Making Happy People: The nature of happiness and its origins in childhood

A seemingly more technical assault on happiness was mounted in an academic paper published in the respectable Journal of Medical Ethics in 1992. The paper’s author, psychologist Richard Bentall, proposed that happiness should formally be classified as a psychiatric disorder, to be known as ‘major affective disorder, pleasant type’. In support of his thesis, Bentall pointed out that happiness fits the key criteria that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness: it is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with distinctive patterns of brain activity, and involves distortions in thinking and memory. Happy people, Bentall argued, are impulsive and irrational; they have an unrealistically rosy view of themselves and the world, they find it harder to remember bad experiences, and they overestimate their ability to control events. In other words, they are deluded. Furthermore, their happiness lures them into irrational and damaging behaviour: happy people overindulge in food and alcohol, and become obese.

Happily, Bentall’s paper was a spoof. The real target of his satire was not happiness, but sloppy thinking in psychiatric diagnosis. In reality, there is no reason to believe that happy people are deluded, irrational or living in a fantasy world. Research has found that even very happy people – those fortunate individuals who are consistently much happier than most of the rest of us – still display appropriate emotional responses to the vagaries of life. They may be very happy most of the time, but they do nonetheless experience occasional low moods in response to real disappointments or setbacks. Even very happy people do not live in a state of continuous bliss, cut off from the realities of life.

If anything, the evidence suggests that happiness gives people a better grip on reality. Studies have shown that happy people with a positive outlook on life are better at attending to relevant information, including negative or threatening information. In one set of experiments, volunteers were exposed to potentially worrying information about health, such as evidence of links between caffeine consumption and fibrocystic breast disease. Those individuals who were feeling happy at the time they received this worrying information were more receptive to it, better at remembering it, and more objective in the way they assessed it. Being in a happy, positive frame of mind did not blind them to reality, even when faced with news they might prefer not to hear.

Happy people also appear better able to cope with practical problems because they know when to change tack or give up. This was highlighted by an experiment in which volunteers were confronted with a series of mental tasks,

some of which (unbeknown to them) were literally impossible to solve. Individuals who had a positive, optimistic outlook and a belief in their own ability to control events proved to be significantly better at disengaging from the unsolvable tasks and switching to other tasks that were solvable. The implication is that happy people are more realistic about what they can and cannot achieve.

So the notion that happiness is a form of delusion has little solid basis in fact, and even less to commend it as a philosophy of life. The world might well be a ghastly place, but being unhappy will not make it any better. Happiness does not turn us into ‘contented cows’ – on the contrary, we would all be better off if there were a few more happy people around.

Another dubious piece of folklore asserts that you have to be unhappy to be creative. Happiness encourages intellectual mediocrity, it is claimed, and creative geniuses are usually tortured souls. This romantic belief runs counter to the evidence, which I outlined earlier, that happiness boosts creativity; it is hard to find credible support for the ‘tortured genius’ hypothesis, even in the form of historical anecdotes.

In sum, then, happy people feel better, achieve more, create more, enjoy better health and live longer than unhappy people. They make better employees, better friends, better partners and better parents. They are also less likely to turn to drink, drugs or crime. In a world of happier people there would be less illness, less depression, less crime and shorter queues in doctors’ surgeries. There is nothing feeble or self-indulgent about wanting to make ourselves and our children happier. The only ones who might lose out would be psychotherapists, pharmaceutical companies, drug dealers and the writers of self-help books.

Is there anything good about unhappiness? (#ulink_5cf5cab4-d0d8-5599-9851-95cd8df3eb6d)

Happiness has a lot to recommend it and little to be wary of; the more, the better. What about unhappiness and its key ingredient, displeasure? Is there anything good to say about unpleasant emotions like sadness or anxiety? Biology casts some unexpected light on this issue. The capacity to experience displeasure is actually an immensely valuable asset. Being sad or anxious may feel horrible, but under the right circumstances it can be good for you. How could this be?

The human mind, like the human body, is the product of millions of years of biological evolution. The process of evolution through natural selection has given rise to immensely elaborate physical structures such as eyes, lungs and kidneys, which look as though they have been exquisitely designed for a particular purpose. The brain is also a product of biological evolution, and similar reasoning can be applied to the ‘design features’ of mental and emotional faculties, including the capacity to feel joyful or sad.

Emotions guide our behaviour, and they are crucial for our ability to function in the real world. They immediately point us in roughly the right direction, before we can begin to fine-tune our judgments using the more conventional instruments of conscious thought, logic and reasoning. Individuals suffering from certain types of brain damage that specifically impair emotional faculties can end up incapable of coping with everyday life, even though their intelligence and cognitive abilities remain intact. Even a simple decision like whether to have tea or coffee can become cripplingly difficult if the only thing you have to rely on is pure logic and rational analysis. The emotionless Mr Spock of Star Trek would have been useless.

Sadness, anxiety and other disagreeable emotions can be thought of as the mental equivalents of physical capacities like pain and fever. Being able to feel pain is essential for survival because it stops us doing things that would damage our bodies. Very rarely, individuals are born who lack the capacity to feel pain: they invariably die from injuries or infection before they reach middle age. In a similar way, fever is unpleasant but beneficial. Fever is one of the body’s defence mechanisms for fighting infection. The rise in temperature makes your body a less hospitable place for the invading bacteria or viruses and thereby speeds recovery.

Unpleasant emotions help to protect us in an analogous way. Feeling frightened is immensely beneficial if it stops you being eaten by a lion, and feeling anxious can pay dividends if it stops you ambling down a dark alley where muggers lurk. The American scientist Lewis Thomas described worrying as the most natural and spontaneous of human functions, and argued that we should all learn to do it better.

We are born with the capacity to experience fear, anxiety, sadness and other unpleasant emotions because they helped our ancestors to survive and reproduce (and hence to become our ancestors).

(#litres_trial_promo) Someone who was permanently joyful, regardless of their actual circumstances, would be at risk of ignoring real threats to their well-being. Biology tells us that there is nothing natural or biologically optimal about feeling happy all the time. As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it: ‘There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy.’

If anything, negative emotions are more important in biological terms than positive emotions like pleasure or joy, because they help to keep us alive. Many different things can go wrong in life, threatening our well-being or safety, whereas relatively few things are needed to make a life good. This could explain why the number of distinctly different negative emotions far outweighs the number of different positive emotions. The repertoire of negative emotions includes numerous specific fears and phobias, anger, sadness, depression, anxiety, jealousy, hatred, rage, boredom, and so on, whereas there are relatively few variations on the theme of pleasure, joy and contentment.

The protective functions of negative emotions also help to explain why they are often more vivid and more compelling than positive emotions, and why negative emotions usually override positive emotions. A feeling of relaxed contentment can be swept away in an instant by sudden fear, anger or sadness, but the reverse seldom happens. Our minds are ‘designed’ to be more responsive to negative events precisely because these are the ones most likely to threaten our well-being.

Sadness usually occurs in response to some loss or setback, and it encourages us to behave differently. We seek to change whatever is making us sad, or we withdraw so that we are no longer exposed to it. If things are going really badly, the best option may be to give up and withdraw rather than carry on and waste time or cause further damage. And because sadness is unpleasant, we try in future to avoid situations that experience suggests might make us sad. Sadness does not feel nice, but it sometimes helps us to do the right things. Pursuing this logic still further, the writer Gwyneth Lewis has argued that even severe depression can have its hidden benefits. In her autobiographical account of her own struggles with depression, Lewis explores the idea that it forces the sufferer to reappraise their life. ‘Depression’, she wrote, ‘is a lie detector of last resort. By knocking you out for a while, it allows you to ditch the out-of-date ideas by which you’ve been living and to grasp a more accurate description of the terrain.’

Much of the sadness we all sometimes feel is social in origin; it arises from our relationships with other people. To understand why people feel happy or sad, contented or anxious, it is usually necessary to understand their personal relationships. We shall return to this theme later.

The idea that unpleasant emotions are biological defence mechanisms, akin to pain and fever, has some non-obvious implications. Numbing the pain of an injured joint can increase the risk of inflicting further damage on that joint. Similarly, taking drugs to suppress a fever can actually impede recovery from infection. We feel better, but our defences are impaired. By the same logic, blocking negative emotions with anti-anxiety drugs, tranquillizers or antidepressants might carry risks as well as benefits. It would be interesting to know, for example, whether people who routinely take antidepressants or tranquillizers have more accidents or make more bad decisions. There are reasons to think they might. For example, controlled experiments have shown that the tranquillizer diazepam (trade name Valium), which is used to treat anxiety, impairs the ability to recognise facial expressions of anger and fear. Someone who has taken diazepam is prone to mistake fear for surprise, and disgust for anger. You can imagine how this perceptual distortion, combined with the lack of anxiety, might affect their ability to respond appropriately in an aggressive social situation or an encounter with a nervous mugger.

Routinely suppressing anxiety might also have unforeseen consequences on a grander scale. In early 2000, the American psychiatrist and leading Darwinian thinker Randolph Nesse published a superbly prescient article called ‘Is the market on Prozac?’ In it, Nesse asked whether the extraordinary boom in world stock markets, which was then still in full flood, might be attributable not just to the dot-com revolution, but also to the fact that a substantial proportion of investors, brokers and dealers were taking psychoactive drugs. Was it possible, wondered Nesse, that their natural caution and anxiety were being chemically suppressed, leading to irrational optimism, overconfidence and unsustainable rises in stock values? A few months later, the vastly overinflated dot-com bubble burst. A little fear or anxiety is not such a bad thing.

FOUR Where does happiness come from? (#ulink_17194ecd-11b6-5218-b7e3-0da4fa2b3208)

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet (1601)

Happiness is (mostly) in the mind (#ulink_bd38bae7-a806-53b6-8256-506c4560c5f0)

Why are some people consistently happier than others? Why do we all feel happier at some times than others? Historically, there have been two contrasting schools of thought as to what makes a happy person happy. According to one view, happiness is largely a consequence of what happens to us. It depends on how many pleasant or unpleasant experiences we have, whether we succeed in satisfying our desires, how people behave towards us, how much money we earn, and so on. Set against this is the belief, common to many ancient philosophies and religions, that happiness is essentially a product of how we perceive and construe the world around us – in other words, that happiness is all in the mind and has little to do with external events.

These two very different perspectives on the causes of happiness imply two very different approaches to achieving it. If happiness reflects the world around us, then we should seek to make ourselves happy by changing the world to match our desires – for example, by acquiring pleasurable experiences, possessions, wealth, fame or power. A belief in the ability of material possessions and pleasurable experiences to create happiness is one of the driving forces behind our consumerist culture. If, on the other hand, happiness is all down to our beliefs and attitudes, then we should be able to find it by altering our perception; nothing in the world around us need change.

The alluring idea that happiness is all in the mind has a long history. More than two thousand years ago Aristotle argued that happiness depends not on the external world but on how we perceive it. And because happiness depends on how we think, it can be cultivated. In similar vein, the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who was born in the first century AD, championed a lofty indifference to the hardships and imperfections of life. ‘What upsets people’, he wrote, ‘is not things themselves, but their judgments about the things.’ Epictetus argued that the path to happiness lies in wanting what you have rather than having what you want. Many other ancient schools of thought, including the Yogi, Taoist, Zen and Buddhist traditions, similarly hold that happiness depends on freeing the mind from the malign influence of external events. Strong echoes of this time-honoured view can be found in contemporary self-help books which advise that happiness comes from positive thinking or learning to love ourselves more.

Everyday experience, however, suggests that the reality is less clear cut. Events and circumstances obviously do have some bearing on personal happiness. Most of us would feel better after eating a delicious meal, having fantastic sex, being successful at work or winning a large sum of money. Equally, we might feel downcast if we had just lost all our money, suffered a major career setback, or if a close friend had suddenly died. But events clearly cannot account for more than part of the story, because individuals can respond very differently to identical circumstances. An event that casts one person into gloom might seem trivial to another and a source of amusement to someone else.

Many people manage to be reasonably happy (in the broad sense as defined in chapter 2) despite living in dreadful circumstances. Even severe illness, disability or poverty does not inevitably condemn someone to lasting unhappiness. Research has shown that people living in conditions of extreme poverty in developing nations are sometimes considerably happier than might be expected given their grim physical circumstances. One study of slum-dwellers in Calcutta found that they derived considerable happiness from their relationships with other people. Personal relationships make a huge contribution to personal happiness, but they have little to do with wealth or material possessions. You do not have to be rich to have supportive friends and a loving family.

Similarly, many people with severe illnesses or disabilities are found to be only slightly less happy than averagely healthy people, once they have come to terms with their condition. For instance, one American study found that more than 80 per cent of people who were paralysed in all four limbs considered their lives to be average or above average in terms of happiness, and more than 90 per cent of them were glad to be alive. Another study, which assessed paralysis victims years after their injury, found that those who were receiving good social support from family and friends were about as happy as anyone else. Objectively bad events or circumstances do not automatically condemn us to persistent unhappiness, and good events do not automatically create lasting bliss. The truth is that happiness depends both on what happens to us and how we perceive those events.

The characteristic style in which you interact with the world around you, including other people, is known as your personality. And your personality has a major influence on your happiness for two basic reasons: first, because it shapes your lifestyle and experiences; and second, because it affects how you perceive those experiences.

The experiences you have during the course of your life do not just randomly happen to you: they are to some extent your own creations and depend on your personality. Someone who is highly sociable, outgoing and adventurous is likely to live their life differently from someone who is shy, timid and conservative. Personality also affects how we perceive and construe our experiences. As well as having a larger number of positive experiences, happy people tend to interpret those experiences more positively. For their part, unhappy people have an unfortunate habit of interpreting objectively similar experiences in less positive ways, thereby reinforcing their doleful view of the world and prolonging their unhappiness.

Research suggests that personality has a stronger influence on the emotional elements of happiness (namely, pleasure and displeasure) than it does on the thinking element (satisfaction). Someone may have the sort of personality that makes them feel low much of the time, perhaps because they are shy and anxious. Nonetheless, they may still derive considerable satisfaction from their work and family life, leaving them reasonably happy overall. Personality traits typically remain stable over time, which helps to explain why an individual’s overall level of happiness will also tend to be moderately stable.

The characteristics of happy people (#ulink_5a95ccf0-e54f-55f1-8224-e1f84c7cdc77)

We have seen, then, that happiness is a reflection both of who we are and what happens to us. But which particular aspects of personality and circumstances make the biggest differences to happiness? Some are more important than others. As we saw in chapter 2, happiness comes in many forms, comprising different blends of pleasure, displeasure and satisfaction, and each blend can be achieved in many different ways. Nonetheless, some patterns can be discerned among the complexities. Happy people usually have most or all of the following characteristics in common.

1. Connectedness

Probably the single most important and consistent characteristic of happy people is that they are connected to other people by personal relationships. Happy children typically have secure and loving relationships with their parents, get on well with other children, and have one or more good friends. For their part, happy adults typically have one or more close relationships with a partner, relatives or friends, plus a range of shallower relationships with friends, acquaintances and colleagues.

One of the main themes of this book is that personal relationships are central to happiness; we shall be exploring this further in the next chapter. The support, confidence and emotional security that come from close personal relationships form the bedrock of happiness, especially for children. And when it comes to relationships, quality is more important than quantity. One close relationship with a partner, parent or friend may be sufficient to sustain happiness, in a way that hundreds of casual acquaintanceships rarely achieve.

To have any relationships at all, of course, a person must have some basic willingness and ability to interact with other people. The more someone is naturally drawn to the company of others, the more relationships they are likely to have and the greater their scope to form close relationships. That is one reason why socialites tend to be happier than recluses. The philosopher Bertrand Russell hit the nail on the head when he wrote that to like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness. Over the years, research has consistently found that sociable people are, on average, happier than those who find company difficult or unattractive. For example, a long-term study of everyone born in the UK in one particular week in March 1958 found that those who were more sociable during their teens were significantly happier when assessed again in their mid-thirties.

Much of the psychological research in this area has focused on a personality characteristic known as extroversion, which is essentially an indirect measure of sociability. Extroverts are friendly, outgoing, sociable, warm and active. They have a natural tendency to enjoy social situations and social activities such as parties, games and team sports.

(#litres_trial_promo) Numerous studies have uncovered links between extroversion and happiness throughout the lifespan, including in old age.

By the same token, shy people – those who consistently feel anxious, self-conscious and reticent in social situations – tend to score low on measures of happiness. Shyness can be a real problem, both for adults and children. On average, shy children are lonelier, have lower self-esteem and suffer from more anxiety than sociable children. Very shy adults are found to be unhappier even than people suffering from anxiety or mood disorders. Not all shy people are unhappy, however. A significant minority of ‘happy introverts’ are happy despite not being gregarious.

Sociability and happiness form a virtuous circle: sociable people become happier because they are more connected, and happiness, in turn, makes us more sociable, as we saw in the previous chapter. Happy people spend more of their time engaging with other people and have a larger number of social interactions.

2. Social and emotional competence

A second almost universal characteristic of happy people is having at least moderate levels of social and emotional competence. To be happy, you need basic social skills to form and maintain personal relationships, together with the emotional literacy to understand and deal effectively with your own feelings and other people’s.

A socially and emotionally competent adult or child can read and interpret the feelings that underlie other people’s actions and expressions. They can work out whether another person is angry, sad, jealous or afraid, and then respond appropriately. Such skills are subtle but crucial, and not everyone is richly endowed with them. Aristotle put it like this: ‘Anyone can be angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not easy.’

Individuals with poor social skills are, not surprisingly, at greater risk of being socially isolated, with potentially damaging consequences for their happiness and health. Children and adults who lack emotional literacy find it hard to manage their own feelings or to understand other people’s feelings. They consequently have more problems coping with anger and aggression, among other things. Studies of school children have found that those who are poor at understanding and managing emotions are more likely to become violent. Responding aggressively may be the only tactic in their repertoire for dealing with everyday situations of conflict.

Socially and emotionally competent people are better equipped to succeed in the classroom and in the adult world of work. They tend to be better motivated, more persistent, more focused and less easily diverted by upsets or squabbles. Social and emotional competence is a stronger predictor of children’s future success than narrow measures such as exam grades. It even reduces the long-term risk of drug abuse: studies have found that teenagers with good social skills are significantly less likely to be using drugs when they are in their thirties.