The New Science of Happiness

If you were slightly skeptical on reading the title of this article, I would not blame you in the least. For those of us who have spent years in pursuit of happiness, and who have possibly fallen prey to self-help books and scam artists on the journey, it can seem more than a little suspicious that science could tell us anything about happiness that we don’t already know.

Also, isn’t happiness a subjective experience? Is it even possible to make generalized observations about the kinds of things that give people joy?

Psychologists are finding out, however, that the answers are simpler than we think. Simply surveying large numbers of people, asking them “What is it that makes you happy?”, and aggregating the data can give us useful insights into what makes us happy and what doesn’t. I, for one, learnt a lot as part of the research for this article. I’m not sure how much of a difference this will make to my overall happiness levels, but knowing the answers is only half the battle. A lot of our happiness depends on habits, on effortful activities that enhance happiness in the long run. But more on that later.

If you think about it, there are only three major categories of things that can influence our happiness. One is our genes. It turns out that, despite what we would like to believe, our genetics plays quite a role in how happy we are. Some of us are simply born as more upbeat people than others. Encouragingly, though, scientists have found that only about 50 percent of our happiness is actually influenced by our genes.

The second factor, and one that most of us tend to believe has a huge role to play in happiness, is our circumstances. We think “Oh, if I won the lottery, I would be so much happier!”, and conversely “I cannot even imagine having to live with a disability. That would make me so unhappy”. It turns out, though, that our circumstances affect our happiness levels far less than we think they do.

The happiest part for me about the findings of the science of well-being is that our habits and our efforts towards happiness, things that are entirely under our control, make up a large chunk of our happiness levels. In the words of Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of psychology and author of the book The How of Happiness, “Happiness is not out there for us to find. The reason that it’s not out there is that it’s inside us”. So at least some of the cliches about happiness are backed by science, after all!

We have several tendencies that make us less happy than we ought to be. For one, humans are always comparing themselves with other people. For another, we also get used to material wealth very easily. The happiness that a new gadget gives wanes continually with time. I might have a burst of happiness the first few days of using my new phone, but there is then a sharp decline in happiness level. This reflects hedonic adaptation, the fact that humans have a tendency to reach a baseline level of happiness despite intervening positive (or even negative) events in life.

Scientists have found that techniques such as mindfulness and savoring can help overcome hedonic adaptation to a certain extent. Also, contrary to what most people think, what seems to make us happy is not material wealth or a new job but how much “time affluence” we have—time to spend with family or doing things that we love.

There is much out there on the new and constantly evolving science of happiness. For anyone curious and willing to learn about the research on happiness, The Happiness Lab podcast by Yale Professor Laurie Santos is a great place to start. Dr. Santos also runs an excellent evidence-based course on Coursera called “the Science of Well-Being”. The encouraging thing about happiness research is that much of it can provide us with actionable insights into how we can be happier in our everyday lives.