Category: Happiness

People who push themselves to feel happy can end up feeling worse.

Putting too much value on being happy, paradoxically makes that happiness more difficult to achieve, research finds.

In fact, a greater need to enjoy experiences is linked to more depressive symptoms.

In other words, people who push themselves to feel happy can end up feeling worse.

One reason is down to disappointment.

Imagine listening to some music and trying to force oneself to enjoy it more.

The disappointment felt if it does not work could make one feel worse than if they had not bothered trying to feel happier.

None of this means that pursuing happiness is a waste of time — it just has to be done in the right way.

A happiness culture

There is also a cultural factor to consider.

Culture plays an important part in how we think about happiness, the new study reveals.

Researchers carried out happiness surveys on groups of people in the UK and EU and compared them to previous results from people in the US.

The results showed that people in the US and the UK who valued happiness more also found it harder to focus on and savour positive experiences.

Dr Julia Vogt, study co-author, explained:

“We observed that the inability of participants to focus attention while feeling a range of emotions was a major factor in this idea of not being able to savor a positive experience.”

However, the link was not as strong in the EU, suggesting that culture is a factor.

Dr Vogt continued:

“The relationship between valuing happiness and depressive symptoms was seen far more significantly in UK [and US] participants than those from other nationalities or dual citizens.

We don’t go so far as to test what those differences are, but there seems to be a significant divide between English-speaking western cultures and other cultures when it comes to how our internal value of experiencing happiness shapes our experiences and mood.”

→ Read on about sustainable happiness.

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

These experiences help reduce the effects of stress.

People who have more daily spiritual experiences are happier, research finds.

These regular experiences also help reduce the effects of stress.

It may be partly because spirituality promotes a greater sense of oneness and connectedness with the rest of the universe.

Spiritual experiences include both those related to God and transcendent feelings not linked to God.

For example, some people in the study agreed with the statement:

• “I feel God’s love for me directly or through others.”

Whereas, others endorsed a statement such as:

• “I feel a deep inner peace or harmony.”

The study tracked people’s moment-by-moment spiritual experiences like these through their phones over two weeks.

Dr Matt Bradshaw, study co-author, said:

“This study is unique because it examines daily spiritual experiences—such as feeling God’s presence, finding strength in religion or spirituality, and feeling inner peace and harmony—as both stable traits and as states that fluctuate.”

The study included 2,795 people who also answered questions which accessed positive and negative emotions.

Dr Bradshaw explained that…

“…these findings suggest that stable, consistent spiritual experiences as well as short-term periodic ones both serve as resources to promote human flourishing and help individuals cope with stressful conditions.”

Stressful events were also taken into account, explained Dr Blake Victor Kent, the study’s first author:

“The findings indicate, as you would expect, that the wear and tear of daily stressors are associated with increased depressive symptoms and lower levels of flourishing.

What this study really contributes is that daily spiritual experiences play an important role as well.

Essentially, if you take two people who have equal levels of stress, the one with more spiritual experiences will be less likely to report depressive symptoms and more likely to indicate feelings of flourishing.

That’s a comparison between two people.

But what about one person?

The unique thing about this study is we are able to show that when someone’s spiritual experiences vary day to day, the ‘above average’ days of spiritual experience are associated with better mental well-being than the ‘below average’ days.”

Reducing self-centredness

Previous studies have found that people who are more spiritual have better mental health.

Spiritual people feel a greater connection with the rest of the universe.

Being spiritual may boost people’s mental health because it reduces self-centredness.

The study was published in the The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (Kent et al., 2020).

Friends or family? Which group of people make us happiest?

People report feeling happier when they are with their friends than their family, research finds.

However, this is probably because of the type of activities that people tend to do with their friends compared with their family.

With friends, people do more enjoyable activities, such as going to restaurants, sports or visiting new places.

In comparison, with families people do more mundane tasks, like chores and caretaking.

The study reveals a positive view of the family, says Dr Nathan Hudson, the study’s first author:

“Our study suggests that this [feeling happier while with friends] doesn’t have to do with the fundamental nature of kith versus kin relationships.

When we statistically controlled for activities, the ‘mere presence’ of children, romantic partners, and friends predicted similar levels of happiness.

Thus, this paper provides an optimistic view of family and suggests that people genuinely enjoy their romantic partners and children.”

For the study, over 400 people were asked to think back to activities they had done and rate their happiness and sense of meaning.

Psychologists compared the amount of happiness people felt when around three different groups:

1. Friends,
2. children,
3. and romantic partner.

The results revealed that people were happiest when relaxing, eating and socialising.

People tended to do these activities more often when they were with their friends rather than their families.

Study participants spent 28 percent of their time with their partner socialising, but 65 percent of their time with friends socialising.

Time spent with children was often drudge work, involving housework and ferrying them from one place to another.

However, people viewed childcare positively.

Once the activity was taken out of the equation, people reported having just as much fun with friends as family.

Dr Hudson explains:

“It’s important to create opportunities for positive experiences with romantic partners and children—and to really mentally savor those positive times. In contrast, family relationships that involve nothing but chores, housework, and childcare likely won’t predict a lot of happiness.”

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Hudson et al., 2020).

How you can get that beautiful chills-down-the-spine feeling.

Upbeat music sounds better when you make a concerted effort to enjoy it, rather than just listening passively, psychological research finds.

While many people let music flow over them; making the effort to enhance your emotions can be an incredibly rewarding experience.

Across two studies, researchers at the University of Missouri looked at the effect of music on positive emotions (Ferguson & Sheldon, 2013).

In one experiment, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, people visited a lab five times over two weeks to listen to music they’d selected for 15 minutes:

• Half were told to just listen to the music and not think about their happiness.
• The other half were told to try and feel happier and think about their happiness.

Although both groups said they’d enjoyed the music equally, it was the group that tried to feel happier that actually felt happier after the two weeks.

Another experiment confirmed the results, with participants listening to upbeat music, and trying to make themselves happy, feeling better than those who just listened passively.

Crucially, though, trying to make yourself happier only worked when the music was upbeat.

The study’s lead author, Yuna Ferguson, pointed out a pitfall with actively seeking happiness from music.

She counsels against continually asking yourself “Am I happy?”:

“Rather than focusing on how much happiness they’ve gained and engaging in that kind of mental calculation, people could focus more on enjoying their experience of the journey towards happiness and not get hung up on the destination.”

The study’s co-author, Professor Kennon Sheldon, said the study demonstrates our potential to change our own levels of happiness:

“…we can intentionally seek to make mental changes leading to new positive experiences of life.

The fact that we’re aware we’re doing this, has no detrimental effect.”

Why not try it right now with your own favourites, or one of the upbeat pieces of classical music used in the study (Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ from the ballet ‘Rodeo’):

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Study tests which memories can make us happy in the future.

People rarely miss a chance to record the highlights of their lives.

Phones, albums and social media sites are full to bursting with holiday snaps, wedding videos, baby photos, and all the rest.

But even the more mundane, everyday experiences can provide unexpected joy down the line, psychological research finds.

A series of studies, published in the journal Psychological Science, was inspired by the finding that we are surprisingly poor at predicting what will make us feel happy in the future (Zhang et al., 2014).

In one study, 135 students were asked to create a time capsule at the start of the summer which included:

• a recent conversation,
• the last social event they’d attended,
• an extract from a paper they’d written,
• and three favourite songs.

At the time, they also predicted how they’d feel about these items when they opened the capsule three months later.

Despite being relatively mundane, the students significantly under-estimated how surprised and curious they would be when they opened it.

They also found the capsule much more meaningful to them than they had predicted.

Ting Zhang of Harvard Business School who co-authored the research, said:

“We generally do not think about today’s ordinary moments as experiences that are worthy of being rediscovered in the future.

However, our studies show that we are often wrong: What is ordinary now actually becomes more extraordinary in the future — and more extraordinary than we might expect.”

Another study found that, in comparison, people were pretty accurate at judging the value of more stand-out events, like what they did on Valentine’s Day.

Taken together, the studies are a reminder of how we tend to undervalue the happiness we can get from everyday events.

Zhang continued:

“People find a lot of joy in rediscovering a music playlist from months ago or an old joke with a neighbor, even though those things did not seem particularly meaningful in the moment.

The studies highlight the importance of not taking the present for granted and documenting the mundane moments of daily life to give our future selves the joy of rediscovering them.”

This doesn’t mean that we should continuously take pictures of anything and everything, because that would interfere with enjoying the moment, Zhang warned.

Still, it’s worth bearing in mind our tendency to undervalue the pleasure we will get in the future from what seem like everyday moments right now.

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Giving makes us feel connected to others and reinforces a positive self-image.

The joy of giving does not fade like the joy of getting, new research reveals.

Usually when people repeat pleasant experiences, happiness fades after each one.

However, when people keep on giving to others, the happy feeling remains powerful.

In fact, people in the study were just as happy giving money away after the fifth time as they were the very first time.

It may be because giving makes us feel connected to others and reinforces a positive self-image.

Dr Ed O’Brien, the study’s first author, said:

“If you want to sustain happiness over time, past research tells us that we need to take a break from what we’re currently consuming and experience something new.

Our research reveals that the kind of thing may matter more than assumed: Repeated giving, even in identical ways to identical others, may continue to feel relatively fresh and relatively pleasurable the more that we do it.”

For the study, people were asked to either spend $5 per day on themselves or to give it away to others.

Those that spent the money on themselves saw a pattern familiar to psychologists.

The first day they got a kick out of it, but that quickly faded as the days past (this is called ‘hedonic adaptation’).

But, for those that gave their money away, the joy was just as strong on the fifth day as it was on the first.

Dr O’Brien said they tested all sorts of alternative explanations for their results.

For example, perhaps people thought longer and harder when giving the money away.

This did not explain the effect, though:

“We considered many such possibilities, and measured over a dozen of them.

None of them could explain our results; there were very few incidental differences between ‘get’ and ‘give’ conditions, and the key difference in happiness remained unchanged when controlling for these other variables in the analyses.”

The study is to be published in the journal Psychological Science (O’Brien & Kassirer, 2018).