When you ask yourself the question 'what will make me happy?', how do you answer? Do you say, more money, more time, a bigger house, a new job, a new handbag, a gardener, better health, your children being more confident, losing weight? Most of us would want to change our circumstances in some small or possibly, drastic way. We probably grew up thinking 'we'd be happy when...' we got a boyfriend, or had the right haircut, or later, got married, got a great job and were brilliant and successful in it, had a baby. Even if we are not striving for material or monetary goals, we still get hooked into the idea that if and when our circumstances change, then we'll be happy.
But it seems that happiness is not as simple as that. It's not what or where we expect it to be. If we thought long and hard about it we should be able to work this out - after all, did we find our imagined, never-ending happiness when we achieved the great job, perfect man, children, flatter stomach or new outfit? Probably not.
The reason for this, according to research*, is that life circumstances only make up about 10% of our happiness. Only 10%! So if I get a new, bigger house with that extra bedroom, office and easier to manage garden, the maximum my happiness level can go up by is 10%. Ok, I may feel more than 10% happier for a while after I move in, but within a short time (a few months to a year) my happiness will go back down to the same level (or perhaps the odd percentage point higher, but no more than 10%) that I was before. Scientists call this the 'adaption process', but we can also describe it as 'the novelty wearing off'. So either we have to buy a new, bigger house every year in order to keep ourselves happy (does that desire sound familiar?) or we have to give up this way of searching for long-lasting happiness and try some other ideas.
So what about the other 90% I hear you asking. It seems apparent, mainly through many twins studies, that happiness is about 50% genetically based. When we are born, we inherit a 'happiness set point' from our parents which we are stuck with for life. This is the level our happiness will return to within a year of certain traumatic or happy events that happen to us (including winning the lottery, or losing limbs in a car accident). The good news is (for those of us who have inherited a low happiness set point) that the remaining 40% is down to us. In other words we can top up our set points by changing the way we think and behave on a daily basis - potentially increasing our overall happiness level by up to 40%. Which is pretty exciting.
I'll leave you with a couple of quotes from Sonja Lyubomirsky, positive psychology research scientist and author of The How of Happiness:
"As banal and cliched as this might sound, happiness, more than anything, is a state of mind, a way of perceiving and approaching ourselves and the world in which we reside. So, if you want to be happy tomorrow, the day after, and for the rest of your life, you can do it by choosing to change and manage your state of mind."
"In a nutshell, the fountain of happiness can be found in how you behave, what you think and what goals you set every day of your life. There is no happiness without action"
* Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., Schkade, D. (2005), 'Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change', Review of General Psychology, 9, 111-131.
