Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

In the New York magazine article Happiness: A User’s Manual, Ben Mathis-Lilley takes a bunch of happiness research findings and translates them into 20 useful tips for New Yorkers.

The result is fun, and a cute reminder of those findings about happiness - some of which may be familiar to Happiness Strategies readers via 101 Happiness Strategies and Book Reviews.

Here’s a sample from the article:

Fire your therapist if he so much as mentions your childhood.
Contra Freud and pro common sense, much of Authentic Happiness author Martin Seligman’s research suggests that rehashing events that enraged you long ago tends to produce depression rather than sweet closure and relief.

If someone tells you he’s still pining for his ex, ask the ex out.
Stumbling on Happiness author Dan Gilbert is currently conducting a study designed to show that the best way to predict how much you’ll enjoy a blind date is to ask the last person to go out with your date how much fun he had.

If you can’t decide what TV to buy, walk across the hall and ask your neighbor if he likes his.
In multiple studies, subjects felt they’d be better able to predict their reaction to an experience by imagining it, rather than hearing somebody else’s testimony. Even regarding such seemingly straightforward activities as deciding whether to eat pretzels or potato chips, they were wrong. Turns out, people are happier following advice.

If you go on a shopping spree, throw away the receipts.
In one study cited by both Schwartz and Gilbert, photography students were allowed to keep only one picture taken during their course. Some students were later allowed to swap their choice for a different photo, yet those who couldn’t change were much happier. How did they deal with inflexibility? By rationalizing how much they enjoyed their new decoration.

Take the local, and don’t wait for the express.
Inaction, on the other hand, gnaws away at the mind relentlessly, like so many rats chewing on an empty Mountain Dew bottle someone dropped onto the tracks as you idly waited for the 4. You should have just jumped on the 6.

Join a church, a yoga studio, an Alcoholics Anonymous group, or an underground fight club.
People who have more friends and belong to community-building groups are happier. To paraphrase the Norm MacDonald–era “Weekend Update,” perhaps that’s the kind of finding that could have been published in the scientific journal Duh, but there it is.

Order from the same takeout menu every time.
Researchers found that subjects asked to choose their meals weeks in advance mistakenly predicted that variety would make them happier, while those who simply decided what to eat on the spot were completely satisfied with the same thing each week. (Although eating macaroni and cheese endlessly, like repeating any pleasant experience over and over, reduces its appeal—so switch it up with cheeseburgers.)

Excerpted from http://nymag.com/news/features/17574/

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In last Monday’s Yorkshire Post Maggie Stratton asked the question:

In a society obsessed by material gain, should schools be teaching our children the true meaning of happiness?

Her answer draws on the advice of two education experts who believe it’s time to get very serious about happiness at school.

Alas, say Smith and Jones, unhappiness at school is a problem

Educationalist Alistair Smith and Sir John Jones, headteacher for 17 years, believe in preventative educational medicine.

Smith quotes research that:

• Children with a positive mind learn faster
• The best indicator of adult happiness is childhood happiness
• Children learn from the optimism or pessimism of adults around them
• Irritated children tend to be more neurotic and unhappy as adults.

He says happy teachers and students boost children’s results and prospects and lower their risk of problems like violence, truancy and drug taking.

Jones is concerned about the pressure of constant testing. He says ‘Youngsters today are the most tested in the history of testing. I don’t think testing brings happiness’.

So what’s the solution for happier kids at school?

No dark sarcasm in the classroom

Smith and Jones run a conference called Winning the H Factor – The Secrets of Happy Schools. Their strategies include:

• Assembly - have only positive messages
• Weekly awards - for the person who cheered everyone up
• Weekly staff lunch - served by pupils
• Freedom of expression - allowing people to voice their grievances
• Positive language - eg challenges versus problems, learning versus behavior and setback versus crisis
• Focus on independent learning rather than test results - although of course tests can’t be altogether avoided.

Here’s how Jones sums it up:

‘What we are saying is let’s look at the culture, let’s talk about happiness. If pupils are happy they are less likely to come in and abuse or assault the teacher, they are less likely to drink too much on a Friday night or consider taking drugs under pressure from peers. If you build a community in which individuals are happy then they are more likely to be functional.’

Happiness strategies revisited

This ties in with the idea that being happy is good for you and everyone around you, as we explored in some of the early 101 Happiness Strategies, including

• Happiness Strategy 3. Choose happiness for your health
• Happiness Strategy 4. Be happy now
• Happiness Strategy 5. Spread it around

and summarized (good for a quick review) in

• Happiness Strategy 6. Make happiness a goal.

If you’ve got kids, this is a timely lesson - it’s never too early to start being happy.

Lesson: We can learn from happy extraverts and happy introverts

We saw in Strategy 12 that introverted people tend to be less happy than their extraverted counterparts.

But before you anti-social butterflies throw up your wings in despair and head for the nearest net, let me share some nuggets of evidence that the extraversion-happiness link is less clear-cut than it looks.

1. Even the strong correlations between extraversion and happiness (up to .61 for the statistically minded; 1) allow for rather a lot of happy introverts. Most of us can think of someone who’s not naturally outgoing, but who’s happy. If extraversion isn’t inevitably related to happiness, something else must be at work, at least for the happy introverts.

2. Happy introverts act a lot like like happy extraverts - at work, leisure and even when engaged in solitary activities (1). So although  happy introverts and happy extraverts score differently on personality traits, they behave in similar ways.

3. Simply acting extraverted leads to feeling happier. This applies whether you’re deliberately making an effort to be social, optimistic and active (some of the qualities of extraversion) or you do it naturally in the situation (2).

The fact that there are unhappy extraverts and happy introverts means it can’t be extraversion per se that makes people happy. Rather, the findings above suggest that both extraverts and introverts are happy when they do extraverted things. Perhaps acting social, optimistic and active comes naturally to extraverts - but the good news for the rest of us is that even when introverts act that way, their happiness increases too.

Happiness strategy: Act like you’re an extravert - even if you aren’t

Wherever you sit on the introversion-extraversion dimension, you can be happier. You needn’t go from party pooper to party popper overnight, but you can take small actions that feel good to you. For instance:

• Start one conversation each day
  It can be with a person at the store, the library, the gym, the coffee machine - anywhere you see people. Keep it simple and light - no medical stories or rants about today’s youth. Starting up conversations is a great way to build your social muscle - and soon you’ll find it’s less of an effort and more of a habit.
• Initiate social dates
  Not everyone is the life of the party but we do all benefit from having a network of people in our lives - even a small one. Be prepared to initiate some social activities yourself. Start with something simple like inviting a friend out for coffee or suggesting a movie to see with a small group you already know.
• Plan activities for yourself
  You might feel disinclined to plan activities but having a schedule is a good way to become more proactive. Boosting your energy level and opting for a little extra adventure can be goals you pursue at a pace that feels challenging, but good. 

The idea with this strategy is not to push yourself to be something you’re not. Rather, simply aim for the more extraverted end of your own spectrum - and you might just find yourself at the happier end, too.

A note on neuroticism
Neuroticism hasn’t attracted as much research attention as extraversion, so we don’t have parallel findings about people acting emotionally stable (neuroticism’s opposite pole). As happiness research continues to thrive, such research may emerge.

Research sources:

(1) Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2001). Happiness, introversion-extraversion and happy introverts. Personality and Individual Differences, 30(4), 595-608.

(2) Fleeson, W., Malanos, A. B., & Achille, N. M. (2002). An intraindividual process approach to the relationship between extraversion and positive affect: Is acting extraverted as ‘good’ as being extraverted? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1409-1422.

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.

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Image: (eLi) under the terms of a creative commons license