I used to study success, but noticed that many successful people were unhappy. So I decided to study happiness instead. What does the science actually say?
The result is my personal model of “happying” as a verb, not a goal. You don’t pursue it. You do it. And the five elements of doing it form the acronym H-A-P-P-Y.
H = Harmony (emotional balance)
A = Action (flow and achievement)
P = People (strong relationships)
P = Purpose (sense of meaning)
Y = Yes! (positive emotions)
Before the late 1990s, psychologists mostly studied how people suffer. Then Martin Seligman, president of the American Psychological Association, asked: what if we also studied how people thrive?
He introduced positive psychology as a field, and identified five core elements of wellbeing. These are positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment. I have restructured these into the acronym H-A-P-P-Y, which I think makes them easier to remember.
H = Harmony
We should strive for emotional harmony, and keep our positive and negative experiences in perspective. We’re bad at remembering what made us happy, good at knowing how we feel now, and bad at predicting how we’ll feel later.
That’s why, a year later, lottery winners are less happy than we expect, and crippled accident victims less unhappy. It’s also why people believe that living in California would make them happier than people who do live in California actually are.
When we think of these events, we focus on the change of becoming a lottery winner or accident victim or resident of California, not on the ongoing reality of being one. Over time, we adapt to most changes. Millionaires face new problems. Disabled people develop new interests.
Just being aware of this mistaken bias in our minds helps us to counteract it. Also, we should get older! Older people are less likely to over-predict how future events will make them feel, simply because they have been through so many similar good and bad events in their lives.
As we develop our emotional Harmony as a foundation for our happying, we should apply it in a balanced way to the four pillars of Action, People, Purpose, and Yes!
A = Action
You should spend time engaged in activities that you love doing for their own sake, not for an external reward. It can be a hobby, playing sport, reading, writing, dancing, playing music, or anything you love. It is often but not always something you do by yourself.
The ideal activity is a little bit more challenging than your current skill level. If it is too challenging, you can get anxious. If it is too easy, you can get bored. If you hit that sweet spot, you can get so absorbed that you reach a state named ‘flow’ by the late positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
During flow, you can lose your sense of time and space, and start to notice nuances that are not open to you outside the state of flow. You might suddenly realise that hours have passed, and you didn’t even notice.
As well as enjoying a sense of flow while doing things for their own sake, you can also do things that might not feel good at the time, but result in a sense of achievement when you reach a target. These two types of action (based on flow and achievement) can each help you be happier.
P = People
We humans are social animals. We thrive when we are sharing our lives in a supportive way with other people. These relationships can be romantic or platonic, and can be with people at home, work, and play. The late positive psychologist Chris Peterson put it succinctly: ‘other people matter.’
Positive relationships give us a sense of belonging, and reduce our stress levels. We should cultivate our shared ability to experience joy, gratitude, love, trust, empathy, forgiveness, communication, and good conflict management.
Also, happiness is infectious. It spreads through social networks, infecting people that you don’t even know. And it spreads more strongly than sadness does. One comprehensive study found that people at the core of a local social network are more likely to be happy than people at the periphery.
Finally, the World Happiness Report consistently has Nordic countries topping its charts. Six variables explain most of the reasons why a country is happier. These are having someone to count on, GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, and freedom from corruption.
P = Purpose
You should live for something bigger than yourself, through which you can give your life meaning. It could be a life philosophy, a cause, a craft, or just making life better for others. My purpose is promoting fairness, justice, and happiness for individual people and nonhuman animals, through rational secular liberalism. Yours might be entirely different. And that’s the point
Many people get their sense of purpose through religion. This is understandable. Organised religion provides a ready-made life philosophy, as well as opportunities for flow, community, and positive emotions. And you are more motivated to stick with a worldview if you believe the creator of the universe wants you to.
But religion is an example of a sense of purpose, not the source of a sense of purpose. I and many others create our sense of purpose through engagement with the natural world. We don’t need to add in unsupported beliefs about the supernatural. We don’t follow rules just because someone claims a supernatural being said so.
Wherever you get your sense of purpose, living your life in accordance with it will help your wellbeing. Just be aware of the danger that following it might cause you to inflict injustice on other sentient beings.
Y = Yes!
Yes! represents the feeling you get from positive emotions. One way of doing this seems obvious: have more physical pleasure. But this suffers from the hedonic treadmill effect. If you get a certain level of pleasure buzz from doing something, you can need a stronger dose of doing the same thing to get the same buzz the next time.
The other four elements of H-A-P-P-Y (Harmony, Action, People, and Purpose) do not suffer from this effect. Instead they can accumulate positively. They can strengthen your ability to be happier rather than reducing it. So don’t avoid physically pleasant experiences. They are usually good. But don’t rely on them alone for happiness.
Conclusion
This is my approach to happiness. I consider ‘happying’ to be a verb. I do it, not pursue it. While doing this, based on the results of positive psychology research, I start in Harmony, take Action, connect with People, live with Purpose, and enjoy moments of Yes!
Thanks for reading my return to regular writing. You can also read this post on Substack and register for free to have future articles emailed to you. I’ll be blogging about happiness, humour, reason, atheism, and secular liberal politics.