Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

In yesterday’s Guardian, Rebecca Hardy looked at a topic very close to this happiness strategist’s heart: although people are ‘popping happy pills like Smarties’, the accumulating mass of scientific research suggests that ’happiness is, quite literally, a state of mind’.

Hardy extensively quotes Sonja Lyubomirsky, a favorite researcher of mine and a co-author of the meta-analysis we’ve been drawing on for our three most recent happiness strategies (4: Be happy now, 5: Spread it around and 6: Make happiness a goal).

Although evidence supports the idea that some people are naturally happier than others, there’s also evidence we can all develop a happy person’s habits – that is, we can learn to behave in more happy-producing ways.

Things to avoid include:

• instant gratification via pleasure-seeking and incessant buying, which ‘leaves people ultimately dissatisfied and hankering for more’
• comparing ourselves to others
• unproductive rumination.

Better choices are:

• having goals, like learning new things, improving ourselves, and nurturing spiritual or philosophical ideas
• writing about our goals.

The article wraps up with 5 ways to lift your mood:

1. Note 3 things that went well today and why
2. Identify strengths and use them in new ways
3. Write about an imagined, future, best-possible self
4. Write a thank-you letter
5. Do five kind acts a week.

(We’ll explore each of these in later happiness strategies.)

My 2 cents

I have a friend who falls squarely into the ‘born happy’ category. She sees the upside of everything without trying to ‘look on the bright side’, thinks the best of everyone, is supremely confident, outgoing and talented, takes risks, and manages rejection and disappointment with poise.

Another friend (OK, it’s me) scores pretty high on neuroticism and introversion – the two personality traits most consistently associated with unhappiness. I have to perform mental contortions in order to keep my mood on an even keel and manage the quirks of worry and overwhelm that can loom large at times.

But since I’ve learned happiness skills and actively adopted a happiness mindset, the two of us are pretty much on par, being-happy-wise.

We all know people who are lucky enough to think positively on automatic pilot.

The rest of us are just as lucky. We simply need to grab the controls and do the steering a little more consciously.

Image by rodrigo senna under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

At the shops today I heard this wonderful lyric – expressing what I believe about happiness – over the speakers:

I choose to be happy
So I am, so I am

Turns out it’s Belinda Emmett, who last year lost an eight-year battle with cancer -  first breast cancer and finally bone cancer. She’d been working on the album for several years and it was released posthumously in April 2007.

She sure had an excuse to choose to be miserable, making these lyrics all the more encouraging.

Today’s a grey, windy day. It would be so easy to think myself gloomy. Which got me thinking again about thinking, and how it relates to happiness and depression.

Last month I wrote about a recent study suggesting it may be hard to think your way out of depression. I warned readers not to let such results stop us from watching how we think,  and perhaps avoiding depression in the first place.

As a further note-to-self to watch those thoughts, consider another thought-ful study.

Here’s what the study did.

• People were given tests of negative thinking to identify their risk of developing depression. People in the top quarter of scores were put in a  high-risk group and people in the bottom quarter were put in a low-risk group. Currently depressed people were excused from the study.
• Participants’ mental health was assessed regularly over 2.5 years*. The assessors didn’t know which people were in which group. 

Here’s what the study found.

• Whether or not people had a history of depression, a greater proportion of the high-risk group than the low-risk group developed both major depressive disorder (the clinical term for depression) and minor depression.
• For people with no history of depression, 17% of the high-risk group, compared with only 1% of the low-risk group, developed major depressive disorder. The high-risk group also had many more minor depressive episodes.
• The researchers concluded that negative thinking makes you more susceptible to depression.

Some studies look at the relationship between negative thinking and depression at a snapshot in time. But knowing things go together doesn’t say which came first – do you think negatively because you’re depressed or are you depressed because you think negatively? Because this study unfolded over time and excluded already-depressed people, it could say that depression followed thinking.

That doesn’t prove negative thinking causes depression, but it’s good evidence that negative thinking could be a contributor.

So please - watch what you think. It’s powerful.

Study details: Alloy L.B., Abramson L.Y., Whitehouse W.G., Hogan M.E., Tashman N.A., Steinberg D.L., Rose D.T., & Donovan P. (1999). Depressogenic cognitive styles: predictive validity, information processing and personality characteristics, and developmental origins. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37, 503-531(29).

*The study was part of a series for which data was collected over 5 years. The results described here apply to the first 2.5 years of the data.

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Maybe you can’t think yourself out, but don’t think yourself in