10 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Incredibly Happy
One
example: While I'm definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether a one-day burst, or a lifetime, or things you should not do every
day),
probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people
accomplish more.
Easier
said than done though, right?
Actually,
many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle
Beth Cooper, Content Crafter at Buffer, the social media
management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social media
updates.
Here's
Beth:
1.
Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough
Think
exercise is something you don't have time for? Think again. Check out the 7 minute workout mentioned in The New
York Times. That's a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
Exercise
has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being that it is an
effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study cited in Shawn Achor's
book The Happiness Advantage, three groups of patients
treated their depression with medication, exercise, or a combination of the
two. The results of this study are surprising: Although all three groups
experienced similar improvements in their happiness levels early on, the
follow-up assessments proved to be radically different:
The
groups were then tested six months later to assess their relapse rate. Of those
who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent had slipped back into
depression. Those in the combination group were doing only slightly better,
with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the
exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent.
You
don't have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though. Exercise can help
you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve your body image, even if
you don't lose any weight.
We've
explored exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains,
such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.
A study in the Journal of Health
Psychology
found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they
saw no physical changes:
Body
weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and 18 females before
and after both 6 × 40 minutes exercising and 6 × 40 minutes reading. Over both
conditions, body weight and shape did not change. Various aspects of body
image, however, improved after exercise compared to before.
Yep:
Even if your actual appearance doesn't change, how you feel about your
body does change.
2.
Sleep More: You'll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions
We
know that sleep helps our body recover from the
day and repair itself
and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also
important for happiness.
Negative
stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or neutral memories gets
processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation hits the hippocampus harder
than the amygdala. The result is that sleep-deprived people fail to recall
pleasant memories yet recall gloomy memories just fine.
In
one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students tried to memorize a
list of words. They could remember 81% of the words with a negative
connotation, like "cancer." But they could remember only 31% of the
words with a positive or neutral connotation, like "sunshine" or
"basket."
The
BPS Research Digest explores another study that proves sleep affects
our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a facial recognition task
throughout the course of a day, researchers studied how sensitive participants
were to positive and negative emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon
without taking a nap became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and
anger.
Using
a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified reactivity to anger
and fear emotions across the day, without sleep. However, an intervening nap
blocked and even reversed this negative emotional reactivity to anger and fear
while conversely enhancing ratings of positive (happy) expressions.
Of
course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how you feel
when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole day.
Another study tested how employees'
moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire work day.
Researchers
found that employees' moods when they clocked in tended to affect how they felt
the rest of the day. Early mood was linked to their perceptions of customers
and to how they reacted to customers' moods.
And
most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on performance,
including both how much work employees did and how well they did it.
3.
Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can't Buy You Happiness
Staying
in touch with friends and family is one of the top five regrets of the dying.
If
you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research
proves it can make you happier right now, too.
Social
time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our happiness, even for
introverts. Several studies have found that time spent with friends and family
makes a big difference to how happy we feel.
I
love the way Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:
We
are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all
the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more
family and friends.
George
Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.
In
an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant
was asked, "What have you learned from the Grant Study men?"
Vaillant's response: "That the only thing that really matters in life are
your relationships to other people."
He
shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at The Atlantic on how men's social connections made a
difference to their overall happiness:
Men's
relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life adjustment better than
any other variable. Good sibling relationships seem especially powerful: 93
percent of the men who were thriving at age 65 had been close to a brother or
sister when younger.
In
fact, a study published in the Journal of Socio-Economics states than your
relationships are worth more than $100,000:
Using
the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase in the level of
social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a year in terms of life
satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little
happiness.
I
think that last line is especially fascinating: Actual changes in income, on
the other hand, buy very little happiness. So we could increase our annual
income by hundreds of thousands of dollars and still not be as happy as we
would if we increased the strength of our social relationships.
The
Terman study, covered in The Longevity Project, found that relationships
and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:
We
figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or she had friends
and relatives to count on when having a hard time then that person would be
healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for, we predicted, would live
the longest.
Surprise:
our prediction was wrong... Beyond social network size, the clearest benefit of
social relationships came from helping others. Those who helped their friends
and neighbors, advising and caring for others, tended to live to old age.
4.
Get Outside More: Happiness is Maximized at 57°
In The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends
spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:
Making
time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study
found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted
positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory...
This
is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about fitting new habits
into our already-busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a short enough time to spend
outside that you could fit it into your commute or even your lunch break.
A
UK study from the University of Sussex also found that being
outdoors made people happier:
Being
outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon is the perfect spot
for most. In fact, participants were found to be substantially happier outdoors
in all natural environments than they were in urban environments.
The
American Meteorological Society published research in 2011
that found current temperature has a bigger effect on our happiness than
variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the average temperature over
the course of a day. It also found that happiness is maximized at 57 degrees
(13.9°C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for
your 20 minutes of fresh air.
The
connection between productivity and temperature is
another topic we've talked about more here. It's fascinating what a small change in
temperature can do.
5.
Help Others: 100 Hours a Year is the Magic Number
One
of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to make yourself
feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours per year (or two hours
per week) is the optimal time we should dedicate to
helping others in
order to enrich our lives.
If
we go back to Shawn Achor's book again, he says this about helping others:
...when
researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they
found that money spent on activities--such as concerts and group dinners
out--brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions,
or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called "prosocial
spending," also boosts happiness.
The
Journal of Happiness Studies published a study that explored this very topic:
Participants
recalled a previous purchase made for either themselves or someone else and
then reported their happiness. Afterward, participants chose whether to spend a
monetary windfall on themselves or someone else. Participants assigned to
recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier
immediately after this recollection; most importantly, the happier
participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on
someone else in the near future.
So
spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves.
But what about spending our time on other people?
A study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers
were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:
Shortly
after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German reunion, the first wave
of data of the GSOEP was collected in East Germany. Volunteering was still
widespread. Due to the shock of the reunion, a large portion of the
infrastructure of volunteering (e.g. sports clubs associated with firms)
collapsed and people randomly lost their opportunities for volunteering. Based
on a comparison of the change in subjective well-being of these people and of
people from the control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the
hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of higher life
satisfaction.
In
his book Flourish: A Visionary New
Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin
Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:
...we
scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable
momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
6.
Practice Smiling: Reduce Pain, Improve Mood, Think Better
Smiling
can make us feel better, but it's more effective when we back it up with
positive thoughts, according to this study:
A
new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar suggests
customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day worsen their mood
and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But workers who smile as a
result of cultivating positive thoughts--such as a tropical vacation or a
child's recital--improve their mood and withdraw less.
Of
course it's important to practice "real smiles" where you use your eye
sockets. (You've seen fake smiles that don't reach the person's eyes. Try it.
Smile with just your mouth. Then smile naturally; your eyes narrow. There's a
huge difference in a fake smile and a genuine smile.)
According
to PsyBlog, smiling can improve our attention and help us
perform better on cognitive tasks:
Smiling
makes us feel good which also increases our attentional flexibility and our
ability to think holistically. When this idea was tested by Johnson et al.
(2010), the results showed that participants who smiled performed better on
attentional tasks which required seeing the whole forest rather than just the
trees.
A
smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling
circumstances:
Smiling
is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting situation.
Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even forcing a smile
when we don't feel like it is enough to lift our mood slightly (this is one
example of embodied cognition).
7.
Plan a Trip: It Helps Even if You Don't Actually Take One
As
opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply planning a vacation or break
from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life showed that the highest
spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a vacation as people enjoy
the sense of anticipation:
In
the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight
weeks. After
the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most
people.
Shawn
Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:
One
study found that people who just thought about watching their favorite movie
actually raised their endorphin levels by 27 percent.
If
you can't take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night out with
friends, put something on the calendar--even if it's a month or a year down the
road. Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness, remind yourself about it.
8.
Meditate: Rewire Your Brain for Happiness
Meditation
is often touted as an important habit for improving focus, clarity, and
attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It turns out it's also
useful for improving your happiness:
In
one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at the
brain scans of 16 people before and after they participated in an eight-week
course in mindfulness meditation. The study, published in the January issue of
Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course,
parts of the participants' brains associated with compassion and self-awareness
grew, and parts associated with stress shrank.
Meditation
literally clears your mind and calms you down, it's been often proven to be the
single most effective way to live a happier life. According to Achor,
meditation can actually make you happier long-term:
Studies
show that in the minutes right after meditating, we experience feelings of calm
and contentment, as well as heightened awareness and empathy. And, research
even shows that regular meditation can permanently rewire the brain to raise
levels of happiness.
The
fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through mediation is most
surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however we feel and think today
isn't permanent.
9. Move
Closer to Work: A Short Commute is Worth More Than a Big House
Our
commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our happiness. The
fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five days a week makes it
unsurprising that the effect would build up over time and make us less and less
happy.
According
to The Art of Manliness, having a long commute is
something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:
...
while many voluntary conditions don't affect our happiness in the long term
because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed to their daily slog
to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and sometimes it's not.
Or
as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, "Driving in traffic is a
different kind of hell every day."
We
tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job,
but these compensations just don't work:
Two
Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on happiness found that
such factors could not make up for the misery created by a long commute.
10.
Practice Gratitude: Increase Happiness and Satisfaction
This
is a seemingly simple strategy but I've personally found it to make a huge
difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice gratitude, from
keeping a journal of things you're grateful for, sharing three good things that happen
each day
with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude when
others help you.
In an experiment where participants took
note of things they were grateful for each day, their moods were improved just
from this simple practice:
The
gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being across several, though
not all, of the outcome measures across the three studies, relative to the
comparison groups. The effect on positive affect appeared to be the most robust
finding. Results suggest that a conscious focus on blessings may have emotional
and interpersonal benefits.
The
Journal of Happiness studies published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being Results
indicated that writing letters of gratitude increased participants' happiness
and life satisfaction while decreasing depressive symptoms.
Quick Final Fact: Getting Older Will
Actually Make You Happier
As we get older, particularly past
middle age, we tend to naturally
grow happier. There's
grateful can affect our levels of happiness:
Participants included 219 men and
women who wrote three letters of gratitude over a 3 week period.
still some debate over why this
happens, but scientists have a few ideas:
Researchers, including the authors,
have found that older people shown pictures of faces or situations tend to
focus on and remember the happier ones more and the negative ones less.
Other studies have discovered that
as people age, they seek out situations that will lift their moods--for
instance, pruning social circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring
them down. Still other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and
disappointment over unachieved goals, and focus their goals on greater well
being.
So if you thought getting old will
make you miserable, it's likely you'll develop a more positive outlook than you
probably have now.
How cool is that?
BY Jeff Haden http://www.inc.com/jeff-haden/10-scientifically-proven-ways-to-be-incredibly-happy-wed.html?cid=em01020week52a
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