Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile or HOW TO AVOID MAKING YOURSELF MISERABLE

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”

                                                                                                                          ― Nathaniel Hawthorne

By Olena Denysyuk

INTRODUCTION

THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK IS “HAPPINESS: the science beyond your smile”.  IT SHOULD BE “HOW TO AVOID MAKING YOURSELF MISERABLE”. Happiness is a word that sells, but not the real topic of this book. It contents no concrete indication of what to do. Rather, it points where the main obstacles to a satisfactory life are. Actually this book is about what mistakes many people often make without realizing that their behavior will have almost inevitably lead to self-deception, disappointment and chronic frustration. And it shows that there can be many roadblocks on our ways to achieve our aims.

 

For instance:

-          our frame of reference, or how we compare ourselves to others with considerable myopia

-          the endowment effect, or how we come to attach more value than reasonable to our possessions

-          the peak-end effect or how we give preference to short-term intense enjoyment/entertainment over long-term pleasure

-          the exaggeration of the importance of life-events, i.e. the over-estimation of their effects on us personally

-          and, ultimately, the power of many foolish human desires, as it prevents us from enjoying our present possibilities for well-being, as Buddha demonstrated 26 centuries ago.

So, have you ever considered that actually we are not predisposed to be happy because we live on considerable state of uncertainty? For example, the knowledge of our own death, society’s suppression of our drives, or the cruel and illusory psychology of desire and “wrong” preferences, as well as other demands from society to be concerned with our self-presentation, put us in a state of eternal worry. 

Alas, we live in an economic system geared to constantly remaining us of our desires. So here we are leaving the personal sphere to the analysis of HOW our social organization based on market economics is inherently a source of profound frustration and the deep foundation of the lack of meaning in most people lives.

Therefore, we have to work hard to construct our own happiness.

 

But often, as the consequence, and as a motor, happiness is often associated with the accessibility to a desired life… Therefore, we always run after happiness. A bigger apartment, a better car, higher salary…

And often we think that we are happy when we have what we want to obtain, where we want to live, what we want to do and how we want to do it. At some point we get it. And we get used to it. And once again, we are after something more- because we always want more of everything.

Because the desired live is full of cruel and illusory desires, and because we fail to understand the biases of our desires, we often look for happiness, where it is not, or just don’t see it, where it is.  So to say, the uncertainty the universe gives us, and our biased mind doesn’t offer us the predispositions to be happy.

If your life is ALWAYS like a dog/horse/mouse/lion/hedgehog running towards the pursuit of happiness, the book about  happiness  by Daniel Nettle “Happiness: The Science behind Your Smile” has the potential to positively contribute to your life;  to make you slow a little down and enjoy your life as it is.

If you feel a little unhappy, then the book can guide you in the right direction, providing you with the right mind-set when understanding the psychology behind happiness.

Nevertheless, I am not sure that it can turn you from a pessimist into an optimist, but it can help you to think about the gaps between what life you desire to live and what life you do actually live – the most common reasons of your illusions about happiness, is indeed the failure to understand happiness.

The main point in the book is that we can’t be happy because of some profound gap between what we want and what we actually can have. So to be happy, we do something. For example, we make an estimate of our happiness/desired life and go after it. We make a kind of best guess, or objective estimate of our subjective experience. Please note- we make a GUESS about what can make us happy. But this guess is full of illusions, noise and biases.

This guess is biased by things like the peak-end rule, our current mood, the standard of comparison we are making, and our failure to predict our own adaptation. This means, we may end up with an inaccurate picture of the net effects of our behavior on our happiness, and choose things that don’t in fact make us happier. They also mean that great unhappiness in life is often a result of thinking about things in the wrong way rather than objective circumstances; failing to discount other reasons for moods, making the wrong comparisons, or dwelling on the past in the wrong way.

So understanding of the objective effects (mood, adaptation, etc.) that bias our subjective happiness has significant implications when pursuing happiness.

Why is it important? For ages psychologists have been working around negative live shells- anxiety, depressions and other unhappiness-related states of mind.  But only recently the interest within positive psychology did reach the fields of psychology. This interest is on the rise, but still, there is a long way to go.

If this is not clear to you, take a look at the definition of happiness, its biases and illusions. I have chosen the Daniel Nettle’s words from his book “Happiness : The Science Behind Your Smile”. I believe they are valuable, if you are in pursuit of happiness.

So what is happiness?

“The most immediate and direct senses of happiness involve an emotion or feeling, like joy or pleasure. The feeling is brought on by a desired state being (perhaps unexpectedly) attained, and there is not much cognition involved, beyond the recognition that the desired thing has happened. I this sense of happiness, this is ‘level one happiness’.

“Now let’s assume that if you had a pleasure-measuring device, then you would be able to show that the choices people made were the ones that maximized the balance of pleasurable feelings over painful ones. However, the lack of any practical way of measuring happiness or utility implies that, over time, economists took the utility of an outcome became the propensity of people to choose it. For example, if people prefer to spend money on cars rather than boats, then economists say that having a car gives greater utility than having boats. This is not a psychological hypothesis. Indeed, it is not an explanatory claim at all. The greater utility of cars cannot explain why people choose them, since the greater utility of cars is defined as the propensity of people to choose them. The concept is therefore merely shorthand for a device for predicting people’s behavior when allocating scarce resources.” Buying a boat would make you happier, but taking your limited resources into account, buying a car would be more a rational choice. But buying a car is not an equivalent of buying happiness.

Therefore, happiness is more the feeling of pleasure and joy, rather than maximized utility of a pleasure-giving device. In this sense, the car you own is not a source of happiness, but rather driving this car, is a source of pleasure, and therefore, happiness. But apart from driving a car, there are other maintaining activities involved, which, in turn, can discount the felling of joy.

Therefore, the possession of a pleasure-giving device is not a guarantee for happiness. 

What does make you happy?

The very simple perception of happiness, according to Nettle is the feeling of joy. Thus, the emotional experience of joy and pleasure is what we really like.

Why then people choose, for example, a higher income over more leisure time? It follows that a higher income must make people happier than more leisure time; otherwise they would not have chosen it.

Therefore, there is a level two of happiness- your own behavioral preferences towards things that might make your happy. Let’s assume, you prefer to work many hours, because it will give you higher income, which in turn, will make you happier.

In Nettle’s words “Here ‘happiness’ is being used to mean behavioral preference”. However, it says nothing about the actual emotional content of the two outcomes. It merely describes people’s propensity to choose one or the other. You chose to focus on higher income, as a source of happiness, without actually knowing if it will bring you joy and pleasure, and, therefore, happiness as all.

So, your behavioral preferences will be based on a guess, and only after “performing” this preference, will you find out whether it was a right choice for you to be satisfied.

What else? Positive emotions! (Ha, surprise, surprise!)

So, “One influential view of the relationship between satisfaction (level two happiness) and emotional experience (level one happiness) is that satisfaction is the balance of negative and positive emotions experienced in life— the balance, in other words, of pleasures and pains”. But apart from behavioral preferences and the feeling of enjoyment, there are other sources of happiness. Positive emotions!

“If you might think that the amount of negative emotion and the amount of positive emotion in life ought to be inversely related, so that as one increases, the other decreases. This is not in fact so. “Whilst it is hard to have negative and positive emotions at the same moment, over the run of life, you can have frequent negative emotions and frequent positive emotions, or alternately, infrequent positive and infrequent negative ones. Some people experience more emotional ups and downs than others, so that when we correlate the frequencies of positive and negative emotions across a group of people, we found no correlation”. (although, I am not sure how the author established a correlation, or no correlation; or what was a RELIABLE MEASURE of EMOTION? Does he have a measure instrument?)

The moral is: when you are down, do not expect to be on top, naturally. The work is to be done here to be on top again! Being on top is not yet a guarantee that you will never be at the bottom. Don’t take things for granted!  So, if you associate the happiness with positive/negative emotions, remember, this is just a temporarily state of being. Good to know how the frequency of your mood influences your perception of happiness.

Frame of reference –recent vs. distant events  

The interpretation of happiness has also something to do with a frame of reference. For those considering negative recent events reported lower satisfaction than those considering positive recent events. But those considering negative distant events reported themselves as happier than those considering positive distant events. So, for the current state of being, you might project the negative recent events, that, at some point you can’t change. Therefore, when assessing your happiness, you might have a feeling of helplessness due to the frame of reference regarding recent events.

Frame of reference- someone’s life

At other times, the frame of reference can be someone else’s life, or what you might have been. “In one famous study, people were asked how satisfied they were with their partner either before or after being shown photographs of models. Predictably, especially for men, the availability (at least in the imagination) of the models lowered their satisfaction with their real partners. Olympic bronze medalists report higher satisfaction than silver medalists. For them, the natural comparison is with not getting a medal at all, which they narrowly escaped. For the silver winners, the natural comparison is the gold, which they missed out on”.

So, focusing on the wrong frame of reference is obviously not only the source of envy, but also the source of unhappiness. Therefore, I think, it’s important to carefully choose your frame of reference, and it should be the one that actually can make you more satisfied with your life.

Adaptation

Importantly, when we think about our future happiness we often fail to predict our own adaptation. So to say, a thing can make you happy for some time, but after some time, you will come back to your normal state of being, wanting a new thing. Another side-effect of adaptation is the so-called endowment effect, where we think it would be really hard to get along without something we now have, forgetting that we got along quite fine without it for years.

The endowment effect

The endowment effect is really easy to elicit. For example, participants were given a choice between a mug and a sum of money, and asked to indicate how much the sum would have to be for them to prefer the cash. The sum was about $3.50 on average. Alternatively, participants were given a mug for keeps. They were then asked how much money they would accept to give up the mug. Now they said they would need on average $7.12. The two conditions used identical mugs. Yet, in as much as money is an indicator of utility, the participants seemed to believe that the mug was improving their lives by over twice as much in the case where it was already theirs.

The failure to predict our own adaptation, and the endowment effect of it is one of the most obvious reason why we always on a run after happiness.

Pick-end rule

“The implication of this rule for happiness is that we might often be tempted to fall for things that provide either a high peak of joy or remain joyful right to the end, when in fact we would maximize the amount of pleasure in our lives if we chose things that went on for longer at a lower level of intensity. The former type of thing— a big night out, for example— might make a greater psychological impact in terms of the average of peak and end, but the latter— a good weighty novel, or a new skill acquired— might provide more lasting happiness if all its moments were added up.”

Therefore, not selecting carefully the moments of joyment can also be the reason of unhappiness.

Personality factors: Neuroticism, introvert/extrovert

Personality factors powerfully affect levels of positive and negative emotion in life.

Individuals who score highly on scales of agreeableness and conscientiousness also tend to be happier.

Neuroticism is the strongest single predictor of unhappiness. High neuroticism scorers will always be vulnerable to negative thoughts and feelings. Thus, a person with high neuroticism tends to exaggerate negative events, and is also differentially likely to remember the negative aspects of things. Thus, faced with assessing whether a life event like ‘serious argument with children’ or ‘continuous financial worry’ has happened to them over the last two years, they could be likely to conclude that it had even though their objective situation is no worse than anyone else’s.

We over-estimate the importance of events

“The Australian study shows that part of the association between happiness and life events is really an indirect association between personality and happiness. This means that when we examine the relationship between life circumstances and happiness, we almost certainly overestimate how important life events are. Having said that, Headey and Wearing concluded that life events did have a genuine effect on well-being over and above the indirect operation of personality, although for each event this effect would be subject to adaptation over time.”

Conclusions

It seems there is a set level of happiness to which we will return more or less when assessing our happiness. It’s our desires, reference to a time, our mood, etc. But the biggest mistake when underestimating our happiness is driven by foolishness of humans desires. This makes sense of several consistent but puzzling findings: that people believe they will be more happy in the future than they are now, but in fact seldom are; that societies don’t get happier as they get richer; and that people are consistently wrong about the impact of future life events on their happiness, as well as pleasure-giving devices.

So, many people often try to guess on what will make then happy. However, this guess can be biased by the luck of appropriate time frame of reference or other’s live frame of reference. But the truth is people are really not very good at predicting what the effects of their choices on their happiness will be. They might be hit by disappointments of high expectations when pursuing happiness. Hit very hard indeed, if their childhood, school, family and higher education have presented then from having a realistic point of view of the human condition.

I think in pursue of happiness it is crucial to understand that brain functioning of your own thoughts can influence our perception of happiness, not the accessibility to a desired life. So instead of comparing our own happiness to somebody’s else or another period of your life, it’s better to focus in your inner well-being at the moment and your higher purpose in life. And, maybe, the better you understand the foolishness of your desires, the happier you are.

P.S But the desires are still very important for gaining experience and social rewards. And NOBODY can have a meaningful live without desires…