Money doesn’t buy happiness. More stats on who’s happy and who isn’t, this time in the UK.
Those who are married or live with a partner are as much as 13% happier than singletons according to the research. Relationships with partners, friends and family are the biggest influencers on our happiness.
However, increased prosperity in the past 50 years has not necessarily increased happiness levels. In 1957, a staggering 94% of people described themselves as happy in a Gallup Poll.
Read: GMTV - Find out which cities have the happiest residents
More about Martin Seligman and his quest to make everyone happy.
One new study showing change in happiness levels followed thousands of Germans for 17 years. It found that about a quarter changed significantly over that time in their basic level of satisfaction with life. (That’s a popular happiness measure; some studies sample how one feels through the day instead.) Nearly a tenth of the German participants changed by three points or more on a 10-point scale.
Other studies show an effect of specific life events, though of course the results are averages and can’t predict what will happen to particular individuals. Results show long-lasting shadows associated with events like serious disability, divorce, widowhood, and getting laid off.
Read: Discovery Channel :: News - Human :: The Art of Happiness, by Prescription
More proof that Happiness is filling in the right circle on the questionairre.
Choice Quotes:
“Once average annual income is above $20,000 a head, higher pay brings no greater happiness.”
“Happiness is better equated with satisfaction than pleasure, says Emory University psychiatrist Gregory Berns in Satisfaction (Henry Holt, 2005), because the pursuit of pleasure lands us on a never-ending hedonic treadmill that paradoxically leads to misery.”
“…in an experiment in which subjects anticipated that they would prefer an assortment of snacks, when it actually came to eating the snacks week after week, subjects in the no-variety group said that they were more satisfied than the subjects in the variety group. “
Read: Scientific American: (Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (via Action Institute Power Blog)
Reason # 428 to move to Denmark…
The Eurobarometer study said the most content in the bloc were the Danes, 97 percent of whom declared themselves “happy.” The Dutch, Belgians, Irish and Swedes, followed by respondents from Luxembourg and Finland, were not far behind in the happy stakes.
The British, at 92 percent, were found to be happier than the French (90 percent) and the Germans (82 percent).
(Actually, I don’t know what the first 427 reasons might be, but this one looks pretty good.)
Read: Most Europeans Feel Happy, Surveys Show
I’m in the middle of reading Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman’s (former president of the American Psychological Association) book on Positive Psychology. Seligman stumbled on the idea of learned helplessness as a grad student - when dogs who were trained to associate a buzzer with an electrical shock didn’t try to escape, from the shock even when they could, he explained it by saying that they’d simply given up trying. This was contrary to the behaviorists at the time, who believed that animals could only do what they’d been taught to do through conditioning - this kind of abstraction (inescapable pain in one situation to pain in all situations), they believed, required human level thinking.
Seligman persisted, however, and further research bore him out - people can be trained to give up. The theory of learned helplessness eventually became attatched to an area of cognitive psychology known as “attributional style” in which people explain good or bad events as in terms of three dimensions - permenance, universality, and control. That is, will this bad event have a lasting effect (permenance) that affects multiple areas of your life (universality) and do you have the ability to change it (control). Your measure in these three dimensions predicts (according to Seligman’s book) how quickly you’ll recover from setbacks.
I’m not yet up to the part where tells us how to train ourselves to be optimistic, but I’ll keep you up to date. In the mean time, here’s a roundup of my links on happiness & positive psychology.
Read: Are We Happy Yet? (Survey on happiness in America & how it correlates to things like income, age and political affiliation)
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: The recipe for success: get happy and get ahead in life
Read: The Sweet Smell of … Happiness?
Read: Secret to a long life - get even more often (leave it to the Germans to figure out that surliness will help you live longer)
Read: Just the expectation of a mirthful laughter experience boosts endorphins 27 percent, HGH 87 percent
Read: The Beguiling Truth About Beauty (You’re hotter than you think)
Read: The Hidden Side of Happiness Pleasure only gets you so far. A rich, rewarding life often requires a messy battle with adversity.
Read: The New Science of Happiness What makes the human heart sing? Researchers are taking a close look. What they’ve found may surprise you
Read: So what do you have to do to find happiness?
Read: Smile for Success: New research shows happiness leads to success, not the other way around
Read: The Science of Happiness - Harvard Magazine (January-February 2007) (via MindHacks)
Read: Happiness 101 (via MindHacks)
A recent report published by the UN says that Britian and the United States of industrialized nations, the US and Britain are the two worst places to raise children.
The study found there was no consistent relationship between a country’s wealth, as measured in gross domestic product per capita, and a child’s quality of life.
Perhaps it’s time we switched to a Gross National Happiness measure, like in Bhutan. The government of Bhutan makes decisions based on how much happiness it will bring their citizens, not how much money it will bring in to the nation.
Maybe we should all follow Joel Johnson’s advice and Stop buying this crap. Just stop it. and go about living our lives.
I just watched a bizarre, wonderful movie named Mind Game. Some truly beautiful animated films come out of Japan from time to time (Any of the Studio Ghibli films , for example) and this is certainly one of them. While my girlfriend gave up on this movie in the first 20 minutes, when it looked like any other gritty anime, if you stick with it, you’re in for a wild life-affirming ride.
If you don’t believe me, just check out the IMDB user comments for this movie.
Buy Mind Game (amazon.com)
I have this half-baked theory learning tools (like flash cards) could be used to train people to think in certain ways the same way they help me remember important facts. By forming associations between the stimulus on one side of the card & the reward on the other, you could retrain certain negative, automatic thoughts.
Well, here are some Self-esteem Games that, admittedly, made me smile.