The determinants of a happy life: the foundations

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:

1. 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.

2. 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. 

3. 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.

4. 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.

Neuroscience and Wellbeing

Despite there being strong evidence that subjective wellbeing measures produce statistically significant and often highly informative results, due to their subjective nature there will always be some scepticism surrounding them. In order to help prove the doubters wrong, and to understand wellbeing better, neuroscientists and psychologists have started to investigate the relationship between our functional neuroanatomy and our sense of wellbeing.  

In this article we aim to give an up to date view of our current understanding on this topic. We start by mapping out the key sections of the brain, then discuss some key concepts and finally we finish off outlining some of the most interesting findings in the literature. To put into perspective how cool the brain is – it’s a bundle of cells, like all the other organs in the body, but it’s a bundle of cells that has sent man to the moon, performed awake operations on other brains, re-engineered genes and created Jay-Z’s Black Album (Elliot’s favourite). Let’s go on a tour of these cells. Although there are well accepted areas of the brain that control certain things, it is important to note that these are not hard and fast. . Each brain is unique, like our hands and faces, meaning that our mappings of abilities within and on the surface of the brain are not identical to one another.

The brain is made of two hemispheres, the left and the right. Generally speaking, the left cerebral hemisphere controls the right of the body and the right controls the left. We split these two hemispheres into four ‘lobes’ according to their unique functions: frontal, temporal, parietal and occipital. The frontal is sometimes referred as the ‘human’ part of the brain, as it helps us to read emotions, solve problems, plan, memorise, make judgements, inhibit sexual behaviours and order our language. The temporal lobe is one of Jess’s favourites. Here we process sounds, which are turned into electrical signals, read by the brain through the cochlear.

The parietal lobe holds the ‘sensory strip’, neighbouring the motor strip but instead giving the brain feedback about sensation. It also processes and conceptualises visual information, language and importantly mathematics. Finally, the occipital lobe. Here visual information is processed and understood correctly. Damage here may cause people to neglect half of their vision, such as reading one half of a word, or not knowing where a sentence finishes on a page.

There are also a few parts of the brain that we are most interested in for happiness research. Firstly, the connection between the Amygdala and the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which is the brain circuit that is relevant for emotion regulation. Raw emotions are triggered from the Amygdala and are often done so sub-consciously. Our conscious experience is more linked to our frontal lobes than the deeper parts of our brains. Typical neuroscience studies involve putting electrodes all over the scalp and reading the electrical activity. These measurements are then related to the feelings people report. Positive emotions lead to more activity in the left front side of the brain and negative emotions lead to more activity in the right front side of the brain.

Before we move onto the literature, here are a couple of key concepts that come up a lot in these papers. The first is ‘neuroplasticity’, also known as brain plasticity and it is defined as the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or following injury. The second is “epigenetics” – the literal meaning for this is ‘above genetics’ – as it does not refer to a change in a person’s DNA but rather how much or whether some genes are expressed in different cells in your body. Over the course of a person’s life recent research has shown that epigenetics change based on a person’s experiences or life choices, for example by eating a bad diet or choosing to smoke. These concepts are important for wellbeing research because they show that through our own actions we can produce objective results on our mind and body.

We have split the research findings into four topic areas below:

1. Resilience: by resilience we mean the ability to improve mood and emotion regulation. A paper by Kral et al (2018) found that the more experience an individual has in meditating, the stronger was the connection between the Amygdala and the MPFC. As such, the reactions from these individuals to extreme positive and negative stimuli were much smaller than the control group, who had little or no meditating experience. 

2. Attentiveness: An interesting paper was written in 2010, titled “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind”. They developed an app to create an extremely large database of real-time reports of thoughts, feelings and actions of a broad range of people as they went about their daily lives. There were three main findings. First, people’s minds wander frequently, regardless of what they are doing. Mind wandering occurred in 46.9% of the samples and in at least 30% of the time during every activity except making love (individuals had 22 activities to choose from on the app). Second, people are less happy when their minds are wandering than when they are not. And third, what people were thinking about was a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing at the time. This evidence is supported by neuroscience research, for example, Lutz et al (2009) shows that mental training can significantly affect attention and brain control.

3. Connection: the ability to understand emotional experiences of others, empathy, is an important skill for effective social interactions and helps to develop deeper personal relationships. An extremely interesting and unique study was completed last year to test how training empathy in adolescents impacts their brain circuits. The authors of the paper created their own video game (not joking), called Crystals of Kaydor and investigated whether playing the game increased empathic accuracy and related brain activation in adolescents. The authors found that connectivity in empathy-related brain circuits was stronger after gameplay and that the training produced behaviourally-relevant, functional neural changes in the brain. 

4. Purpose: Boyle et al. (2009) used data for 1238 older persons and found that a greater purpose in life is associated with a reduced risk of mortality, holding all else constant. They used life evaluation surveys over a 5-year period and controlled for a large number of variables that will have also impacted the result. Shaefer et al. (2013), found that purpose in life can predict a better recovery from negative stimuli. Greater purpose, assessed over two years prior, predicted better recovery from negative stimuli indexed by a smaller eyeblink after negative pictures offset.

For more detail on neuroscience and wellbeing, please click on the link below or check out the video above.