Hacking Happiness (24 page)

Note I said he would “work” with patients. This language is key. If you go see a therapist, you’re making a bold and admirable step. You’re seeking help. But once you get there, be ready to
work
. As a writer and actor, I’ve had the benefit of years of training around introspection. It doesn’t mean I can control my emotions, mind you; it just means I understand the need to measure how I feel and behave where I feel I need to improve.

I’m saying this because I don’t want to bullshit you in terms of Hacking H(app)iness. Taking measure of your life is hard. It should be. Otherwise it wouldn’t be rewarding. You’re worth the effort of deep self-reflection. That way, you get to discover what makes you tick. You’ll also learn what actions you can take to amplify the positive things in your life while decreasing the negative.

Here’s some more straight shooting for you: The majority of science around positive psychology shows that the mood of elevated feelings often associated with ephemeral happiness is fleeting. This type of happiness is called hedonic happiness (same root word as
hedonism
) and stems from short-lived experiences we get used to quickly. This doesn’t diminish the joy you’ll feel at these moments, like when you get a raise or buy a new car. But within a week or two, you may find yourself needing another rush from a similar type of experience, and you may get caught up on what’s called a “hedonic treadmill.” This means you’ll adjust, or habituate, your core level of happiness to this new event. Pretty soon it won’t bring the same pleasure it did at first.

This is the type of emotional experience most of us associate with happiness—the rush of romantic love, the thrill of an exotic vacation. These are normal, valid, and frankly awesome emotions to have. But you can prolong another type of happiness known as eudaimonic happiness by focusing on things that bring you intrinsic rewards.
Eudaimonia
is a word coined by Aristotle and is often translated as “human flourishing.” Flourishing implies a long-term state of being versus momentary mood. This is why, in academic or scientific discussions, people often use “well-being” instead of “happiness” to discuss these issues. “Happiness” in these contexts can be construed as mood, or the narcissistic pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake alone. Eudaimonia, by contrast, refers to the highest human good one can achieve. By definition, seeking eudaimonic well-being implies an outward focus in order to flourish within. For the Greeks, this also meant interaction within one’s
polis, or city, as helping others in the community was a way to increase long-term and intrinsic well-being.

Here’s some good news: I’m not going to give you a bullshitian how-to set of rules to follow in this book that will “guarantee your happiness.” The sobering, yet also good, news: I’m going to walk you through an amazing set of scientifically proven theories showing how you can work to identify the things that bring you meaning, and how you can amplify them to increase long-term well-being. But first you have to be willing to do the work.

It’s like the old psychiatrist joke my dad loved to tell:

DAD:
How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?

ME:
How many?

DAD:
Two. One to get the ladder, and the other to ask the lightbulb if he really wants to change.

The Science and the Sacrifice

Do you want to change? Do you want to work to improve your level of happiness? It’s okay if initially you think that this idea is a load of hooey. But don’t let that stop you from experimenting with the ideas you’ll discover from some of the leading scientists around the world. Rather than a self-help formula, however, a lot of what positive psychology reveals feels like common sense. It’s just common sense backed by science.

A big part of Hacking H(app)iness is about taking action to improve your well-being, and I want to provide some proactive tools to get you started right away.

Here’s my first recommendation: Go to Happify (www.happify .com) and sign up to try their site. Their five-part STAGE framework (Savor, Thank, Aspire, Give, Empathize) is based on the science of positive psychology. They point out on their site that “recent scientific breakthroughs reveal that happiness is a skill within your
control.” This is backed up by a number of other psychologists and scientists. Like exercising your body, you can exercise areas of your life that will increase happiness. No time like the present—sacrifice a little bit of time and see how happy you are with your results.

When you go to the site to sign up, you’ll be asked to fill out a short survey (took me three minutes) to assess your happiness level, a number to show where you’re optimized and where you could improve. Then you’ll be given a number of tracks to choose from to help begin the work of improving your happiness. I chose the “strengthen your friendships” track, because even though I’m a very outgoing person, I’m also a homebody as a writer. I was given the “thanks for being awesome” task that asked me to write down three things I appreciated about my best friend. Here’s what I wrote:

• She listens to the details of my work even when I know she hasn’t always told me about her day.
  
• She is always thinking ahead for what’s best for our kids and our family.
  
• She loves me for who I am. That is not always easy for
  me
  to do.
  

I felt pleasure writing those words. It took about sixty seconds to think about how awesome my wife is, and I felt a renewed sense of blessing that she’s in my life.

I paused. I reflected. I remembered how freaking lucky I am. I got happier.

One of my favorite aspects of Happify is how, after you finish a task, you can click on their “Why It Works” button to read about the science behind the activity you’ve just done. Here’s what was listed after my “thanks for being awesome” exercise:

In a study conducted by Drs. Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, and Christopher Peterson, a group of people was asked to practice this gratitude exercise every day for one week. Even though the exercise lasted just one week, at the one-month follow-up, participants were happier and less depressed than they had been at baseline, and they stayed happier and less depressed at the three- and six-month follow-ups. This practice primes our mind for gratitude and helps overcome the brain’s natural “negativity bias,” a phenomenon by which we are wired to give more weight to negative rather than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
¹

The negativity bias, by the way, is why my dad told people not to watch the news—you have to train yourself against your brain’s proclivity to heed negativity. Apparently it’s a remnant from caveman days when being aware of negative things like “that mammoth looks angry” or “neighbor Grog has ax aimed at my head” helped keep us alive. These days, that ancient bias means we feed off distressing news or even gossip.

Let it go, people. Mammoths are extinct. It’s time to focus on the positive.

A Complement to What’s Come Before

The science of positive psychology has been Hacking H(app)iness for over a decade now, helping people focus on ways to improve
their well-being versus simply removing pain. Note the field is not trying to replace traditional psychoanalysis, but to complement it. Utilizing the scientific method in analyzing human behavior, the field seeks to prove that focusing only on people’s disorders could lead to an incomplete view of their condition. Here’s how the International Positive Psychology Association answers the question “Is positive psychology an abandoning or rejection of the rest of psychology?”:

In a word, no. [The] consequence of this focus on psychological problems, however, is that psychology has little to say about what makes life most worth living. Positive psychology proposes to correct this imbalance by focusing on strengths as well as weaknesses, on building the best things in life as well as repairing the worst. It asserts that human goodness and excellence is just as authentic as distress and disorder, that life entails more than the undoing of problems.
²

In a similar fashion, Gross National Happiness and other metrics of well-being around the world are widening people’s perspectives around measuring value. While measuring wealth is an important metric, it isn’t the only determinant of happiness or well-being. In his book
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being
, Martin Seligman agrees with this sentiment, noting that if all that is being measured by GDP is money, policy will be focused only on getting more money. By measuring well-being, policy will reflect a wider scope of measures beyond fiscal wealth.

In terms of your life, if all you measure is the negative, guess what you’ll focus on?

In terms of your digital life, if your main priority is increasing your online influence, you’ll discover the hedonic treadmill
firsthand (literally—your thumbs are probably tired from posting on Facebook). If you measure your life only by your Klout score, you’ll never achieve long-lasting happiness.

To increase our well-being, we need to look beyond ourselves.

Martin Seligman and PERMA

A great way to introduce yourself to the work of Martin Seligman is to listen to his talk about the state of psychology from a TED Conference in 2004.
³
In about twenty minutes, Seligman walks through specifics on the nature of traditional psychoanalysis and how positive psychology as a science is now complementing the study and improvement of well-being. Seligman is called the father of positive psychology, although there are others, like Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Sonja Lyubomirsky, who are also credited with creating the field (we’ll discuss them in future chapters on the concepts of flow and altruism).

Here’s how Wikipedia defines positive psychology:

Positive psychology is a recent branch of psychology whose purpose was summed up in 1998 by Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “We believe that a psychology of positive human functioning will arise, which achieves a scientific understanding and effective interventions to build thriving individuals, families, and communities.” Positive psychologists seek “to find and nurture genius and talent” and “to make normal life more fulfilling,” rather than merely treating mental illness.
⁴

In Seligman’s recent book
Flourish,
he discusses his idea of PERMA,
⁵
or the five measurable elements of well-being (versus happiness), the primary focus for positive psychology.

POSITIVE EMOTION
—You can act on this by being grateful, either by journaling or telling someone else how they improve your life.

ENGAGEMENT
—You can act on this by identifying the core skills you think you were built to accomplish. This is the idea of discovering your “flow,” a term coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi that we’ll discuss in a future chapter. When you achieve a state of flow, you don’t feel anything in the moment, since you’re so deeply involved in what you’re doing. It’s after a task is completed and you reflect on it that you feel a deep sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

RELATIONSHIPS
—You can act on relationships, but since they include other people, they become multifaceted but necessary aspects of improving well-being.

MEANING
—You can act on this by serving a purpose bigger than your own fulfillment. Like the Greek focus in eudaimonia about civic engagement, meaning is created from outside of yourself, not solely from within.

ACHIEVEMENT
—You can act on this when you pursue success, accomplishment, and mastery for their own sakes, even if they bring no positive emotion or increase in positive relationships. Similar to the idea of flow, people often pursue achievement in things like sports for the sheer joy of participating in that activity. As an example of this, in
Flourish
, Seligman quotes the actor playing famous Olympic runner Eric Liddell in the film
Chariots of Fire
: “I believe that God made me for a purpose . . . But he also made me fast, and when I run, I feel His pleasure.”
⁶

In
Flourish
, Seligman points out that PERMA and well-being are constructs, where happiness is a “real thing.” In positive psychology as well as economics, measuring happiness is often done by asking people to fill out a survey question focused on “life satisfaction.” Typically this contains either a seven- or ten-point scale, where one indicates low life satisfaction and seven or ten indicates
high life satisfaction. These scales are a useful tool because they ask people to provide their subjective perspective on how they feel about a certain experience or aspect of their lives. While they may be affected by survey bias, a term meaning they know they’re being asked a question and may change their answer based on that awareness, they’re providing a truth that nobody can deny. Subjective in nature, employing a large-scale survey about citizens’ life satisfaction around a certain issue lets a government discover the answer to “How are we doing in this area?”