6. Help others – 100 hours a year is the magical
number
One of the most counter intuitive 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.
…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.
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).
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