The Promise of Sustainable Happiness

Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (in press). The promise of sustainable happiness. In S. J. Lopez (Ed.), Handbook of positive psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press

The article suggests that, despite several barriers withholding people to increase their well-being, less happy people can successfully strive to be happier by learning a variety of effortful strategies and practicing these with determination and commitment. They use the sustainable happiness model (by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and Schkade, 2005) as theoretical framework. According to the model, three factors contribute to an individual’s happiness level:

• The set point

• Life circumstances

• Intentional activities/effortful acts that are episodic and naturally variable

The journey to happiness has always and still is of great interest, there is empirical evidence that it even leads to positive life outcomes such as a higher income and stronger relationships. The question, however, is whether people can actually attain a level of sustainable happiness.

To answer this question, we first we look at what happy and unhappy people are like:

The first thing that comes to mind is the difference between their ‘objective’ circumstances that could cause a difference in their level of happiness. Some examples include: marital status, age, sex, culture, income etc. It is shown, however, that these factors do not explain the variation in people’s level of well-being.

The article proposes that happiness and unhappiness is due to the subjective experience and construal of the world by people. They interpret their environment differently, leading the authors to explore an individual thoughts, behaviors and motivations. Happier people see the world in a more positive, and thus happiness-promoting, way. Research suggests that happy people are this way because of multiple adaptive strategies:

Construal

Research that involved having happy and unhappy people reflect on similar hypothetical situations / actual life events, revealed that happy people view these events as more pleasant, while unhappy people view these same events as unfavourable..

Social comparison

Findings suggest that people that are happy are less sensitive to feedback about another person or his or her performance (favourable and unfavourable feedback). When performing ‘better’ on a task, all participants became more confident about their skills; however when the other was better, happy people were unaffected while unhappy people were, negatively. Unhappy people seem to feel positive emotions when a peer has done worse than them, even if they both got negative feedback. When they got positive feedback but performed at a lower level than a peer, they felt negative emotions. This was the case in both individual and group settings.

Decision-making

When happy people make life-altering decisions, they tend to be satisfied with their possible options, and only express negative emotions when their sense of self is threatened. Conversely, unhappy people were generally unhappy withthe options offered to them. Happy and unhappy people also differ in how they make decisions in the face of many options. Research suggests that happy individuals are relatively more likely to be satisfied with a solution that is "good enough," while unhappy people tend to maximise the benefits of their decisions and attempt to make the absolute best choice. Although maximizers’ decisions may ultimately produce objectively superior results (e.g., a more lucrative job), maximizers experience greater regret and diminished well-being relative to satisficers.

Intrusive Dwelling

Self-reflection and dwelling on yourself is more often done by unhappy people. When led to believe that one has failed something, the unhappy person dwells on it and fails at further tasks. However, given distractions from these intrusive thoughts, unhappy people tend to behave more similarly to happy people. This finding hints at a critical mechanism underlying differences between happy and unhappy people— namely, that one could ‘‘turn’’ a happy person into an unhappy one by instructing her to ruminate about herself. Conversely, one could make an unhappy person ‘‘look like’’ a happy person by directing his attention away from himself.

One study showed that when reflecting on past experiences unhappy people exaggerate the negative emotions with negative event and inherent positive emotions linked with positive events. Happy people do the opposite.

The question remains: Can one increase happiness? This question has been addressed in several studies:

1. Twin and adoption studies showed that genetics account for approximately 50% of the variation present in well-being. Identical twins living either together or apart had strong correlations in happiness level while fraternal showed much smaller correlation.

2. Longitudinal studies of changes in well-being showed that a positive/negative life experience increases/decreases happiness in the short term people rapidly go back to their baselines. This suggests that baselines are unique and genetically determined and immune to influence.

3. Concept of hedonic adaptation – After positive or negative life experiences, people quickly become accustomed to their new conditions and eventually return to their baseline happiness

4. Strong association between happiness and personality – Personality traits are relatively fixed and lack of variation across time. Happiness due to this stable personality means it is hard to increase happiness because you cannot change personality.

However the sustainable happiness model in optimistic about creating and maintaining happiness. The three influencing factors:

As mentioned before (see twin studies,) set points are thought to account for 50% of chronic happiness; unfortunately, this appears resistant to change. Life circumstances only account for 10% and tend to be rather constant (e.g. culture, gender) thus this also does not look like a promising route. However people differ in how easily they adapt to new life situations, such as winning the lottery. The most promising route is thus ‘Intentional activities’. These are characterized by committed and effortful acts in which people choose to engage. The benefits of these acts are that they are naturally variable and episodic. These benefits can work against adaptation because they are not relatively constant. This means that people adapt faster to circumstantial changes but not to intentional activities. Studies suggest this process is successful in increasing happiness in the short term only.

Some further ways of enhancing happiness include:

Acts of kindness - These work because of bolstered self-regard, positive social interactions and charitable feelings towards others and the community. Variety in acts, not frequency, led to increase of happiness and also timing, clustering the activities instead if spreading them, led to an increase.

Expressing Gratitude - This works because of promoting savouring of positive events and situations and may counteract hedonic adaptation by not taking something for granted. Timing was, again, decisive and increased well-being only when participants did not count their blessings often.

Visualizing best possible selves - This works because it optimizes one's thoughts about the future. When writing about the future, a longterm positive emotion resulted from participants first visualising the best possible version of themselves.

Processing Happy Life experiences - Thinking about a positive life event results in higher life satisfaction than when you talk or write about it. This works because structure diminishes positive emotions with the event.