The how and why of happiness

By Kyung M. Song
Seattle Times staff reporter

	MARK HARRISON / THE SEATTLE TIMES Georgina Boyson, left, composed a letter to Pat Wilsey, expressing how grateful she is for the friendship that's grown between them since they met by chance at a film festival at the historic Admiral Theatre in Bremerton. Expressing gratitude is seen as one key to happiness among followers of the positive-psychology movement.
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With a longtime partner who abruptly ditched her for another woman, and with a 16-year-old son in the hospital suffering from suspected bipolar disorder, Georgina Boyson could be excused for not feeling exactly elated with her life.

But the Bremerton physical therapist says she's happy. Boyson has let go of her consuming anger toward her ex and forgiven him for his quickie wedding in Las Vegas. She is grateful that her son, although ill, is at least alive.

Boyson, 57, has cultivated two of the virtues that some researchers deem essential for personal happiness: forgiveness and gratitude.

Boyson is a student of positive psychology, a relatively new field that focuses on enhancing lives instead of on what can go wrong. Positive-psychology researchers are redirecting psychology's focus from the traditional concentration on dysfunction to how and why people achieve satisfying lives.

Researchers know quite a bit about the science of happiness, or its broader scientific term, subjective well-being. Subjective well-being is how people evaluate their own lives in terms of self-esteem or fulfillment or purpose — happiness is just one domain of that. Happiness is a matter of degrees, and being less happy doesn't necessarily mean depression or a life devoid of joy.

The pursuit Can you train yourself to be happier? Researchers offer no elixir, but scientific and anecdotal evidence suggest there are influences you can control: • Be grateful: Dwell on the good things in life. Take time to savor everything from snagging a great parking spot to the loyalty of friends. Writing down daily things for which you are grateful can help. • Forgive: Let go of anger and hurt. It can be hard, but it's liberating. • Make friends: The happiest people all enjoy great friendships. The number of friends may not matter as much as the closeness of the relationships. • Challenge yourself: Lose yourself in challenging activities that you enjoy, whether it's playing the piano or training for a marathon. People who spend a lot of time in this "flow" zone tend to be happier. • Be good to others: Research shows that altruism causes others to be nicer to you, makes you feel good and creates an upward spiral of happiness. • Let small things slide: The happiest people don't fixate on little things that go wrong. Fix them or move on. • Money isn't everything. Really. Being rich may make you a bit happier. But pursuing wealth may require sacrificing close social relationships and challenging activities that make you happy. — Kyung M. Song, The Seattle Times

For instance, research has shown that some happy people do experience a lot of negative emotion — but the positive emotion prevails. That's one paradoxical finding from 30 years' worth of data about who is happiest and why.

Richer and happier?

Money can make people happier — but not by much. Citizens of richer nations consistently rate their life satisfaction higher than do those who live in poorer countries. And abject poverty is likely to reduce life satisfaction; studies of slum dwellers in Calcutta, India, have borne that out.

But once people's basic needs are met, the correlation between money and happiness levels off dramatically. Ed Diener, a psychology professor at the University of Illinois and a leading researcher on subjective well-being, found that the super rich are only slightly happier than other randomly chosen dwellers of their cities.

In 1985, Diener and his colleagues surveyed 100 people from the Forbes list of 400 wealthiest Americans (minimum net worth: $125 million). The rich reported feeling happy 77 percent of the time, compared with 62 percent for those picked out of a phone book (average net worth: $122,000).

Yet even prodigious wealth didn't ensure happiness. Thirty-seven percent of the Forbes respondents scored lower on one happiness scale than the average non-rich person.

As with money, being good-looking, intelligent or healthy contribute only nominally to greater happiness.

Personality traits have been shown to predict happiness to a far greater degree. A Minnesota study of twins found that genetics accounted for about half of the variability for both positive moods, such as joy and affection, and negative moods, such as anxiety and grief.

Extroverts are happier than neurotic persons, who by definition are anxious, worried and socially insecure. However, the personality traits with the biggest impact on happiness tend to be of the less-obvious kind.

People who rate high in hardiness (able to put problems in context and then tackle them), desire for control (taking charge of their lives) and trust (ascribing honest motives to others) feel more satisfied than those who repress or deny threatening information or believe that they're powerless when things go wrong in their lives.

A happiness thermostat?

The symbiotic link between people's personality characteristics and their emotional well-being prompted a pair of researchers at the University of Minnesota to declare that happiness may be a function of "the great genetic lottery that occurs at conception."

David Lykken and Auke Tellegen, who conducted the twins study, argued that trying to be happier was akin to trying to be taller.

A person's happiness level at any moment can depend greatly on external events: money woes, a death in the family or a bad-hair day. But a number of researchers have found that over the long haul, people's baseline happiness level can stay largely impervious to windfalls or catastrophes.

A classic 1978 tracking study of lottery winners and spinal-cord injury victims showed that good fortune and misfortune affected them immediately and profoundly. But elation and despair eventually dissipated, and the subjects' level of happiness returned after several months to near original levels, according to the study, which was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Long-term depression

Some life events do have potential to leave people's mental well-being permanently altered.

For example, it can take a very long time to adjust to widowhood. Family members caring for an Alzheimer's patient do not return to their baseline level of happiness, likely because the disease, and the consequent stress, continue to progress. And studies of unemployed German workers found that their decline in happiness lasted for years after they had lost their jobs, and the people never quite achieved their previous level of happiness.

Diener, the University of Illinois psychologist, said such data make a persuasive case that circumstances can leave a lasting imprint on people's subjective well-being.

Keys to joie de vivre

So what makes for happy people? In 2002, Diener, along with Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, the man credited with spawning the positive-psychology movement, followed 222 college students for a semester to learn what the happiest 10 percent had in common.

Their conclusion: The happiest students all had solid friendships and were agreeable, outgoing and well-adjusted.

Introverts may be happy with fewer friends than extroverts, but almost everyone needs intimate, close relationships to be happy.

"People who say, 'I have no friends but I'm really happy' don't exist. Or they're rare," Diener said.

Being in a good mood most of the time, rather than experiencing short bursts of euphoria, makes for happier people. In fact, some researchers believe that people who seek intense happiness — constantly chasing a better job or a new love — inevitably find that their happiness erodes over time.

Carol Ryff, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has long pushed the notion that psychological well-being doesn't rest solely on happiness. Instead, Ryff believes that people should evaluate how much their lives have purpose and meaning, whether they are living to their fullest potential and how much control they exert over their lives.

Devoting all your time to activities that bring short-term happiness — eating out with friends, making love, shopping for shoes — is an indulgent and ultimately not very healthy or meaningful life, Ryff says. People should relieve themselves of the "burden that they should feel great everyday. That's just not how life is," she adds.

Ryff subscribes to the ideal, articulated by the 19th-century British philosopher and economist John Stuart Mill, that true happiness is a byproduct of noble deeds. Pursuing noble goals may not pay off in short-term happiness, Ryff said. Raising children or a having a challenging job can be stressful, exhausting and thankless. Yet they can give people profound satisfaction and direction.

Ryff says happy people lead purposeful lives and seek challenges that test their potential. They can be artists and athletes who make sacrifices for their goals or janitors who take pride in their work.

"It doesn't have to be a fast-track life. It just has to be a life that has purpose or direction in whatever track you're on," Ryff said.

Happiness matters

According to Diener, the data are convincing that happy people are more sociable, stay married longer and probably make more money. Studies also suggest that severely depressed people get cancer more often and that negative thinking depresses the immune system, although those findings are somewhat controversial.

Happy people make better employees, too, Diener says. They aren't necessarily smarter and may not outperform their gloomier colleagues. But they are less likely to steal, take sick days or bad-mouth the company.

Despite all that research, however, "the data is pretty skimpy still on what kinds of behavior will make you happier," Diener said.

Seligman, the founder of positive psychology, has developed a course to teach for about $2,000 what he calls authentic happiness. Over 24 weeks, students learn how to nurture traits that Seligman considers most essential to a satisfying life, such as optimism, positive thinking and curiosity.

Students are instructed to write down the good things that happened at the end of each day and to tune out the negative stuff. They also make gratitude visits, delivering letters that explain in detail the reasons they're thankful to the recipient.

Boyson, the Bremerton physical therapist, wrote such a letter to her friend, Pat Wilsey. The two women have become close since they met a year ago after striking up a conversation at a movie theater.

Boyson thanked Wilsey for helping her appreciate nature's beauty during their hikes and beach walks and even for the way she takes home her cigarette butts in her purse because Boyson does not smoke.

"She was overwhelmed," Boyson recalled. "Numerating and writing all that down, it made me feel really good that she's in my life. It really helped to solidify our relationship."

Boyson also learned to forgive. She admits that she harbored "a huge hurt" against the father of her youngest son, who left her for good in 2002 after nearly two decades of on-and-off relationship. Forgiveness isn't an easy virtue to acquire, and it took a couple of weeks for Boyson's heart to match her mind's desire.

Boyson finally forgave her ex for his affair and abandonment. It helped her to empathize that, as an adopted child, her ex had struggled with feelings of rejection all his life.

"I was angry for a long time," Boyson said. "When you truly forgive someone, you feel like you can almost fly. Hey, it's done. It's over. I feel so much better."

Kyung Song: 206-464-2423 or ksong@seattletimes.com

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company