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Lo dice la ciencia: estos son los 5 hábitos para ser más feliz

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Your Happiness Calendar for January 2024

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The World No.1 Happiness Expert: Single Friends Will Keep You Single & Obesity Is Contagious!

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What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness | Robert Waldinger | TED

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Misperceptions abound when it comes to what we think will make us happy. People often believe that happiness will be achieved once they reach a certain milestone, such as finding the perfect partner or landing a particular salary.

Humans, however, are excellent at adapting to new circumstances, which means that people will habituate to their new relationship or wealth, return to a baseline level of happiness, and seek out the next milestone. Fortunately, the same principle applies to setbacks-we are resilient and will most likely find happiness again.

Regarding finances specifically, research shows that the sweet spot for yearly income is between $60,000 and $95,000 a year, not a million-dollar salary. Earnings above $95,000 do not equate to increased well-being; a person earning $150,000 a year will not necessarily be as happy as a person earning a lot less.

The type of thoughts below exemplify these misconceptions about happiness:

"I'll be happy when I'm rich and successful."

"I'll be happy when I'm married to the right person."

"Landing my dream job will make me happy."

"I can't be happy when my relationship has fallen apart."

"I will never recover from this diagnosis."

"The best years of my life are over."

For more, see The Science of Happiness.

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Happiness is an electrifying and elusive state. Philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and even economists have long sought to define it. And since the 1990s, a whole branch of psychology-positive psychology-has been dedicated to pinning it down. More than simply positive mood, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life, one with a sense of meaning and deep contentment.

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There's a Specific Kind of Joy We've Been Missing

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There's a Specific Kind of Joy We've Been Missing

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Credit... Linda Merad

Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton focused on how people find motivation and meaning in daily life.

In late June, over 15,000 vaccinated people packed in to watch the Foo Fighters reopen Madison Square Garden. When the band brought the comedian Dave Chappelle onstage to sing the Radiohead song "Creep," the audience erupted in the closest thing I've seen to rapture in a solid year and a half.

No one cared that Mr. Chappelle was off key. They were all participating in an experience that was unimaginable just months earlier. One day they'll tell their grandchildren about that night, when New York City came back to life and their favorite band performed another band's song, and they tried to carry a tune with a legendary comic doing lead vocals.

Most people view emotions as existing primarily or even exclusively in their heads. Happiness is considered a state of mind; melancholy is a potential warning sign of mental illness. But the reality is that emotions are inherently social: They're woven through our interactions.

Research has found that people laugh five times as often when they're with others as when they're alone. Even exchanging pleasantries with a stranger on a train is enough to spark joy. That's not to say you can't find delight in watching a show on Netflix. The problem is that bingeing is an individual pastime. Peak happiness lies mostly in collective activity.

We find our greatest bliss in moments of collective effervescence. It's a concept coined in the early 20th century by the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim to describe the sense of energy and harmony people feel when they come together in a group around a shared purpose. Collective effervescence is the synchrony you feel when you slide into rhythm with strangers on a dance floor, colleagues in a brainstorming session, cousins at a religious service or teammates on a soccer field. And during this pandemic, it's been largely absent from our lives.

Collective effervescence happens when joie de vivre spreads through a group. Before Covid, research showed that more than three-quarters of people found collective effervescence at least once a week and almost a third experienced it at least once a day. They felt it when they sang in choruses and ran in races, and in quieter moments of connection at coffee shops and in yoga classes.

But as lockdowns and social distancing became the norm, there were fewer and fewer of these moments. I started watching stand-up comedy specials, hoping to get a taste of collective effervescence while laughing along with the people in the room. It was fine, but it wasn't the same.

Instead, many of us found ourselves drawn into a dark cloud.

Emotions are like contagious diseases: They can spread from person to person. "Emotional contagion is when we are literally infected with other people's emotions," my colleague Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor and a leading researcher on the topic, has explained. "In almost all of our studies, what we have found is that people don't realize it's happening."

When the pandemic began in 2020, the first negative emotion to spread was fear. Waves of panic crashed through communities, compelling people to purify packages and hoard hand sanitizer. As too many people lost loved ones, too many others lost jobs and everyone lost some semblance of normal life. The number of adults with symptoms of depression or anxiety spiked from one in 10 Americans to about four in 10.

And there's reason to believe these symptoms haven't been caused only by the crisis itself - they've actually been transferred from person to person. Studies show that if your spouse, your family member or your roommate develops depression, you're at heightened risk for it. And contagion isn't limited to face-to-face interaction: Emotions can spread through social media posts and text messages, too.

Emotional contagion can in part explain so-called Zoom fatigue, a phenomenon that has mostly been attributed to sitting still, staring at oversize virtual heads, feeling self-conscious at seeing your own reflection and juggling the cognitive load of reading glitchy facial expressions. The science of contagion suggests that the negative emotions we feel from video-call overuse could be partially driven by hours of communicating with people who are also sad, stressed, lonely or tired. (How to survive a Zoombie apocalypse: Avoid eye contact at all costs.)

When it first became clear that people would be encouraged to stay at home and avoid large crowds, a joke circulated in which introverts declared, "I've been preparing for this moment my entire life." But the data tell a different story: During the pandemic, it's generally been introverts, not extroverts, who have reported more depression, anxiety, stress and loneliness. Extroverts may seek more connection, but introverts need it as well - they are also energized by social interaction. In isolation, many introverts may have been surprised to feel forlorn. They were missing collective effervescence, too.

This spring, I wrote an article about languishing - the stagnation and ennui between the valley of depression and the peak of flourishing. I've never seen people so enthusiastic about discussing their lack of enthusiasm. One poignant response came from a woman who owns a bakery in Chicago, who shared with me that she missed the hours she used to spend absorbed in baking bread. Maybe it wasn't just about finding flow in an individual task. Could she also have missed the collective effervescence of baking with and for others?

When Émile Durkheim first wrote about collective effervescence, in 1912, it was the eve of World War I and six years before the Spanish flu began its deadly spread. But the Roaring Twenties brought it back in full force. People sang and danced together and watched and played sports together. They didn't just find collective effervescence in the shallow fun of frivolous activities; they also forged it in the deep fun of creating together and solving problems together. That decade brought an explosion of popular art like jazz and talking films, recreation like water skiing and medical advancements like insulin.

As some countries start to reopen, collective effervescence will happen naturally - and it already is. There will be fewer Zoombies roaming the internet in their pajama bottoms, reaching out listlessly through their computer screens. Some of us have already started feeling the thrill of creative collisions at work and the rush of a real vacation. But getting out of the house doesn't guarantee that we'll pursue happiness the best way.

Psychologists find that in cultures where people pursue happiness individually, they may actually become lonelier. But in cultures where they pursue happiness socially - through connecting, caring and contributing - people appear to be more likely to gain well-being.

The return to normalcy in the United States, or something like it, is a time to rethink our understanding of mental health and well-being. We should think of flourishing less as personal euphoria and more as collective effervescence. Happiness lives in the kinds of moments that we celebrated in the early days of Covid, when people found solidarity singing together out their windows in Italy, using dish soap to turn their kitchen floors into treadmills in Brazil, and clapping and banging pots with spoons to honor essential workers around the world. It was reborn in New York City when more than 15,000 strangers heard Dave Chappelle sing, "I don't belong here," and they all felt they belonged there.

The Declaration of Independence promised Americans unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. If we want that pursuit to bring us bliss, it may be time to create a Declaration of Interdependence. You can feel depressed and anxious alone, but it's rare to laugh alone or love alone. Joy shared is joy sustained.

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Opinion | There's a Specific Kind of Joy We've Been Missing

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Dr. Grant is an organizational psychologist at Wharton focused on how people find motivation and meaning in daily life. In late June, over 15,000 vaccinated people packed in to watch the Foo Fighters reopen Madison Square Garden.

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When the Pursuit of Happiness Turns Toxic

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When the Pursuit of Happiness Turns Toxic

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In Homer's "Odyssey," Odysseus finds himself having to navigate a ship down a strait that sits between two sea monsters: Scylla, a six-headed carnivore perched on the cliffs who likes to snap up sailors in her jaws, and Charybdis, a whirlpool that can easily suck an entire boat and crew down to unsurvivable depths. Years of watching the evolution of positive psychology - in articles, books, and, most impactfully, social media posts - have left me wondering whether Americans are destined to approach happiness as a similarly precarious, if not entirely impossible, tightrope walk.

Positive psychology is a branch of the study of the human mind and behavior that focuses on positive emotion, traits, experience, and institutions. It tends to be about optimism and resilience in the face of life's challenges. Just listen to Andrea Bonior, Ph.D.

"[W]hen we invite negative (or dysfunctional) thoughts to hang around, we empower them," she writes in " Detox Your Thoughts: Quit Negative Self-Talk for Good and Discover the Life You've Always Wanted." Her book is one piece of the $10.4 billion self-improvement market that has made happiness and positivity "both a goal and an obligation," according to Whitney Goodman.

Goodman isn't the first to write a book on toxic positivity, usually defined as an obsession with maintaining a positive mindset, but hers, " Toxic Positivity: Keeping It Real in a World Obsessed with Being Happy," represents the culmination of years spent advocating against it via her influential Instagram account @sitwithwhit.
The basics of toxic positivity
Some believe positive psychology can be boiled down to a fake-it-'til-you-make-it style of rebranding. "Our obsession with positivity is all around us," Goodman writes: "Struggles are now 'opportunities.' Triggers are 'teachers.' Grief is now 'love with nowhere to go.' Weaknesses are actually 'emerging strengths.'"

Bonior's book would seem to exemplify this thinking. She encourages readers to "channel your uncomfortable feelings into something progressive or creative." When faced with "embarassments, setbacks, emotions that feel like weaknesses, and incidents we wish we could do over," she suggests asking oneself, "How can you turn those into something that matters in a positive way?" and "If you pretended this feeling was a teacher, what would its lesson be?"

"Our obsession with positivity is all around us," Goodman writes: "Struggles are now 'opportunities.' Triggers are 'teachers.' Grief is now 'love with nowhere to go.' Weaknesses are actually 'emerging strengths.'"

Her book is all about how to keep negative thoughts from becoming "sticky," and thus interfering with our work, moods, and relationships. Bonior offers powerful, research-backed tools like self-distancing ("I'm not a good enough mother" becomes "I'm having the thought that I'm not a good enough mother"), mindfulness, reinterpreting and reframing, visualization ("Are the thoughts big, dark, hot clouds like smoke?"), meditation, and more. "[I]t's not the presence of our thoughts we need to change," she says, "It's how we view them." After all, two people waiting in line for a roller coaster, one excited and one terrified, experience the same physiological sensations; the only difference is "what story you tell yourself about them."

Bonior wants us to know we are in charge of such things. "Summon the courage to release the thoughts that are redundant, dysfunctional, exaggerated, or unduly catastrophic," she writes: "If you choose to find meaning in your mistakes, then you get to decide what story your mistake tells you and what value it has."

This sort of messaging can frame wellness as something "promised to those who work for it, earn it, and deserve it," Goodman says, and "it feels like if we're not able to achieve this mindset, we must be doing something wrong, something must be wrong with us." Anxiety becomes a sign that "you're not focusing enough on the good." Gratitude is "a weapon of shame that we wield at ourselves and one another."
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Goodman sees people who are obsessed with their mental detox to the point of becoming "like orthorexia (an obsession with healthy eating), but for the mind."

There are more problems with fixating on positivity, according to Sara Ahmed, a self-described person of color from Australia with a philosopher's penchant for writing in circles (albeit circles that advance the conversation). In " The Promise of Happiness," she addresses pressure to be happy for the sake of others, and judgment of those who fail to do so, like divorcees.

The ideal of happiness has a history of being used to oppress, Ahmed argues. The image of "the happy housewife" has been used to justify an inequitable division of domestic labor and deny millions of women ambition, curiosity, and desire. The myth of the " happy slave" paved the way for continued violence and denial of humanity, and in its wake cruises the "angry Black woman" trope. The same pattern applies to colonization: It was justified as bringing modern sensibilities to unhappy natives and trailed by pressure on immigrants to bask in multiculturalism. Those who do not quickly and gratefully assimilate are labeled "melancholic migrants." They - like Nikole Hannah-Jones and "feminist killjoys" - are accused of sabotaging the happiness of others with their consciousness of injustice. Happiness can be problematic for the LGBTQ+ community as well. The most common vision of queer happiness, Ahmed writes, approximates the "domestic bliss" of heterosexuality. To prove that one deserves to have married and become a parent is to appear unfailingly content. And to prove that one deserves to be content is to marry and become a parent.

The face of happiness," she concludes, "looks rather like the face of privilege," which provides a full-circle moment given the word's derivation from the Middle English "hap," meaning lucky or fortunate. Combining the two authors' readings, toxic positivity is a myth of mental meritocracy that says we can experience perpetual happiness if only we work hard enough to toe the line.
The tightrope walk
Goodman is right, of course. Positivity can be toxic. But that doesn't make Bonior wrong. In fact, both therapists ultimately write the same prescription: Whether the diagnosis is perfectionism or regret or a need for affirmation, balance is the treatment. That, and avoiding a second layer of negativity, as Bonior puts it, "feeling bad about feeling bad."

She writes, "If you can make room for your negative feelings as well as your positive ones ... then you - quite ironically - can help them on their way."

Goodman agrees, but says, "Timing is everything.... [Y]ou have to allow yourself to experience the full breadth of the emotion and allow it to rise, peak, and then fall." Self-directed toxic positivity leads us to short-circuit this cycle. "It effectively says, 'Nope, that feeling you're experiencing, it's wrong and here's why you should be happy instead.'" She recommends taking the time to say, "I'm feeling (name) and I'm allowed to have this feeling."

When it comes to sharing our emotions, "we have to be careful and find the perfect balance between too much emotional expression and too little," Goodman says. Don't repress emotion. But also don't vent. Complain, because, she writes, "Complaints are how we let people know what we need and how to meet our needs." And don't assume having gripes means you're unappreciative or "can't handle it." That said, "when complaining becomes constant or circular, it's much less helpful." She ultimately offers eight guidelines for complaining effectively.

Combining the two authors' readings, toxic positivity is a myth of mental meritocracy that says we can experience perpetual happiness if only we work hard enough to toe the line.

When someone confides negative emotions in us, Goodman says, we have to avoid the phrase "at least" (e.g., "your marriage may have been abusive, but at least you wound up with two gorgeous kids!") and other attempts at perspective-lending that can leave "no more space for your emotions or your processing." She describes these efforts at what psychologists call "reappraisal" - and the rest of us call "finding silver linings" - as "being pulled into the land of positivity whether you were ready or not," and says, "It's the exact opposite of what we want to do when people are in pain." It can leave our friend feeling invalidated, their traumas minimized.

And yet, research suggests that just offering sympathy as someone recounts a negative experience may make them feel better temporarily, but it doesn't help them process. Facilitating as they reconstrue an event - by asking them to step in someone else's shoes or look at the big picture - does aid in discharging the underlying emotion. "At least" and other counterfactuals can make us feel better and improve performance, other research shows, even if that meaning-making process initially feels like a negation. Goodman defaults to, "Have I asked them how they like to be supported?" But that may give our loved ones what they want, not what they need. It's easy to err on one side or the other.

Gratitude gets the same treatment. Bonior says "counting your blessings" doesn't mean ignoring "the crappy stuff." Rather, "[g]ratitude is ... being attuned to the whole picture of your life." And that's essentially where Goodman lands too, via a cautionary tale. Before she understood toxic positivity, she'd say to herself, "I have so much to be thankful for, other people have it worse, and I should be happy." This forced thankfulness is unproductive, she says. And yet, Goodman acknowledges research showing that gratitude interventions like regularly journaling can improve well-being. "This makes sense.... If we focus solely on what we lack or what we don't have control over, it will only lead to feeling worse. The hard part is finding that balance." Both authors want us to, in Goodman's words, "make room for validation and gratitude at the same time."

Okay, got it: Complain, but don't do it the wrong way. Express emotion, but not like that. Embrace gratitude, but not too tightly. I find myself in a shiny leotard, high above the circus spectators, holding that pole and praying my toes keep finding rope.
Is positive psychology the answer to the problem with positive psychology?
Laurie Santos, a Yale professor and host of the popular podcast "The Happiness Lab," disseminates information like Bonior's. When anxious, she suggests in one issue of the Science of Wellbeing newsletter, "You can calm yourself with touch. Tenderly touch your stomach or your chest; hold your face; rub your hands; give yourself a hug." Or make your way through "a checklist of questions we can all use to interrogate an anxious thought." In an interview with the New York Times, she says, "Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy? ... Because it takes work! Because it's hard!"

Goodman, the critic, doesn't entirely disagree. In the most revealing segment of her book, she writes, "Toxic positivity is the advice we might technically want to integrate but are incapable of synthesizing at the moment." The fact that we can't is what "leaves us feeling silenced, judged, and misunderstood" or like we're not working hard enough to be positive enough (or to care less about being positive enough). There's circularity here, a definition that's both contingent and malleable: When we can swing coping mechanisms, they're healthy. When we can't, they're toxic. We don't know what we can manage until we try, but just the pressure to try can be toxic.

This was the point in my thinking where I had to call Lea Waters. Waters is a researcher and leader in the field of positive psychology. She likens academic psychology to a pendulum swing: for a century, it was fixated on what's wrong with us. Then, about 20 years ago, she and others pulled the pendulum back, saying, "we also need to know what's right with us." A decade later a new movement emerged, dubbed "Positive Psychology 2.0," which she sums up as a synthesis of the two sides of the pendulum: "It's yin and yang; we have to integrate both these things." For example, negative emotions like guilt and sadness can have positive outcomes by alerting us that something needs to change.
RELATED: Permanent happiness is a myth: Why you shouldn't want to always be happy
She understands the frustration of those who say, "All right, so now it's positive to be negative?" And she sees why Goodman says it can be negative to be positive: "When the science gets reported in self-help books and media blogs, it does become very one dimensional," Waters says. She totally gets that her field can unintentionally feed perfectionism and bootstrapping. And yet, she still recommends Aristotle's "golden mean," which she summarizes as "the right emotion or the right action for the right context in the right amount." In other words, the middle path, the tightrope walk, the threading of Scylla and Charybdis.

But she offers us a few ways out of this performance. Kind of. Sort of?

First, Waters recommends more trust in ourselves. Like Goodman, she draws a parallel to the physical health industry. "People say, 'Which one do you want me to do? Am I supposed to do high protein or am I supposed to do high fat?'" Just as experimentation helps you find the diet that works well for you, Waters says, finding that mental health middle path is about trial and error. She thinks folks run into trouble when they rely on solely one positive psychology tool.

"Forgiveness is a virtue, but if you are in a repeatedly harmful relationship and keep on forgiving, then forgiveness ends up harming you," she says. And you can't be mindful if you're constantly stressing over whether you're being mindful enough. "If we have a small number of things in our toolkit, and we kind of brittly use those things, that leads to toxic positivity," she says. So one answer is to gather more tools and use them more intentionally, which is ... more self-help via more positive psychology.

Her second approach to the problem she dubs, "permission to be human." Waters says she takes "time off from my well being journey ... to just have some days where I don't think, 'Okay, I can reframe that.'"

How do you step off the positivity treadmill? When you worry, "Oh, I didn't lean into anger," Waters says, "use the tool of self-kindness and self-compassion." She pauses for a moment. "So that's kind of an interesting irony, that it's a positive psychology tool that allows us to step away from that pressure."

Framing happiness as an individual duty is bad because it makes us turn a blind eye to social ills that may be the true source of our misery - and which aren't easily fixable through reframing.

There's a different kind of permission to be human, and it comes from Betty Friedan, among others. In "The Feminine Mystique," she holds up "aliveness" as an alternative goal to happiness. All of these folks touch on the two types of well being: hedonic and eudaimonic. Hedonic is that blissed out, in the moment, this-is-so-fun type of pleasure. Eudaimonic well-being is a deeper sort of contentment related to living a life of purpose, a life we believe in. Too many of us think we can muscle our way toward lasting joy through positivity, but Goodman says the very best lives feature only moments of bliss amid that eudaimonic sense of fulfillment. This knowledge, "makes room for the fact that living in accordance with our values doesn't always mean feeling happy or good."

Framing happiness as an individual duty is bad because it doesn't make that room, and also because it makes us turn a blind eye to social ills that may be the true source of our misery - and which aren't easily fixable through reframing. Ahmed quotes Audre Lorde: "Looking on the bright side of things is a euphemism used for obscuring certain realities of life, the open consideration of which might prove threatening or dangerous to the status quo."

Positivity might encourage us to be satisfied with injustice, but in other ways it makes us dissatisfied with our now, constantly striving for a better future. That's why Bonior stresses, "There is no point in life when we will suddenly 'arrive' at a place that is permanently easier, less stressful, or free of unexpected complications." That's just not what aliveness entails, Goodman agrees: "Distress, discomfort, and anxiety are all a guaranteed part of life."

Yet social media sells positivity and happiness the same way it sells a tiny waist paired with an apple bottom. Of her patient, Tory, Goodman writes: "[T]he world is determined to always make her feel like she's missing something so that they can sell her a product or get her to change. Tory has been sold the lie that there is this oasis of positivity and happiness on the other side of her self-improvement journey." But "there isn't this final happiness destination," Goodman says, "This is it." So accept that fact. Reframe with this lens. Embrace the messiness of being human.

That sounds a lot like more positive psychology work.

The most clarifying thing Waters says in our chat relates back to Goodman's assertion that positive psychology frames weaknesses as "emerging strengths." That's just not true, Waters balks: A strengths-based approach acknowledges the existence of true weaknesses and asks you to work on them only to the point where they no longer negatively impact your life.

My favorite example is handwriting. If you're just not great at it and don't have a passion for it, aim for legibility, not calligraphy. Waters recommends a similar approach to using these wellness tools: "It doesn't have to be another thing on your to-do list.... You do the hard work, and it gets you to the level where there's a kind of built-in momentum. So you don't even have to think of doing mindfulness. It's not a task or a chore, your brain will just kind of automatically do it."

My brain does not yet just kind of automatically do it.

Which brings us to a third kind of permission to be human. In times of crisis, Waters says, when everything is burning down, "I'm not using the foundational tools because I can't." She says she rises wiser and kinder, like a phoenix from the ashes: "Sometimes, you have to step out of your own way and just let the lessons of life sort of present themselves." Goodman's bottom line recommendation sounds similarly simple: "Seriously, eat the cookie. Watch the movie. Read the book. Not everything you do has to be about improving your health, your knowledge, your job, or your body."

Pretty much everything all of them they say makes sense. And yet, my leotard chafes as I feel the rope wobbling under my feet, my sights trained on the distance.
Read more from Gail Cornwall on parenting:

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The problem with positive psychology: When the pursuit of happiness turns toxic

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In Homer's "Odyssey," Odysseus finds himself having to navigate a ship down a strait that sits between two sea monsters: Scylla, a six-headed carnivore perched on the cliffs who likes to snap up sailors in her jaws, and Charybdis, a whirlpool that can easily suck an entire boat and crew down to unsurvivable depths.

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The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic

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The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic

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"How to Build a Life" is a new column that aims to give you the tools you need to construct a life that feels whole and meaningful.

Jan Buchczik

It seems strange to launch a column on happiness during a pandemic. The timing is, well, awkward, isn't it?

Maybe not. We're stuck at home; our lives on COVID time have slowed to a near halt. This creates all sorts of obvious inconveniences, of course. But in the involuntary quiet, many of us also sense an opportunity to think a little more deeply about life. In our go-go-go world, we rarely get the chance to stop and consider the big drivers of our happiness and our sense of purpose.

On second thought, maybe this is the perfect time to launch a column on happiness.

I teach a class at the Harvard Business School on happiness. It surprises some people when I tell them this-that a subject like happiness is taught alongside accounting, finance, and other, more traditional MBA fare. Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously said, "Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you." This is not exactly the stuff of business administration.

But if you imagine my students sitting outside in a circle (or in a virtual circle on videochat, these days) hoping to have a butterfly land on us, you're wrong. Here are a few of our topics: "Affect and the Limbic System," "The Neurobiology of Body Language," "Homeostasis and the Persistence of Subjective Well-Being," "Oxytocin and Love," "Acquisition Centrality and Negative Affect," and "The Hedonic Treadmill."

The scientific study of happiness has exploded over the past three decades. The Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (both at Princeton University) publish extensively on the subject. The University of Pennsylvania has a whole graduate-degree program in positive psychology, led by Martin Seligman, one of the most distinguished social psychologists in the world. A peer-reviewed academic journal called the Journal of Happiness Studies has been in operation since the year 2000 and enjoys high prestige in scholarly circles.

Religion, philosophy, and the arts have long considered happiness a subject suitable for study. The sciences have only recently caught up. This column, which we're calling "How to Build a Life," will draw on all these sources of wisdom in the hope of helping you identify the building blocks of happiness-family, career, friendships, faith, and so on-and giving you the tools to use them to construct a life that is balanced and full of meaning, and that serves your values.

This column has been in the works for some time, but my hope is that launching it during the pandemic will help you leverage a contemplative mindset while you have the time to think about what matters most to you. I hope this column will enrich your life, and equip you to enrich the lives of the people you love and lead.

To start us off, I want to give you three equations for well-being-equations that, in my opinion, you need to know to start managing your own happiness more proactively.

Equation 1: Subjective Well-being = Genes + Circumstances + Habits

Subjective well-being is a term of art usually used by social scientists. Why not happiness? Many scientists consider happiness as a term to be too vague and too subjective, and to contain too many competing ideas. In everyday language, happiness is used to denote everything from a passing good mood to a deeper sense of meaning in life. The term subjective well-being, on the other hand, refers to an answer to this kind of question: "Taken all together, how would you say things are these days-would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?" (That is the actual wording from one of the most prominent surveys that address the subject, the General Social Survey.)
Read: The Yale happiness class, distilled
Equation 1 summarizes a vast amount of literature on subjective well-being, starting with the question of the heritability of happiness. Personally, I dislike the idea that happiness is genetic; I dislike the idea that anything about my character or personality is genetic, because I want to be fully in charge of building my life. But the research is clear that there is a huge genetic component in determining your "set point" for subjective well-being, the baseline you always seem to return to after events sway your mood. In an article in the journal Psychological Science reporting on an analysis of twins-including identical twins reared apart and then tested for subjective well-being as adults-the psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen estimate that the genetic component of a person's well-being is between 44 percent and 52 percent, that is, about half.

The other two components are your circumstances and your habits. Research is all over the map on what percentage each part represents. Circumstances-the good and the bad that enter all of our lives-could make up as little as 10 percent or as much as 40 percent of your subjective well-being. Even if circumstances play a big role, however, most scholars think it doesn't matter very much, because the effects of circumstance never last very long.

We may think that getting a big promotion will make us permanently happier or that a bad breakup will leave us permanently brokenhearted, but it isn't true, as a casual look back on your own life would surely attest. Indeed, one of the survival traits of human beings is psychological homeostasis, or the tendency to get used to circumstances quickly, both good and bad. This is the main reason money doesn't buy happiness: We get used to what it buys very rapidly and then go back to our happiness set point. And for those of us lucky enough to avoid illness, even the unhappiness from the COVID-19 crisis will be in the rearview mirror before very long.

Genes and circumstances aren't a productive focus in your quest for happiness. But don't worry, there's one variable left that affects long-term well-being and is under our control: habits. To understand habits, we need Equation 2.

Equation 2: Habits = Faith + Family + Friends + Work

This is my summary of thousands of academic studies, and to be fair, many scholars would dispute it as too crude. But I am convinced that it is accurate. Enduring happiness comes from human relationships, productive work, and the transcendental elements of life.

A little bit of clarification is in order here. First, faith doesn't mean any faith in particular. I practice the Catholic faith and am happy to recommend it to anyone, but the research is clear that many different faiths and secular life philosophies can provide this happiness edge. The key is to find a structure through which you can ponder life's deeper questions and transcend a focus on your narrow self-interests to serve others.

Similarly, there is no magic formula for what shape your family and friendships should take. The key is to cultivate and maintain loving, faithful relationships with other people. One extraordinary 75-year study followed Harvard graduates from 1939 to 1944, into their 90s, looking at all aspects of their health and well-being. The principal investigator, the psychologist George Vaillant, summarized the findings as follows: "Happiness is love. Full stop." People who have loving relationships with family and friends thrive; those who don't, don't.

Finally, there's work. Maybe it shocks you that work is part of this equation; it shouldn't. One of the most robust findings in the happiness literature is the centrality of productive human endeavor in creating a sense of purpose in life. Of course, there are better jobs and worse jobs, but most researchers don't think unemployment brings anything but misery.

Read: Meaning is healthier than happiness

What kind of work? White collar or blue collar? Stay-at-home parenting? Work requiring college? A super-high-paying job? My own research as a social scientist has focused on this subject, and I can tell you that these are the wrong questions. What makes work meaningful is not the kind of work it is, but the sense it gives you that you are earning your success and serving others.

Equation 2 is especially worth considering during our pandemic isolation. Ask yourself: Is my happiness portfolio balanced across these four accounts? Do I need to move some things around? Are there habits I can change during this pause?

I asserted above the old claim "Money doesn't buy happiness." It's not quite that simple, of course. I should say, "Money doesn't buy satisfaction." Homeostasis sees to that, in the form of what psychologists call the hedonic treadmill: People never feel they have enough money, because they get used to their circumstances very quickly and need more money to make them happy again. Don't believe it? Think back to your last significant pay increase. When did you get the greatest satisfaction-on the day your boss told you that you were getting a raise? The day it starting hitting your bank account? And how much satisfaction was it giving you six months later?

You might be tempted to conclude that satisfaction is out of reach. But that's not quite right. Equation 3 provides a better way of thinking about satisfaction.

Equation 3: Satisfaction = What you have ÷ What you want

Many great spiritual leaders have made this point, of course. In his book The Art of Happiness (written with the psychiatrist Howard Cutler), the Dalai Lama stated, "We need to learn how to want what we have not to have what we want in order to get steady and stable Happiness." The Spanish Catholic saint Josemaría Escrivá made the same point in a slightly different way: "Don't forget it: he has most who needs least. Don't create needs for yourself."

This is not just a gauzy spiritual nostrum, however-it is an intensely practical formula for living. Many of us go about our lives desperately trying to increase the numerator of Equation 3; we try to achieve higher levels of satisfaction by increasing what we have-by working, spending, working, spending, and on and on. But the hedonic treadmill makes this pure futility. Satisfaction will always escape our grasp.
Read: How happiness changes with age
The secret to satisfaction is to focus on the denominator of Equation 3. Don't obsess about your haves; manage your wants, instead. Don't count your possessions (or your money, power, prestige, romantic partners, or fame) and try to figure out how to increase them; make an inventory of your worldly desires and try to decrease them. Make a bucket list-but not of exotic vacations and expensive stuff. Make a list of the attachments in your life you need to discard. Then, make a plan to do just that. The fewer wants there are screaming inside your brain and dividing your attention, the more peace and satisfaction will be left for what you already have.

Perhaps decreasing the denominator of Equation 3 is a little easier for you than normal during your isolation, because your expectations have diminished along with your physical ability to meet them. Can you find a way to continue this after the material world begins to beckon again in a few weeks or months?

Think of these three equations as the first class in the mechanics of building a life. But there is much, much more where all that comes from. Hence, this new column. In the coming months, I will pull back the curtain on the art and science of happiness to show how the brightest ideas can illuminate new solutions to our ordinary challenges.

Stay tuned. In the meantime, while you are still stuck at home, go study your equations.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Arthur C. Brooks is a contributing writer at The Atlantic, a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School, a senior fellow at the Harvard Business School, and host of the podcast The Art of Happiness With Arthur Brooks.

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spanish catholic saint josemaría escrivá

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The Three Equations for a Happy Life, Even During a Pandemic

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"How to Build a Life" is a new column that aims to give you the tools you need to construct a life that feels whole and meaningful. It seems strange to launch a column on happiness during a pandemic. The timing is, well, awkward, isn't it? Maybe not.

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He recorded his TED talk, titled "What Makes a Good Life? Lessons from the Longest Study on Happiness," in 2015, and it has been viewed 13,000,000 times.

The researchers also found that marital satisfaction has a protective effect on people's mental health. Part of a study found that people who had happy marriages in their 80s reported that their moods didn't suffer even on the days when they had more physical pain. Those who had unhappy marriages felt both more emotional and physical pain.

Those who kept warm relationships got to live longer and happier, said Waldinger, and the loners often died earlier. "Loneliness kills," he said. "It's as powerful as smoking or alcoholism."

According to the study, those who lived longer and enjoyed sound health avoided smoking and alcohol in excess. Researchers also found that those with strong social support experienced less mental deterioration as they aged.

In part of a recent study, researchers found that women who felt securely attached to their partners were less depressed and more happy in their relationships two-and-a-half years later, and also had better memory functions than those with frequent marital conflicts.

"Loneliness kills. It's as powerful as smoking or alcoholism."

"Good relationships don't just protect our bodies; they protect our brains," said Waldinger in his TED talk. "And those good relationships, they don't have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn't take a toll on their memories."

Since aging starts at birth, people should start taking care of themselves at every stage of life, the researchers say.

"Aging is a continuous process," Waldinger said. "You can see how people can start to differ in their health trajectory in their 30s, so that by taking good care of yourself early in life you can set yourself on a better course for aging. The best advice I can give is 'Take care of your body as though you were going to need it for 100 years,' because you might."

The study, like its remaining original subjects, has had a long life, spanning four directors, whose tenures reflected their medical interests and views of the time.

Under the first director, Clark Heath, who stayed from 1938 until 1954, the study mirrored the era's dominant view of genetics and biological determinism. Early researchers believed that physical constitution, intellectual ability, and personality traits determined adult development. They made detailed anthropometric measurements of skulls, brow bridges, and moles, wrote in-depth notes on the functioning of major organs, examined brain activity through electroencephalograms, and even analyzed the men's handwriting.

Now, researchers draw men's blood for DNA testing and put them into MRI scanners to examine organs and tissues in their bodies, procedures that would have sounded like science fiction back in 1938. In that sense, the study itself represents a history of the changes that life brings.

Psychiatrist George Vaillant, who joined the team as a researcher in 1966, led the study from 1972 until 2004. Trained as a psychoanalyst, Vaillant emphasized the role of relationships, and came to recognize the crucial role they played in people living long and pleasant lives.

"When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment. But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships."

In a book called "Aging Well," Vaillant wrote that six factors predicted healthy aging for the Harvard men: physical activity, absence of alcohol abuse and smoking, having mature mechanisms to cope with life's ups and downs, and enjoying both a healthy weight and a stable marriage. For the inner-city men, education was an additional factor. "The more education the inner city men obtained," wrote Vaillant, "the more likely they were to stop smoking, eat sensibly, and use alcohol in moderation."

Vaillant's research highlighted the role of these protective factors in healthy aging. The more factors the subjects had in place, the better the odds they had for longer, happier lives.

"When the study began, nobody cared about empathy or attachment," said Vaillant. "But the key to healthy aging is relationships, relationships, relationships."

The study showed that the role of genetics and long-lived ancestors proved less important to longevity than the level of satisfaction with relationships in midlife, now recognized as a good predictor of healthy aging. The research also debunked the idea that people's personalities "set like plaster" by age 30 and cannot be changed.

"Those who were clearly train wrecks when they were in their 20s or 25s turned out to be wonderful octogenarians," he said. "On the other hand, alcoholism and major depression could take people who started life as stars and leave them at the end of their lives as train wrecks."

The study's fourth director, Waldinger has expanded research to the wives and children of the original men. That is the second-generation study, and Waldinger hopes to expand it into the third and fourth generations. "It will probably never be replicated," he said of the lengthy research, adding that there is yet more to learn.

"We're trying to see how people manage stress, whether their bodies are in a sort of chronic 'fight or flight' mode," Waldinger said. "We want to find out how it is that a difficult childhood reaches across decades to break down the body in middle age and later."

Lara Tang '18, a human and evolutionary biology concentrator who recently joined the team as a research assistant, relishes the opportunity to help find some of those answers. She joined the effort after coming across Waldinger's TED talk in one of her classes.

"That motivated me to do more research on adult development," said Tang. "I want to see how childhood experiences affect developments of physical health, mental health, and happiness later in life."

Asked what lessons he has learned from the study, Waldinger, who is a Zen priest, said he practices meditation daily and invests time and energy in his relationships, more than before.

"It's easy to get isolated, to get caught up in work and not remembering, 'Oh, I haven't seen these friends in a long time,' " Waldinger said. "So I try to pay more attention to my relationships than I used to."

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Over nearly 80 years, Harvard study has been showing how to live a healthy and happy life

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For nearly 80 years, the Harvard Study of Adult Development has been producing data and lessons on how to live longer, happier, and healthier lives.

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Happiness is a positive emotional state characterized by feelings such as contentment, joy, and life satisfaction. Explore ways to improve happiness.

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Browse and choose what is interesting to you!

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What do scientists know about what makes us happy-and what doesn't? Here's everything you need to know about lasting happiness in one infographic.

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By striving for tranquility, rather than gratification, you are less likely to ruin your own day and you'll be more pleasant to others. Guardian Australia's lifestyle editor, Alyx Gorman, recommends this piece by Brigid Delaney on an ancient way to pursue happiness

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

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The secret to happiness in uncertain times? Give up pursuing it

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By striving for tranquility, rather than gratification, you are less likely to ruin your own day and you'll be more pleasant to others.

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Mapped: Global Happiness Levels in 2021

"Are you happy?" is a deceptively complex question to both ask and answer.

It's generally understood that having enough money to cover your needs and wants can help you live a relatively happy, comfortable life-and recent research shows this relationship may increase linearly as income levels grow, as well.

However, there's much more to it than that. Happiness levels depend not just on financial security, but also broader perceptions of one's social support, personal freedom, and more.

This series of map pulls data from the World Happiness Report to uncover the average scores of 149 countries between 2018-2020, and which ones emerged the happiest or unhappiest. We also look at the most and least improved countries in every region.

How is Happiness Measured?

First, let's look at the factors used to calculate world happiness levels. Some clear indicators are health and wealth, both metrics that have been steadily on the rise worldwide. The report takes these into account, weighting GDP per capita and life expectancy at birth into the scores.

The report also looks at more intangible aspects, collecting survey responses around:

Social support

Freedom to make life choices

Generosity

Perceptions of government/ business corruption

Positive or negative affects (Recent experience of emotions)

This year, there was a natural focus on the negative affect measure of the COVID-19 pandemic on happiness levels, such as exacerbating mental health risks. In addition, such measurements varied depending on each country's response to the crisis.

Looking Closely at Regional Happiness Levels

Worldwide happiness comes in at an average score of 5.5, a marginal improvement since our previous coverage of this report in 2019. Let's dive into regional outlooks for happiness levels.

North America

Current Mood: Happy (6.1)

Canada retains its spot as the happiest country in North America, although its overall global ranking has dropped over the years. In 2019, it was ranked in ninth place globally, dropping to 11th in the 2020 edition, and declining further to 14th place in this year's report.

Haiti continues to fare poorly as the unhappiest in the region, with an average annual GDP growth of only 1.3% over 20 years. Its weak economy and political instability have been worsened by the pandemic-setting back efforts to reduce poverty and widening inequality.

South America

Current Mood: Content (5.9)

With the largest middle class in the Americas- 60% of its population-and a miniscule 0.1% extreme poverty rate, Uruguay is the happiest South American country. The nation has also achieved equitable access to basic services, from education to electricity.

The trio of Colombia, Ecuador, and Venezuela are experiencing different stages of progress in happiness levels, but their relationship is very much interdependent.

Venezuela and Ecuador face similar economic challenges and sharp declines in oil prices. Venezuela is additionally acutely affected by socio-political unrest, triggering a mass exodus of citizens to Ecuador and Colombia alike. The silver lining is that the influx of highly-educated Venezuelan migrants may provide a 2% boost to Ecuador's GDP.

Colombia, the most improved country, has halved its poverty rate in the last decade. In addition, it has welcomed almost 2 million Venezuelan migrants as of Dec 2020-and plans to provide them up to 10 years of protective status.

Europe

Current Mood: Happy (6.4)

Finland remains at the top of the leaderboard as the world's happiest country. This year's ranking was also influenced by high levels of trust in the way the COVID-19 pandemic was handled.

Meanwhile, the shock of the COVID-19 crisis is expected to be short-lived in Croatia, which is the most improved country. This is partly due to its steady pre-pandemic economic gains, although risks remain.

In the unhappiest country of Ukraine, conflicts continue to cause stress on its politics, security, and economy. In particular, government corruption remains a big public issue.

Middle East and Central Asia

Current Mood: It's Complicated (5.3)

Saudi Arabia is the most improved country in the region, as it continues to reduce its oil dependence, diversify its economy, and bolster its public services. It has also been making some progress towards gender equality.

The tourism and hospitality industries contribute nearly 20% of Jordan's GDP-and COVID-19 has caused a prolonged economic decline in the country along with the headwinds of these industries.

Although Afghanistan has seen improvements in access to basic services and its agricultural economy, challenges remain with prolonged conflict and violence. A post-pandemic recovery in the world's unhappiest country might take several years.

East Asia and Oceania

Current Mood: Neutral (5.5)

Both New Zealand and Taiwan saw a successful COVID-19 response and recovery boosting their positions in the global happiness rankings. In fact, New Zealand was the only non-European country to make it into the top 10 on the global happiness list.
Note: As the report only covers 149 countries, "Oceania" only refers to Australia and New Zealand in this instance.
Although India remains the unhappiest country in the region, it also showed the most improvement overall, possibly due to its increased access to basic services. Notably though, the pandemic caused a sharp economic contraction in real GDP by 23.9% year-over-year in Q1'2021.

Africa

Current Mood: Unhappy (4.5)

In July 2020, the island nation of Mauritius joined Seychelles to become the second high-income country in Africa, helping cement its status as the happiest in the region.

Zambia, the most improved African country, has one of the world's youngest populations by median age-which presents long-term opportunities for labor force participation.

On the flip side, agriculturally-reliant Benin struggles with high poverty, with close to 40% of the population living below $1.90 per day.

Zimbabwe, the unhappiest country, has been through not just natural disasters but financial disasters too. It experienced hyperinflation of 786% in May 2020, accompanied by an equally sharp rise in food prices.

Although each country has been uniquely impacted by the pandemic, it's clear that on the whole, happiness levels take into account so much more. How will future rankings look like in a post-pandemic world?

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Mapped: Happiness Levels Around the World in 2021

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"Are you happy?" is a deceptively complex question to both ask and answer. It's generally understood that having enough money to cover your needs and wants can help you live a relatively happy, comfortable life-and recent research shows this relationship may increase linearly as income levels grow, as well.

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With more than 16,756 entries from amateur and professional photographers, the 50 finalists of Agora's #Happiness2020 World Best Photo competition, @Agoraimages, are a joyful show of how happiness looks around the world.

The images capturing moments of joy occurring in all corners of the globe, from touching family moments and children playing to friends of all ages laughing together, have been released by Agora, a photography platform that organizes international photo contests , as part of the competition to select the #Happiness2019Hero, #Agora.

The winning photo will be announced on January 2, 2020.

"Agora is a free-to-use photography social platform that gathers a community of more than 3.5 million users from 193 countries," the organizers explain. "Over the past couple of years, Agora has transitioned from being a social photo market to a digital channel where people create, vote and curate the best images made worldwide."

All 50 finalists can be seen here.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out some of my other work here.

... Read More

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The Happiest Photos Of The Year: 20 Joyful Images Finalists Of Agora's World Competition

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With more than 16,756 entries from amateur and professional photographers, the 50 finalists of Agora's #Happiness2020 World Best Photo competition, @Agoraimages, are a joyful show of how happiness looks around the world.

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Girls as young as seven experiencing a fall in happiness

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Girls as young as seven experiencing a fall in happiness

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Girls as young as seven are facing a "devastating" drop in their happiness thanks to negative experiences on the internet and social media, research suggests.

Almost half (49%) of girls aged seven to 10 have had a negative experience on the internet in the last year, according to research carried out by Girlguiding.

Nearly a fifth (18%) said they had encountered a person pretending to be someone else, while more than 11% said they had seen obscene pictures.

Older girls said they also experienced various forms of online harassment.

According to a survey of 2,114 girls and young women aged between seven and 21 by the charity, 71% said they had been harmed by something online.

This rose to 73% of girls aged 11-16 and 91% of those aged 17-21.

The poll, which took place between March and April, found one in four (26%) of those aged 11-21 had been sent unwanted sexual images, half had received sexist comments and 28% had been harassed.

Girls were also "unavoidably" exposed to "unrealistic and unattainable images of perfection" on social media, impacting their mental health.

Some 45% of 11 to 21-year-olds said they had seen images that made them feel insecure about their appearance.

Disabled and LGBTQ girls and women were more likely to experience online harm - 40% of disabled 11 to 21-year-olds, compared with 25% of respondents without a disability - and 42% of LGBQ respondents compared with 24% of straight girls and women reported being harassed online.

The findings also show that overall happiness amongst girls and young women is "dramatically" falling - more so among younger girls.

Two-thirds (67%) said they are feeling more sad, anxious, or worried. The coronavirus pandemic has only "accelerated and intensified" these feelings, Girlguiding said.

Some 63% said they feel happy most of the time, down from 81% three years ago, with a third of all girls feeling unhappy most of the time.

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Just a quarter of seven to 10-year olds said they feel "very happy most of the time", down from 43% in 2018.

Girlguiding member and advocate Amanda, 17, said she was not surprised by the findings, which show a "devastating trend in declining happiness".

"We're exposed to more and more pressures, both online - from harassment to images portraying unrealistic ideals of perfection - and as a result of the pandemic and the disruption it's brought to everyday life.

"Pressures like these are directly impacting the confidence and happiness of girls and young women in the UK."

Girlguiding chief executive Angela Salt said society must act in the interest of girls to avoid a "lost generation".

She said: "Girls' mental health has been significantly impacted. Online harms have been exacerbated.

"It's critical that we address the decline in girls' happiness that we've observed since we started this research over a decade ago."

Almost all of the girls and young women surveyed said they want more to be done to protect young people from body image pressures.

Girlguiding is calling for dedicated online harms legislation to address appearance pressures and for better protection for children from social media adverts for weight loss and "appearance-enhancing".

Children and families minister Vicky Ford said: "We know that for too many girls and young women, these sorts of issues have become commonplace - that is simply not OK.

"That's why giving them the tools and confidence to cope with the new and growing pressures they face is so vital."

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Girls as young as seven experiencing 'devastating' fall in their happiness thanks to online abuse

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Girls as young as seven are facing a "devastating" drop in their happiness thanks to negative experiences on the internet and social media, research suggests. Almost half (49%) of girls aged seven to 10 have had a negative experience on the internet in the last year, according to research carried out by Girlguiding.