We all have an idea of what we need in life to be happy and we are often wrong. Why is it so difficult to crack the happiness formula?
Something is always. If the milk isn’t sour, then the car battery is empty or a tooth root is showing up. Blessed is the person who doesn’t let all these little and big adversities of everyday life ruin their mood. Who can laugh about a scraped knee and doesn’t go out the door wearing knee pads from now on. And who is content, yes, even happy, even though the bank account is empty and the marriage is broken. Most of us can’t do that. If only we had more money, finally a partner for life or at least less belly – it would be so easy to be happier, right?! Exactly not. Studies show that we often look for happiness in the wrong things and thus sabotage the possibility of a contented life.
It starts with the question, what exactly is happiness? There are many definitions. This includes the hedonistic well-being approach, which revolves around the idea of experiencing as many positive emotions as possible and as few negative emotions as possible. The focus is on the here and now: Am I having a good time? Am I feeling good? Acute fun, however, played no role in Aristotle’s concept of happiness. His idea of happiness should not be understood as a sprint, but as a marathon. Eudaimonic well-being, as he calls it, comes from the feeling of living a meaningful and fundamentally good life.
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Nobody is always happy
The problems often arise from the fact that one only pursues hedonistic happiness, but not everyday, more sustainable happiness, says Robert Waldinger. He leads the Harvard Study of Adult Development, a happiness study that has been running for 84 years, longer than any other on the topic. Waldinger advocates a mix of the two concepts.
The happiness researcher knows that constant happiness is unrealistic. But he also says in an interview with “The Guardian” that “if you’re not happy, you’re not doing life right.” And how do you do it right? Humans are amazingly stupid when it comes to deciding what they need to be happy. At least that’s what a number of studies suggest.
There’s the matter of money. Money has a dubious reputation for making people happy. Because the more money, the fewer worries – that’s the idea. There is also no denying that economic security is relaxing. It is good for your own well-being not to have to hide from every utility bill. It is therefore not surprising that studies show that as income increases, the positive evaluation of one’s own life increases and emotional well-being also increases. But it doesn’t rise infinitely and that’s the crux of the matter.
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The more money the happier? Nope!
It was Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton who discovered that the “sweet spot” was $75,000 in annual income. Once we have achieved this, we exploit the maximum happiness that we can get through financial prosperity. Anything above this limit does not increase emotional well-being. The study was conducted in the USA and cannot be extrapolated to other countries with different socio-economic structures and values. However, the basic idea was confirmed in further studies – once you reach a certain level of wealth, money no longer makes you happier.
So much for the theory. In reality, however, we think we need more and more and more. We just can’t get enough. Because we get used to positive and negative feelings faster than we realize. The exhilaration wears off and we fall back to a sort of baseline of happiness. The phenomenon is called the hedonistic treadmill or hedonistic adaptation. And to put it simply, he means that the Lamborghini in the garage, once bought as a dream come true, will soon just be nice. But having a Ferrari as a second car would be even better. And if there is a Maserati next to it, then, yes, at the latest, we believe, our happiness would be perfect. Puppy cake! Perhaps the worst thing about it is that we always seem to forget that this hedonistic treadmill exists.
The habituation effect is the enemy of happiness
It’s not just when it comes to material things that the habituation effect gets in the way of being happy. We tend to overestimate the influence of certain events on our lives. With both positive and negative experiences, we assume that the effects on our lives will be much more lasting than they are in reality. This also applies to love. According to science, the feeling of happiness that couples have after getting married decreases faster than we would like. After just one or two years, the “honeymoon effect” wears off and great love becomes “just” love. We fall back to our default happiness level. However, according to studies, this is higher than for singles.
Happiness researcher Waldinger is also convinced that relationships have an enormous influence on our well-being. But it doesn’t have to be a love relationship. He comes to the conclusion that social contacts per se, the more qualitative the better, not only increase well-being, but also prolong life. “We found that people who have a network of good relationships are more able to weather storms and are more likely to be happy,” says Waldinger. Singles with a stable social network can be just as satisfied and happy as people in romantic relationships.
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Beauty alone doesn’t make you happy either
And then there’s the matter of the neighbor’s garden. We compare ourselves with others using so-called reference points. These vary from person to person and depend on their individual career. The bottom line is: no one wants to be worse off and have less than someone else – how thick their own pockets are filled plays a minor role if someone else has a thicker one. Your own relationship is called into question when another couple seems much more intimate. And looking in the mirror can become a farce after scrolling through models’ Instagram profiles for hours. How much happier would we be if our faces were less wrinkled and our bodies were slimmer?
You guessed it. Not as much happier as you think. Several studies that looked at people who were dissatisfied with their appearance and promised to make changes to make them happier came to sobering conclusions. Both obese people who had lost weight and those who had had cosmetic surgery were not only no happier afterwards, their well-being had actually worsened. Beauty alone is not something that will inevitably make you happy.
Happiness is not something you can work towards and once you have it, it stays forever. That would be too easy. “The myth that you can always be happy if you just do the right things is not true. Happiness waxes and wanes,” says scientist Waldinger. Provided our basic needs are met, it can be assumed that happiness simply “happens” to us. But you could help him a little. Health, nutrition, sleep, exercise and social contacts are important factors for a happy life.
Source: Study 1: Income, Study 2: Immune Neglect, Study 3: Beauty, Study 4: Hedonistic Adaptation, Study 5: Adult Development, The Guardian
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