This month’s article is the first half of a two-part study into the determinants of what makes a happy life. This is all part of a broader piece of work we are doing at Exploring Happiness, but all will be revealed with respect to this in good time. This article focuses on building some foundations for thinking about this topic, which are vital for understanding what will follow, as we aim to construct a framework for assessing how happy our lives are. To simply say that it’s complicated would be a cop out but there certainly isn’t a ‘one-size fits all’ approach to solving this problem. We are all different and we will outline in this article how our differences shape our happiness.
In next month’s article we will turn to the evidence currently available related to key components of our lives and how important they are in determining our happiness. The results in this paper will typically be averages based on large sample studies and therefore each result will have distribution of responses around this average. For example, a result may say: an increase in your income of 50% leads to an increase in your happiness on a scale of 0-100, of 10% on average. Of course, it is not 10% for everyone, this is just the average across all the people in the sample. In this month’s article we are focusing on understanding more about this distribution, since it is this that shows how we differ. We cover four main topic areas which we have summarised below:
Attentiveness: At Exploring Happiness we subscribe to the view that your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you think about, tends to drive how you behave. And this in turn, determines your happiness. Using this logic, you can conclude that you will be happiest when you can allocate you attention as best you can. This theory stipulates that the same life event can happen to two very similar people and the effect on their happiness can differ depending on how much attention each individual allocates to this event.
Preferences: Each one of us has their own likes and dislikes and it is this, that at least in part, determines how we choose to allocate our attention. Therefore, if it is our allocation of attention that determines our happiness, then we need to think about how our different preferences towards things determines how we allocate our attention. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems with this. Firstly, our attention isn’t always allocated consciously, often we find ourselves thinking about things entirely subconsciously and this may or may not be consistent with our true preferences. And secondly, often we don’t actually know what our true preferences are, and in actual fact, we may be allocating our attention towards our dislikes rather than our likes in some cases. So, this makes the whole situation a little murkier and more complicated ‒ such is life.
Track your happiness: So, we know what the goal is: we want to best understand our preferences towards different elements of our life so then we can make well-informed decisions about how to allocate our attention. Therefore, we have created the following spreadsheet that you can download: here. The spreadsheet that allows you to track how you feel on a daily basis. Give yourself a score from 0-100 each day, and then answer a range of different questions we have provided for you to ask yourself each day so you can start to build a daily log of what you did that day (whether you socialised, exercised, chilled out or studied etc.). Don’t feel that you only have to stick to answering the questions we have provided in the spreadsheet, add some of your own questions that you think might be more relevant to your own circumstances. The aim is that you understand your preferences towards things a little better and therefore you can look to allocate your attention in a way that is consistent with this.
Balancing different forms of happy lives: Before leaving you to get stuck into this new tool that we hope will be your ticket to a happier life we want to briefly touch on the different forms of happy lives. This should hopefully help you to understand that we can all lead equally happy lives but in completely different ways. There are many different theories on this topic, positive psychologist ‒ Martin Seligman, is one of the most famous with his views on the ‘good life, the pleasant life and the meaningful life’. The ‘pleasant life’ is one full of positive emotions and raw feelings. The ‘good life’ is related to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s famous psychological concept of ‘flow’. A person that is capable of engaging in ‘flow’ regularly is one that participates often in activities that require the perfect balance between a high level of skill and a high level of challenge. Professional athletes are one of the best examples of people that are highly capable of ‘flow’. This feeling can increase your happiness rapidly and is a very different form of pleasure since during ‘flow’ you don’t feel anything because you are entirely absorbed in what you are doing. Finally, the ‘meaningful life’ relates to contributing towards something that is bigger than yourself. Using your strengths and skills to benefit others is a good example of this.
Consider the different forms of happy lives as you track your daily happiness, for most people it’s about managing the trade-offs to gauge the right balance. And to add a final spanner in the works before we finish, we should mention that your preferences will change over time. This will mean as you start to make more informed decisions based upon a better understanding of your likes and dislikes, you will need to ensure that these choices remain consistent with your current objectives as your circumstances change. Good luck.