Happiness gives greater chance of success

Submitted by tonyplant on December 20, 2005 - 19:37.

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

 

Weep, and you weep alone

I have always relegated the meaningfulness of this comment with the saws of my grandmother. My grandmother constantly predicted that the consumption of gin would lead to tears. Or, in the case of children, “Laughter soon turns to tears”. Plus those old stand-bys, “Running children soon fall and are grazed”, and, “If you go out with wet hair you’ll get pneumonia/meningitis”. But it now seems as if cynical responses to the rhyming wisdom of Ella Wheeler Wilcox have been misplaced.

 

When I was studying Authentic Happiness I was accustomed to reading jolly little papers with helpful titles like, “Positive affect and health-related neurodendocrine, cardiovascular and inflammatory processes”. Now, my grandmother’s expectations and mine concerning this topic are very different. She would have believed that all that positive emotion would exhaust your bodily systems and wreak terrible pay-back for those moments of jollity and frivolity. Inflammation would be too mild a retribution. Unless, of course, it involved running pustules and a complexion more commonly found in leper colonies.

Being an old hand at interpreting this stuff, I know that the outcome of such studies is always going to be that happy people are healthier, heal better, live longer, are more sociable, more fulfilled and have more sex than unhappy people. Possibly, that is why they are happy. Which means that those of us who are hunkered down watching re-runs of The Simpsons, inhaling pizza washed down with caffeinated sodas and trying to gather the energy to go online to order trousers to accommodate our expanding girth could also acquire all of these health benefits and sexual advantages. If only we would cheer up.

Now, I’ve always felt that the injunction, “Cheer up”, is even more useless than the typically barked command to “Relax”! My wife once helpfully explained to me that T.S. Eliot described Othello’s great final speech as an attempt at “cheering himself up” (Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca). My Shakespearean knowledge is dodgy but I seem to recollect that the success of this attempt at self-cheer was surrounded by paranoia, murder and suicide. So-pretty much in line with my feelings about exhortations without a solid plan to back them up.

And, now, just to heap more misfortune on the heads of the unhappy, we learn that

There [is] strong evidence that happiness leads people to be more sociable and more generous, more productive at work, to make more money, and to have stronger immune systems.

 

Happy people are more successful. And Lyubomirsky and her colleagues have done an exhaustive analysis of many studies to demonstrate this point. However, there are some words of comfort for those who are not happy. The success that was measured was not just material, it includes social capital like friends and close family. And the research findings indicate that there is some value in sad people working to increase the frequency of positive emotions in their lives by doing things that would even temporarily boost their happiness levels. Researchers caution that these boosters should not be immediately dangerous or cumulatively self-harming (e.g., driving recklessly or drinking large quantities of alcohol).

We can change how we experience our lives and the quality of our lives by learning to be happy. However, although happiness is a legitimate individual pursuit that can be self-cultivated, it seems as if there is a role for our local and national governments. Researchers like Ed Diener say that it is easier to be happy when there is a sense of trust, safety, stability and security. He says that governments can create conditions such as recreational facilities, working hours legislation, a health infrastructure and transport infrastructure that have a profound influence on people's happiness.

It seems as if there are many contributions to our happiness. Our openness to opportunities for happiness and willingness to embrace it as something worth working for is a significant contribution that we can make.

Copyright 2005, Tony Plant Happystance Project

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