The Art of Happiness

How Small Ripples Lead to Great Change

2012-05-11T16:34:00.000-04:00

Hogwarts & Happiness at Harvard; GI Joes vs. Unicorns; the relativity of the scientific method, ordering psychological disorders; Dr. Bobo & Mary The Unicorn; reversing the formula for happiness & success; how small ripples lead to great change - these are just a few of the fascinating subjects that psychologist Shawn Achor mentions in this fast-moving and entertaining talk, in which he argues that happiness inspires productivity (not vice-versa). It is an amusing talk worth 12 minutes of your time.

Is it The Principle That Matters?

2011-12-20T07:44:00.001-05:00

One must question the principle of things when they exist to primarily make life miserable for ourselves and others. Are the cents we save worth the sense of serenity lost in their trivial pursuit? Does haggling over who has more actually give us less? Are those intangibles lost - time irreplaceable, peace, harmony - equal to menial claims we gain?

Living beyond limits

2011-12-05T17:06:00.000-05:00

If you ever felt that your boss, your job, your parents, your life, your obligations, your financial troubles, your big-ass nose or anything other woe you might worry about placed a limit on your abilities, you should watch this inspiring TED talk.

I guarantee it is worth 9 minutes.

It is a good reminder to us to stop whining, to count our blessings, and to accept the things we cannot change, to have the courage to change those we can, and to have the wisdom to know the difference...or better yet, as Ms. Purdy elegantly puts it, to challenge common wisdom and ourselves, so that we may discover what it possible when we put our imagination to the task.

About The Speaker
Amy Purdy became a professional snowboarder despite losing both her legs to meningitis. She encourages us to take control of our lives, and our limits.

About the Talk
When she was 19, Amy Purdy lost both her legs below the knee. And now ... she's a pro snowboarder. In this powerful talk, she shows us how to draw inspiration from life's obstacles.

Amy Purdy: Living beyond limits
www.ted.com

Money is the cheapest thing

2011-11-09T11:38:00.000-05:00

Screenshot from website for the film Bill Cunningham New York, a documentary by Richard Press

“You see, if you don’t take money they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing, don’t touch money! It’s the worst thing you can do. Money is the cheapest thing. Liberty is the most expensive.”

—Superstar NY Times Street Fashion Photographer Bill Cunningham explaining why he didn’t accept payment for the 100 page spreads of photographs he shot for the original Details magazine in the late 80’s.

Color is powerful. It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. -Jessi Arrington

2011-06-11T09:48:00.001-04:00

“Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.” Martin Seligman

2011-05-24T08:41:00.000-04:00

A New Gauge to See What’s Beyond Happiness
By JOHN TIERNEY
(Originally published by the New York Times, May 16, 2011)

Is happiness overrated?

Martin Seligman now thinks so, which may seem like an odd position for the founder of the positive psychology movement. As president of the American Pyschological Association in the late 1990s, he criticized his colleagues for focusing relentlessly on mental illness and other problems. He prodded them to study life’s joys, and wrote a best seller in 2002 titled “Authentic Happiness.”

But now he regrets that title. As the investigation of happiness proceeded, Dr. Seligman began seeing certain limitations of the concept. Why did couples go on having children even though the data clearly showed that parents are less happy than childless couples? Why did billionaires desperately seek more money even when there was nothing they wanted to do with it?

And why did some people keep joylessly playing bridge? Dr. Seligman, an avid player himself, kept noticing them at tournaments. They never smiled, not even when they won. They didn’t play to make money or make friends.

They didn’t savor that feeling of total engagement in a task that psychologists call flow. They didn’t take aesthetic satisfaction in playing a hand cleverly and “winning pretty.” They were quite willing to win ugly, sometimes even when that meant cheating.

“They wanted to win for its own sake, even if it brought no positive emotion,” says Dr. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. “They were like hedge fund managers who just want to accumulate money and toys for their own sake. Watching them play, seeing them cheat, it kept hitting me that accomplishment is a human desiderata in itself.”

This feeling of accomplishment contributes to what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which roughly translates to “well-being” or “flourishing,” a concept that Dr. Seligman has borrowed for the title of his new book, “Flourish.” He has also created his own acronym, Perma, for what he defines as the five crucial elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

“Well-being cannot exist just in your own head,” he writes. “Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.”

The positive psychology movement has inspired efforts around the world to survey people’s state of mind, like a new project in Britain to measure what David Cameron, the prime minister, calls GWB, for general well-being. Dr. Seligman says he’s glad to see governments measuring more than just the G.D.P., but he’s concerned that these surveys mainly ask people about their “life satisfaction.”

In theory, life satisfaction might include the various elements of well-being. But in practice, Dr. Seligman says, people’s answers to that question are largely — more than 70 percent — determined by how they’re feeling at the moment of the survey, not how they judge their lives over all.

“Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology,” he writes in “Flourish.” By that standard, he notes, a government could improve its numbers just by handing out the kind of euphoriant drugs that Aldous Huxley described in “Brave New World.”

So what should be measured instead? The best gauge so far of flourishing, Dr. Seligman says, comes from a study of 23 European countries by Felicia Huppert and Timothy So of the University of Cambridge. Besides asking respondents about their moods, the researchers asked about their relationships with others and their sense that they were accomplishing something worthwhile.

Denmark and Switzerland ranked highest in Europe, with more than a quarter of their citizens meeting the definition of flourishing. Near the bottom, with fewer than 10 percent flourishing, were France, Hungary, Portugal and Russia.

There’s no direct comparison available with the United States, although some other researchers say that Americans would do fairly well because of their sense of accomplishment. The economist Arthur Brooks notes that 51 percent of Americans say they’re very satisfied with their jobs, which is a higher percentage than in any European country except Denmark, Switzerland and Austria.

In his 2008 book, “Gross National Happiness,” Dr. Brooks argues that what’s crucial to well-being is not how cheerful you feel, not how much money you make, but rather the meaning you find in life and your sense of “earned success” — the belief that you have created value in your life or others’ lives.

“People find meaning in providing unconditional love for children,” writes Dr. Brooks, who is now president of the American Enterprise Institute. “Paradoxically, your happiness is raised by the very fact that you are willing to have your happiness lowered through years of dirty diapers, tantrums and backtalk. Willingness to accept unhappiness from children is a source of happiness.”

Some happiness researchers have suggested that parents delude themselves about the joys of children: They focus on the golden moments and forget the more frequent travails. But Dr. Seligman says that parents are wisely looking for more than happy feelings.

“If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago,” he says. “ We have children to pursue other elements of well-being. We want meaning in life. We want relationships.”

In observing people’s need for accomplishment, Dr. Seligman says, he’s reminded of his early experiments that famously identified the concept of “learned helplessness.” He found that when animals or people were given a series of arbitrary punishments or rewards, they stopped trying to do anything constructive.

“We found that even when good things occurred that weren’t earned, like nickels coming out of slot machines, it did not increase people’s well-being,” he said. “It produced helplessness. People gave up and became passive.”

To avoid that sort of malaise, Dr. Seligman recommends looking at the basic elements of well-being, identifying which ones matter most to you, setting goals and monitoring progress. Simply keeping track of how much time you spend daily pursuing each goal can make a difference, he says, because it’s easy to see discrepancies between your goals and what you do.

You might also start to question some of your goals and activities, the way that Dr. Seligman occasionally wonders why he spends so much time playing bridge. It’s brought him some clear achievements — including a second-place finish in the North American pairs championship — but he doesn’t pretend that bridge provides any meaning in life. He says he plays for another element of well-being, the feeling of engagement. “I go into flow playing bridge,” he writes, “but after a long tournament, when I look in the mirror, I worry that I am merely fidgeting until I die.”

Is playing bridge for the feeling of flow any more worthwhile than playing it just to win? Dr. Seligman doesn’t want to judge.

“My view of positive psychology is that it describes rather than prescribes what human beings do,” he says. “I don’t want to mess with people’s values. I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing to want to win for its own sake. I’m just describing what lots of people do. One’s job as a therapist is not to change what people value, but given what they value, to make them better at it.”

You bought it. Are you happy? Money can make you happier – to a point – but not in the way you think.

2011-05-21T04:00:00.006-04:00

By Husna Haq, Correspondent / December 20, 2010
(Originally published in the Christian Science Monitor)

By the time the last shred of wrapping paper is recycled and the final crumb of fruitcake devoured, Americans will have spent 12.9 billion hours and $447 billion shopping, wrapping, and returning gifts this holiday season. That's about 42 hours and $688.87 per person, according to Consumer Reports and the National Retail Federation, respectively. At the end of it all, Americans will have a lot more stuff – but will it make us happier?

It's a perennial question: Can money make us happy?

Generations of Americans were raised to believe it couldn't. The nation's Puritan roots bequeathed a philosophy of frugality upon its people. Henry David Thoreau, the Amish, and the Shakers all pursued austere lives. "Money doesn't buy happiness," our mothers taught us.

But contrary to kitchen table wisdom, research suggests it can – though not in the ways we traditionally think. And it could change the way Americans spend money and buy gifts.

"If you think money can't buy happiness, you just don't know where to go shopping," says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and author of "Predictably Irrational." "Most people just don't know how to use money to buy happiness."

Money, and to a lesser degree, stuff, can make us happy if it promotes the experiences that make us happy, like personal growth and social connectedness, says Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside. "Money can buy happiness if you spend it right."

Here's how spending can maximize happiness:

Maximizer No. 1: "Spend on experiences, not possessions," says Professor Lyubomirsky. Research shows that spending money on experiences like a dinner out, travel, or a massage make people happier than "stuff" like a TV or a handbag. There's an initial thrill to owning something, then we adapt and want more, says Lyubomirsky. "In contrast, we're much less likely to adapt to experiences. And we're much less likely to compare to others – we might compare a car with our neighbor's, not so much with vacations."

Maximizer No. 2: Spend on personal growth and social connections. French lessons, for example, give people a sense of growth and accomplishment, an experience key to human happiness. And they may help us build friendships and social networks, another key to well-being. The same goes for a gym membership, salsa lessons, or joining a professional society. "When you buy an experience – like climbing a mountain, sailing the ocean, or achieving a goal – those experiences give people an amazing amount of happiness," says Professor Ariely.

Maximizer No. 3: Spread it out. For example, research shows people tend to get more happiness from several small vacations (say, three regional road trips) rather than one big one (a two-week Caribbean cruise) because variety ensures we won't adapt and get bored by Day 9 of the cruise. Also, anticipation and recall of an experience or purchase – think planning and mapping out a road trip, then reliving it through photos and stories – can be more positive than the experience itself.

Maximizer No. 4: Give your money away. "When you give money away, you become happier," says Ariely. "There's something incredibly satisfying about helping others that makes you happy." Lyubomirsky conducted a study in which students were asked to do five acts of charity or kindness a week for six weeks. By Week 6, the students reported a significant rise in happiness. Giving time or money, and more important, getting involved in an outreach activity, gives people a sense of purpose as well as fostering interdependence and cooperation – all major happiness boosters. It's worked for Bill Gates, says Ariely. "He's never seemed more happy, eloquent, charming, and relaxed as when he stopped working at Microsoft and started philanthropy."

But if some money is good, more money isn't necessarily better. A new study by Princeton economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman put a figure on happiness: $75,000 per year. As people earn more, their day-to-day happiness rises until they hit $75,000, after which, more money has no measurable impact on daily contentment.

But for those struggling with money, more money equals happiness. "It's very stressful to always be thinking about every last nickel," says Gretchen Rubin, author of "The Happiness Project." "One of the greatest luxuries that money buys is not having to worry about money."

The courage to be imperfect, the willingness to say "I love you" first, and the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees...

2011-05-20T07:00:00.000-04:00

Excerpted from The power of vulnerability, a TED Talk by Brene Brown

There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy. And to me, the hard part of the one thing that keeps us out of connection is our fear that we're not worthy of connection, was something that, personally and professionally, I felt like I needed to understand better. So what I did is I took all of the interviews where I saw worthiness, where I saw people living that way, and just looked at those.

What do these people have in common? ...These are whole-hearted people, living from this deep sense of worthiness...And so here's what I found. What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word cor, meaning heart -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

The other thing that they had in common was this. They fully embraced vulnerability. They believed that what made them vulnerable made them beautiful. They didn't talk about vulnerability being comfortable, nor did they talk about it being excruciating -- as I had heard it earlier in the shame interviewing. They just talked about it being necessary. They talked about the willingness to say "I love you" first, the willingness to do something where there are no guarantees, the willingness to breathe through waiting for the doctor to call after your mammogram. They're willing to invest in a relationship that may or may not work out. They thought this was fundamental.

Family First: Carpio said that one major benefit of being mom to sextuplets is six times the Mother's Day smooches. "They gave me so many kisses that it made me cry of happiness," she said. "I'm so thankful."

2011-05-19T07:00:00.005-04:00

Digna Carpio celebrates Mother's Day with her 2-year-old sextuplets and 10-year-old son

BY Erica Pearson, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Originally published by the Daily News, Monday, May 9th 2011

Now that all of her sextuplets can say "Mama," it was an extra special Mother's Day for Queens mom Digna Carpio.

"Every day I feel more happy - as they grow, my joy grows," said Carpio, 33, after cuddling with her six lovable toddlers - all in their terrible twos.

"I thank God that they're all happy and healthy," said Carpio. Her brood gave her a bunch of red roses on her special day.

Then the family - 2-year-olds Danelia, Genesis, Justin, Jaden, Joel and Jezreel, 10-year-old brother Jhan Carlos and dad Victor - piled into their van for church. The adorable six were a wriggling bunch at the Tabernaculo de Jesucristo service in Corona.

As one fell, another asked for water and all cried out for "Mama" in a chorus. "They walk, they run - and they do fight a lot!" laughed Carpio. "They all want one toy at once."

Digna, 33, and Victor, 37, a maintenance worker, are believed to be the first Hispanic parents of sextuplets in U.S. history. The Ecuadoran immigrant family has become famous - starring in a TLC series called "Sextuplets Take New York."

Carpio said that one major benefit of being mom to sextuplets is six times the Mother's Day smooches. "They gave me so many kisses that it made me cry of happiness," she said. "I'm so thankful."

Secret to happiness: big government? New study finds that happiness is highest in nations with the most government intervention. Of 15 nations, Norway ranks No. 1 in happiness; US, only No. 10.

2011-05-18T04:00:00.012-04:00

By Stephanie Pappas, LifeScience senior writer / May 16, 2011
(Originally published by the Christian Science Monitor)

In a time of vicious budget debates on Capitol Hill, a new study finds that the path to happiness might be through big government.

But the findings aren't likely to be the last word on the topic, underscoring the difficulty of answering the prevailing political question in the U.S. right now: How large should government be?

According to the new research, published in April in the journal Politics and Policy, bigger governments make for more satisfied citizens. Norway finished No. 1, followed by Switzerland and Finland.

The results, which rank the U.S. 10th out of 15 industrialized democracies in life satisfaction of citizens, seems to suggest that bumping up social welfare expenditures would make for a happier populace. But "suggest" is the key word, according to University of Pennsylvania economist Justin Wolfers, who was not involved in the research.

"The study as a whole is suggestive, but not convincing," Wolfers told LiveScience. "And the reason I say that is it's ultimately a study of [only] 15 countries." [See the rankings of all 15 countries]

Nonetheless, said Richard Easterlin, an economist at the University of Southern California who studies life satisfaction, the findings are "pretty plausible." Citizens in countries that transition from socialism to capitalism often don't experience the happiness boost one might expect from the resulting influx of goods and services, Easterlin told LiveScience. The reason may be that they lose out on perks like guaranteed health care.

"There really are areas where it seems like the market doesn't do the job," Easterlin said.

Happy citizens

To tackle the question of whether government makes people happy by providing social services, or unhappy by squelching efficiency and growth, Baylor University political scientist Patrick Flavin and his colleagues used data from the 2005 to 2008 World Values Survey. This survey asks residents of countries around the world how satisfied they are with their lives, among other questions. The researchers limited their analysis to industrialized democracies so they'd be comparing a similar slate of nations. Among the countries studied were Australia, France, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. [Read Who's Happier: Europeans or Americans?]

For each country, the researchers measured the size of the government in four ways: the country's tax revenue as a percent of its gross domestic product (GDP), the government's consumption as a percent of real per capita GDP, average unemployment benefits and social welfare expenditures as a percent of GDP.

After controlling for factors that could skew the results, including health and age of respondents, church attendance, unemployment rates, and the level of individualism in the country's culture, the researchers found that the happiest countries were those with big, busy governments. The result remained even when the researchers took into account the fact that government size and benefits can influence variables such as unemployment and marriage rates, Flavin told LiveScience.

"The jump in happiness in going from a country that's low on the government intervention scale to one that is high on the government intervention scale is about the same as the effect of getting married," Flavin said.

Out of the 15 countries studied, the United States ranked 14th for both tax revenue as a percent of GDP and in social welfare expenditures as a percent of GDP; 13th for government's share of consumption; 11th for unemployment benefits; and 10th for life satisfaction.

The effect is largest for the poor, Flavin said, but richer citizens in big-government countries reported more satisfaction than their small-government counterparts, too.

"This is one piece of evidence that we should think long and hard about, what the effect on citizens' well-being would be if we starting changing Medicare to a voucher system or reducing welfare benefits," Flavin said.

Room for interpretation

The study isn't the first to link government intervention with happiness. One of Flavin's co-researchers authored a 2010 paper in the Journal of Politics finding that U.S. states with bigger governments have happier citizens. [Read: Happiest States Revealed by New Research]

On the other hand, a 2007 study published in the journal Political Choice used the same World Values Survey from 1997 to 2001 to compare government size (as measured by the percent of GDP made up by government consumption) and life satisfaction in 74 countries. That study found the opposite result as Flavin's: Bigger governments seemed to make people unhappy.

Justina Fischer, a senior researcher in economics at the University of Mannheim in Germany and a researcher on the 2007 study, said she thought the difference could stem from the different time periods in which the data was gathered. In the late 1990s, she said, the countries studied had left-leaning governments that may have grown the government too large; In 2005 to 2008, when Flavin's data were taken, those governments had shifted rightward.

"Given this change in governments between the 1990s and 10 years later, I think their finding is an effect of conservative governments cutting too much," Fischer told LiveScience.

In other words, Fischer said, there could be a certain balance between government size and private efficiency that both studies are dancing around. Fischer's study, she said, caught people's attitudes during a time of too much government, so cuts to government spending drew them back toward the ideal. Later, governments may have overcorrected, meaning that a tendency not to cut as much made people happier.

Measuring happiness and government size is difficult, Wolfers told LiveScience, not only because it can be tough to define what those variables mean, but also because cultural differences can confound the results. Nordic countries, which ranked high in happiness in Flavin's study, tend to be cheerful places, Wolfers said, while former communist countries are never quite as happy as would be expected.

To get to the bottom of the question, Wolfers told LiveScience, economists would have to conduct larger studies on more countries. The ideal study would randomly assign people to live in states with big governments and states with small governments and then watched to see how happy they become. Obviously, that sort of research isn't possible, Wolfers said, so conclusions about government size and happiness have to be drawn "from a pastiche of evidence." That leaves room for interpretation.

"It's very likely that a Democrat and a Republican would read that evidence and come to different conclusions," Wolfers said. "And that's because we don't have that single perfect experiment."

Let's Revive the Golden Rule

2011-05-17T15:29:00.002-04:00

"The way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep" Arianna Huffington

2011-05-16T08:00:00.000-04:00

The Power of Smiling

2011-05-15T08:00:00.001-04:00

"I no longer try to be right, I choose to be happy." — Ric Elias

2011-05-14T14:36:00.002-04:00

The Art of Humility & Appreciation

2011-04-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

Many of you may have seen something about Nick already, a phenomenal motivational speaker who has not let the fact that he has not had limbs since birth him hold him back. His message bears repeating over and over again.

I implore you to watch; it is a great exercise in humility and appreciation.

Nick Vujicic, Being Thankful

Happiness Between The Spider and The Fly

2011-04-29T12:54:00.002-04:00

SAD, BUT TRUE:
“In an age when everyone is ‘overworked, underpaid and trying to multitask,’ a phone call is likely to be an unwelcome interruption, so it should be avoided…”
—J. Whitmore.

Considering all the phone numbers, voicemails, e-mails, bulletin boards, and IMs my “friends” and I actively use, I quickly counted three dozen channels of communication.

Today’s ever-expanding web of communication and networking is both an entrapping bane that raises the bar of expectations and diminishes our ability to be patient, to focus, and engage people in a meaningful manner that nurtures intimacy and relationships—as well as an opportunity to inspire and influence others.

Happiness lies in the balance between being the gregarious spider and autonomous fly.

Don’t call me, I’ll text you, april 29, 2011, amNewYork

To know true Happiness one must meet Misery first.

2011-01-28T07:56:00.002-05:00

A Week of Happy News

2011-01-18T10:31:00.004-05:00

One of the most common complaints that readers of Metro NY make is that is leans toward the negative. In response, Metro News is presenting "Happy Metro," a week of stories highlighting some of the good news in the world.

Click here to view articles online at www.metro.us

Joe Davis's Mission: To Amuse Enlighten and Save The World

2011-01-10T09:57:00.001-05:00

Learn By It

2011-01-10T08:05:00.001-05:00

If we got wiser before we got old(er) we would sap all the fun out of youth, when time and effort lack the meaning gained with experience. The average person only truly enjoys life twice—first as children, when we don't know any better; and secondly as wiser, older people, when we know better. A lot of the in-between is a matter of running that gets us nowhere, especially if we do not take the time to learn by it.

Dare Share Your Dark Side

2010-12-21T08:05:00.003-05:00

Buddha said, "Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth." Seek to reveal the latter within yourself, dare share a little of your dark side this evening, the night of the last full moon of 2010.

The U-Bend of Happiness

2010-12-20T11:10:00.002-05:00

Happiness is just around the 'bend'
The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes
(Posted: 20/12/2010 on Winnipeg Free Press)

Ask people how they feel about getting older, and they will probably reply in the same vein as Maurice Chevalier: "Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative." Stiffening joints, weakening muscles, fading eyesight and the clouding of memory, coupled with the modern world's careless contempt for the old, seem a fearful prospect -- better than death, perhaps, but not much. Yet mankind is wrong to dread aging. Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands toward the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the midlife crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move toward old age they lose things they treasure -- vitality, mental sharpness and looks -- they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility -- the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

There are already a lot of data on the subject collected by, for instance, America's General Social Survey, Eurobarometer and Gallup. Surveys ask two main sorts of questions. One concerns people's assessment of their lives, and the other how they feel at any particular time. The first goes along the lines of: Thinking about your life as a whole, how do you feel? The second is something like: Yesterday, did you feel happy/contented/angry/anxious? The first sort of question is said to measure global well-being, and the second hedonic or emotional well-being. They do not always elicit the same response: Having children, for instance, tends to make people feel better about their life as a whole, but also increases the chance that they felt angry or anxious yesterday.

Statisticians trawl through the vast quantities of data these surveys produce, rather as miners panning for gold. They are trying to find the answer to the perennial question: what makes people happy?

Four main factors, it seems: gender, personality, external circumstances and age. Women, by and large, are slightly happier than men. But they are also more susceptible to depression: A fifth to a quarter of women experience depression at some point in their lives, compared with around a tenth of men. Which suggests either that women are more likely to experience more extreme emotions, or that a few women are more miserable than men, while most are more cheerful.

Two personality traits shine through the complexity of economists' regression analyses: neuroticism and extroversion. Neurotic people -- those who are prone to guilt, anger and anxiety -- tend to be unhappy. This is more than a tautological observation about people's mood when asked about their feelings by pollsters or economists. Studies following people over many years have shown that neuroticism is a stable personality trait and a good predictor of levels of happiness. Neurotic people are not just prone to negative feelings: They also tend to have low emotional intelligence, which makes them bad at forming or managing relationships, and that in turn makes them unhappy.

Whereas neuroticism tends to make for gloomy types, extroversion does the opposite. Those who like working in teams and who relish parties tend to be happier than those who shut their office doors in the daytime and hole up at home in the evenings. This personality trait may help explain some cross-cultural differences: A study comparing similar groups of British, Chinese and Japanese people found that the British were, on average, both more extroverted and happier than the Chinese and Japanese.

Then there is the role of circumstance. All sorts of things in people's lives, such as relationships, education, income and health, shape the way they feel. Being married gives people a considerable lift, but not as big as the gloom that springs from being unemployed. In America, being black used to be associated with lower levels of happiness -- though the most recent figures suggest that being black or Hispanic is nowadays associated with greater happiness. People with children in the house are less happy than those without. More educated people are happier, but that effect disappears once income is controlled for. Education, in other words, seems to make people happy because it makes them richer. And richer people are happier than poor ones -- though just how much is a source of argument.

Lastly, there is age. Ask a bunch of 30-year-olds and another bunch of 70-year-olds (as Peter Ubel, of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University, did with two colleagues, Heather Lacey and Dylan Smith, in 2006) which group they think is likely to be happier, and both groups point to the 30-year-olds. Ask them to rate their own well-being, and the 70-year-olds are the happier bunch. The academics quoted lyrics written by Pete Townshend of The Who when he was 20: "Things they do look awful cold / Hope I die before I get old." They pointed out that Townshend, having passed his 60th birthday, was writing a blog that glowed with good humor.

Townshend may have thought of himself as a youthful radical, but this view is ancient and conventional. The "seven ages of man" -- the dominant image of the life course in the 16th and 17th centuries -- was almost invariably conceived as a rise in stature and contentedness to middle age, followed by a sharp decline toward the grave. Inverting the rise and fall is a recent idea. "A few of us noticed the U-bend in the early 1990s," says Andrew Oswald, professor of economics at Warwick Business School. "We ran a conference about it, but nobody came."

Since then, interest in the U-bend has been growing. Its effect on happiness is significant -- about half as much, from the nadir of middle age to the elderly peak, as that of unemployment. It appears all over the world. David Blanchflower, professor of economics at Dartmouth College, and Oswald looked at the figures for 72 countries. The nadir varies among countries -- Ukrainians, at the top of the range, are at their most miserable at 62, and Swiss, at the bottom, at 35 -- but in the great majority of countries people are at their unhappiest in their 40s and early 50s. The global average is 46.

The U-bend shows up in studies not just of global well-being but also of hedonic or emotional well-being. One paper, published this year by Arthur Stone, Joseph Schwartz and Joan Broderick of Stony Brook University, and Angus Deaton of Princeton, breaks well-being down into positive and negative feelings and looks at how the experience of those emotions varies through life. Enjoyment and happiness dip in middle age, then pick up; stress rises during the early 20s, then falls sharply; worry peaks in middle age, and falls sharply thereafter; anger declines throughout life; sadness rises slightly in middle age, and falls thereafter.

Turn the question upside down, and the pattern still appears. When the British Labor Force Survey asks people whether they are depressed, the U-bend becomes an arc, peaking at 46.

There is always a possibility that variations are the result not of changes during the course of life, but of differences between cohorts. A 70-year-old European may feel different to a 30-year-old not because he is older, but because he grew up during the Second World War and was thus formed by different experiences. But the accumulation of data undermines the idea of a cohort effect. Americans and Zimbabweans have not been formed by similar experiences, yet the U-bend appears in both their countries. And if a cohort effect were responsible, the U-bend would not show up consistently in 40 years' worth of data.

Another possible explanation is that unhappy people die early. It is hard to establish whether that is true or not; but, given that death in middle age is fairly rare, it would explain only a little of the phenomenon. Perhaps the U-bend is merely an expression of the effect of external circumstances. After all, common factors affect people at different stages of the life-cycle. People in their 40s, for instance, often have teenage children. Could the misery of the middle-aged be the consequence of sharing space with angry adolescents? And older people tend to be richer. Could their relative contentment be the result of their piles of cash?

The answer, it turns out, is no: Control for cash, employment status and children, and the U-bend is still there. So the growing happiness that follows middle-aged misery must be the result not of external circumstances but of internal changes.

People, studies show, behave differently at different ages. Older people have fewer rows and come up with better solutions to conflict. They are better at controlling their emotions, better at accepting misfortune and less prone to anger. In one study, for instance, subjects were asked to listen to recordings of people supposedly saying disparaging things about them. Older and younger people were similarly saddened, but older people were less angry and less inclined to pass judgment, taking the view, as one put it, that "you can't please all the people all the time."

There are various theories as to why this might be so. Laura Carstensen, professor of psychology at Stanford University, talks of "the uniquely human ability to recognize our own mortality and monitor our own time horizons." Because the old know they are closer to death, she argues, they grow better at living for the present. They come to focus on things that matter now -- such as feelings -- and less on long-term goals. "When young people look at older people, they think how terrifying it must be to be nearing the end of your life. But older people know what matters most." For instance, she says, "Young people will go to cocktail parties because they might meet somebody who will be useful to them in the future, even though nobody I know actually likes going to cocktail parties."

There are other possible explanations. Maybe the sight of contemporaries keeling over infuses survivors with a determination to make the most of their remaining years. Maybe people come to accept their strengths and weaknesses, give up hoping to become chief executive or have a picture shown in the Royal Academy, and learn to be satisfied as assistant branch manager, with their watercolour on display at the church fete. "Being an old maid," says one of the characters in a story by Edna Ferber, an (unmarried) American novelist, was "like death by drowning -- a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling."

Perhaps acceptance of aging itself is a source of relief. "How pleasant is the day", observed William James, an American philosopher, "when we give up striving to be young -- or slender."

Whatever the causes of the U-bend, it has consequences beyond the emotional. Happiness doesn't just make people happy -- it also makes them healthier. John Weinman, professor of psychiatry at King's College London, monitored the stress levels of a group of volunteers and then inflicted small wounds on them. The wounds of the least stressed healed twice as fast as those of the most stressed. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Sheldon Cohen infected people with cold and flu viruses. He found that happier types were less likely to catch the virus, and showed fewer symptoms of illness when they did. So although old people tend to be less healthy than younger ones, their cheerfulness may help counteract their crumbliness.

Happier people are more productive, too. Oswald and two colleagues, Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi, cheered up a bunch of volunteers by showing them a funny film, then set them mental tests and compared their performance to groups that had seen a neutral film, or no film at all. The ones who had seen the funny film performed 12 per cent better. This leads to two conclusions. First, if you are going to volunteer for a study, choose the economists' experiment rather than studies by psychologists or psychiatrists. Second, the cheerfulness of the old should help counteract their loss of productivity through declining cognitive skills -- a point worth remembering as the world works out how to deal with an aging workforce. The aging of the rich world is normally seen as a burden on the economy and a problem to be solved. The U-bend argues for a more positive view of the matter. The greyer the world gets, the brighter it becomes.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition December 20, 2010 A13

The Happiness of Being There (guardian.co.uk)

2010-12-17T10:27:00.005-05:00

Taken whilst wandering through Chandni Chowk, one of Old Delhi's main thoroughfares, by Christopher Griffiths.

Here are some other cheerful photos from The Guardian's "Been There" photo competition.

Wisdom from a 9-year old

2010-11-21T20:02:00.002-05:00

"Happiness is fun, food, friends and family."
Dominic Dominguez

The Road to Happiness

2010-11-12T17:54:00.000-05:00

“The Rarámuri have no money, but nobody is poor,” Caballo said. “In the States, you ask for a glass of water and they take you to a homeless shelter. Here, they take you in and feed you. You ask to camp out, and they say, “Sure, but wouldn’t you rather sleep inside with us?’” Born to Run, Christopher McDougall