Happiness

Happiness is hard work. It takes willpower and practice to develop habits that make a life work well; it takes conscientiousness to build flourishing relationships; it takes self-reflection to know what we value and, therefore, where to spend our precious time and energy.

So instead of wishing you a Happy New Year today, I’d like to show you how you can build yourself a strong, resilient New Year… The happiness is what you’ll earn from the doing.

There are three specific elements I’ll show you today. Let’s start with Learned Optimism.

First let me define what I mean by optimism: It isn’t about ignoring harsh realities and pretending things are great, when they’re not. Optimism is a pro-active, problem solving approach to the obstacles and opportunities we’re faced with.

An optimist is more likely to find solutions, because they’re actively looking for them. A pessimist is more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, because they’re actively looking for reasons that any given solution won’t work.

Optimists are more likely to succeed at work, school, and relationships, and may live 8 years longer than pessimists. They tend to do better after experiencing adversity, to bounce back stronger; while pessimists tend to do more poorly after adversity, to take longer to get their feet back underneath them.

So the benefits for living more optimistically are huge. And, fortunately, it’s also an element of our personality that’s easily available to change – with some work, of course. Here’s one way to work on this:

A. When you find yourself looking at an event from a pessimistic perspective, first identify the adversity – whatever the situation is that is causing you trouble: “My wife and I are having an argument,” for example.

B. Then identify the belief that brings you to be feeling badly, “We’re always arguing; she never understands me; I just can’t express myself ever in a way that seems to work.”

C. Then notice what the consequence of that belief is: “I feel awful, I feel hurt and angry, I feel afraid of the conflict; I have a sense of despair over how our relationship is going.”

D. The next step is disputation, challenging this belief that is bringing you to feel badly: “Wait a minute. I love my wife, and she loves me. We are not always arguing, if I added it up, we probably argue a tiny fraction of the time we have been together. She actually understands me quite well most of the time, and soon we will understand each other again. Maybe there’s a way I can help to bring that about.”

Practice this – a lot. It will not always come out perfectly, and there will likely be times when it is extremely hard to bring yourself to do this. But the more you practice this the more an effective, optimistic stance will come naturally for you.

The next element is to de-catastrophize.

When we’re faced with a challenge of some kind, hoping for the best isn’t likely to be our best approach; but neither is assuming the worst. When our tendency is to expect the worst-case scenario when trouble presents itself, it weakens us.

We’re more likely to feel helpless and overwhelmed, less likely to succeed, and more likely to struggle – including suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after a traumatic situation.

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When we think of what we’ll be like ten years from now, most of us imagine that we’ll be just like we are now. Yet when we look back ten years, we’re usually different than we were then.

We’ve learned from experiences, dealt with some hardship, maybe suffered some loss, triumphed in some things, been delighted by epiphanies, and came to understand some things we had not understood before.

If there is something we won’t do now because we “learned it the hard way,” if we have things that we regret having done that we would never ever do again, we can thank our younger self for learning that lesson for us – so we don’t have to keep re-learning it, and suffering over and over again like some cruel Groundhog Day remake.

Of course we are different today than we were ten years ago – unless we’ve removed ourselves from any experience of living. Life is a continual anti-entropy endeavor. If we don’t expend energy to create order, the natural tendency of things to move toward disorder takes over.

If we don’t mow the lawn, the lawn becomes a growth of weeds; if we don’t use our bodies in some kind of physical activity, our bodies begin to break down; if we don’t use our minds to learn and think about new things, our minds will become less active and effective.

If we don’t grow and learn and change our behavior over time to adapt to what we learn, we will become stuck in a rut, passively holding on to the familiar while the world carries on without us.

We all must succumb to entropy to some degree of course, but we also all experience things, and learn, grow, and change as a result.

We will be different in ten years than we are now. That’s a fact of life. The question is, how will we be different; and will we be different mostly as a result of events, or through conscious choice?

In research by Quoidback, Gilbert and Wilson, The End of History Illusion, they found that while we look back over the past ten years and easily see and expect that we are different now, we don’t expect that we will be different ten years from now. Rather, we tend to think that our current age is where we have finally become who we are – and who we are now, we feel, is who we will be in the future.

So, we will be different ten years from now; that’s a fact, a given, a law of the universe even. Yet we don’t think we will be different. That leaves a vacuum. There will be change, yet we tend not to think there will be, so the question becomes: “How will that change happen, if we’re not in on it?”

The answer is, often the change will happen to us. Other people, events, processes outside of our conscious awareness maybe, or outside of our conscious control, will shape us, influence us, and change us over time.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Good people can change us in good ways; good experiences can lead us in better directions. The point is not to avoid influence from others; that would be a lonely and rigid life, and it is not really possible to achieve. We all influence and are influenced by one another much more profoundly than most of us are aware.

In their book Connected, Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler show that if we gain or lose weight, for example, our friends are more likely to gain or lose weight; if we quit smoking, our friends are more likely to quit smoking; if we become happier, our friends will be more likely to become happier.

But we can take that too far and allow ourselves to be changed and molded passively by outside events most of the time; and that’s not an approach to living that I’d recommend.

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People who are extroverts – people who are more sociable, who like to be out, talk, and interact with other people, and who gladly put themselves out into new situations – tend to be happier than people who are not.

That’s great for those who, by temperament, happen to be extroverts. But what if we’re not naturally extroverted? We can still improve our overall happiness by doing extroverted things.

The delightful truth is that, from simply taking more extroverted actions, our overall happiness grows about the same as if we were naturally extroverted.

If you tend to be an introvert, if your natural comfort is to be more solitary, shy, or quietly inward, I’m not suggesting that you deny your nature, or pretend to be someone that you’re not. There are significant strengths to introversion that I’ll discuss in a moment.

But you can get some of the benefits of an extrovert as well by practicing certain skills; then you can have the best of both worlds.

Try doing something each day that challenges you to be more outgoing. Don’t worry about doing the world’s most socially engaging activity – you don’t have to become some social thrill-seeker. What matters is the direction, not the mileage.

Start with activities that push you a little bit, but that are manageable. Find things that you’ll enjoy, that you genuinely would want to do, and do them at a pace and to a degree where you won’t be overwhelmed.

You can start by joining a group activity that you think you might enjoy. Think of what you like to do anyway… then just add people. If you like to exercise, join a fun exercise class; if you like to read, join a book club.

Nudge yourself to talk with the checkout person at the store, the person next to you on a plane…look around and notice people. Make eye contact with people more often (don’t stare), say hello to people in passing rather than looking away.

Purposefully arrange to go out and be with friends more often. Check out Toastmasters, or take an acting or improvisation class.

These are just some examples to get your own ideas started. As with most anything, the secret is to do a little bit that you can easily manage nearly every day. It’s the practice, the repetition, the refinement of skills over time that makes them a part of you.

Design these activities with success in mind. If we push ourselves for too big of a stretch, we run the risk of having it go badly, feeling awful, and being less likely to try such things again anytime soon. If we challenge ourselves – but reasonably – then we’re more likely to succeed, have a good time, and look forward to the next challenge.

You’ll find that you become more comfortable doing extroverted things as time goes on.

As the late Paul Harvey used to say, “Now for the rest of the story…”

There are advantages of being an extrovert. It’s a happier life in many ways, you’re likely to have more friends and acquaintances and get more accolades for your accomplishments; people will be more naturally drawn to you, and you’ll tend to be in a position to make things happen in a more obvious fashion.

There are also many benefits to introversion, but they tend to be, well, quieter strengths than are seen with extroversion. Quieter, but indispensable.

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Having choices is wonderful. Today we have more options in terms of goods and services to choose from than any time in the history of the human race, and the options for spending money are nearly endless. This is part of the Great Enrichment I’ve written about earlier, and when we manage it well, it can contribute to our quality of life.

When we don’t manage it well, it can ruin our quality of life – even in the midst of incredible abundance.

On one end of the spectrum, we can get into trouble with our money when we don’t think enough – we spend too much on things we don’t really like once we have them. On the other end, we can devote too much time and emotional energy on making absolutely sure that we’ve bought the very best thing, at the very best price, with everything we buy.

This is where it’s essential for our happiness that we aim for making choices that are good enough, rather than trying to maximize every single purchase we make.

This is the message of Barry Schwartz’s excellent book, The Paradox of Choice.

When we habitually obsess over our purchases, it can undermine our well-being, drain the pleasure from what we buy, and even drop us into depression.

It’s important to put the time and energy into research and comparisons for some purchases. But if you spend hours deciding between one pair of shoes or another, or days fretting over whether you’re getting the best deal on a coffee maker, you might just be overdoing it.

Doing this with one or two choices won’t cause much trouble, but cumulatively, over time, this kind of painstaking deliberation can seriously erode our sense of joy and satisfaction.

When we buy something, we adapt fairly quickly to it. That top-of-the-line super-duper convection oven that we’re so delighted with when it’s first installed blends into the background of our lives within a month or two. We spend time and energy deliberating over just the right laptop, but we habituate it within a few weeks as long as it works well, then it’s just the gizmo we do our work on.

But the more effort we put into our choices, the higher our expectations become that they will be emotionally satisfying. And over time the awareness of the trade-offs we’ve made for each purchase can multiply our negative experience, undermining our sense of well-being.

When we buy something, there are the obvious costs in terms of money spent, time and energy put into choosing and making the transaction. But there’s another, more sneaky cost: the “opportunity cost.” This is the potential benefit from a missed opportunity: When we buy one thing, it’s likely that we’re also not buying another thing – or many other things.

And we therefore miss the imagined benefits of that other choice.

We buy the fancy shoes, but we didn’t buy the more comfortable shoes. We buy the automatic coffeemaker, but we didn’t buy the cappuccino maker. We buy the tickets to the play, but we could’ve bought the tickets to the basketball game…

With every decision we make, the cost of not choosing something else affects us. The more we miss not buying the other thing, the more severely it affects us – and that negative impact grows with each minor regret.

The reason the number is important is that we have a negativity bias, which means that losses can have more than twice the emotional impact on us as gains. So even when we’re twice as happy with a choice we made versus the alternative, the net emotional impact may be just neutral.

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Lying takes a huge toll on our relationships, our physical health, and our mental health. But sometimes we’re not so clear about what it means to be honest. Does it mean we say everything that we think or feel?

There are very strong benefits to honesty; and also some common sense guidelines as to what’s appropriate to express.

Let’s start with outright lying. Americans lie an average of 11 times per week.

In one study, two groups were asked each week over a ten-week period how many lies they told while they were given a lie detector test. One of these groups was also encouraged to stop telling major and minor lies for the ten weeks.

Both groups ended up lying less, which is not surprising. When we focus our attention on something specific we are much more likely to improve our behavior around it – if we weigh ourselves regularly, we are more likely to lose weight; if we carry a pedometer to measure the number of steps we take, we are likely to exercise more – if you want to change something, measure it.

Not surprisingly, those who were encouraged not to lie, lied less than those who weren’t.

In any given week, when people lied less, they also reported that their physical health and mental health was better. But those in the group who were encouraged not to lie also reported that their relationships were better.

This is not shocking. Honesty is one of the foundations of trust, and trust is essential to good relationships. Lying leads to greater distrust. When we lie, we’re not as sneaky as we may think. People figure it out eventually, and they trust us less. Our relationships suffer dearly for it.

Lying also is stressful; we feel more disconnected, isolated, and there is pressure to keep track of the lies that we tell. When we lie often, we have in effect a long list to keep track of in our mind, and that can wear on us. The clients I have worked with over the years who have been habitual liars have also been chronically anxious.

In another study, Sally Theran of Wellesley College reported that, “My research on girls and boys… indicates that the process of being authentic, or being honest and open in meaningful relationships, is significantly related to feeling less depressed and having higher self-esteem…. There may be increased conflict, as a result of being open and honest, but it leads to a better quality of friendships.”

This is common sense, but here’s where this can get tricky: I have known people who believe that if we don’t express every feeling or impulse, we’re being dishonest. I’ve watched these folks say the most awful, hurtful, vile things to each other, calling each other the most insulting names in the process. Their impulse is sometimes to hurt the other, and so they do it.

It doesn’t really work very well for them.

By this philosophy, the whole concept of honesty and authenticity becomes nebulous. By this way of thinking, if we don’t express literally everything that goes through our mind, we can’t be honest.

This is of course ridiculous. To be honest is not to be brainless. To be honest does not mean that we let fly anything that comes to mind.

Honesty is one facet of integrity. To have integrity is to integrate our thoughts, feelings, experience, values, and knowledge. In other words, real honesty requires consciousness.

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