6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical
number
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of
advice I found is that to make yourself feel happier, you should help others.
In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours per week) is the optimal
time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.
If we go back to Shawn
Achor’s book again, he says this about helping others:
…when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent
purchases, they found that money spent on activities—such as concerts and group
dinners out—brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes,
televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called
“prosocial spending,” also boosts happiness.
The Journal of Happiness Studies published
a study that explored this very topic:
Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or
someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose
whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants
assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling
significantly happier immediately after this recollection; most
importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose
to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future.
So spending money on other people makes us
happier than buying stuff for ourselves. What about spending our time on
other people? A study
of volunteering in Germany explored
how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken
away:
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion,
the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering
was still widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the
infrastructure of volunteering (e.g. sports clubs associated with firms)
collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based
on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of
people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the
hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life
satisfaction.
In his book Flourish:
A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor
Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:
…we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most
reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
7. Practice smiling – it can alleviate pain
Smiling itself can make us feel better, but
it’s more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to this
study:
A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests
customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood
and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a
result of cultivating positive thoughts – such as a tropical vacation or a
child’s recital – improve their mood and withdraw less.
Of course it’s important to practice
“real smiles” where you use your eye sockets.
It’s very easy to spot the difference:
According to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us
perform better on cognitive tasks:
Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility
and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et
al. (2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on
attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the
trees.
A smile is also a good way to alleviate
some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:
Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation.
Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile
when we don’t feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one
example of embodied cognition).
One of our previous posts goes into even
more detail about the
science of smiling.
8. Plan a trip – but don’t take one
As opposed to actually taking a holiday, it
seems that planning a vacation or just a break from work can improve our
happiness. A study published in the journal, Applied
Research in Quality of Life showed that
the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as
employees enjoyed the sense of anticipation:
In the study, the effect of vacation
anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks.
After the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for
most people.
Shawn Achor has some info for us on this
point, as well:
One study found that people who just thought
about watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by
27 percent.
If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out
with friends, put something on the calendar—even if it’s a month or a year down
the road. Then whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about
it.
9. Meditate – rewire your brain for happiness
Meditation is often touted as an important
habit for improving focus, clarity and attention span, as well as helping to
keep you calm. It turns out it’s also useful for improving
your happiness:
In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at
the brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an
eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January
issue of Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the
course, parts of the participants’ brains associated with compassion and
self-awareness grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.
Meditation literally clears your mind and
calms you down, it’s been often proven to be the single most effective way to
live a happier live. I believe that this graphic explains it the best:
According to Shawn Achor, meditation can
actually make you happier long-term:
Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience
feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy.
And, research even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the
brain to raise levels of happiness.
The fact that we can actually alter our
brain structure through mediation is most surprising to me and somewhat
reassuring that however we feel and think today isn’t permanent.
10. Practice gratitude – increase both happiness
and life satisfaction
This is a seemingly simple strategy, but
I’ve personally found it to make a huge difference to my outlook. There are
lots of ways to practice gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you’re
grateful for, sharing
three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude
when others help you.
In an
experiment where some participants took note of
things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just from
this simple practice:
The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across
several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the 3 studies, relative
to the comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most
robust finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional
and interpersonal benefits.
The Journal of Happiness studies published
a study that used letters of gratitude to test how
being grateful can affect our levels of happiness:
Participants included 219 men and women who
wrote three letters of gratitude over a 3 week period.
Results indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants’
happiness and life satisfaction, while decreasing depressive symptoms.
Quick last fact: Getting older will make yourself
happier
As a final point, it’s interesting to note
that as we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to grow
happier naturally. There’s still some debate over
why this happens, but scientists have got a few ideas:
Researchers, including the authors, have
found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on
and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less.
Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out situations
that will lift their moods — for instance, pruning social circles of friends or
acquaintances who might bring them down. Still other work finds that older
adults learn to let go of loss and disappointment over unachieved goals, and
hew their goals toward greater well being.
So if you thought being old would make you
miserable, rest assured that it’s likely you’ll develop a more positive outlook
than you probably have now.
Want to chat about this article? Leave a comment below or send me an email with your thoughts.
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