Two Modest Techniques for a Happier New Year

This basketball may have been doing the two exercises

Whether 2011 was a real winner or a huge bomb, I think it’s pretty safe to assume that most people I know would be happy to have a little more happiness in their lives. This leads me straight to the field of positive psychology, which focuses on helping ordinary people thrive rather than treating illness. It’s a pretty fertile area that spends a lot of time looking at human happiness. I’ve been thinking about two research conclusions that have come out of the field, and some activities I’ve been doing that seem to fit with the findings.

Our Distorted Beliefs
The first is that people are pretty good at figuring out whether they are happy at a given moment. (When someone asks “How’re you doing?” it’s not that hard a question to answer.) On the other hand, the way memory works makes it very difficult to remember what has made us happy in the past or to predict what might make us happy in the future. Plenty of research has shown that people believe that the most intense or dramatic things, such as buying a house, having an illness, or breaking up with a lover, have the biggest impact on their happiness. But in fact these dramatic developments aren’t as important as you might think. One of the leaders in the field, Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, elaborated on this in a recent Harvard Business Review interview about the science of happiness:

As it turns out, people are not very good at predicting what will make them happy and how long that happiness will last. They expect positive events to make them much happier than those events actually do, and they expect negative events to make them unhappier than they actually do. In both field and lab studies, we’ve found that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or failing an exam—all have less impact on happiness than people think they will. A recent study showed that very few experiences affect us for more than three months. When good things happen, we celebrate for a while and then sober up. When bad things happen, we weep and whine for a while and then pick ourselves up and get on with it.

Frequency, Not Intensity
The second finding is that when it comes to happiness, frequency trumps intensity. Working toward something major that will ultimately give us pleasure is not nearly as important as having many more frequent but minor happy experiences. University of Illinois researcher Ed Diener was the trailblazer in establishing this point. In one of his key research studies, Diener calls intense positive emotions “an interesting phenomenon,” but then concludes that it is “doubtful that [positive emotions] are closely related to the longer-term state we refer to as ‘happiness.’ ” Kind of wonky-sounding, eh? Well, I’ll leave it to Gilbert—a wickedly funny author—to make the frequency-intensity divide a little more accessible.

When we think about what would make us happy, we tend to think of intense events—going on a date with a movie star, winning a Pulitzer, buying a yacht. But Diener and his colleagues have shown that how good your experiences are doesn’t matter nearly as much as how many good experiences you have. Somebody who has a dozen mildly nice things happen each day is likely to be happier than somebody who has a single truly amazing thing happen. So wear comfortable shoes, give your wife a big kiss, sneak a french fry. It sounds like small stuff, and it is. But the small stuff matters. 

OK, so where am I going with this? I’ve been doing two new activities over the past year; not quite every day, but as often as I can. An unscientific study of one (me) found them very helpful in boosting my mood. But it’s only now that I see that there’s a research basis for what I’ve been doing.

1. Good Morning, Joel: I do a very brief mental exercise first thing most mornings. (Yes, I really do call it “Good Morning, Joel.” Very original title, isn’t it?) The goal is to go through each of my senses, and think of something I’ve experienced in the past that I liked. For example, I might pick out taste and think of fresh, lean corned beef. (Delicious!) For sight, how about the blue clematis flowers in our backyard last summer? (What a vibrant color!) Smell may be the fragrant rosemary plant in the hallway of our home. Once I’ve gone through the senses, I think of at least one recent memory and one longer-term memory. The idea is not to focus on huge highlights but rather on basic things I might otherwise overlook. Now, here’s the connection with the research. “Good Morning, Joel” looks suspiciously like the kind of activity you might do to try to reduce the distortions around your memories of your own happiness. It moves me from the realm of dramatic and intense memories to touch on much more basic happy memories.

2. Good Things: When Lani and I sit down to dinner, we often do a quick activity somewhat like those who say grace. But there’s no religious component. We each recount to the other a few good things that happened to us during the day. The goal is to make them as mundane as possible: The bus was there when I got to the stop. Traffic wasn’t too bad at that lousy intersection. I grabbed a piece of dark chocolate from the candy jar at work. (They all count.) This activity seems squarely aimed at the frequency-vs.-intensity problem. Each evening that we talk through Good Things, we are cataloging the frequent but minor pleasurable things that happened to us during the day. And by doing so, we are actually changing how we experience our days; we are encouraging ourselves more actively to notice minor pleasures we encounter as the hours roll by.

There’s nothing magical about these two techniques. Almost anyone could copy them or adapt them. I think the key is to do them frequently, hopefully every day. 

[Photo courtesy of Cindy Seigle.]