The Happiness Project: How To Be Happier

Happiness Myth No. 2: Nothing Changes a Person's Happiness Level Much

As I’ve studied happiness over the past few years, I’ve learned many things that surprised me. Each day for two weeks, I’m going to debunk one “happiness myth” that I believed before I started my happiness project. Yesterday I wrote about Myth #1: Happy People Are Annoying and Stupid.

Happiness Myth No. 2: People have a happiness set point, and no matter what happens to them, before long, they snap back to their usual happiness level.

Wrong.

From time to time, someone says to me something like, “Trying to make yourself happier is futile. People have a genetic set point that doesn’t change. I heard about a study of people who became paralyzed, and after a few months, they were back to their old selves!”

It’s true that there’s a powerful genetic link to happiness—usually it’s estimated to be about 40 percent to 50 percent. Some people are born more Tigger-ish, and others are born more Eeyore-ish. And it’s also true that people are amazingly adaptive, both to good and bad fortune. Human resilience is extraordinary.

However, adaptation has its limits.

About those people who become paralyzed—in a major study looking at the happiness levels of people with disabilities, it turned out that these folks took a big hit when they were injured, and they didn’t all snap back to where they were before. Some, yes, did recover their previous level of happiness, some recovered somewhat, and some didn’t recover much at all.

Major life events can have strong, lasting effects on people’s happiness. For example, although people adapt quickly to marriage, it takes much longer for widows adapt to widowhood. Losing a job, getting divorced—these kinds of events make a significant lasting impact on happiness.

Adaptation varies considerably among people. Some get over changes quickly, while others take much longer to adapt, if they ever do.

This is the way I’ve come to think about this question: People are born with a natural range of temperament, but circumstances, actions, and thoughts can push people up to the top of their range or down to the bottom of their range.

That’s the effect my happiness project has had on me. When I’m in neutral—say, I’m staring out the window of a bus—I’m the same familiar Gretchen. My happiness project hasn’t changed my inborn temperament. (I score 3.92 on a 1-to-5 scale, by the way; take the Authentic Happiness Inventory Questionnaire if you want to test yourself.) The difference is that, because of my happiness project, my daily experience of my life is happier. I have more fun and less guilt. I have more challenge, more novelty, more satisfaction as well as less anger, less boredom, less remorse. That’s how I’ve made myself happier, without changing myself.

If you want to read more about this fascinating debate, check out the chapter “Nature and Nurture: Is There a Happiness Set Point, and Can You Change It?” in Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener’s Happiness and Richard E. Lucas’s “Personality and Subjective Well-Being” in The Science of Subjective Well-Being.

* Interested in starting your own happiness project? If you’d like to take a look at my personal Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just e-mail me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (Sorry about writing it in that roundabout way; I’m trying to thwart spammers.) Just write “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

You Use the BCC in E-Mails? What Does That Say About You?

Yesterday, as I was reading Bob Sutton’s work manifesto, I was struck by his no. 9: “The best test of a person's character is how he or she treats those with less power.” I love this way of thinking about character, and that statement got me thinking: What else is a test of a person’s true nature? Well, what a person finds funny is a good test. I asked a bunch of friends for their ideas.

- “How a person treats a waiter.”
- “Whether a person plays by the rules when no one is watching.”
- “How people behave when they’re pulled over while driving.”
- “How a person treats his or her own parents. And in-laws.”
- “My father told me never to trust a man who doesn’t drink—though he did say there are a few medical exceptions.” (Maybe I'm off the hook here as a woman, but I basically had to give up drinking, so I'd fail this test.)
- “How often they use the bcc function in work emails. I don’t think you should ever use the bcc.”
- “Whether a person eats a piece of chocolate cake at a birthday party.” (As an unconventional eater myself, I'd fail this test; I wouldn’t eat that birthday cake.)
- “How he or she handles good fortune.”
- “How he or she behaves during a long, arduous trip.”
- “It is almost a definition of a gentleman to say that he is one who never inflicts pain.”—John Henry Newman.

I get a tremendous kick out of collecting these kinds of observations. If you have one to add, please post it.

* Interested in starting your own happiness project? If you’d like to take a look at my personal Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. (Sorry about writing it in that roundabout way; I’m trying to thwart spammers.) Just write “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.