The How of Happiness
Or: How to ensure that you are at least 50% happpy
The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want, by Sonja Lyubomirsky
How much of your happiness can you control? About 40%, according to research. 50% of your happiness is genetic, 10% (and only 10%) is due to your circumstances, leaving 40% under your volition. Lyubomirsky explains why happiness is important, what we get wrong about it, and how to create it.
Happiness allows us to be more productive, healthy, and fulfilled, according to research. As the kind of person who loves to talk about pursuing “meaning, not happiness,” I found this an interesting counterargument.
Also interesting were her thoughts on why circumstances don’t matter that much. We get used to the good things in our lives. I’m not going to give examples because everyone can think of 5000 of them. But we also eventually acclimate to bad things. We don’t think we will, but once they happen, we eventually do.
So, what should you do about this? She offers 12 different strategies for creating happiness and suggests a “choose your own adventure” approach where you employ the strategies that will work best for you (and offers a quiz to help you identify them).
I enjoyed this overall. It’s well written and has a good combination of scientific research / actionable insights. A few other takeaways:
I really appreciated how honest she was about 1) how much happiness is out of our control and 2) that creating happiness is hard work. Knowing that some of it was out of my control made it easier for me to feel better about my own level of happinesss and kept me from having unrealistic expectations. But at the same time, knowing that I could move the needle on 40% of it allowed me to feel like I still had some volition
One large theme in the book is intrinsic motivation. Doing things you enjoy intrinsically will make you happier than things you do for extrinsic reasons, and you are more likely to be compliant in doing them. I thought back to a recent commitment I made for extrinsic purposes – and how un-energized it makes me feel. I compare that to something like writing this email, which I enjoy very much and can find time to do even though there is no pay.
Another large idea is variety. In general, variety works because it stops us from becoming adapted to an experience or happiness strategy. Take gratitude, for example: if you have a gratitude journal and write the same thing in it every day, it’ll be much less useful.
Another thing I liked about the book was her use of caveats. Sometimes self-help books can be overly pat – “be positive!”. She does a great job of discussing the limits of certain techniques and when they work vs. when they don’t (e.g., 5 random acts of kindness 1 day a week is better than 1 random act 5 days a week)
I enjoyed the section on rumination – how thinking of a bad event or experience over and over again will get in the way of happiness. I think this is an underlooked point. We celebrate introspection and self-awareness, but need to understand the line between introspection and rumination. Having written a gazillion “reflection” papers in business school, I know that if I reflect on something negative, I will feel worse - and vice versa.
I’ve read about 15 books on self-improvement over the last year-and a half, and strangely enough, have started thinking about free will. Let’s use this book for an example. OK, I get it, 40% of my happiness is up to me. Great. But I still need to have a second-order desire to be happy as well as the motivation and willpower to do so. Do some people have more innate willpower / motivation than others? Probably. Also, nobody wants to be unhappy, so why wouldn’t they fix if it they could? If you go down this rabbit hole, it’s easy to end up with a deterministic world view. But we kind of need to idea of free will for the world to work.
Re the question of why don’t unhappy people change, I’d guess the reason is that most people are “busy.” And any free time they do have is likely sucked up with things that are more “fun.” And also, when you’re stressed, you feel like you can’t even take 5 minutes to write a gratitude journal! Which provokes another question: how do you get people off that treadmill of stress?