Is happiness a trap?

Much has been said and written about happiness and the pursuit of it. But as always, much of what makes us happy or unhappy is a matter of how our brain perceives what we go through.

Indulge me for a moment while I ask you to imagine the lives of two people. A is successful at his high-paying job, owns a big house, is married and has a child, and recently purchased a new car. B, on the other hand, rents a small apartment with his parents and works at a job that does not pay as highly as A’s. Which of these two people do you think is happier? If you’re anything like most people reading this article (and the person writing it as well), your intuition would be to say “Of course A is happier! He has everything he needs to be happy!”.

But does he? As we shall see, our predictions and intuitions about what makes us happy are usually far off the mark.

Identifying what makes us happy

Let’s start with one of the things that we are convinced will make us happy — a good job. Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues performed a study to examine whether students’ happiness levels went down drastically when they didn’t get a job they really wanted. What they found was that, yes, there was indeed a drop in students’ happiness levels when they didn’t get the job, but this drop was far smaller than the students themselves had predicted.

Interestingly, when students felt that they didn’t get the job due to an unfair reason, there was literally no drop in their happiness levels. Why would this be the case? It seems as though once the students were convinced that the reason they didn’t get the job had nothing to do with themselves, they were able to placate themselves quite successfully. Happiness, after all, depends so much on the stories we choose to tell ourselves.

But surely, people who have higher paying jobs must be happier? If this was the case, people from richer countries would consistently score higher on happiness levels. But research has found that this is not true — a study that examined people from 37 countries across five continents found no significant relationship between higher rates of economic growth and overall increase in life satisfaction.

This is not to suggest, however, that “money cannot buy happiness”. Try telling that to a couple struggling to make ends meet with their meagre salaries. Of course, money can buy peace, happiness and security, but this increase in happiness appears to taper off when the salary reaches a particular threshold. Once that threshold is reached, money seems to have less impact on happiness levels, and the graph flattens out.

Why might this be the case? The authors of this study suggest that perhaps “further increases in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with the people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure”. Preliminary research also suggests that people who have higher incomes might have a lower ability to savour small pleasures in life.

Built-in biases in our brain

A bias of the brain also comes into play here. Our brains, (as illustrated by the following image), thinks in relative terms:

The size of the two orange dots is exactly the same, but our brains assume that one is larger and the other smaller, at least partly on the basis of the size of the dots that surround them. This is true when it comes to the way we think about our salaries as well. People usually predict that the salary that would make them happy is higher than what they currently earn. It doesn’t matter if they earn Rs 2 lakh per annum or 12, people will always want more.

There’s another reason why material wealth doesn’t necessarily make us happier. And that is because it is so easily susceptible to social comparison. It’s easy for me to look at my friend’s car and compare it with my own, because I know the cost of both cars. Research suggests that we’d be better off investing in experiences rather than material things. For one, it is much harder to compare one’s vacation with one’s neighbour’s vacation. Secondly, experiences are far less susceptible than material goods to a phenomenon called hedonic adaptation (hedone is Greek for pleasure). This is the term psychologists have chosen to describe how the 100th time you enter your car probably makes you not even a tenth as happy as the first time you entered it.

Our brains are built to get used to things. This is a useful feature in general. Can you imagine the information overload if, for example, our brains didn’t decide to treat our peripheral vision as unimportant, or suddenly decided to pay complete attention to the way our clothes feel on every part of our bodies at every moment? When it comes to happiness, though, this feature of our brains leads to hedonic adaptation and doesn’t serve us very well.

Negative visualisation

Scientists suggest a few ways to thwart hedonic adaptation, not just to material goods but to experiences as well. The first of these is savouring. The very word savouring brings up the image of someone closing their eyes and slowly enjoying a mouthful of ice cream, and now that I come to think of it, it’s a decent metaphor for the technique. Savouring is mindfully experiencing what is in the here and now.

Another way to force our brains to be happy without getting used to stuff is to utilise a technique called negative visualisation. Ask yourself, “how would it feel if I didn’t have the things that I have right now?” This can be an extremely powerful way to remind yourself of how much the things that you have actually matter and can in turn cause you to feel grateful for them. Thinking about what we are grateful for is a great way to also avoid falling into the trap of social comparisons.

Is the pursuit worth it?

“Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.” — Whoever said this would have had no way of knowing that current psychology research would support the first part of their statement. It has been shown that people who aggressively chase happiness not only derive less joy out of emotional experiences in the short term, but are also less likely to attain long-term happiness.

Researchers have an interesting theory about this: people who intensely value happiness, they posit, are not able to enjoy moments that ought to make them happy because they are always comparing their current feelings with how happy they would like to be. So ironically, by setting their goals too firmly and too high, happiness-seekers might just be missing the mark completely.

People who value happiness and optimism too much might also be in for trouble in another way. As with any emotion, positive emotions too, are adaptive only when applied in the right context and experienced in the right quantity. And of course, placing too much importance on immediate pleasure and not too much on the long-term consequences of our behaviour can cause us to make all kinds of risky decisions, including abusing drugs and alcohol.

Robert Nozick, who was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, devised a clever thought experiment to drive home the point that happiness cannot possibly be life’s only goal. Imagine you were floating in a tank with electrodes attached to your brain that neuropsychologists could control. Within this machine, the scientists could stimulate your brain to feel the same way as it would if you were, say, reading a great book, meeting a friend, or any one of the million things that could possibly make you happy. Would you choose to spend your life in such a tank? It might seem artificial, but it would have tremendous advantages over real life in addition to remote-controlled happiness. There wouldn’t be any sadness or trauma, or any of the things that we learn are life’s inevitabilities.

As tempting as a life in the tank sounds, most people say they would not like to spend their life hooked up to such a machine. But why not? As Nozick explains, “Someone floating in a tank is an indeterminate blob. There is no answer to the question of what a person who has been long in the tank is like. Is he courageous, kind, intelligent, witty, loving? Should it be surprising that what we are is important to us? Why should we be concerned only with how our time is filled, but not with what we are?”

Is happiness a pursuit of meaning?

This question of “who we are”, brings us neatly to another aspect of existence that is tied inextricably to the quest for happiness — the elusive entity called ‘meaning’. Of course, humans have been searching for meaning for as far back in time as is possible to record. The Epic of Gilgamesh, which was written 4,000 years ago and is considered the earliest surviving piece of notable literature, is at least partly about a person’s quest to understand how best to live his life knowing that he will one day die.

Ancient texts from around the world, from the Upanishads to Greek mythologies, are filled with debates on pleasure versus purpose. Aristotle made the distinction between pleasure or hedonia and personal fulfilment or eudaimonia. Researchers today use the terms happiness and “subjective well-being” interchangeably — Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor of Psychology at the University of California Riverside, describes happiness as “the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile”.

This definition encompasses both the transitory happiness that we get out of everyday joys, as well as the deeper sense of well-being that comes out of living a meaningful life — however each of us might define meaningful.

Can you train yourself to be happy?

We’ve discussed quite a bit about the kinds of things that don’t bring us lasting joy. What, then, are the kinds of experiences that we should be seeking out more? In direct disagreement with the quote on happiness being like a butterfly that comes to us only when we turn our attention away, science seems to suggest that there are things we can do, little changes we can make to our habits, which can help us achieve lasting happiness.

The first of these is kindness. Doing multiple acts of kindness every day seems to be extremely effective at increasing our happiness levels. Studies have found that spending money on other people tends to make people happier than if they were spending that money on themselves. Also, the amount of money spent doesn’t make any difference to the outcome.

Social connection is another experience that seems to give most people joy. People with close social ties have been found to be less vulnerable to stressful events and premature death, and also more likely to survive fatal illnesses.

While we tend to think of affluence in material terms, it is another kind of affluence that contributes more to our happiness levels, and that has to do with time. Simply having enough time to pursue things that interest us makes us happier. Ironically, what happens when we chase that high-paying job is that it often leaves us strapped for time to enjoy the things that really matter to us. Studies have found that people who value time are generally happier than those who value money.

Regularly practising meditation has also been found to make people happier in the long term. Meditation, which usually involves focusing the mind on the breath rather than on distracting thoughts, has the benefit of tamping down activity in the default mode network of the brain — “mind wandering” regions of the brain that are active when the brain is not performing a focused activity.

There are also a couple of habits that we could weave into our everyday routines to help enhance our happiness levels. The first is to simply get moving a bit more! Exercising causes our bodies to release mood-enhancing chemicals called endorphins. Research suggests that just running for 15 minutes a day or walking for an hour decreases the risk of major depression. Second, making sure we get 7-8 hours of sleep consistently every night can enhance our moods over time.

'The face of happiness'

I will end with this wonderful quote by Sonja Lyubomirsky — “The face of happiness may be someone who is intensely curious and enthusiastic about learning; it may be someone who is engrossed in plans for his next five years; it may be someone who can distinguish between the things that matter and the things that don’t; it may be someone who looks forward each night to reading to her child. Some happy people may appear outwardly cheerful or transparently serene, and others are simply busy. In other words, we all have the potential to be happy, each in our own way."

The author is a neuroscience PhD turned science writer who is fascinated by the workings of the brain and how we can ‘rewire’ it to our advantage.

The Mind’s Eye is a column that aims to explore neuroscience in everyday life. It will appear once in every two months.