The pursuit of happiness

We spend billions of dollars each year looking for happiness, hoping it might be bought, consumed, found, or travelled to. Other, more contemplative cultures and traditions assure us that this is a waste of time. Live in the moment, and there you’ll find true contentment.

Sure enough, our most fulfilling experiences are typically those that engage us body and mind, and are unsullied by worry or regret. In these cases, a relationship between focus and happiness is easy to spot. But does this relationship hold in general, even for simple, everyday activities? Is a focused mind a happy mind? Harvard psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert decided to find out.

In a recent study published in Science, Killingsworth and Gilbert discovered that an unnervingly large fraction of our thoughts – almost half – are not related to what we’re doing. Surprisingly, we tended to be elsewhere even for casual and presumably enjoyable activities, like watching TV or having a conversation. While you might hope all this mental wandering is taking us to happier places, the data say otherwise. Just like the wise traditions teach, we’re happiest when thought and action are aligned, even if they’re only aligned to wash dishes.

To sample our inner lives, the team developed an iPhone app that periodically surveyed people’s thoughts and activities. At random times throughout the day, a participant’s iPhone would chime, and present him with a brief questionnaire that asked how happy he was (on a scale from 1-100), what he was doing, and if he was thinking about what he was doing.

If subjects were indeed thinking of something else, they reported whether that something else was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant. Responses to the questions were standardised, which allowed them to be neatly summarised in a database that tracked the collective moods, actions, and musings of about 5000 total participants (a subset of 2250 people was used in the study).

According to the data from the Harvard group’s study, the particular way you spend your day doesn’t tell much about how happy you are. Mental presence – the matching of thought to action – is a much better predictor of happiness.

The happy upshot of this study is that it suggests a wonderfully simple prescription for greater happiness: think about what you’re doing. But be warned that like any prescription, following it is very different from just knowing it’s good for you. In addition to the usual difficulties of breaking bad or unhelpful habits, your brain may also be wired to work against your attempts stay present.

Recent fMRI scanning studies show that even when we’re quietly at rest and following instructions to think of nothing in particular, our brains settle into a conspicuous pattern of activity that corresponds to mind-wandering.

This signature ‘resting’ activity is coordinated across several widespread brain areas, and is argued by many to be evidence of a brain network that is active by default. Under this view our brains climb out of the default state when we’re bombarded with input, or facing a challenging task, but tend to slide back into it once things quiet down.

Regardless of what prompts our brains to settle into the default mode, its tendency to do so may be the kiss of death for happiness. As the authors of the paper elegantly summarise their work: “a human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.”

On the plus side, a mind can be trained to wander less. With regular and dedicated meditation practice, you can certainly become much more present, mindful, and content. But you’d better be ready to work. The most dramatic benefits only really accrue for individuals, often monks, who have clocked many thousands of hours practising the necessary skills (it’s not called the default state for nothing).

Studies have demonstrated that social comparisons can influence people’s well-being in many diverse situations. We measure our success relatively. When it comes to economics, psychologists have shown that our perceptions of how our income relates to other people’s matters as much, if not more, than the actual amount we earn. And if there is a large amount of inequality, you may be more likely to make those comparisons.

This could go some way to explaining the Easterlin paradox. In 2015, Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia and Selin Kesebir at London Business School put this idea to the test by comparing Easterlin’s original data with historic measures of inequality in the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

Sure enough, they found that people’s happiness over time closely tracked changes in inequality. When the gap between rich and poor was smaller, people tended to be more satisfied with their lives than when it was bigger, while the overall wealth, measured by GDP, tended to have little effect.

They then tested the hypothesis on more recent data from over 30 countries. The same pattern emerged: economic growth only increased happiness when the new-found riches were more evenly distributed among the citizens, reducing the overall inequality.

“In countries like the US, where an increase in national wealth goes, almost exclusively, to the top 10 per cent of the population, you can’t expect economic growth to improve population happiness,” says Oishi ( Shigehiro Oishi at the University of Virginia and Selin Kesebir at London Business School).

A second explanation for the Easterlin paradox comes from studies of social capital: the links and bonds that we forge with other members of our community.

Most psychologists readily accept that friendly interactions with others can make a huge contribution to our mental and physical health. Indeed, according to one famous meta-analysis by Julianne Holt-Lunstad at Brigham Young University in Utah, a lack of social connection can harm our health as much as obesity or smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.

Social capital is often measured by getting people to rate how much they trust the people around them. “Social trust happens to be one of those variables that has been consistently monitored across a large number of countries for a long time,” says Sarracino.

For example, participants might be asked: “Would you say that most of the time people try to be helpful or that they are mostly looking out for themselves?” People with lots of connections from a strongly integrated community tend to give more positive responses.

A third factor influencing the link between GDP and happiness is the quality of a country’s institutions and the ways that they look after those who are in need – through healthcare, unemployment benefits and pensions.

In the past, some economists had simply looked at the proportion of GDP devoted to the welfare state, and they had tended to find that generous spending had surprisingly little effect on the overall happiness of the population. In some cases, there even appeared to be a negative correlation between welfare budgets and life satisfaction, a discovery that would seem to argue against government intervention in people’s lives.

The Nordic countries – and Finland in particular – provide a perfect illustration of all these trends. They each have low economic inequality, high levels of social trust and an effective welfare state. In Martela’s view, all three of these factors have interacted to create a kind of virtuous cycle. The welfare state has helped reduce inequality, which in turn has helped increase people’s sense of trust in others.

Equally, Finnish people’s trust in each other and the quality of their institutions have meant that they are more willing to see their taxes go into the welfare state. “I recall one American economist who said that Nordic countries are the only places in the world where you can go into elections saying ‘I’m going to raise taxes’ into elections saying ‘and still win’,” says Martela.

An examination of the Nordic nations can also help us dispel some lingering myths. Many commentators, for instance, have expressed surprise that Finns could be so satisfied with their lives when the population has to endure such cold, dark winters. But reams of scientific research show that climate has very little influence on life satisfaction in the long term.

This seems to be the result of habituation: while a single rainy or sunny day might affect our mood, we soon adapt to long-term weather patterns.