tend to overstate the improvement of their life satisfaction over time, whereas unhappy ones tend to overstate the deterioration of their level of happiness.
This indicates a certain confusion between feeling happy and feeling better.”
People were asked at regular intervals about their current feelings of happiness every year.
But, when they tried to remember their past levels of happiness, their present feelings got in the way of an accurate assessment.
Dr Prati and Professor Senik said:
“People are able to recall how they used to feel about their life, but they also tend to mix this memory with the way they currently feel.”
In contrast to downgrading their past happiness, people seem to consistently upgrade the happiness they feel in the present.
On average, people feel they have been steadily getting happier over their lifetimes, despite their own yearly happiness ratings suggesting otherwise.
The study’s authors write:
“It thus seems that feeling happy today implies feeling better than yesterday.
This recall structure has implications for motivated memory and learning and could explain why happy people are more optimistic, perceive risks to be lower, and are more open to new experiences.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Prati & Senik, 2022).
How the triumphs and tragedies of our age affect national happiness.
How the triumphs and tragedies of our age affect national happiness.
The unhappiest period in the United States in the last two hundred years was in the early 1970s, during the Vietnam War.
In the UK, the unhappiest period was during the 1978-79 ‘Winter of Discontent’ caused by strikes, bitter cold and a worsening economy.
However, national happiness quickly bounces back and people soon forget the triumphs and tragedies of the age in which they live.
The conclusions come from a study that measured national happiness over the last 200 years by analysing millions of books and newspapers published at the time.
The study also found that increases in national income make people a little happier, but it takes a huge rise in income to have any measurable effect.
Avoiding one year of war, though, gave the equivalent boost to happiness of a 30 percent rise in GDP.
Researchers created a happiness index for the US, UK, Italy and Germany using linguistic analysis.
Professor Thomas Hills, the study’s first author, said:
“What’s remarkable is that national subjective well-being is incredibly resilient to wars.
Even temporary economic booms and busts have little long-term effect.
We can see the American Civil War in our data, the revolutions of 48′ across Europe, the roaring 20’s and the Great Depression.
But people quickly returned to their previous levels of subjective well-being after these events were over.
Our national happiness is like an adjustable spanner that we open and close to calibrate our experiences against our recent past, with little lasting memory for the triumphs and tragedies of our age.”
The Italians suffered most during fascism and in recent years following the financial crisis, said Professor Eugenio Proto, study co-author:
“Looking at the Italian data, it is interesting to note a slow but constant decline in the years of fascism and a dramatic decline in the years after the last crisis.”
National happiness has only been measured for a maximum of 50 years, and even then only in a few countries.
That is why researchers used data from Google Books, which contains 8 million books, over 6 percent of the books ever published.
Professor Daniel Sgroi, study co-author, said:
“Aspirations seem to matter a lot: after the end of rationing in the 1950s national happiness was very high as were expectations for the future, but unfortunately things did not pan out as people might have hoped and national happiness fell for many years until the low-point of the Winter of Discontent.”
Changes in word meaning had to be controlled for, said Dr Chanuki Seresinhe, study co-author:
“It was really important to ensure that the changing meaning of words over time was taken into account.
For example, the word “gay” had a completely different meaning in the 1800s than it does today.
We processed terabytes of word co-occurrence data from Google Books to understand how the meaning of words has changed over time, and we validate our findings using only words with the most stable historical meanings.”
The study was published in the journal Nature: Human Behaviour (Hills et al., 2019).
Why the ‘local-ladder effect’ is so important for happiness.
The long-term goals linked to life satisfaction and happiness.
The long-term goals linked to life satisfaction and happiness.
Setting realistic and modest goals makes people happier in the long-term.
People feel most satisfied with their lives if they have control over achieving their goals.
Fascinatingly, the importance of the goal does not matter so much.
In other words, modest goals that can be achieved make people happier than grand goals which are difficult to feel in control of.
It also matters to happiness what types of goals people set for themselves.
For example, people are happier when they set themselves goals related to social relationships or health, the researchers found.
Younger people, though, prefer goals related to work and status.
However, these tend not to be satisfying in the long-term.
The study used data from 973 people in Switzerland, many of whom were followed for around 4 years.
They were asked about their life goals across many areas, including social relationships, image, wealth, family and health.
Realistic goals are the key to happiness, the study’s authors write:
“…the attainability of intrinsic goals was positively linked to later well-being.
Goal attainability might be conducive for subjective well-being given that it reflects a person’s feeling of control and perceived sphere of influence.
…people are more satisfied if they feel they have this internal locus of control, and that a greater feeling of goal attainability might yield more opportunities
for goal achievement.”
Age had some influence over what types of goals people pursued.
Younger people were naturally more interested in work, status and personal growth.
Both status and work goals were only linked to satisfaction in the short-term, but not in the long-term.
Perhaps it is no surprise that older people, with greater experience of life, focus more on social relationships and their health.
The study was published in the European Journal of Personality (Bühler et al., 2019).
How to formulate your New Year’s resolutions (if you want them to stick).
How to formulate your New Year’s resolutions (if you want them to stick).
The first step in keeping a New Year’s resolution is to rephrase it.
Do not use New Year’s resolutions that contain the words “I will quit…,” or “I will avoid…”
Instead, use “I will start to….”
When people phrase resolutions positively, in terms of what they will do, instead of what they are trying to avoid, they are more likely to carry through.
Study co-author, Professor Per Carlbring, explains:
“In many cases, rephrasing your resolution could definitely work.
For example, if your goal is to stop eating sweets in order to lose weight, you will most likely be more successful if you say ‘I will eat fruit several times a day’ instead.
You then replace sweets with something healthier, which probably means you will lose weight and also keep your resolution.
You cannot erase a behavior, but you can replace it with something else.
Although, this might be harder to apply to the resolution ‘I will quit smoking,’ which is something you might do 20 times a day.”
The conclusions come from a study of 1,066 people who made resolutions at the end of 2017.
The researchers tested the effects of providing different levels of support to people in their attempts to change their behaviour.
Surprisingly, providing people support had little effect, explained Professor Carlbring:
“It was found that the support given to the participants did not make much of a difference when it came down to how well participants kept their resolutions throughout the year.
What surprised us were the results on how to phrase your resolution.”
The second step is to think carefully about a resolution that will satisfy the three most basic psychological needs.
People find it much easier to stick to resolutions that tap directly into basic human needs.
These three basic psychological needs are for:
Professor Richard Ryan, whose theory of motivation is highly influential, suggests adopting a resolution that involves giving to others.
He says:
“If you want to make a New Year’s resolution that really makes you happy, think about the ways in which you can contribute to the world.
All three of these basic needs are fulfilled.
The research shows it’s not just good for the world but also really good for you.”
We can help ourselves, says Professor Ryan, by helping others:
“Think of how you can help.
There’s a lot of distress out there: If we can set goals that aim to help others, those kinds of goals will, in turn, also add to our own well-being.”
The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE (Oscarsson et al., 2020).
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
