Confucius advocated a kind of dignity or reverence as happiness, where you focus on enhancing the welfare of others. Aristotle believed that happiness is about living a life of virtue. Utilitarianism advocate actions that bring about the greatest happiness for the greatest number. As a Buddhist, the Dalai Lama teaches equanimity, compassion and kindness.
Being "happy" could refer to many things: a sense that our life is going well, a momentary emotion, a trait we have, or even a sensation.
Before the late 17th century, people thought of happiness as the result of luck or divine favor. In fact, the word for happiness in every Indo-Europe language comes from the word for luck.
Health, money and comfort affect happiness but not meaning.
Extreme positive emotions expressed in the wrong context, or too much of some positive emotions like pride, can be detrimental.
Too much positive emotion is associated with inflexibility in the face of challenges. Extreme happiness can also make us take undue risks, since we focus on the positive and can miss warning signs.
We should pursue happiness in moderation, in the right context, and with the acceptance of negative emotions and situations.
Happiness is associated with greater longevity and health. Happy people have better social relationships: they have more friends, are judged more warm and intelligent and less selfish, and are more likely to get assistance and trust. Happy people who get married are less likely to get divorced and feel more love and fulfillment. Finally, happiness can boost creativity and innovation.
According to research, about 50% of our happiness is accounted for by genetics, 10% by life circumstances, and 40% by intentional activity. The 40% is what we should focus on changing, by cultivating relationships and philanthropy, optimism, savoring and mindfulness, physical activity, spirituality and goal pursuit.
Loneliness increases stress, affects our health and sleep, and makes us unhappier.
Every night remember three good things that happened during the day.
Positive emotions open our hearts, minds, and perspectives. They cause us to think more broadly, seeing global differences and similarities. This allows us to see more possibilities and be more creative. We also become more trusting and come up with better solutions to negotiations.
Do loving-kindness meditation regularly over three months. People who do this experience increased mindfulness and resilience and better health and relationships.
Catalino distinguishes between two different ways to pursue happiness: by striving to feel good all the time, or by striving to have more positive experiences ("prioritizing positivity"). People who prioritize positivity try to do more activities they enjoy - monitoring their schedule rather than their emotions. According to her study of more than 200 adults, people who prioritize positivity have more positive emotions. Let go of the constant need for happiness and instead try to organize your week and your life around positive activities.
Hedonic adaptation would suggest that we'll eventually adapt to any positive thing that happens in our life.
Although hedonic adaptation is clearly real, we fail to predict how much and how quickly we'll adapt to positive and negative circumstances. We fear breakups, even though people who have experienced them bounce back; we pursue wealth, when (after a certain amount) it doesn't give us a boost. We buy things, when material purchases actually decrease our satisfaction.
Money makes us happier - but only up to a certain point.
Exercise is a source of happiness.
Very happy people have rich relationships and spend little time alone, talking with friends is one of the happiest activities, and sex and socializing give us a lot of positive emotion.
Social connections were a better predictor than academic performance for future happiness. Social connections give us support during challenges in life, help us see our strengths, and provide meaning.
People who are securely attached are loving, warm, and trusting. People who are anxiously attached never feel close enough or loved enough. People who are avoidantly attached avoid closeness, remaining aloof and distant. Anxious and avoidant attachment styles are considered "insecure" and we can combat them in the short term by simply thinking about positive relationships we've had, or in the long term by cultivating a relationship with someone who has a secure style.
Our attachment style, shaped by our early childhood experiences, affects how oxytocin is released and used in the brain. In comparison to securely attached people, anxiously attached people have a greater amygdala response to negative feedback and avoidantly attached people have a lesser response to positive feedback. In other words, insecure attachments increase the sting of criticism and dampen the thrill of praise.
Sometimes psychologists talk about a fourth style of attachment: fearful-avoidant, where we want to be close but are afraid of being hurt.
To overcome our insecure attachment, we should understand our personal style and search for knowledge in how it affects our life. If we're in a relationship, we should make sure our partner is securely attached or consider couples therapy if they aren't, and practice communicating better. Any movement toward secure attachment has beneficial side effects, including more generosity, altruism, and compassion.
The vagus nerve is a mammalian nerve that starts at the top of our spinal cord and runs downward through the neck muscles we use to nod, make eye contact, and speak. It has connections to many key physical functions, including our oxytocin networks, immune response, and inflammation response. It also coordinates the interaction between our breathing and heart rate and controls many digestive processes. Activity in the vagus nerve is related to feelings of connection and care, so it activates in response to emotions – responding strongly to empathy and weakly to emotions like pride. People with lots of vagal activity show more positive emotion, stronger relationships and more social support, and more altruism.
Oxytocin is a neuropeptide, a sequence of amino acids that affects the brain and organs. It is increased by touch, and people with a particular gene on their third chromosome produce more oxytocin. When you give a whiff of oxytocin to people, we show more trust, generosity, empathy, and ability to read emotions. In fact, giving a father oxytocin will cause his baby to show increased oxytocin. Giving oxytocin to non-human species increases monogamy and caregiving.
In general, more oxytocin correlates with a reduced stress response in our hormones, cardiovascular system, and amygdala. On the positive side, it correlates with secure attachment and peaceful conflict resolution in romantic relationships.
Oxytocin, produced by mothers during childbirth and breastfeeding, is widely known as the feel-good hormone. Yet there is a flipside to oxytocin: while it attaches us to some people, it also makes us exclude others.
Hyped up on oxytocin, we are loyal to our lovers and leery of other potential partners. We're transformed into poor winners and sore losers; oxytocin courses through us when we feel envy during a game or taunt other players – anytime we want something from someone else. Deprived of oxytocin, we're more apt to forget negative social encounters, so cruel people can "fool us twice".
Oxytocin promotes cooperation, to the extreme – boosting our oxytocin levels makes us more likely to follow group decisions instead of thinking for ourselves. According to some studies, it also makes us favor our own group and see it as better than others.
Thankfully, however, we don't need to be afraid of sci-fi dictators pumping us with oxytocin. Although it makes us more trusting, we'll still have doubts and hesitation if the person we're dealing with or the message they're promoting doesn't seem quite right.
Touch can be used to communicate emotion – in one study, even a one-second touch on the arm could communicate emotions. Touching someone creates feelings of reward, reciprocity, safety, soothing, and cooperation. In certain situations, the touch from a romantic partner is powerful enough to eliminate our stress response.
Many babies died in orphanages before caretakers started holding and touching them.
Touch therapy is being used in health care and education. It has (almost miraculously) been shown to increase weight gain in premature babies, reduce depression in Alzheimer's patients, make students more likely to speak up, and decrease mortality in patients with complex diseases.
One practice that's been shown to increase happiness is active listening. Have a conversation with someone you're close to, and ask them to share what's on their mind. As they're talking, show attentive body language and don't get distracted or interrupt them. Make sure you understand by paraphrasing what they're saying and asking questions. Try to be empathetic and accepting.
Love behaviors, but not desire behaviors, coincide with the release of oxytocin.
Waiting with becoming a parent until one is mature and securely attached is a good idea.
Friendship and connection have health benefits, activating oxytocin, combatting stress, and even increasing lifespan.
We should look for niche groups online and deliberately try to offer our help to others.
Friends provide us with deeper benefits, including a sense of belonging, visibility, and a chance to express empathy. The main dangers of friendship are jealousy and dependence: we may become discouraged or bitter about our friends' successes, or rely on them too much for approval and self-esteem. The best way to handle these is to remember that we want our friends to be happy – don't we? – and to realize that their success benefits us, too.
A danger is to rely on a lover too much, creating unrealistic expectations or dependence. The remedy is to remember to keep cultivating friendships as well.
To become more egalitarian, we should deliberately expose ourselves to and cultivate friendships with people outside our in-group.
There are two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Affective empathy may be facilitated by mirror neurons, which are motor neurons that fire even when we're just watching other people move. Cognitive empathy refers to a thought – the ability to understand how people feel and to see things from their perspective. Cognitive empathy involves broader parts of the brain.
Empathic concern can make us happier, as long as it doesn't turn into empathic distress (the kind of paralyzing feeling when we become overwhelmed by others' suffering). In general, empathy increases the sharing of positive emotions and brings people closer together.
Empathy is useful from an evolutionary perspective because it encourages us to care for our young and work cooperatively in groups.
We can cultivate empathy by learning and thinking more about the lives of other people. Try having conversations with strangers and being genuinely curious about how they live. In fact, in any conversation, make it your goal to understand how the other person is feeling and to express your own feelings. Challenge yourself to discard prejudices and get to know individuals. Literally walk in someone else's shoes and live a day in their life.
To take your empathy to the next level, draw on your fellow human beings' empathy and lead a movement to provide aid or reduce discrimination. Go so far as to empathize with your opponents in order to figure out how to speak to them and change their minds.
Pro-social behaviors and emotions are directed at improving the well-being of others. Kindness makes us happier: it literally activates the brain's reward circuitry and strengthens our social connections. We're happier when we spend money on others vs. on ourself, for example, and people who volunteer are more satisfied with life and in better health.
Compassion is the feeling of witnessing someone suffering and wanting to help them. That desire to help distinguishes compassion from empathy and from mimicry.
Compassion calms our autonomic nervous system, slowing our heart rate, and can kick off a virtuous circle where compassion stimulates oxytocin that encourages more compassionate behavior. When we actually reach out and help others, we have activity in the brain's reward/pleasure centers (like the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate).
We're hardwired to express compassion through facial expressions and touch. When we feel compassion, we display a concerned gaze and oblique eyebrows.
Compared to negative emotions, positive emotions are less genetic and more influenced by our environment. So parents can try to raise compassionate children by helping them develop a secure attachment style, parenting with reasoning rather than power, and modeling compassion themselves.
Compassion has three stages, beginning with empathy. After experiencing the emotions of others or understanding their perspective, we start to have other feelings. We might feel caring, distressed, or even annoyed. In the third stage, we form judgments about ourselves, the sufferers, and the environment that help us decide how to act.
Compassion makes us happier by many pathways. It creates empathy, improving our social connections and making us feel more similar to others (particularly vulnerable people). It teaches us to manage distress: we learn to sit with others' pain and channel it in a positive direction toward caregiving. Compassionate people also see themselves as more capable and self-efficacious, characteristics that are associated with happiness and resilience.
In the body, compassion has a number of physiological effects. It activates empathic and caregiving circuitry in the brain. It makes us happier by increasing vagal nerve activity and boosting the reward/pleasure response we get from helping others. It also has lasting stress-reduction effects, lowering stress response and amygdala activity when we're confronted with challenging situations.
Many studies have linked kindness to happiness and health. People who volunteer live longer, and elderly people who care for others are less likely to die over a certain period of time.
If we enroll in a two-month program in loving-kindness meditation, we'll see an increase in our daily positive emotions.
Observers rated the toddler as happier when giving away one of their treats to the monkey than giving away a treat the experimenter found or even getting a treat. This suggests that kindness is innately pleasurable.
Research suggests that the way to raise kind children is not necessarily to reward them for kindness, which makes them see themselves as doing kind acts for the reward. Instead, parents should help kids cultivate an internal motivation to be kind.
Doing five acts of kindness in a day makes us more happy than doing five acts of kindness over a week.
Kindness changes the way we see ourselves: we become pillars of generosity, interconnected to those around us. We start giving people the benefit of the doubt and feel less distressed when we see suffering, because we're doing our little part to help. Kindness also helps us make more friends and become the recipient of others' kindnesses.
One survey of 10,000 people from 37 countries found that good character/kindness was the most important trait that attracted people to long-term partners.
Further evidence that kindness is innate can be found in our instinctual reactions. When you force people to decide in 10 seconds or less how much to give, they give more than when they have extra time to think about it – suggesting that we have generous intuitions. Even 18-month-old children, who are relatively unburdened by social norms, show strong tendencies to help others.
Various studies have shown that we find people more physically attractive if we also see them as likable, familiar, respected, or intelligent - and our evaluations of their attractiveness can change as we get to know them better.
Do five kind things in a day.
Our environment can have a big effect on whether we decide to help others or not. If we're busy, we've been playing too many violent video games, or the sufferer is outside our group, we're less likely to help. We're also discouraged from lending a hand when it doesn't seem possible or our contribution doesn't seem to matter, such as when lots and lots of people are in need.
We can prevent the collapse of compassion by assuring participants they're not expected to donate money or by instructing them to fully experience their emotions.
To increase compassion outside the lab, our job is to help people accept their compassionate emotions and not feel overwhelmed by them. We can do that by making helping easy – like sending a text message to donate – and making clear the impact of that help. Compassion training can also reduce our empathic distress and fear of compassion, and promote helping.
Helpers should be aware of what the recipients need, rather than imposing their views on what would help. And helping can be incredibly rewarding when we see people transformed from a state of suffering to happiness and gratitude.
Kindness is contagious – it can spread three degrees in a social network to a third person we don't know at all. Seeing people be kind or generous makes us more kind or generous.
Although heroes are often seen as solitary, heroism actually works best when we organize networks of people.
Surviving a disaster or trauma makes us three times more likely to be a hero.
Experiments like the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies have shown that, in a particular environment, people adopt the dehumanizing and cruel behavior that is expected of them.
A hero is someone on a quest – they're out to save lives or preserve some noble ideal (such as justice). They expect to risk their lives or their social standing.
What makes a hero? The same situations that bring out evil also tend to bring out heroism, like the Holocaust. Heroes have certain traits of character, like internal strength and self-assurance – they're willing to stand against the crowd. Often, they have a strong sense of morality that prevents them from doing nothing in the face of injustice.
We should cultivate stories of heroism and spread them through media. We should be on the alert for opportunities for heroism and avoid talking ourselves out of it by rationalizing why we can't help or fearing the negative consequences. We have to believe that heroism is the right choice, and it will ultimately be recognized and celebrated.
It make sense that we evolved to be cooperative because of its benefits for groups and for individuals. Even today, neighborhoods with more social cohesion and cooperation (called "collective efficacy") have better child health and life expectancies, greater high school graduation rates, and less social disorder. In contrast, non-cooperative or "Machiavellian" people feel more isolated, more stressed, and less happy. And when we look at our primate relatives, we see that they in fact are quite cooperative.
While an individual can get the best outcome by defecting when their partner cooperates, this strategy obviously wouldn't work if everyone used it. Ideally, everyone would cooperate and achieve the greatest collective good. On the individual level, the best strategy is called "tit for tat": we start cooperative then mirror our partner's actions.
Cooperation is not just part of human nature, but also animal nature and nature itself. Multicellular organism are simply cells cooperating. Ants coordinate their route in and out of the nest to avoid traffic jams. Big fish let little fish clean out their mouths in exchange for a snack. Birds gang up to protect each other from predators – but only if the bird in danger has come to their aid before. Four out of five bats would die if they didn't share food, which they do – as long as the other bats share with them. All these behaviors should inspire us to nurture our own cooperative natures.
Cooperation activates our reward-processing and pleasure centers.
Peaceful species tend to have more abundant food supplies, less sex differentiation, monogamy, and shared parental responsibilities.
A violent baboon will learn to be more peaceful in just an hour if we drop it among peaceful baboons. If we raise two groups together, naturally violent macaques become reconciliatory and stay reconciliatory even if we put them back with their own group. A group of baboons that lost its most aggressive males developed a more peaceful culture, which persisted even when the males left and other males arrived.
What does that mean for humans? We've evolved to be cooperative but very wary of outsiders, but that doesn't mean we can't change. Our amygdala may naturally activate when we see people of other races, but we can stop that by regularly spending time with other races or striving to see people as individuals.
When we're embarrassed, we turn our heads down and to the side, exposing our vulnerable necks and showing weakness and humility in a way similar to animal gestures of appeasement. That movement breaks our eye contact with the other(s) and serves to cut off the previous interaction and start a new one.
Research has shown that apologies increase psychological health and positive emotion in victims, while decreasing negative emotions. They also benefit the apologizer, who similarly sees an increase in psychological health.
An effective apology has four components:
This kind of apology satisfies the victim's psychological needs for dignity, shared values, and an opportunity to express their feelings.
The step where apologies often break down is in acknowledging the offense, because the offender doesn't get specific enough. But if done right, apologies make it easier for the victim to forgive. Victims may even accept some blame and end up closer to the offender. When an apology isn't forthcoming, it might still make sense to forgive – which is different from reconciling – because of the benefits for the forgiver.
Forgiveness doesn't mean condoning or forgetting; rather, it involves accepting negative emotions like betrayal, anger, grief, or fear. It doesn't minimize the offense, and we may still resolve to never suffer the same way again. It's something we do for ourselves, so it may not even involve contact with the offender.
If we're in a place with crime, disorder, and no rule of law, we're more likely to be vengeful. But if our environment has stable judicial institutions and norms of reconciliation and cooperation, we're more likely to be forgiving. We can also transmit forgiveness through cultural vehicles like religion, the arts, media, and politics.
Forgiveness occurs when we are able to accept what happened, reduce our desire for revenge, avoid the offender less, and feel more compassion for them. It's not reconciliation for the sake of reconciliation or taking away responsibility from the offender; in fact, it can be something we do for our own well-being. Forgiveness is linked to more life satisfaction, more positive emotions, less negative emotions, less physical symptoms of illness, and less fight-or-flight response. Couples who forgive are happier as many as 9 weeks later.
Forgiveness is good for our health and relationships. It correlates with happier and more committed relationships. When they don't forgive, partners can become competitive and start to "keep score", which is extremely detrimental to the relationship.
Forgiveness can reduce stress, anger, depression, and hurt while increasing optimism, hope, compassion, and vitality.
Robert Enright detailed eight steps to forgiveness, beginning by making a list of people who hurt you who are worth forgiving. Then, you start with the least painful offense and take some time to think about how you suffered and how that makes you feel. When you've decided to forgive, you can start to think about the circumstances that led to the offense, including the offender's childhood, past hurts, and other pressures they were under. Pay attention to whether you feel kinder toward the offender and consider giving them a small gift. In the end, you can reframe the experience and try to find meaning and purpose in what happened.
Touch is a gateway to trust, with its ability to soothe and activate reward circuitry in the brain. The simple handshake when we meet someone is a gesture of trust.
Trustworthiness is a most desirable quality in a romantic partner, and it encompasses qualities like dependability and honesty.
While it's critical in relationships, trust is also important on a global scale. Regions of the world with low trust have lower voting rates, less active parents/schools, less philanthropy, more crime, lower longevity, worse health, worse academic performance, and more inequality.
Updated on 2020-07-22.