In the past few weeks, I’ve written about the evil three-legged stool of perfectionism, procrastination and impostor phenomenon beliefs. And about self-injury. All draw from my research at the end of last year.
Now, I’m trying for something a bit brighter. According to analyses of the Gallup World Poll, our own little corner of paradise is the 10th happiest place in the world. On an 11-point scale, from 0 to 10, New Zealand’s latest score is a respectable 7.1. Or, in university grades, a “B”. For a benchmark, the happiest nation in the world, Finland, gets a 7.8 (a “B+”), so we’re not doing too badly. In fact, we’re one of only two countries in the top 10 that aren’t in Northern Europe.
Unfortunately, though, happiness has fallen in many of the countries surveyed, compared with the first poll a decade ago.
Those who compiled the World Happiness Report explain the differences between nations as not just reflecting a difference in average levels of happiness in each country, but also the distribution of happiness. Just as nations that have bigger economic gaps between those at the top and bottom of the social pile tend to have more social and health problems, the happiest nations also tend to have a smaller gap between the happiest and relatively unhappiest.
Incidentally, northern European countries also tend to be more egalitarian.
In my September 2023 survey, I asked about happiness. I asked how much people agreed that “in general, I consider myself to be a very happy person”. Just over two-thirds of the 5000 or so who responded agreed at least a little, 14% were ambivalent and 18% disagreed.
There were no differences based on gender or education. Older people were more likely to see themselves as very happy. People with higher incomes showed a statistically significant, but practically negligible, trend in being happier. The lesson here is consistent with what we already know about happiness: we tend to think it all reflects whether happy-making things happen to us or not, but really, we all have a happiness setting that is mostly genetic. Happy things explain only about 10% of the variation in happiness in any one moment, but about 40% comes from how you choose to approach happiness and your life in general.
You can take courses on happiness. For many years, the poster child for this was the Yale University first-year course “Psychology and the Good Life”. Professor Laurie Santos’s syllabus stresses that the course is for people who want to live happier lives, and so it has two sets of academic requirements. The first set is the usual: read the readings, sit the tests, etc, but the second she cheesily refers to as “course rewirements” – students “rewire” their happiness by practising the course’s evidence-based content. I like her already.
This course has been the inspiration for others, including the University of Bristol’s “Science of Happiness”, in which students complete pre- and post-course measures of subjective wellbeing. Sure enough, students are 10-15% better off.
And in March, the folk running this course (along with Santos) published a follow-up where they resurveyed as many students as they could, showing that happiness gains are maintained, but only if you carry on practising “happiness hacks”. Remember I mentioned our happiness baseline? If you don’t work at it, you return to that baseline.
The hacks are cheesy and simple. Telling people you appreciate something they’ve done, savouring the moment, doing kind things for others, keeping a journal, and getting physical exercise, whether that’s walking, running, dancing or whatever. Gratitude was the most commonly used hack.
Just as keeping your muscles healthy requires exercise or the gym, improving and maintaining happiness requires that you work at it.
