The How of Happiness

The truth is that my research on happiness had a serendipitous beginning. On my very first day of graduate school at Stanford, I spent an entire afternoon taking a walk around the campus with my new advisor, Lee Ross. He is a world expert on conflict and negotiation (a field not exactly akin to well-being field!), but he happened to raise with me the question of happiness that day. What is the secret to happiness? So, we started conducting some studies together, mostly very descriptive studies, in which we interviewed people who’d been nominated by their peers as being “very happy” or “very unhappy.” We were naïve at first about what we’d find, and so the interviews, as well as our later work, turned out to be very revealing.

That was 18 years ago, and those years have been challenging and thrilling. Since that first day, I’ve been investigating the question of why some people are happier than others and the question of how we can make people even happier. I often have the feeling of “I can’t believe I get paid to do this.” However, at the beginning, I was pretty insecure about the research and my abilities as a researcher. In part, this was because the topic of happiness was not considered very scientific back then. Now, there are scores of researchers and serious scientists investigating happiness at every level – from the experimental social psychology laboratory to the neuroscience bench to the field.

Freud suggested that lieben und arbeiten – to love and to work – are the secrets to well-being, and that has certainly been true for me. My husband and my family. My work. They have been the most powerful and most enduring sources of happiness for me.

One way that my approach to studying happiness has altered in past years is that I changed from a focus on investigating why some people are happier than others – that is, comparing happy and unhappy people – to studying how and why we can increase happiness. In the earlier years, in interviews with journalists, I would invariably be asked, “So what do your findings mean for our readers? What can they do to be happier?” And I would always say, “I don’t know,” or “My research really can’t address that question.” After some time, I realized that my research could address that question, and I started thinking about how to accomplish that.

I have not met with significant resistance from colleagues. In my mind, the biggest tension in my specific field is between its applied (or practical) and basic science branches. That is, at what point do we (as scientists) feel comfortable taking our findings from our basic laboratory and field studies – for instance, from double-blind placebo-controlled studies that my colleagues and I have done examining how practicing particular strategies can make people happier over time – and applying them to the wider public. As one example, a few years ago I was approached by a representative of the Compton School District about conducting a major happiness intervention in their elementary and middle schools. I declined, feeling that we as scientists did not yet know enough about how well our interventions would work in the “real world” to consume an extraordinary amount of time and resources on the behalf of schools. Today, I think we are closer to being ready to do this. On the other hand, some of my colleagues feel that a book like mine, which makes recommendations to readers on how they can become personally happier in their lives, is a bit premature, as the science hasn’t yet crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s. However, if researchers always waited until they knew everything there is to know about a topic before disseminating their findings to the public, then a great deal of discoveries and innovation would be lost to the world. The problem is that there will always be practitioners (such as self-help gurus and life coaches) who will not wait for the research findings to arrive and thus end up offering and popularizing advice that’s not based in solid science. So, it’s better that we disseminate our findings sooner – and ideally in a readable, accessible way – rather than later.

The How of Happiness has tons of footnotes, which provide the references for most of the “technical” findings that I mention. In psychology, like in most scientific fields, the vast majority of new discoveries are published in scholarly journals rather than in books. So I would urge highly motivated and interested readers to look up my footnotes. In addition, I have written a sample “syllabus” (see link on www.thehowofhappiness.com), which lists the most important academic papers that are relevant to each chapter. This syllabus is intended for teachers and instructors of courses on the subject of happiness, as well as for reading groups and individuals who simply want to learn more.

In my classes, when I’ve had students try several different strategies, they always find forgiveness to be the hardest. The reason, I think, is that this exercise requires overcoming strong negative emotions, as well as the motivation to forgive. (Many people do not believe that certain individuals or acts should be forgiven, and they may be wise not to choose this strategy.) Forgiving is very possible, however, but it may require a great deal more effort and time than some of the other happiness activities.

The story of Amy Biehl, and her parents, has always been powerful and memorable for me, as she was a student at Stanford at the same time that I was, and news of her death hit some people that I knew very, very hard. Her parents’ depth of forgiveness, and her mother’s actions of the subsequent years, is perhaps unfathomable to most people. I definitely see her parents as role models we may try to aspire to, not to emulate.

My family emigrated from Russia to the United States when I was 9 years old, and one of my earliest memories is observing people strolling down the street in Boston looking cheerful, smiling, and saying hello as we passed by. It occurred to me that Americans must be happier than Russians, who appear pretty dour-faced and sullen walking about. Indeed, one of the most striking cultural differences immediately evident to first-time visitors to a new country is in the ways that the locals express (or fail to express) happiness. There’s actually more to such variations than meets the eye. Whereas Russians may appear melancholy relative to Americans in public, the difference seems to reverse when one observes a raucous dinner party inside a Moscow home. Some 20 years later, I decided to study the question of cultural differences myself by traveling to Russia and doing research there. I found that, as I suspected, due to cultural norms rooted in their history and religion, Russians did report being significantly less happy than Americans. However, the difference only held for the older generation. The young people – those of the worldwide media and internet generation – were very similar in their beliefs and pursuit of happiness to their U.S. counterparts.

The bottom line is that I believe that the desire for happiness is universal. Members of different cultural groups may define happiness in different ways (i.e., as involving fun vs. romantic love vs. spiritual salvation, as entailing material success vs. a virtuous life, etc.). They may express happiness in different ways – through throwing themselves energetically into a lifelong goal, through smiling and laughter, or through quiet contemplation. And they may pursue happiness in different ways – for example, by trying to appreciate what they have or by devoting themselves to family life or by working to attain closeness to God. But, in the end, they all seek happiness in their own way. In every nation probed by survey researchers, respondents have placed happiness at the top of their most significant life goals. And even during the relatively rare instances in which some individuals profess not to desire happiness for themselves, almost all concede that they wish their children to be happy. In short, although the ways that happiness is defined, understood, coveted, expressed, shared, and pursued may slightly differ in different nations, the yearning for a flourishing, happy life and many of the ingredients for such a life appear to be universal. As a bicultural and bilingual person – and a close observer of cultural difference in general – I am persuaded that every reader of every stripe can find something befitting and becoming among the dozen happiness-enhancing activities that I describe within my book.

Many of the stories come from people I’ve met – either in my personal life or through my work and media experiences – and a few are actually amalgamations of different people, including those interviewed in my lab. I especially resonate with the stories of people who appear to have it all– or have had it all and lost it – but recognize that their happiness doesn’t come from external things.

People are indeed often surprised – sometimes astonished – at some of the findings, but they almost never react negatively. The few unfriendly reactions I have received are from people who maintain that the research is worthless because everything my colleagues and I have found has already been described in the bible. My answer has always been that all of us are bombarded with numerous prescriptions for happiness – not just from religious teachings, but from our grandmothers, uncles, blogs, and television shows. Some of the advice is questionable and some is even contradictory. For these reasons, it is very important to establish that how-to-be-happy recommendations are supported by solid empirical results. Why? Because scientific research holds multiple advantages over anecdotal or clinical observations. By applying the scientific method, researchers have the ability to disentangle cause and effect and to study a phenomenon systematically, without biases or preconceptions.

I recall one day that I had spent hours writing about the “Will it matter in a year?” strategy (for the section in my book on how to shake off ruminations), and I became very excited about trying this technique. So, I started telling my husband, Pete, what a great strategy this is and how well it works. Just when I finished talking, my daughter, who was then 7, walked in and her hair was completely and utterly entangled with gum. I just lost it! I started yelling at her: “How could you do such a thing?! That was so foolish!”, etc. And Pete just started laughing. “What were you just telling me? Will this matter in a year?” “But it will matter in a year!” I cried. “I’m going to have to cut her hair off and it’s still going to be short a whole year later!”

Though that was clearly not an opportunity that I took to use the “Will it matter in a year?” strategy, I still practice it quite often and find it extremely effective.

I’ve been fortunate not to have experienced real tragedy, but there have certainly been very trying times. I’ve come out of those experiences with a realization that I’m a strong person and that I can endure a lot. This recognition has helped me tremendously when the next stress or challenge comes along. I have also been able to use past ordeals as a contrast with a happier present (e.g., “I’m so happy and relieved that I don’t have to worry about X anymore”), and, to use that old cliché, to count my blessings.

Religion is a tough subject for a scientist to wrap her head around because many people believe that religion and science do not mix – that faith and spirituality belong on one level of analysis or category of experience, and that science is on an entirely different level or category. The approach I take in the book, however, is not to empirically establish the validity of religious beliefs, but to consider whether being spiritual or religious is associated with positive outcomes, like happiness and health. This turns out to be a very tractable scientific question, the answer to which is “yes.”

Much of my reluctance has come from the seeming “hokeyness” of the strategies that I describe. I’ve never been the type of person to read inspirational quotes or browse through the self-help section or try counting my blessings. I even resisted for a long time doing research on how happiness can be increased, for fear that it would be too practical or applied. But after thinking about it for a couple years, I realized that the question of how and why people can become happier is a fascinating basic scientific question in itself. I also came to see that the supposed hokey strategies can be tested systematically in the laboratory for their efficacy. Now I know that practicing certain happiness activities – and practicing them in specific optimal ways – is highly effective and has the potential to change people’s lives. Hearing from people who have experienced the power of the strategies has also probably changed my perspective. I still am not a fan of inspirational quotes or most self-help books, but I do try to swallow my own medicine and practice a few of the strategies in my daily life.