Resetting your Happiness Metric

What does it mean to be happy? It seems an important, albeit loaded question as we take steps to move out of lockdown. The answer will differ from person to person (especially post-covid) as everyone has their own metric for happiness. When asked, my goal in life for quite a long time in my younger years, was always, “to be happy”, a true answer given though I didn’t quite understand how I would gain this. American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne once famously said, “Happiness is a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” When I became older, that sentence shifted my perspective.

We are often sold the concept of happiness through literature, film or music as either something to be chased or something tied to a particular event in life – a partner, a dream job, a new house – frequently we are told happiness is something that can be found if we go through almost a ‘box-ticking’ exercise using the events above as a measure for it. And in life, the fact is, we do try to achieve higher levels of satisfaction by increasing what we have by working, spending, saving, buying a house – it’s a treadmill that’s hard to stop. And the issue of unhappiness is compounded if we happen to not meet any of these boxes – our satisfaction levels can plummet.

So, how can we re-adjust our happiness meter overall if we find ourselves wanting? Resetting any ingrained societal ideals around happiness is a first step towards greater contentment. As is moving to the beat of your own drum – life is not about ticking boxes. Life is meant to be lived and a life well lived comes in many guises. Arthur C Brooks writes in his Happiness Column in The Atlantic that another key thing is to stop obsessing about your ‘haves’, and manage your ‘wants’, instead. “Don’t count your possessions (or your money, power, prestige, romantic partners, or fame) and try to figure out how to increase them; make an inventory of your worldly desires and try to decrease them. Make a bucket list – but not of exotic vacations and expensive stuff. Make a list of the attachments in your life you need to discard. Then, make a plan to do just that.”

“The fewer wants there are screaming inside your brain and dividing your attention, the more peace and satisfaction will be left for what you already have.”

Next, it’s realising about half of our level of happiness, according to a Harvard study, is based on genes. Some people are just predisposed to be happier and more upbeat than others. But that does not mean you cannot increase your level of happiness if it does not come naturally, you can. More research says that circumstances could make up as much as 40 per cent of our subjective well being, but scholars do dispute this because the effects of circumstance never last very long. For example, we may think that getting a big promotion will make us permanently happier or that a bad breakup will leave us permanently brokenhearted, but we know neither is true.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development — one of the longest-running studies on happiness, done over 75 years – has some interesting insights. Essentially, the principal investigator, the psychologist George Vaillant, summarised the findings as follows: “Happiness is love. Full stop.” Meaning people who have loving relationships with family and friends ultimately thrive as opposed to those who do not.

Author and spiritual leader Eckhart Tolle has also written extensively on this very topic and he explained in a conversation with Oprah on her Super Soul podcast that the key to living a happier life ultimately exists by an attitude shift. It all comes down to simply accepting the present moment – and living within it. “Accept this moment, as if you had chosen it and that brings in a new consciousness,” he said. Do not deny the moment, he says, because resisting the moment that is, is only going to create more anxiety, and more upset.

It’s all about your mind, he explains and realising that you can shift your mindset in a stressful situation. “A lot of the unhappiness that people experience, they believe it's due to the conditions of what's happening at this moment, but in most cases, it's not the conditions of the situation that you're in that causes unhappiness. It's the mind, telling you it’s something about this moment causes the unhappiness.” For example, in other words, it’s not the pandemic that causes every bit of our anxieties now, but the worst-case scenarios that we will conjure up around it.

He explains that it’s all about trying to rewire how your mind reacts to situations now: “Ask yourself, Is it this situation, or is it that my mind is telling me that this should not be happening? The ego is very good at misinterpreting reality and it believes its stories, so the ego comes up with these stories, often not pleasant stories, about many things. And it's a source of great suffering. So once you recognise that, you can experiment in your own life. When you feel upset arising – be aware of what your mind is doing. The most vital thing in the spiritual life is to be the observer of your mind, and watch it, so that the mind is not controlling you. This is how you eliminate stress and suffering.”

Ultimately, he says we can’t control much these days, but we can control how we feel in the present moment. And if that means you’ll feel happier at this moment forgoing anything else but a glass (or two) of wine and the fanciest takeaway you can afford of a Saturday night, well, that’s as good a step forward as any other.