Category: Happiness

How to move home, change job or start a new relationship with no regrets.

Ending phases of life with a sense of closure makes people feel happier, research finds.

People who tie up all the loose ends before moving house, changing job or starting a new relationship experience fewer regrets.

When people feel they have ‘said goodbye’ properly to their old life, they experience easier transitions to their new life.

Things like going-away parties help people experience a sense of closure.

Without doing everything that could have been done, people are more likely to have regrets.

Professor Gabriele Oettingen, the study’s first author, said:

“Starting a new life phase in a positive and constructive way is often challenging, so we examined methods that could help people find a good start to a new job, a new relationship, or a new home.

We observed that how people end their previous life periods makes a difference.

In fact, the more people feel that they have done everything they could have done, that they have completed something to the fullest, and that all loose ends are tied up, the happier they are later on, the less they are plagued by regrets, and the more constructively they enter the next life phase.”

The research included over 1,200 people across seven different studies.

Participants were asked about transitions like finishing school or travelling for a period.

In one study, people imagined moving away from their hometown or leaving a best friend’s wedding.

The results showed that ending these periods in a well-rounded way — for example, by saying goodbye to friends — was linked to fewer regrets and a more positive transition.

Finishing in a well-rounded way was even linked to enhanced attention and cognitive flexibility by one study.

Professor Oettingen said:

“Ending the various phases in our lives in a well-rounded way seems to be an important building block for sustaining emotional, interpersonal, and professional happiness.”

The study was published in the journal Motivation Science (Schwörer et al., 2019).

How we think with both our brains and our bodies.

One of the simplest ways of feeling happier is to force a smile.

Similarly, scowling makes us feel more miserable.

Both are examples of how we think with both our brains and our bodies.

While we tend to think of smiles and scowls being the end product of our internal emotional processes, they can also be the start.

No one is claiming that forcing a smile will cure depression, but it is worth considering the implications of even a small effect such as this one.

Imagine all the little facial expression a person makes over a day, and then over a lifetime.

Think of how the posture and dynamics of the rest of the body feeds back to the mind’s emotional state (for example, a happy style of walking).

It is not hard to imagine that routinely smiling as opposed to scowling, along with other aspects of positive body language, would make a difference to mental health in the long-term.

Nevertheless, the idea that smiling makes people happy has been controversial, explained Mr Nicholas Coles, the study’s first author:

“Conventional wisdom tells us that we can feel a little happier if we simply smile.

Or that we can get ourselves in a more serious mood if we scowl.

But psychologists have actually disagreed about this idea for over 100 years.”

For the study, researchers looked at 138 separate studies including over 11,000 people.

Mr Coles said:

“Some studies have not found evidence that facial expressions can influence emotional feelings.

But we can’t focus on the results of any one study.

Psychologists have been testing this idea since the early 1970s, so we wanted to look at all the evidence.”

The meta-analysis found that facial expressions do indeed have a small effect on how people feel.

Mr Coles said:

“We don’t think that people can smile their way to happiness.

But these findings are exciting because they provide a clue about how the mind and the body interact to shape our conscious experience of emotion.

We still have a lot to learn about these facial feedback effects, but this meta-analysis put us a little closer to understanding how emotions work.”

The study was published in the journal Psychological Bulletin (Coles et al., 2019).

For happiness: when you should have children and how many.

First and second children provide parents a boost in happiness up to a year before they are born but the third does not, research finds.

The increase in happiness lasts around one year from birth, after which some parents’ happiness returns to its usual pre-baby levels.

The research, published in the journal Demography, found that it’s the first child that provides the greatest boost in happiness, while the increase from the second is about half the size (Myrskylä & Margolis, 2014).

The happiness boost from the first child was equivalent in size, on average, to getting divorced or losing your job — except obviously it made people happy rather than sad.

Men and women, on average, saw similar increases in happiness, although women gained more just before the birth and their happiness dropped more quickly in the year after birth.

Professor Mikko Myrskylä, the study’s co-author, explained:

“Our results show a temporary and transitory gain in parents’ happiness around the birth of first and second children.

The fact that parental happiness increases before these children are born suggests that we are capturing broader issues relating to childbearing such as couples forming partnerships and making plans for the future.

The arrival of a third child is not associated with an increase in the parents’ happiness, but this is not to suggest they are any less loved than their older siblings.

Instead, this may reflect that the experience of parenthood is less novel and exciting by the time the third child is born or that a larger family puts extra pressure on the parents’ resources.

Also, the likelihood of a pregnancy being unplanned may increase with the number of children a woman already has — and this brings its own stresses.

Parents who are highly educated or have their first children between the ages of 35 and 49 show the strongest gains in happiness around the birth of their children.

For these parents, happiness gained when they became parents was sustained over the long-term.

Dr. Rachel Margolis, who co-authored the study, said:

“The fact that among older and better-educated parents, well-being increases with childbearing, but the young and less-educated parents have flat or even downward happiness trajectories, may explain why postponing fertility has become so common.”

The researchers found that teenagers who had children showed no happiness boost, indeed they tended to become less happy over time.

The data comes from the analysis of household surveys in Britain and Germany, which included over 7,000 people.

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A 12-minute exercise that boosts happiness and empathy while reducing anxiety.

Wishing happiness for others, and really meaning it, makes people feel happier themselves, research finds.

Instead of focusing inwards, sending loving-kindness outwards can work magic.

People who did this for just 12 minutes felt happier than those who concentrated on how they were better off than others.

It also reduced anxiety and boosted empathy.

Professor Douglas Gentile, the study’s first author, said:

“Walking around and offering kindness to others in the world reduces anxiety and increases happiness and feelings of social connection.

It’s a simple strategy that doesn’t take a lot of time that you can incorporate into your daily activities.”

For the study, young people were split into three different groups and each tried a different strategy for feeling happier:

• Loving-kindness: looking at others and sincerely wishing them happiness.
• Interconnectedness: considering people’s connections to each other.
• Comparing oneself favourably to others: thinking about how one is better off than other people.

All were compared to a control group.

The results showed that people who practiced loving-kindness felt happier themselves, were less anxious and more caring and empathetic.

In contrast, those who compared themselves to others felt less caring, connected and empathetic.

Dr Dawn Sweet, study co-author, explained:

“At its core, downward social comparison is a competitive strategy.

That’s not to say it can’t have some benefit, but competitive mindsets have been linked to stress, anxiety and depression.”

Loving-kindness is effective, whatever your personality type, Lanmiao He, study co-author, said:

“This simple practice is valuable regardless of your personality type.

Extending loving-kindness to others worked equally well to reduce anxiety, increase happiness, empathy and feelings of social connection.”

Social media tends to encourage social comparisons, said Professor Gentile:

“It is almost impossible not to make comparisons on social media.

Our study didn’t test this, but we often feel envy, jealousy, anger or disappointment in response to what we see on social media, and those emotions disrupt our sense of well-being.”

The study was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (Gentile et al., 2019).