Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

Lesson: Happiness is pretty big-picture

Most of the research on happiness refers to subjective wellbeing* (SWB), sometimes called hedonic wellbeing.

Here’s what researchers generally agree about SWB:

• It’s somewhat stable. Over time people tend to stay within a range of happiness, allowing of course for the inevitable ups and downs of life.
• It’s fairly consistent across life areas. People who are moderately happy at work are often moderately happy in relationships, again allowing for highs and lows.
• It involves a judgement about how satisfactory life is, compared to expectations. A rich, loved, attractive person expecting more than they have might be unhappy, while a less favored person who’s satisfied with their life might be perfectly content.
• It involves experiencing more positive than negative feelings overall.

When people talk about ‘happiness’, they usually mean this long-term, overall, thinking and feeling idea of SWB.

Happiness strategy: Get clear about happiness

You can tell from this definition that happiness is much broader than either mood – like waking up grumpy – or state – like getting stressed because work is overwhelming. You can have bad days, rough times and disappointments but still be a happy person, enjoying SWB.

With this in mind, you can take a broad view of happiness to help keep short-term hassles in perspective. Letting your troubles trick you into thinking that you’re miserable or life sucks can put you on a path toward depression. But seeing happiness as more stable can stop those inevitable ill winds from blowing your house down.

It also helps to notice the role expectations play in your happiness. If you expect things to be fabulous all the time you’re sure to find life less satisfying than if you’re prepared for a more varied life experience.

This strategy really comes down to seeing happiness in a more empowering way – adjusting your gauge to encompass your whole life and monitoring your expectations so they serve rather than undermine your happiness.

It’s a theme we’ll return to again and again – being happy is largely in your head.

*SWB differs from psychological wellbeing, which is marked by having a sense of meaning, purpose and growth in life. It’s sometimes called eudaimonic wellbeing. Although psychological wellbeing is an interesting field of theory and research, this series will focus on SWB.

Research sources:

Argyle, M. (2001). The psychology of happiness (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.

Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95(3), 542-575.

Diener, E. (2000). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist, 55(1), 34-43.

Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2001). On happiness and human potentials: A review of research on hedonic and eudaimonic well-being. Annual Review of Psychology, 52(1), 141-166.

Spangler, W. D., & Palrecha, R. (2004). The relative contributions of extraversion, neuroticism, and personal strivings to happiness. Personality and Individual Differences, 37(6), 1193-1203.

Veenhoven, R. (1991). Questions on happiness: Classical topics, modern answers, blind spots. In F. Strack, M. Argyle & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Subjective well-being: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 7-26). Oxford England: Pergamon Press.

How to be happy:
101 practical strategies drawn from positive psychology.

This post is part of a series covering simple, practical, research-inspired, happiness strategies you can use in your own life. For more information about the series, check out the 101 Happiness Strategies main page.

How to be happy – a new series

I’m starting a new series called
How to be happy: 101 practical strategies drawn from positive psychology.

The series will be divided into lessons from the research – snippets that summarize interesting findings about happiness and wellbeing. Along with each lesson there’ll be a strategy – a suggestion you can apply for yourself to move toward a happier life.

Starting this week, I’ll be be posting at least one new strategy each week.

For more information about the series, check out the 101 Happiness Strategies main page.

Tune in to this series to discover simple and practical, research-inspired happiness strategies you can use in your own life.

Annie Dillard wrote a classic book on the experience of being a writer, called The Writing Life.

In it she shares some wonderful wisdom that might be equally applicable to living ‘The Happy Life’:

Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now… Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water… Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Although Dillard is talking about writing, I think her notion of holding nothing back applies to happiness too.

If we wait for something – a relationship, job, opportunity, situation – before we express our best self, or do what we love, or choose to be happy, then we might be wasting who we are now. We don’t have to save up our happiness till the circumstances are just right. We’ll be different people later, and the resources we’ll draw on then will have been replenished ‘from beneath’, by the intervening time, thought and experiences.

Perhaps Dillard’s advice can free us to trust that ’something more’ will be there for tomorrow, and to let today be as happy as we can make it.

Perhaps her words can inspire us to choose happiness right now, and spare ourselves a safe filled with ashes.

During the break at a recent Web 2.0 talk I overhead people saying the talk was pitched too high and they weren’t following. They invested a lot of energy into their grumble, but it was wasted – they weren’t telling anyone who could do anything about it.

This got me thinking that venting can be therapeutic, but it rarely gets you a solution, since:

• You often vent to someone who has no power to fix the problem – your spouse about your boss, a friend about your spouse, the cable guy about your bank manager.
• If you do speak to someone who can help, you can be so busy letting off steam – I’ve been in this queue since 9.47am – that you fail to ask for what you want – I’d like you to take my forms and send the new checkbook in the mail please.
• If you’re cross, your manner can make it hard for the person who can help, to want to help – Your mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries; now where’s my refund?

When faced with a frustrating customer experience, snarky email from a colleague, or other button-pushing situation, I’ve found it helpful to separate the response into two parts:

1. Expressiveness 
Here’s where you rant to a friend, yourself or your therapist. You do it to get something off your chest, to dial down the frustration. This is emotion management, pure and simple. You don’t do it to fix the problem, you do it to feel better. Think of it as taking the emotion offline.

Once you’ve done the expressing that may be enough. Not every frustrating experience has to be handled – some things are just frustrating. But if you do want to fix the situation, you need to change gears.

2. Effectiveness
Being effective involves time, thought and composure. Here’s where you decide what you want to happen, and you work out who to approach and what to ask for. If it’s an email you work out what to put in your reply – and remember, you need to take the emotion offline, not sneak it in between the lines.

To have the best chance of a good solution it helps if you:

• Address the person with the power
• Be succinct and clear about what you’d like them to do
• Be pleasant.

Getting into the habit of disentangling expressiveness from attempts at effectiveness will likely bring you:

• Less morning-after email remorse following a hot-headed reply
• Better customer service
• Less frustration
• Happier relationships.

Try it! And if it doesn’t work, please vent offline before you tell me about it.

This is the tenth of 10 tips for unwavering woe.

No survey of happiness-thwarting tips would be complete without perfectionism. Perfectionism is like a troll at your drawbridge, asking ridiculous riddles and setting pointless challenges for every little joy that seeks to enter your castle. And because the troll’s tasks are impossible, those joys invariably end up drowning in your moat of misery.

Now, it’s not that the troll’s standards are high – it’s that they’re dumb. You don’t need a perfect house, spouse, family or life to be happy, but the troll doesn’t know that. (Remember: trolls aren’t known for their brains; they’re known for their hair.)

You need only install your own perfectionist troll -  require everything in your life to be perfect before admitting happiness – and you can be sure happy days will never come.

Although perfectionism works brilliantly at this macro level to keep happiness on the other side of your moat, it has more subtle benefits too.

1. You can cherish forever the possibility of your undiscovered brilliance.
This is the genius of perfectionism. By never acting, never committing, never being ready to start, you get to preserve the immense potential of all that you could be.

Once you do something – start the lessons, write the first chapter, let yourself love the person, enter the competition – you come face-to-face with the alarming reality of what you’re capable of. This could be more than you’d hope for, or it could be less. Much better to leave Schrödinger’s cat in a state of suspended possibility than lift the lid and deal with what’s under there.

As a bonus, just by mastering the one skill of perfectionism, you automatically gain mastery in related areas such as:

• Procrastination – why start now if it can’t be perfect?
• Resentment – why should others get all the rewards when they’re less than perfect and I could well be perfect if I actually tried something?
• Self-pity – poor me; why can’t people see beyond my immobilization to my true, never-expressed talents?

2. You can haughtily criticize others
When you don’t waste your efforts getting out there and having a go, you have the time and energy you need to endlessly disparage the attempts of others. And let’s face it – constantly judging others, analyzing their flaws, workshopping how far superior your own hypothesized endeavors would have been – these tasks are exhausting. In order to preserve your stamina for looking down on others, you simply cannot afford to try for yourself.

So what if the doers get to learn, improve, do better next time, and succeed? Perfectionists get to laugh at them. So there.

3. Your perfectionism takes on a life of its own.
Here’s another of the little-recognized joys of perfectionism: it gains momentum. The less you attempt and the more you criticize, the harder it becomes to do anything but criticize. In fact, criticism can become like a director’s commentary looped in your brain. Ohmigod does she not have a mirror Could that child be any dirtier What kind of moron would say that His house is so ugly… Soon you won’t even have to try not to try – you’ll have forgotten how to do anything other than bag out everyone else.

You could picture your 24-7 diatribe as an out-of-control freight train careening down a mountain, losing all sense of direction and gathering casualties along the way. I prefer to think of it as a finely fashioned wardrobe filled with perfectly matched outfits and accessories for every occasion. Okay, so the second analogy fails to meet even the basic requirements of metaphor in that it bears no resemblance to the compared thing, but this leads beautifully to the final benefit of perfectionism…

4. You don’t really have to try.
Psychological laziness is the most efficient kind of laziness – all the challenges of life, all the big decisions, all the difficult choices, are negotiated in the gray matter of your mind. Give up there and your work is done. And perfectionism is the ideal way to never get past the mental starting block of any goal, project or change – including being happy.

Submit to the absurd trials of the perfectionism troll and you’ll be spared such indignities as freedom, success and happiness. But allow yourself to be imperfect at something, or feel grateful for a life that’s less than perfect, and you risk letting all manner of contentment cross your moat.

It’s much safer being perfectly miserable.

Other tips in this series of 10 tips for unwavering woe: