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Happiness is not a handbag

When Sheryl Crow sang “if it makes you happy, it can’t be that bad…” who knows what she was thinking? It’s true that different things make us happy, but as the research progresses, psychologists are becoming clearer that certain things help us on our way more than others.

If you think winning the lottery, buying a new car or shopping are the best routes you’re going to be disappointed very quickly. According to the research we get just 15 minutes worth of happiness from the high of buying something new and lottery winners are no happier than lottery losers. As a client said when reflecting on how she’s been spending much of her free time, “shopping for handbags is vacuous.”

So if consuming isn’t the answer, what is? The opposite of consuming – creating – is a good place to start. When we set our minds to producing something – a letter, a flowerbed, a cake, a business plan – we tend to lose ourselves in what one fabulously named positive psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced Mee-hi Cheek-sent-me-hi) calls ‘flow.’

It’s that sense of time passing us by as we’re totally absorbed by the task at hand, purposefully deploying our skills. Creating is especially satisfying if it’s a challenge that requires us to stretch ourselves; as Benjamin Disraeli once said “Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.”

So step one in managing our happiness might be to become more mindful of the balance of consuming versus creating in our lives. Both have a place but probably not in equal measure when we think about what makes us happy.

Given the nature of my work I’m really interested in research on happiness that’s linked to how we think. I’m not talking about having happy thoughts necessarily – although studies show that people who default to positive emotions are more likely to be happier than those that don’t – more the ways of thinking that lead to a sense of contentment and fulfillment. The following four broad ideas are thought-patterns all of us can develop over time and in the rest of this article I’m going to talk about the first:

1. Choosing your comparisons carefully
2. Aiming for mild contentment
3. Managing your expectations
4. Being content with what you have

Careful Comparisons

In a world of high technology and media it’s easier than ever to make comparisons between ourselves and the wider world. Life today is in stark contrast to 150 years ago when the rest of the village (who were likely to be quite similar to us) was the commonest comparison to make. Now, in a world where celebrity worship and consumption of high-profile-people magazines is commonplace it’s easy to be dissatisfied with our lot as an average unknown person. That’s because this constant upward comparison leaves us feeling like we want more than we have, that life’s not fair and a general discontent with what we do have. These people are in the minority and who’s to say that they’re happier than us?

A couple of years ago I heard a motivational tale about Colin Jackson’s attitude to performance comparisons. According to the story, the Olympic hurdler’s 400m times improved when he adopted a mindset of being the best he could be instead of aiming to beat his competitors. I wonder how often we measure ourselves against others when the most helpful comparison would be against our past performance and potential?

Sticking with the science of sporting success, in a study of Olympic medal winners at Barcelona in 1992 (Medvec, Madey and Gilovich) the researchers found bronze winners to be “happier” about the event than the silver medal winners. The authors attribute this finding to the comparisons the medal holders made about “what might have been” or imaginary counter factuals. The most salient comparison for the silver medalists to make was upward – I could have won gold – but for the bronze it was a comparison with the rest of the field – I did well, I could have come away with nothing.

So back to our reality, we can help ourselves by choosing what comparisons we make. Sometimes it’s better to make a downward comparison (‘look how well off I am’) than an upward one, although that has it’s place too. Psychologists interested in human happiness have found that counting our blessings (making downward comparisons such as being grateful for clean running water) help us to feel happier about ourselves and our lives. Saying 5 blessings before getting out of bed each day has a motivating effect, especially on a Monday.

Upward comparisons help us to strive to better ourselves and depending on what you’re striving for that could be a good thing. Again it comes back to balance and raising your awareness of your natural tendencies. Too much of one can make us unhappy.

It’s good to be mindful of the comparisons we make and the effect they have on us. To compare ourselves to our peers and the people we come into contact with the most is human and normal. But is normal always good? It depends what normal does for you. Do your comparisons make you a nicer, happier, more successful person? Or do they leave you wanting, demotivated and unhappy? It’s just a thought.

We can help direct our comparisons by reframing situations. Imagine you have a busy day ahead and you arrive at the station, dash to the platform only to find the doors closing seconds before you reach it. You now have to wait 15 minutes for the next one. You’re probably feeling ticked off and start running through the morning’s events that led you to miss the train (“What if I’d done this…” type thinking). Compare that to scenario number two where you arrive 30 seconds later and find an empty station with space for you to sit down and wait for the next train. It’s still 15 minutes away but because you didn’t have the close shave experience as in scenario one you’re probably much happier and enjoy being able to sit in peace. So might the lesson be for us to conjure up the thoughts and feelings associated with scenario two even when we experience scenario one?

Enjoy mulling it over,

Jessica

P.S. If you’re interested in coaching to enhance your sense of happiness or curious for some further reading, do drop me a line, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or see my web space: www.beyoubutbetter.co.uk

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