In pursuit of happiness

In his 2016 book Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari speculates about the different projects that humanity will be pursuing in the future, which will inevitably lead to the creation or evolution of the next genus homo, which he calls Homo Deus. Harari paints an accurate picture of future trends to come of which we are already seeing signs everywhere. Future projects of humanity include: overcoming death, creating artificial life and finding the answer to happiness. Thus, the pursuit of happiness is on most people’s agendas.

Given that the newest research findings by Martin Seligman, Peter Railton, Roy Baumeister and Chandra Sripada indicate that human beings are hard-wired to anticipate and plan for the future, we can understand why it is so difficult for people to focus only on the present, and why millions of people buy books on meditation and mindfulness in attempts to learn how to stay present and find that ever-elusive thing called happiness.

But have you ever wondered why happiness feels so elusive? And why we are hard-wired to keep looking for it? In fact, most people try to actively avoid anything that will detract from their happiness. We have difficulty being with difficult emotions and we often pursue various forms of stimulation and entertainment in our desperate search for happiness…

Is there a Happiness Formula?

That brings us to the question of whether there is a formula for happiness. It turns out there is. Martin Seligman shared his formula for happiness in his book Authentic Happiness. Based on years of research with thousands of participants, Seligman was able to identify the factors that directly contribute to one’s overall level of happiness. The Happiness Formula reads as follows:

H = S + C + V

• H in the formula, represents your enduring level of happiness

• S is your set range, or your genetic capacity for happiness

• C is the circumstances of your life, and

• V represents factors under your voluntary control

According to Seligman, research demonstrates that circumstances (in particular, wealth and health) play a less important role in our happiness than most of us believe. For example, executives report only slightly higher levels of happiness than people in the post-room, and people who become paraplegic eventually return to their previous levels of happiness.

To achieve greater happiness, positive-psychology advocates for “learnt optimism” practices, such as sitting down at the end of each day and listing the things that went well that day; learning to feel grateful for what we have; and practising random acts of kindness. Seligman also points out that lasting happiness has nothing to do the pursuit of hedonistic pleasures – such as shopping, eating sweets, and partying – and has a lot more to do with solid values: i.e. a sense of community and meaningful work.

Let’s look at each of these elements of the Happiness Formula in a little more detail.

H: Enduring Level Of Happiness

First off, it’s important to distinguish between momentary happiness and enduring happiness. Momentary happiness can easily be increased by small things such as praise from your boss, chocolate, a fun movie, sex, flowers, or a massage. Increasing the number of transient bursts of happiness in your life, however, is not the goal here, as this simply leads to what Baumeister, Vohs, Aaker and Garbinsky would call the pursuit of a hedonistic lifestyle. Pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle does not increase your overall happiness. In fact, it could pull you down into an endless spiral of mindless and ceaseless pursuits of pleasure that only provide a temporary thrill and then subsides.   

Instead, the goal is to raise your enduring level of happiness (which won’t be accomplished by merely increasing the number of bursts of momentary positive feelings). An enduring level of happiness is tied to the pursuit of meaning instead of pleasure. Concerns with personal identity and expressing the self, contribute to meaning and leads to a higher level of enduring happiness.

The remaining three variables in the happiness formula will show us what factors increase or decrease our level of enduring happiness.

S: Set Range

About 50 percent of your happiness is completely out of your control, because it depends on your genes. You may be genetically wired to be happy most of the time. Or you may be genetically wired to be sad most of the time. Or you’re somewhere in the middle. Some people are simply naturally more optimistic than others. Interestingly, Seligman’s research revealed that pessimists are more realistic about their abilities and their circumstances, but they also tend to be more unhappy than optimists who can sometimes overestimate their own abilities or over-simply complicated situations. It seems the trade-off for happiness is realism.

According to Martin Seligman, you have a so-called happiness set-point to which you will always gravitate towards in good as well as in bad times. Getting your book published, getting a promotion or pay raise, going on holidays, meeting your future wife or husband, winning the lottery; each of these may raise your happiness level for a while but, in a few weeks or months, you will drift back to your set-point.

This happens because of a process called adaptation. Human beings, it turns out, are adaptation machines. We take good things for granted, and overcome daunting obstacles, only to return to our natural happiness set-point.

Even individuals who become paraplegic from spinal cord accidents quickly begin to adapt to their greatly limited capacities, and within eight weeks they report more net positive emotions than negative emotions. Within a few years, they wind up only slightly less happy on average than individuals who are not paralysed.

The bottom line is, we have a set range of happiness towards which we naturally gravitate. Some of us see the glass as half full. Others see it as half empty. And we tend to fall back into our habitual patterns of behaviour within a few weeks after the occurrence of both positive and negative events in our lives.

Thankfully, we can still use the other remaining variables, C and V, to raise or level of enduring happiness.

C: Circumstances

If you want to lastingly raise your level of happiness by changing the external circumstances of your life, Martin Seligman suggests that the following strategies are proven to work:

• Live in a wealthy democracy, not in an impoverished dictatorship (a strong effect)
• Get married (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal)
• Avoid negative events and negative emotions (only a moderate effect)
• Acquire a rich social network of friends and loved ones (a robust effect, but perhaps not causal)
• Become religious or practice a religion (a moderate effect)

And here are the external circumstances that you don’t need to bother with, because their effect is negligible on your overall level of enduring happiness:

• Make more money. Money has little or no effect once you are comfortable enough for your most basic needs to be met. And research actually shows that more materialistic people are less happy, than those who are able to appreciate the simple pleasures in life.
• Stay healthy. Subjective health, not objective health matters more. Consequently, how you feel about your health, energy levels, and age, has a greater effect than how objectively healthy you are.
• Get as much education as possible (no effect). It seems the old adage that ignorance is bliss, might have some truth to it.
• Change your race or move to a sunnier climate (no effect). In fact, people who live in colder and rainier climates are sometimes happier than those living in warmer climates, even though they objectively might have a reason to be unhappy about the weather at least.

When you work through these lists, you probably notice that changing some of these circumstances is often either impractical, too expensive, or downright impossible. Not everyone can afford to move to another country or might even want to relocate to another country. Sometimes, getting married is simply not an option. And just marrying for the sake of increasing your overall level of enduring happiness might backfire in the long run. Just as there are people who are happily married, there are also people who are stuck in unhappy marriages. It’s almost impossible to avoid all negative events and emotions. We cannot control or predict what will happen to us in life. And we certainly cannot change our race or the culture we are born into. Some things are simply out of our control.

And even if you could alter all the above circumstances, they wouldn’t make much of a difference for you. Why? Because they account for only between eight and 15 percent of the variance in happiness.

The good news is that there is one more factor (i.e. Voluntary Control Variables) that can change and that will have a greater impact on your overall level of enduring happiness.

V: Voluntary Control Variables

To change your level of enduring happiness, it’s best to focus on the variables where you have voluntary control. Voluntary Control Variables account for about 40 percent of your overall level of enduring happiness and get divided into three categories:

1. Positive emotions about the past (e.g. satisfaction, contentment, fulfilment, pride, and serenity)
2. Positive emotions about the future (e.g. optimism, hope, faith, and trust)
3. Positive emotions about the present (e.g. joy, ecstasy, calm, ebullience, pleasure, and flow)

Ho proposed that there are three kinds of happiness: retrospective happiness, happiness in process, and prospective happiness. Retrospective happiness refers to the state of happiness of a person as they ponder their past. You might be satisfied with past endeavours, and you might cherish the sweet moments that you spent with loved ones. Alternatively, you may be still hurting from past traumas, grievances, or regrets. If you feel satisfied with past achievements and you have fond memories of family, friends and loved ones, your retrospective happiness levels will be high. However, if you have many regrets about your past or you haven’t processed trauma from your past, your retrospective happiness levels may be very low.

Happiness in process refers to the present-moment experience you have when you are immersed in what you are doing. An artist may be enjoying creating a new canvas; a musician may be enjoying the playing of a great piece of music; a singer may be enjoying their singing. You can also be simply enjoying life, or enjoying your family life, or the company of the people around you. On the other hand, you may be suffering from an ailment, or the agony of some unpleasant experience, which would then detract from your present-moment awareness and enjoyment. As mentioned already, most of us struggle to stay present in the now, due to our propensity for forward projection and anticipation of the future.

Prospective happiness refers to the happiness experienced by a person as they look forward to the things that will happen in the future. A couple about to be married may cherish the prospect of raising a family. A scientist may cherish the prospect of a major discovery. You might be looking forward to a holiday trip.

Despite the different descriptions of these different kinds of happiness, paradoxically perhaps, all three kinds of happiness are actually experienced in the moment and are therefore realised or not realised on the spot. For example, anxiety about the future as well as remorse about the past gives rise to unhappiness NOW. Similarly, satisfaction about one’s past achievements or the expectation of an achievement in the future, gives rise to happiness NOW. The immediacy of the retrospective or prospective happiness or unhappiness is no different from that caused by an experience that is happening in the present.

Let’s explore each of these categories more closely right now, and see how we can become more present in the moment.

Letting the past go

Letting the past go can sometimes be hard, but it is in service to your overall happiness and your future self, that you find ways to leave past be where it belongs – i.e. in the past. How you feel about the past can have a big impact on your happiness. You can either experience negative emotions about the past (e.g. resentment, anger, pity) or positive emotions (e.g. satisfaction, contentment, fulfilment, pride, serenity). So, how do you improve your happiness about the past? Martin Seligman offers three strategies in his book:

1. Let go of the belief that your past determines your future. This belief engenders a certain passivity about life that is not helpful. Your past is simply that, the story of where you’ve been. You can either see past events as obstacles or you can choose to view them as learning opportunities. When we learn from past mistakes, we set ourselves on a path to course correct in the future. Your past does not predict your future. You have a choice about how you want to engage with your life right now in the present to consciously create a different future that will steer you away from past setbacks and failures.
2. Be grateful about the good things in your past. Gratitude amplifies the good events that happened to you in the past and minimises your focus on the negative events. To ignite feelings of gratitude about your past, you can try writing a gratitude letter or journal about things/events/people that you’re grateful for.
3. Learn to forgive yourself and others for past wrongs. Forgiveness and self-compassion are all about letting go of negative events in the past that embitter you. Holding on to anger, resentment, pity, or any other negative emotions over a past event will lower your level of enduring happiness. In a way you give your power away to those who’ve wronged you in the past by holding on to past regrets and resentment. Those who have wronged you may no longer be in your life, but they still end up having power over your life in the present, if you are unable to let it go. So, in service to your future self and your own level of personal enduring happiness, let it go.

How To Feel Lastingly Happier About Your Future

Your feelings about the future — whether good (e.g. optimism, hope, faith, and trust) or bad (e.g. fear, anxiety, or dread) — are determined in large part by your thoughts and interpretations of the world. If you worry about messing up a presentation at work next week, you create anxiety and discontent for yourself in the present. If, on the other hand, you’re looking forward to your vacation in Bali next month, you experience more optimism and excitement in the present, in anticipation of this future event. In fact, Gretchen Rubin in her book The Happiness Project shares some interesting research that shows that sometimes the anticipation of an event can bring us more joy than the actual event.

The number one strategy Seligman recommends for improving your feelings about the future is to recognise and dispute automatic pessimistic thoughts. It’s all about keeping things in perspective. You keep things in perspective by asking yourself whether you have sufficient evidence for the thoughts that you are holding as true. We sometimes treat thoughts and feelings as objective truths. You could also ask yourself if there might be a different way of looking at the situation and the thoughts that are causing you so much discontent. Is there another explanation that might be just as plausible?

Disputing your negative or pessimistic thoughts is very much like noticing the Inner Critic or voice of the Saboteur, trying to prevent you from taking action. Often just noticing this Inner Critic, is enough to silence it. For example, let’s say you’ve just gotten some negative feedback from your boss. You might hear the voice of the Inner Critic: “Oh my God, I must be the worst employee ever. I can’t even get a simple reservation right. Maybe I should just quit. My boss thinks I’m useless anyway. I really can’t seem to do anything right. I’m such a loser, blah blah…”

Instead of letting such negative thoughts make you unhappy, why not dispute them? You could say to yourself: “Okay, so my boss wasn’t happy with my performance. Is it an objective fact that he thinks I’m useless? Did he actually say that? I guess I really could have put in a bit more effort. I was slacking off a bit. But, let me work harder over the next few weeks to show my boss what I’m really capable of. I want to show him I can do better. I’m really excited about that. Let’s make it happen!”

Or imagine you are walking in a shopping mall and notice an acquaintance. You wave to greet them, but they don’t greet you back. You immediately wonder why and start ruminating about how rude they were, or about the reasons why they might be avoiding you. It might be useful to pause the flow of thoughts at that moment and interject with a question about the accuracy of your stream of thoughts. Do you have any evidence that they are avoiding you apart from them not greeting you right now? Is there an alternative explanation? Is it possible that they simply did not notice you waving? And that they had no ill-intent towards you? You get to decide how you want to interpret the event and even how much time and energy you want to spend thinking about it. If you want to feel happier, your best bet would be to let it go, and to not attribute any ill-intent on their part.

By considering how much truth there is in your experience, and what parts of the experience is exaggerated, but holds little truth, you change how you feel about the situation. Always consider the evidence and if there is very little objective evidence, contemplate how believing your inaccurate thoughts and feelings, and treating them as truths when they are not, is making you feel a certain way and react in a certain way. By letting go of the false evidence and only acting on the facts (i.e. the objective truths that can be verified by others as well), you consciously choose to change the way you feel about the situation. Additionally, you enhance your personal power to change the situation instead of feeling like a victim of your circumstances.

How To Feel Lastingly Happier In The Present

Seligman explains that to feel lastingly happier in the present, we need to understand the difference between pleasure and gratification.

Pleasure refers to delights that have clear sensory and strong emotional components; what philosophers sometimes call “raw feelings”: exuberance, thrills, ecstasy, orgasm, mirth, delight, and comfort. They are temporary and involve little, if any, thinking. Because of their temporary duration, they require persistence in seeking new thrills or pleasures. This, in itself, can become quite exhausting.

There are times when simple pleasures really do add joy and happiness to your life. The secret is to enjoy them occasionally and to avoid over-indulgence. Pleasures are fine, and can make you temporarily happy, but they will never bring you lasting and fulfilling happiness. In fact, the average state of someone watching TV, is mildly depressed.

The occasional massage, or piece of chocolate, glass of wine, or decadent meal, can stimulate your senses and bring tremendous pleasure. However, as soon as we over-indulge, they lose their impact, and we end up not enjoying those things that used to bring us so much pleasure. This is where the advice from the Stoics serve us. Abstaining from too much indulgence and occasionally partaking in them, can truly enhance our lives.

According to Seligman, a more enduring form of happiness is obtained through gratification. Gratifications are activities that aren’t necessarily accompanied by any raw feelings at all. Rather, they engage us fully, so that we become immersed and absorbed in them. Time stops, our skills match the challenge, and we are in touch with our core strengths. In other words, we experience flow. Gratifications last longer than pleasures, involve quite a lot of thinking, and are aligned with our strengths and our deepest desires or passions.

Gratifications can be practiced over long periods of time. Examples of gratifications include playing volleyball or tennis, going for a run, enjoying a great conversation, rock climbing, reading a good book, cooking, or baking, dancing, knitting, or crocheting, painting, carpentry or pottery, or helping the homeless etc. The list is endless. Anything that can be actively pursued instead of passively enjoyed would qualify as a gratification.

The catch is that it must be something that holds interest for you, and that you can immerse yourself in for hours. Gratifications are activities that allow us to slow down our experience of the passage of time. In other words, when we are engaged in them, we forget about time, because we are so deeply immersed. We don’t feel bored or frustrated; we feel in tune with life.

The key to living a life characterised by enduring happiness, is to increase the amount of gratifications you experience in your own life. Put in a different way, to live a happy life, stop chasing momentary pleasures, and start experiencing more flow instead.

So, how do you do that? How do you increase the gratifications in your life?

For one thing, don’t be a couch potato. Go out there and do something, engage in sports, find a hobby. Ask yourself, when does time stop for you? When do you find yourself doing exactly what you want to be doing, and never wanting it to come to an end? Think of a time when you felt you your most beautiful, creative, inspired, engaged or excited, what were you doing? The things that excite you, inspire you, make you feel empowered, or make you feel like you are working on something important, are your personal gratifications.

Secondly, figure out what your signature character strengths are and use them as often as possible. The research is showing us that, the more we use our top strengths, the more happiness and well-being we experience. The reason for this is simple, using a character strength regularly helps us experience deep gratification. Or, in the words of Martin Seligman: “The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.”

Concluding thoughts

Your set range (S) constitutes about 50 percent of your happiness. It is genetically determined. This means you always gravitate towards your natural range of happiness. Unless you use the other remaining variables, C and V, your overall happiness won’t change much over the course of your lifetime.

Your external circumstances (C) make up only about 10 percent of your enduring level of happiness. Proven strategies to optimise your circumstances for happiness include living in a wealthy democracy, getting married, avoiding negative events and emotions, acquiring a rich social network, and becoming religious. Maximizing these circumstances is usually expensive, hard, and not very practical, or sometimes downright impossible.

The money lies in improving factors under your voluntary control (V), which make up about 40 percent of your overall happiness. To feel lastingly happier about the past, let go of thinking that your past determines your future, be grateful for the good things in your life, and practice forgiveness about past wrongs. Feeling lastingly happier about the future is accomplished by disputing automatic negative thoughts and staying present to your life in the now as it is unfolding. By paying attention to this moment and pursuing activities that bring you gratification, you can increase your overall level of enduring happiness by staying in flow with life.

So, what is the lesson here? Your level of happiness or unhappiness has more to do with what you are thinking about and what you are focusing on in the present moment than on what actually happened in the past or will happen in the future. It all happens now. Or, in the words of Eckhart Tolle everything that has ever happened to you happened now, in this moment. It’s just your mind trying to convince you that it happened at some other time. But, if you slowed down for a minute, you would notice how your life unfolds moment to moment and all there is, is this moment, right now. Everything that has ever happened to you, happened in the now. It happened when you were there experiencing it in the present moment. Everything else is a mind-created illusion.

So, for deeper happiness, the more important question is, what is wrong with this moment? Often when we stop to ponder this thought, we realise that there is nothing wrong with this moment. It simply is. The secret to increasing your enduring level of happiness thus, is learning how to let go of the past, look forward to the future with optimism and hope, and most important of all, be present to your life as it unfolds – i.e. live in the now, because that’s all there really is. If this year has taught us anything, it’s that we have no control over what happens or what will happen. We try to create the illusion of control, but all we really control, is how present we are right now, right here in this moment.

References:

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