Happiness & Public Policy

From a new Time article on Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s new grad program at CGU:

Drawing on his research on happiness, Csikszentmihalyi has three general pieces of advice:

* Be attuned to what gives you genuine satisfaction. Although many people assume that popular activities like watching TV are enjoyable, their own reports generally indicate that they feel more engaged, energetic, satisfied and happy when doing other things.

* Study yourself. To better understand their own happiness, Csikszentmihalyi says, people should systematically record their activities and feelings every few hours for a week or two. In recording your observations, try to focus on how you actually feel, rather than what you think you ought to be feeling or what you expect to feel. Afterwards, note the high points, particularly, and the low ones. Then try to adjust how you spend time according to your findings.

* Take control. Repairing unhappy conditions requires active effort. People often assume external conditions will change for the better or let chance determine their response. That’s a mistake. “Get control,” Csikszentmihalyi says. When things aren’t right, “you have to put in the same effort you would if your business were in trouble. Just as markets move, life changes too.”

Again: “unhappy conditions require active effort.” What if you happen to be writing a novel and just don’t have the time? Unhappiness isn’t that bad, really, if you’ve got something better to be working on.

An article on neuroscientist Richard Davidson:

Findings from Davidson’s lab clearly suggest that a sense of well-being should not be considered as the simple absence of disease or depression, but rather as the presence of a distinct profile of emotional reactivity and emotion regulation characterized by a pattern of unique neurobiological substrates. Moreover, these patterns of brain function appear to influence peripheral biology in ways that may be consequential for health.

Cortisol is a stress hormone produced by the adrenal cortex. It is triggered whenever we feel threatened, but prolonged exposure can increase blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and suppress the immune system.

“We have found that individuals who show very effective regulation of negative emotions also show a more adaptive pattern of cortisol release,” explained Davidson.

Cortisol is naturally higher in the morning and reaches a low point just before bedtime. According to Davidson’s findings, individuals who show the highest levels of well-being and most effective emotion regulation are those who also show the lowest levels of cortisol at night. The ability to automatically regulate this stress hormone may play a critical role in mediating the health consequences associated with high degrees of happiness.

Davidson’s research also shows that positive and negative emotions produce activity in very different paths of the brains. It turns out that one place the blue bird of happiness likes to roost is the left prefrontal cortex.

Research reveals that people experiencing anxiety, anger or depression show the most brain activity in the right prefrontal cortex, just behind the forehead. Those experiencing positive outward-reaching emotions show more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. What’s more, people seem to be predisposed genetically and through their experiences towards being either more left-brained or right-brained, that is, more cheerful or sad.

Davidson promotes the idea that meditation can improve happiness:

“There are many other ways to change the brain, but we know that meditation is a family of procedures that yields virtuous change: we now know that we can learn to cultivate compassion, kindness, altruism, and cooperation, largely through meditation, which produces change in specific brain surfaces,” Davidson said.

I like meditation, but I worry that buying into a full-on ethos of meditative mindfulness can turn you into a passive milquetoast with no creative edge. Am I wrong? The pluralist’s motto: “There is never no cost.” So what’s the cost of meditation? My guess: you cannot sublimate aggression, frustration, and anxiety into creative production if you’ve largely eliminated them. I’d be happy to lose most of my frustration, but I feel like I often need more, not less, aggression, and that a certain amount of anxiety (but not too much!) keeps me focused. I doubt my optimal degree of serenity is even close to my potential maximum.

Interesting findings in SciAm article on UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky:

Her aim is not merely to confirm the strategies’ effectiveness but to gain insights into how happiness works. For example, conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut. Lyubomirsky is also asking about mediators: Why, for example, does acting kind make you happier? “I’m a basic researcher, not an applied researcher, so I’m interested not so much in the strategies but in how they work and what goes on behind the scenes,” she explains.

Initial results with the interventions have been promising, but sustaining them is tough. Months after a study is over, the people who have stopped the exercises show a drop in happiness. Like a drug or a diet, the exercises work only if you stick with them. Instilling habits is crucial. Another key: “fit,” or how well the exercise matches the person. If sitting down to imagine your best possible self (an optimism exercise) feels contrived, you will be less likely to do it.

The biggest factor may be getting over the idea that happiness is fixed–and realizing that sustained effort can boost it. “A lot of people don’t apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives,” Lyubomirsky declares, “but the effort it takes is enormous.”

This last is an important observation that points to the idea that more happiness may not be better as long as there is some cost to increasing one’s happiness level. When you hit the point where the cost of the marginal unit of effort is greater than the benefit of the marginal unit of happiness, then you’re as happy as you want to be, even if you could in some sense be happier.