How our brains trick us into avoiding the very things that bring us joy.
Happiness isn’t about big life changes: it’s there in tiny tweaks you can start today.
It is linked to trying harder at difficult tasks, earning more money and being more satisfied at work.
It is linked to trying harder at difficult tasks, earning more money and being more satisfied at work.
Feeling happy leads to success.People who are happy try harder at difficult tasks, earn more money and are more satisfied with their jobs, psychologists have found in multiple studies.While we are often told that working hard will make us happy, the reverse may also be true, perhaps even more so.Happiness is neither a requirement for success nor the only way of achieving it — legendary leaders like Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill suffered from depression.However, happiness is linked to higher creativity, curiosity and greater striving for higher goals.The conclusions come from a review of many different studies on the connection between happiness and career success.The study’s authors explain their conclusions:“Happiness is positively associated with job autonomy, job satisfaction, job performance, prosocial behavior, social support, popularity, and income.Happy people also receive more positive peer and supervisor evaluations and are less likely to withdraw from work by becoming habitually absent or burning out.”When people are followed over time, their happiness seems to predict their later success, the authors write:
“…people who are happy at an initial time point are more likely to find employment, be satisfied with their jobs, acquire higher status, perform well, be productive, receive social support, be evaluated positively, engage in fewer withdrawal behaviors, and obtain higher income at a subsequent time point.”Experiments conducted in the lab also point to happiness causing success:
“The experimental research demonstrates that when people are randomly assigned to experience positive emotions, they negotiate more collaboratively, set higher goals for themselves, persist at difficult tasks longer, evaluate themselves and others more favorably, help others more, and demonstrate greater creativity and curiosity than people assigned to experience neutral or negative emotions.”The study was published in the Journal of Career Assessment (Walsh et al., 2018).
Studies reveal the power of this emotion in our daily sense of purpose — and four ways to boost it.
Many self-help books claim that more sex in a relationship makes couples happier, but is it really true?
Researchers found that emotional gains were highest for the socially disadvantaged.
One handful of this food a day can help improve mood.
Distress and well-being are not two sides of the same coin and what that means for treatment.
Surveys of 43,000 people reveal the complex emotional trade-offs of parenthood.
All personality types benefit from this type of conversation.
All personality types benefit from this type of conversation.
Having more meaningful or ‘deep’ conversations makes people happier, research finds.
Whether extravert or introvert, people who exchanged more meaningful information about relationships, politics or whatever, were happier.
At the other end of the scale, trivial chat or ‘small talk’ had no link to happiness, one way or the other.
Professor Matthias Mehl, who led the study, said:
“We do not think anymore that there is an inherent tension between having small talk and having substantive conversations.
Small didn’t positively contribute to happiness, and it didn’t negatively contribute to it.
With this study, we wanted to find out whether it is primarily the quantity or the quality of our social encounters that matter for one’s well-being.”
For the study, small recording devices were used to capture snippets of everyday conversation from 486 volunteers.
Professor Mehl explained the difference between small talk and a substantive conversation in their study:
“We define small talk as a conversation where the two conversation partners walk away still knowing equally as much — or little — about each other and nothing else.
In substantive conversation, there is real, meaningful information exchanged.
Importantly, it could be about any topic — politics, relationships, the weather — it just needs to be at a more than trivial level of depth.”
Personality had no effect on how much of a happiness boost people got from deep conversations, Professor Mehl said:
“We expected that personality might make a difference, for example that extroverts might benefit more from social interactions than introverts or that substantive conversations might be more closely linked to well-being for introverts than for extroverts, and were very surprised that this does not seem to be the case.”
Although small talk was not linked to happiness, it is still necessary, said Professor Mehl:
“I think of it like this: In every pill, there’s an inactive ingredient, and it’s a nice metaphor, because you cannot have the pill without the inactive ingredient.
We all understand that small talk is a necessary component to our social lives.
You cannot usually walk up to a stranger and jump right into a deep, existential conversation because of social norms.”
Perhaps, says Professor Mehl, people could be prescribed a deep conversation as a treatment:
“I would like to experimentally ‘prescribe’ people a few more substantive conversations and see whether that does something to their happiness.”
The study was published in the journal Psychological Science (Milek et al., 2018).
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
