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.