As part of research I’m doing for a new book on how the brain works, I’ve picked up some interesting suggestions for improving your life in 2012. Here is one:
Understand where happiness really comes from
Everyone wants to be happier, but what is happiness? Happiness actually results from different processes in the brain. Some of these sources of happiness can work against each other, so it’s important understand where the good feelings come from and how they are produced. Each researcher has their own scheme, but to me they boil down to two very separate sources of happiness:
• Pleasure
• Meaning
We as a culture put a lot of emphasis on the first, but less on the second. Pleasure at it’s most basic level can be the good feeling we get from eating good food, from sex, from drinking a tall glass of water on a hot day. It can come from music or a beautiful object. It can come from a big bonus at work or the sudden decrease in stress that comes with a vacation. The problem with focusing on pleasure as single road to happiness is that it usually results in a dead-end.
Researchers find that a more lasting happiness comes from finding meaning in what you do, from being part of something that is larger than yourself, from making sense of the world, from contributing to something that affects the well-being of others and may extend beyond your own lifetime. Creating meaning can be a difficult and sometimes unpleasant activity, but researchers have found that people end up with a longer lasting sense of happiness (and even pleasure).
One Stanford researcher split her class into two groups. The first she told to go out and “create happiness” in their lives. The second group she ordered to go out and “create meaning” in their lives. People in the first group did things like eat at a favorite restaurant, buy something they have wanted for a while, give up work for the day so they could read. The second group did things like volunteer for a charity or reconnect with family members. After a few days, the two groups came back and were quizzed about their level of happiness. Which group do you think turned out to be happier? (Hint: it wasn’t number one.)
Martin Seligmann, the father of “positive psychology” has proposed that happiness comes from five factors that form the acronym PERMA:
Positive Emotion –which is really pleasure.
Engagement—being fully involved in an activity that is just challenging enough to create a sense of flow
Relationships—being part of a larger social network, whether a couple, a family or a society.
Meaning—what Joseph Campbell called “Understanding the world, its parts and our place in it.” Having a reason for doing things that is greater than our own pleasure, and is sometimes very unpleasant (like dying for a cause). Sometimes this category might be thought of as “significance,” a recognition that you matter in the world.
Accomplishments—completing goals and doing things that extend to the wider world and into the future.
When Plato described happiness he used a word that can be translated as “flourishing.” For Plato, happiness was part not an end goal but the result of an ongoing process. True happiness comes from bringing all the sources of happiness into our lives, like combining the right measures of soil, water, sunlight and nutrients that allow a garden to flourish.