On Happiness, Fake Pies, and Treadmills
In which we blend the happiness pie into a smoothie
I.
Happiness does not come naturally to me. More accurately, not being unhappy requires effort. A broken baseline, perhaps, or brain weasels running wild. It’s been worse and I’ve learned a few tricks along the way, yet happiness remains this elusive skill that slips through my fingers more often than not.
We all want it, though, happiness. We crave it; we chase those moments of joy and sugar and spice and all things nice. Time for a harsh truth: we aren't wired for happiness. At least not in the way it’s often presented to us.
We’ve known for a while that explicitly valuing happiness as a life goal is associated with a higher risk for depression. Siri, play ‘Isn’t it ironic’, please. Interestingly, this link isn’t ironclad. Talking about a 2020 study that examines the happiness-depression connection, psychologist Julia Vogt notes that:
… there seems to be a significant divide between English-speaking Western cultures and other cultures when it comes to how our internal value of experiencing happiness shapes our experiences and mood.
Is it the individualism inherent to most Anglo-Saxon-influenced Western cultures? Is it the consumerism that - pun intended - consumes us? Or do we use flawed reference points like other people’s salaries, looks, and likes and find ourselves coming up short?
Actually, when we talk about wanting happiness, do we even know what we want? Probably not as much as we think we do. Turns out we’re not that good at predicting what will make us feel happy, a phenomenon also known as miswanting. Not only are we not (in general) skilled at putting the finger on what we truly want; we also suck at predicting how happy it will make us feel. Enter jargon: we are inaccurate when predicting future affective states.
Wait a second, some people are good at being happy. I’m sure we all know someone like that. Maybe you are someone like that.
Must be genetics. Right?
We need to talk about pie.
II.
When talking about the nature and nurture of human happiness, there’s a flavor of pie that has become - and remains - very popular. This pie originated in a large 2005 review paper that wanted to quantify the major determinants of happiness and it looks like this:
I’m sure you’ve seen it. That 50% for the set point is almost unanimously used by popular self-help media to say that half your happiness is genetic, but - hallelujah - the other half is yours to shape. Only, that’s completely wrong, even if we set aside the observation that some of the empirical data on which this pie is based are questionable.
The idea that half your happiness is ‘genetic’ is wrong. Even in the original study, the authors write that this pie chart illustrates the major influences on the population variance in reported happiness. Let me translate that: 50% of the difference in happiness levels between people can likely be attributed to a busload of genetic factors.
This tells you (pretty much) nothing about your or anyone else’s personal happiness levels. It’s a population-level metric, and a rough one at that. Nature and nurture are rarely - if ever - completely separate influences on our lives. Actions and environments can influence gene expression. Genes can influence which actions you’re drawn to and which environments you are most likely to thrive in. Sprinkle feedback loops all over the place, and it’s pretty clear that the pie is actually a smoothie with many more than three ingredients mixed in.
Consider a muscle-building analogy: you might be genetically blessed to build a lot of muscle, but if you never do any resistance training and optimize your diet, you’ll never know what your (natural) limit actually is in terms of muscle mass. It’s similar for the genetics of happiness. You might be genetically blessed with neurotransmitters and neural pathways that allow you to experience profound happiness, but you have to find the right environment and take the right actions to get there.
Smoothie, not pie.
Now that we mentioned action, I should probably tell you about a particular treadmill.
More psychology? On hope, or fear, or ‘day in the life’ Youtube videos.
III.
One of the major challenges in living a happy life is the hedonic treadmill, aka hedonic adaptation. In short, we get used to stuff. That thing that made you happy not too long ago? Meh, been there, done that. On to the next thing. After that initial rush, we tend to return to baseline quite quickly.
This suggests that there is indeed an individual happiness ‘set point’ (aka baseline). Like our pie, though, this idea is too simplistic. A treadmill has different settings for both speed and incline, after all. We have several happiness set points and they are not static. This book chapter (free version here) is a revision of the hedonic treadmill that, outlines five points where empirical research suggests that the speed and incline settings of the treadmill are relevant to our individual happiness(es).
Baselines or set points are not hedonically neutral. Your baseline can be happiness, despair, or anything in between.
Different people have different baselines, which, to some extent, correlate with temperament or personality constellation.
A single person also has different baselines. For example, pleasant emotions, unpleasant emotions, and life satisfaction can all have a different ‘set point’.
Baselines can change under certain conditions. Life events, such as changes in marital status or unemployment, can lead to a decrease in reported life satisfaction (let’s take that as a proxy for happiness). People can bounce back quickly, but not everyone gets back up to their previous baseline.
Finally, individuals differ in their hedonic adaptation to events. Not everyone’s baselines change or return to normal easily. For example, people who score higher on introversion and neuroticism (hey, it’s me) tend to cope worse with negative events, which suggests that these people might be slower to return to baseline after negative events, if ever. (Whoopty doo.)
The big lesson here is that your happiness baselines can shift.
How do we shift them in the right direction? The ‘longest running study on human happiness’, or the Harvard Study of Adult Development finds that having strong social relationships is - by a wide margin - the number one thing that can improve individual happiness. (Relationship quality trumps relationship quantity, so don’t worry, fellow introverts reading this.)
Other things that can lead to sustainable beneficial changes in happiness are gratefulness, pursuing personal goals, and performing random acts of kindness. Yes, being kind makes you happier, and even small kindnesses can have large effects on the recipients’ happiness as well. When it comes to happiness, ‘other-care’ might be more important than self-care.
Finally, this systematic review finds that:
As little as 10-min physical activity per week or 1 day of doing exercise per week might result in increased levels of happiness.
Physical activity in itself releases endorphins and other fun stuff, but it can also be a way to increase social interaction and contribute to your overall health.
Happiness is simple but very difficult. The smoothie’s ingredients are not set in stone, though, and the treadmill settings can be tweaked. That should be encouraging.
Since you never know what you have ‘till it’s gone, it shouldn’t be surprising that Abraham Lincoln, who (likely) suffered from depression for his entire life, saw it clearly when he said:
Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.
Guess I got to make up my mind.
Thanks for reading. I’m - here it comes - happy you stopped by. If you know anyone who might be interested in reading this, pass it along.
Have a wonderful day!
This is an important and timely subject. A civil society and mental health are co-dependents. You cannot have one without the other. Consider that the second highest cause of teen death is suicide, and social media is a big cause.
Ben Libet discovered that the right side of the brain is 200 milliseconds faster than the left side. This is profoundly important because in order to catch up, the left side constructs a narrative of the world that helps you fit in, but what if you can't construct a meaningful narrative? You are like the Red Queen, always having to move faster to stay in the same spot.
Babies and infants, whilst suckling in the sake arms of their mother, produce copious amounts of Oxytocin, that opposes vasopressin, and allows the child to produce spindle neurones. These neurone are found in humans many thousands times more than other mammals and allow us to integrate socially and construct a narrative of our place in the world. But a survey of babies born to mother is the Quebec storm in 1998 showed drastically reduced spindle neurones in these babies, along with retarded cognitive abilities. Schizophrenics also have a gene mutation SAP97 that prevents them from constructing a coherent narrative because both sides of the brain are engaged in attention, and if you can attend to things, then you can't construct a narrative, which goes a long way to explain ADD and ADHD, also ASD. The narrative ties both sides of the brain together, but you can actually feel the tension in your gut, which is directly tied into the visceral Right brain, through the vagus nerve; it is called gut feelings.
It is up to society to reduce social tension by supplying Maslow's hierarchy of needs, nutrition, education, shelter, emotional support etc. Why is this?
Consider my dog, who is clever, intelligent, even cunning, which tells me he has a mind, but and conscious awareness, but when I put a mirror in front of him, h will bark as though it is another dog in his territory. Can you see that my dog cannot escape the centripetal force of his own needs. He is locked into his needs. But humans can exceed this Darwinian trap by exceeding Maslow's needs, we can construct our own narrative, called subjective consciousness, that give us AGENCY. This is our transcendency journey.
For me, happiness is having a good map, knowing where I am on that map and knowing where I want to go. The entorhinal cortex (EC) is in the critical first stop of the brainstem/midbrain and functions as a network hub for memory, navigation, and the perception of time. The EC has grid cells that fire when we move (imaginatively or actually) that gradually build a memory map or grid reference of our location and since we measure motion by time, the EC then needs a time reference. To perceive time, the brain needs a repeatable or stationary reference. There are a few ways to get a time reference. One would be from our circadian rhythm; another would be the rhythmic pulsations (3.75 to 7.5 Hz) coming from the limbic hippocampal regions as seen in the Theta waves. Another would be if the EC could reference or cohere to something stationary or “outside of time”. This could be a quantum influence or our homeostasis. It helps me to have a time sense that extends to an afterlife.