Personal freedom boosts well-being everywhere, yet wealth and culture amplify the effect in surprising ways.
Academic success predicted surprisingly little about adult happiness.
It’s a little depressing, but it probably confirms what many people have long suspected.
It’s a little depressing, but it probably confirms what many people have long suspected.
A survey reveals that appearance and money strongly influence how satisfied people feel with their lives.
Among women, appearance was the third strongest predictor of overall life satisfaction.
The top two predictors were money and satisfaction with their partner.
For men, their appearance came second in predicting how satisfied they were with life — it was second only to how happy they were with their financial situation.
Dr David Frederick, the study’s first author, said:
“Our study shows that men’s and women’s feelings about their weight and appearance play a major role in how satisfied they are with their lives overall.”
The survey asked over 12,000 US adults about their personality, relationships, self-esteem and more.
Dr Frederick said:
“Few men (24 percent) and women (20 percent) felt very or extremely satisfied with their weight, and only half felt somewhat to extremely satisfied.
These findings are consistent with the emphasis placed on the importance of being slender for women and for appearing athletic and/or lean for men.
It would seem therefore, that we still have a long way to go before we achieve the goal of Americans being truly happy with their bodies.”
Other key findings from the study included:
Dr Frederick said:
“…body dissatisfaction and anxious attachment styles can lead to an out of control spiral and fuel each other.
People who are less confident in their appearance become more fearful that their partner will leave, which further fuels their worries about their appearance.”
The study was published in the journal Body Image (Frederick et al., 2016).
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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).
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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).
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