Hacking Happiness (25 page)

So while a happiness-focused survey can measure a singular subjective question with rigor, well-being, as Seligman defines it, contains multiple measurable elements versus one overarching answer. Each element contributes to well-being, but doesn’t define it as a whole.

Seligman is the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and his site, Authentic Happiness, features a number of helpful surveys you can fill out to learn more about your attributes as they pertain to PERMA and other positive psychology–related elements. I found the Grit Survey particularly helpful. It has twenty-two questions and took about five minutes to fill out. According to the site, “Grit is perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Our research suggests that grittier individuals accomplish very difficult challenges.” I got a three out of five, which I found to be quite interesting. While I thought my score might have been higher, I tried to answer the questions as truthfully as possible, a process I found enlightening.

A final word from Seligman about the nature of positive relationships in relation to PERMA: “Very little that is positive is solitary,” he notes in
Flourish
. He quotes his friend Stephen Post, professor of medical humanities at State University of New York at Stony Brook, relating a story about his mother. When Stephen, as a boy, looked flustered or upset, his mother would encourage him to “go out and help someone.” As it turns out, this piece of maternal
wisdom has empirical backing, as Seligman notes, “We scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single more reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”
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As my mom said this same thing to me, apparently I was raised by two experts in psychology, not just one. I’m a more positive person because of it.

Positive Psychology at Work

“With the science of happiness and positive psychology, we’re focusing on what’s right with us and fine-tuning those things—like our sense of progress, control, connectedness, and purpose—to become happier people,” noted Jenn Lim.
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Jenn is the CEO and chief happiness officer at Delivering Happiness at Work, the workplace consultancy created by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos.com and author of the best seller
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
. The company is one of a growing group of organizations utilizing principles of positive psychology to inspire increased business value along with inspired employees.

In 2002, Gallup quantified a link between employee feelings and ROI, reporting that lost productivity due to employee disengagement costs more than $350 billion in the United States every year.
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In recent years, there’s been a shift to quantify positive emotions or happiness in the workplace as a way to increase revenue, rather than simply worry about loss due to employee disengagement.

An interesting aspect of the study of happiness at work has to do with global cultural attitudes of emotions and their place in the enterprise. I interviewed Marise Schot, a concept developer and head of the Happiness Lab at the Waag Society in Amsterdam who also founded her own design studio, to gauge how she felt U.S. attitudes toward emotion at work were different from those of the Dutch.

My experience is that in the U.S.A. the existence of emotions is less present in daily life, and also less accepted than in the Netherlands. What I noticed was that food was used to treat yourself or as a way to take a break (the stroll to the Starbucks, lunch meeting with colleagues) or when you think you deserved it. For us Europeans, this idea of having food manage your moods and needs was not something that we recognized. But it makes perfect sense as you relate this with the American dream, where you are expected to work hard in order to become successful—there is no room for emotions.
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I find this fascinating, that the perception of American culture could be that people in the United States don’t have time for emotions regarding work, or that an excuse might be required to go off-site to express one’s feelings. Where food in Marise’s example is the instigator of expression, sensors or other technology aligned with consulting practices like the ones offered by Delivering Happiness appear to be providing permission for Americans and other workers to identify and benefit from positive emotions embraced within the workplace. And while the idea of quantifying happiness in the enterprise may seem fluffy at first, Jenn Lim points out this phase of doubt will pass:

There’s always going to be naysayers, but now that we’ve developed ways to tie workplace benefits back to scientific, measured happiness, even they can’t deny the correlation between happier employees, happier customers, and more successful long-term sustainable business. In five to ten years, happiness in the workplace won’t be a novel idea—it’ll be an economically proven and understood model that organizations will use as a way to ensure long-term sustainable and profitable brands. In an even shorter time, more individuals will recognize that happiness should be prioritized both at home and at work.
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Kristine Maudal is a partner and CFO (chief fun officer) at Brainwells, an innovation consultancy based in Oslo, Norway, helping companies foster happier and more productive workplaces and focusing on a “return on involvement” versus just standard ROI. I interviewed Kristine on the subject of happiness at work, and she noted the importance of being able to measure progress based on employee engagement.

I do definitely think that happiness at work can be measured and improved. But it is important to define what we mean by happiness. Scholars, researchers, consultants, press, everyone is talking about the importance of work-life happiness and satisfaction, but only a few know how to create it. What we know is that people really like to be seen, heard, and involved. That makes them happy. And engaged. Engaged people make better work. That creates happy leaders. It is a good circle.
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A final point on the idea of positive psychology at work: Whatever cultural biases we may have, the fact remains that adults spend the majority of their lives in an office or work setting. When fifty to sixty hours a week (minimum) are spent at work, it’s time we recognized that not focusing on creating well-being and happiness at our jobs means we’re ignoring a large part of our emotional life for the decades we’re in the workforce. The organizations that embrace methodologies to leverage positive well-being and happiness for their employees are certainly more likely to see benefits in the future than the ones that don’t.

Compassion Is Catching

There’s a debate among scientists about human nature regarding selfishness. Are we wired only to think about ourselves? It makes sense to think that, in an evolutionary process, helping others
probably wouldn’t be the best way to keep your own species alive. But a good deal of science in the field of positive psychology has revealed how compassion may be hardwired into us via the neurons and hormones that are a part of our brains.

Greater Good is a website and publication created by the Greater Good Science Center (GGSC) based at the University of California, Berkeley. The GGSC’s mission is to “study the psychology, sociology, and neuroscience of well-being, and [teach] skills that foster a thriving, resilient, and compassionate society.” In his article “The Compassionate Instinct” for the site, Dacher Keltner provides a number of scientific studies documenting altruism and compassion, including research conducted at Emory University:

In other research by Emory University neuroscientists James Rilling and Gregory Berns, participants were given the chance to help someone else while their brain activity was recorded. Helping others triggered activity in the caudate nucleus and anterior cingulate, portions of the brain that turn on when people receive rewards or experience pleasure. This is a rather remarkable finding: helping others brings the same pleasure we get from the gratification of personal desire.
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The article also described the presence of a hormone known as oxytocin in our bodies that floats through our bloodstream. Keltner conducted a number of studies and found that when people perform behaviors associated with compassion (warm smiles, friendly hand gestures), their bodies produced more oxytocin. The suggestion of this behavior, as Keltner points out, is that “compassion may be self-perpetuating: Being compassionate causes a chemical reaction in the body that motivates us to be even more compassionate.”
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I first learned about oxytocin and its relation to compassion
when I interviewed
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filmmaker, publisher, and workshop producer Eiji Han Shimizu. Shimizu is on the advisory committee for the H(app)athon Project that I founded and has a unique program that combines Zen meditation with entertainment. He was also a producer for the
Happy
movie.

One of the best ways to learn a majority of the newest ideas around positive psychology is to watch this film. For a number of months in 2013, it was the highest-rated documentary on iTunes, and has won more than a dozen awards to date. Featuring multiple interviews from leading psychologists and other experts, its power lies primarily in the interviews of people from around the world and their attitudes toward happiness in their own lives.

Shimizu had a thriving career in Tokyo before working on
Happy
. But in our interview, he related that success in business wasn’t helping him improve his well-being. In fact, the more successful he became, the more stress he felt. Sadly, as the documentary points out, Japan has, for many years, had the highest suicide rate of any developed country. Stress is at an all-time high as many young men and women seek to increase their productivity and wealth above all else. The cost for this singular focus has been alarmingly high.

Leaving Japan to pursue work on the film changed Shimizu’s life.
Happy
took a number of years to create, and now that it’s been released, Shimizu is leading workshops to help others discover and foster their own well-being. In our interview, I asked Shimizu what he thought was the most surprising thing he had learned while working on the film.

The most surprising thing to me was that we’d been commissioned to make a film about happiness, but what we ended up making was a documentary on compassion. After interviewing a number of scientists, they verified that having a compassionate mind-set is the best booster of
happiness. Again and again, science has verified the strong correlation between happiness and the good heart.

This correlation is based on the discovery of mirror neurons and how they relate to oxytocin. Essentially, oxytocin is released when you are kind to someone else, or even when you see someone do a kindness for someone else. The basic idea is that you can feel a sense of compassion in the process even if you’re just witnessing it.

That’s why I think we human beings have survived for so long, along with our intellect. It’s not just about survival of the fittest. Survival involves the intellect, but compassion plays an equal role in the process.
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How encouraging to know that even witnessing acts of compassion can increase physical changes in our minds and bodies that increase our well-being. These can be experienced to a certain degree in digital realms, although face-to-face sightings
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provide more lasting results. Seeking to flourish by looking for the positive, instead of subjecting ourselves to the negative, has scientific basis in positive psychology. Looking within to examine what brings us meaning and outward to learn from or help others is a path that can lead to increased happiness.

But we do have to look.

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FLOW

Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue . . . as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.
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VIKTOR FRANKL

I
’M PRETTY SURE
this is how my tombstone is going to read:

John C. Havens

1969–(TBD)

Loving Husband and Father

Kick-ass harmonica player

I’d be okay with this. I’ve played harmonica since high school, and many of the best experiences in my life have revolved around music.
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When I’m onstage, I enter a zone of blissful ignorance where all I’m experiencing is the music in the moment. A lot of harmonica playing involves deep breathing techniques, so playing a two-hour gig is essentially an elongated meditative exercise.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience
by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is one of the seminal books in the positive psychology lexicon and has been a national best seller since it was first published in 1990. Csikszentmihalyi is the founder and codirector of the Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University and, after twenty-five years of research in the field of psychology, made a realization that would guide the rest of his life’s work:

What I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.
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