Happiness & Joy
Happiness: The Art of Wellbeing
It’s probably safe to say we all want happiness—to feel good and enjoy our life as much as possible, but not everyone reaches this goal. Research shows that only around 20% of adults say they are flourishing, leaving a majority who may languish through life or struggle. Studies suggest that only about half of the US population is “moderately mentally healthy” (Martin Seligman, 2000).
When life takes a toll, even the strongest person can begin to feel disconnected or that their life is not going well.
In this section, we will share coping skills that will support resiliency in the face of life’s tolls, strengthen well-being, and improve your chance for happiness. Everyone faces different challenges, but we all have a choice as to how we cope with our struggles—and within that choice, we can always uncover a better version of ourselves.
We cannot change many of the external events of life, but we can develop more skills to help us respond or cope when challenging situations arise. First, we must understand what true happiness is and develop insight into the behaviors that actually strengthen happiness.
In this section we will cover:
One Popular Definition of Happiness, P E R M A
What Happiness Does for You
Being Around Happy People
Happiness Set Points
Mind-Wandering and Happines
Building Healthy Habits-Strategies to Improve Happiness
Happiness Builds Success
Happiness Defined
Happiness has been defined in many ways. Google definitions will generally focus on experiencing joy, gladness, satisfaction, contentment, positive well-being, and a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile. Happiness is more than just a positive mood; it is a state of well-being that seems to evolve from multiple positive experiences combined with a sense of meaning and deep contentment.
One popular definition offered by Martin Seligman (considered by many to be the father of Positive Psychology) includes five characteristics that together complete a popular definition of happiness. We can remember these characteristics with the acronym PERMA (Pleasure, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, Accomplishment).
What does PERMA stand for?
P - Positive emotions: Maximizing positive emotions while minimizing negative emotions. Happy people are generally more upbeat emotionally, but this is different from what we traditionally think of as pleasure. Happiness pleasure is long-term rather than short-term self-indulgent pleasures like buying things or rewarding activities. Happiness pleasure is derived from being with others, giving, or doing good deeds.
E - Engagement: Seeking out activities that provide flow—a state of deep, effortless involvement in which you concentrate on a moderately challenging task, and your sense of time and self vanishes.
R - Relationships: Positive relationships bring many good things to our lives. We are social beings, and though some of us may not enjoy social situations as much as others, we still require positive interaction to flourish.
M - Meaning: Feeling that your life serves something greater than yourself. You feel a sense of purpose, a reason to get up and act in service of a goal, purpose, or mission.
A - Accomplishments: Seeking accomplishment as long as it is pursued with positive emotion and meaning, not just for its own sake.
A uniform definition of happiness is helpful because it gives us direction or specific areas to strengthen and helps us break down the goal of being happier into specific behaviors we can strive to increase. This also helps us understand that happiness is not just being bright and sunny or having a positive mindset; happiness involves hard work, building skills, and character strengths. If you choose to identify with happiness and you want to become a happier person take a more serious look at the behaviors associated with being happy and build these behaviors into your life.
What Does Happiness Do For You?
Dr. Sonya Lyubomirsky refers to herself as a Well-Being scientist. She specializes in research in the field of happiness and positive psychology and has devoted her career to the search for answers to questions such as: What makes people happy? Is happiness good for you? How can you increase happiness?
“Most people think that if they become successful, then they will be happy. But recent discoveries in psychology and neuroscience show that this formula is backward: happiness fuels success, not vice versa. When we are positive, our brains are more motivated, engaged, energetic, resilient, and productive.”
If you measure happiness in the workplace and come back 3 ½ years later and evaluate performance, the happier people will have been more productive and better at sales. They will be rated as getting along better with other employees.
Happy people are better at relationships, have more friends, spend less time alone, tend to be more committed to goals, and have a more genuine (Duchenne) smile.
If you induce a transient mood of happiness. studies show that employees are temporarily more creative, flexible, and positive.
Being Around Happy People Makes You Happier!!
Her research shows correlations between certain behaviors and increased happiness. Mainly happy people consistently engage more in:
Gratitude
Optimism
Savoring small pleasures
Physical activity
Live in the moment
Social Connections
Generosity
Religion or Spirituality
Dr. Lyubomirsky, and others, also conducted an analysis of 225 scientific studies of happiness. These studies demonstrate that happier people were:
More productive at work
More creative
More resilient
Made more money
Better leaders
In better physical health
Less likely to get a divorce
Less likely to die in a car accident
Less likely to get sick when exposed to the cold virus (have a stronger immune system)
Have fewer strokes and less heart disease
Live longer (some studies indicate by as long as 15 years)
Happier people tend to have an easier time reducing stress
It seems that we are hardwired to feel what others feel.
This is why being around happy people helps increase happiness, and of course, this works the other way also; being around negative, sad, or angry people makes us less happy.
This is not to make people who are depressed feel guilty because they are going through a rough time; everyone usually does as well as they can, but the argument is that working to increase happiness helps everyone regardless of where you are when you start.
So, happiness is good for you, but the big question is how do we achieve and maintain these higher levels of happiness and experience these amazing benefits?
We can begin to answer this question by looking at outside factors affecting our happiness, our resiliency, and a combination of strategies for maintaining happiness.
Happiness Set Points
Dr. Lyubomirsky and others have suggested that we all have a “genetic happiness set point.” This genetic set point determines around 50% of our happiness (primarily based on genetic studies with twins who were raised apart and tended to be very close on measures of happiness).
The other 50% are outside circumstances (money, possessions, fame, family, etc.), which account for around 10% of your happiness, and intentional or deliberate behaviors that we control, which account for 40% of your happiness.
Intentional Behaviors
Obviously, outside events can cause internal changes, but the point is that we have little control over outside events. As we navigate life, we can step back and hold external happenings in awareness while noticing internal thoughts and emotions and making better and more effective adjustments. Behaviors like being more involved socially with people, having a wide range of acquaintances, developing a sense of community and a deep connection with your spouse or family, optimism and zest, expecting good to multiply, a sense of mission and meaning, doing more of what you are good at, or practicing gratitude are examples of things we can control which will gradually strengthen our happiness set point.
Outside Circumstances
Resilience, or the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, means that changes in the external world might cause an increase in positive emotions or pain and suffering but will not necessarily or very effectively modify the long-term internal workings of happiness. Changes in this unique, highly individualized happiness set point are not as influenced by external factors as we might think.
Changing our Happiness Set Point:
Changing our happiness set point is not easy. We cannot control genetics (50% of Happiness), and we do not have great control over external circumstances (10 to 15% of the Happiness formula). We can control our intentional behaviors, but we are down to about a 35 to 40% control factor before we even realize what we are up against. Changing our way of being becomes even more daunting when we factor in all the unhealthy thoughts and behaviors we need to extinguish. This is why happiness can be so elusive to many people and why we have to leverage intentional behaviors that we can control. To do this, we need more than just a goal; we need a plan and a system to help us harness the powers of neuroplasticity and the science of positive psychology to our benefit. This is where the TEACH Model can help us reach out into the world of knowledge to get the additional help we need.
Remember, your body is constantly experiencing a complex cocktail of endorphins, neuromodulators, neurotransmitters, hormones, and pheromones that powerfully influence the subjective experience or how you “feel” at any time. Many things can throw you out of balance, as the body's chemistry constantly changes. It is normal to have up-and-down emotions, and we need to be able to ride the waves without panicking when things do not feel right. Depending on how you are feeling, you might become overly cautious or negative; alternatively, you can also become too relaxed and trusting. Either of these reactions can be adaptive depending on the situation or context. However, in modern life, most of us are frequently anxious, overly cautious, and defensive and tend to shut down or avoid many situations that might improve our happiness levels if we have better coping skills. Understand that emotions come and go, but to be Happy is a choice, a decision to work on specific behaviors that can be difficult to learn. Happiness is not a destination that we magically arrive at one day when the stars all fall into alignment. It is an emotion that we cultivate through tiny habits that we practice each day.
Mind-Wandering and Happiness:
The Art of Being Present
In 2010, Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert used a special "track your happiness" iPhone app to look at mind-wandering habits. They asked several thousand people to answer three questions when they were called at random times during the day. They found that we spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn't make us happy. They asked three questions.
1. What were you doing at the time of the call?
2. What were you thinking about at that time?
3. Rate how you feel on a scale of one to ten.
They found that 47% of the time, people were doing one thing and thinking about something else. Perhaps even more interestingly, these people reported that they were significantly happier when they were thinking about what they were doing rather than when they were thinking about something else. Similar results were found in follow-up studies. These studies suggest that about half the time people are not paying attention to the present moment and that we can improve happiness significantly by simply returning our attention to where we are and what we are doing.
When we engage in “time travel,” a specific brain network called the Default Mode Network (DMN) is engaged. When this network is activated we are less happy.
Excessive activation of this network can contribute to negative internal language, particularly if you are remembering and focusing on past negative events. A good way to balance this is to shift your attention to the present and focus on a specific task. This activates a different brain network known as the Task Positive Network (TPN), a brain network that is active during attention-demanding tasks.
The task you are doing does not matter as much as that you keep your mind fully engaged in whatever you are doing. You might try cleaning a room, doing laundry, washing your pet, reading, watching TV, or playing a video game. Mental exercises like noticing things in the room or designing your dream house are other examples of shifting your attention back to a task-positive network. This simple strategy can improve your mood by about twenty percent.
Default Mode Network
Strategies For Creating Happiness - Building Healthy Habits
Learning about Happiness and other emotions and wanting to have more healthy and less unhealthy emotions is a good place to start, but the real challenge is making the behavioral changes that will move your chemistry and permanently change your brain and body. Emotional health, like healthy nutrition or exercise, depends on developing and maintaining healthy habits. In, Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg, founder of The Stanford Behavior Design Laboratory, indicates that permanent changes in behavior typically require at least three things: 1. Motivation, 2. Ability, and 3. Practice.
Developing Healthy Habits
Practice. Growing Happiness involves acceptance and letting go of unhelpful behaviors, which can be difficult. It also means discovering and building helpful habits that will lead to authentic happiness. Even if you have selected helpful behaviors to strengthen and you are highly motivated, getting yourself to practice the new behaviors until they become a habit is hard to do. It is also hard to get rid of old behaviors that are no longer helpful. All behaviors that have been repeated often have “habit strength” so they do not go away easily. This is when you will need to develop a system to help you build on small improvements. The TEACH Program is an example of a global system of self-improvement because it helps you work at multiple levels (thoughts, emotions, attention, connections, and health) and provides prompts and structure to keep bringing you back to helpful intentions. Within that macro system, some microsystems help you with small daily changes that compound over time.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines “An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Old Ones”, and Tiny Habits by B J Fogg, provides many helpful strategies to help you design a plan for behavior change. Behaviors must be repeated often to become habits. To build new habits we usually need a cue or a prompt to help us remember to practice the behavior. We also need to break the behavior down into easy-to-do small components or steps toward a longer-term goal. We also need to celebrate every accomplishment, no matter how small, especially at first. There are many other nuances to behavior change, like keeping it simple, being positive with yourself, developing a more process-oriented mindset, and how to select the one or two best behaviors to start with. Either of these books will help you develop a good plan. The basic steps are 1. Select a desired outcome or direction 2. Design a system of prompts or cues to support the behavior, and then, 3. follow up with the 3 Rs Response, Reward, and Repeat.
Whether building positive emotions or working on other components of the TEACH Model, you can use these same principles. We will present many strategies that have been proven to help in each area of the TEACH Model, but we are not expecting anyone to try all or even most of these strategies. Everyone is different, so we have provided multiple suggestions in the hope you will find one or two strategies that you can commit to. After you select a strategy that might work for you, the challenge is to develop a system to help you practice the behaviors until they become a habit. You can use resources like Tiny Habits or Atomic Habits to help you craft a plan to change behaviors that you want to do more or less.
Designing A System of Prompts or Cues
This involves looking at your daily routine and determining a time and a place where you might be able to practice the behavior. This will depend on the behaviors you select. Still, the idea is to associate the new behavior with already well-established behaviors or to fit the behavior into a routine you generally follow, carving out a time and place for the new behavior and finding ways to make changes that are easy and rewarding. Your system might also include strategies to make unhelpful behaviors less easy or rewarding, a process known as updating your reward and values system.
Selecting Behaviors To Support A Desired Outcome or Direction
So, how do we get to the point where we are doing the things that happy people do? How do we plan ahead and build in prompts or reminders to help us establish small daily skills that are easy and fun? To find this balance, we need to focus in a particular way each day on the small details that make life more enjoyable. Use the TEACH eco-system along with Noticing, Balancing, Focusing, Managing, and Practicing.
Take note of the list below. These strategies are all associated with increased happiness. Write down the strategy(s) that might work for you. Put it on a Post-it note or a Vision Board to help you remember. Keep it simple; pick one or two strategies to start with. Do not count on memory or motivation; write out and begin to think about a simple plan with prompts for the behaviors you want to work on. Make new behaviors you want to learn ridiculously easily; you can do them without thinking. Think about doing one push-up instead of 15, meditating for only one minute, or replacing one unhealthy snack with a healthy one. This is about establishing a new neural pathway without creating a lot of resistance— you can expand your habit later.
Write out your so-small-you-can’t-go-wrong habit, i.e., When I first wake up every morning, I will take a moment to pause on the side of my bed and start the day off with a positive thought, i.e., “Today is going to be a great day.” or ……..(your own mantra or intention for the day).
Other small behaviors you can build on might include:
As you get into your day, train yourself to “Notice the Good,” little things you enjoy or appreciate (showering in the morning, walking down the hallway at work, having a snack, the clothes you wear, flowers near your desk)
Focus more attention on a loved one or pet
Work toward a better balance between work and play
Be more social, smile or laugh or tell a joke
Focus more attention outward or toward what you can do for others
Keep your environment neat and organized
Lower your stress level (see our Strategies for managing stress).
Manage and plan how you want to spend your time each day (Time Block Planning) (Vision Boards)
Practice acceptance and letting go of small irritations
Practice breathing well, walking mindfully, and using self-calming strategies
Practice healthy …… nutrition, hygiene, hydration, sleep, or exercise
Practice self-compassion (especially, but not just when you make a mistake)
Remind yourself to be in the moment and bring yourself back when you notice you are defaulting to time travel (focusing on the past or future)
Slow down, practice savoring, holding on to good things that can easily slip away
Example of someone’s current Vision Board
Example of someone’s completed Vision Board
A Real-Life Example: Designing A System of Prompts or Cues
Mr. R selected exercise as a behavior he wanted to strengthen. He decided to start with a simple plan: do a few push-ups just before he left his office at the end of the day. He started with an easy amount: ten push-ups, and for the first few weeks, he did this every day just before they left the office. The first few weeks were about consistency, establishing a routine, and getting his brain and body to learn, remember, and adapt. After a few weeks, ten push-ups were too easy, so he increased to 15 push-ups, still relatively easy and not too much strain, and he really did not think much about it; he just remembered that part of his daily routine of leaving the office was to do push-ups. After a few more weeks, the weather was nice, so he began to walk a few blocks when he arrived home. His spouse joined for the walk, and they used that time to talk about their day and plan activities. The walks became a very enjoyable daily activity. After four or five additional weeks, he was up to 25 push-ups, and within a few months, he was doing 35 push-ups and walking about a mile. As time passed, he began to feel better, so he started doing ten squats and ten sit-ups when they finished the walk, and this became a daily routine at home. He was consistent, and after a year, he was up to 50 push-ups, a two-mile walk, 25 sit-ups, and squats. He tried to do this at least four times a week, always at the same time, starting with the push-ups just before he left the office every day. Going home every day became the reward for completing the push-ups and the prompt for the additional behaviors after he arrived home. Three years into this plan, Mr. R is at 65 push-ups, 50 sit-ups, 50 squats, and a 3-mile walk every day. His wife joins him on the walk, and they connect and talk about their lives together.
The prompt of finishing his work day helped to keep him on track, and self-praise and going home were immediate rewards. Long-term rewards were improved health, stamina, and appearance. He added additional behaviors over time, such that one behavior led to another, completing a chain of behaviors, which ended with a shower and dinner routine. An interesting fact about this plan is that the body has a memory. After he followed consistent daily routines for a few weeks, he could feel his body automatically respond physiologically when he started the routine. This helped him add additional behaviors without too much physical strain as he gradually built up stamina.
The secret to his plan was consistency and the benefit of compounding. Behaviors that are slight movements in a positive direction add up if you keep doing them long enough, and they become a habit. The downside of this plan is that his exercise plan was highly contextual; it only occurred on the days when he was in his office and at the end of the day. If he left the office at noon, his routine was disrupted, or when he did not work (vacation or time off), he was less likely to engage in the behavior, so it was easy to get out of the habit. The prompt, however, was there when he returned to work and helped him get back on track.
It was hard when he missed a few days, and sometimes, he reduced his daily goals until he could get back into a routine. This helped him notice how quickly his muscles deteriorated when he stopped exercising and reinforced his commitment to keeping up his practice. His plan was highly contextualized, so after some time, he started varying the location by making slight changes so that he exercised in different places in his office or home, and he varied the time of day a little to help reduce contextual dependency and help these behaviors generalize to different locations and times.
This plan worked for Mr. R, but it might not work for a person who has many daily at-home responsibilities like taking care of children. . . . Plans have to be matched to a person’s routine. But it is good to carve out some self-care time each day. This is also a good example of how important it is to have prompts because life always gets in the way, and routines are disrupted, which is why so many plans fail. A good system will help you get back on track when unexpected disruptions occur. When the behaviors become well-established, the prompts are less critical. Mr. R used the book Tiny Habits to help with the nuances and motivation for this plan.
Compared to exercise, growing happiness and positive emotions are very different behaviors in that they grow from many small overt behaviors that together impact how you feel. You can’t just change how you feel. You can work to establish the behaviors that contribute to happiness and the emotion will come along afterward, the secret is to develop and strengthen the tiny behaviors that support positive emotions. These component behaviors need to be identified and supported with a plan and an eco-system that includes consistent, small, easy-to-do steps along with prompts and reminders.
The following statements reflect a subjective scale to help you gage your well-being.
1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
3.I am satisfied with my life.
4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
The CES-D Can give you a general idea of how you stand relative to Happiness. The questions are interesting to ponder and can be helpful in establishing goals to work toward. Regardless of your situation, you always have a choice in what you say and think about your life.
This is a simple tool to track your mental health. Take it once a week. Practice reframing and trying to “Shift Up” a little more every day and practice “Shifting Up” when you are struggling.
Write down things that make you happy.
Notice how your general level of happiness begins to increase.
ED DIENER’S SUBJECTIVE WELL BEING SCALE:
Using the 1 - 7 scale below indicate your agreement with each item by placing the appropriate number on the line preceding that item. Please be open and honest in your responding.
* 7 - Strongly agree
* 6 - Agree
* 5 - Slightly agree
* 4 - Neither agree nor disagree
* 3 - Slightly disagree
* 2 - Disgree
* 1 - Strongly disgree
Material Taken From:
Mindwandering Study Harvard 2011
Flourish Martin Seligman 2000
Tiny Habits, B.J. Fogg, founder of The Stanford Behavior Design Laboratory,
Atomic Habits, James Clear outlines “An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Old Ones