Happiness has become a buzzword, more than the birthday song, more than “if we’re happy and we know it” clapping our hands or stomping our feet. Everywhere we look, it seems, there’s a quiz to take, steps to follow, articles to read that measure, guarantee, heighten our happiness.
What we used to take for granted now has come under the microscope. Amazing research is being done on what makes us happy, how happiness affects our health, whether some people’s brains are more wired toward happiness than others’.
All of which makes us wonder about the basics: What is this thing we know when we feel it, but it seems so hard to put a finger on? Just what constitutes happiness?
The sensation of a shared sunset with someone you love? A really good steak? A raise? A child’s smile? A thumbs-up from the doctor? Finally conquering a fear, maybe finally giving up smoking?
Scientifically speaking, happiness is what Florida psychologist and author David Niven calls “the basic sense of satisfaction with yourself and your environment.”
“It’s not running down the street whistling and skipping and saying, ‘I’m the luckiest boy in the world,’” he said.
Niven, who teaches political psychology at Florida Atlantic University, has written several books on happiness. Among them is “The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People” (Harper San Francisco, $11.95 paperback).
He bases his book on research into happiness, research on what we used to take for granted, on what we never saw the need to question.
The field, called “positive psychology,” is relatively new. Up until about a decade ago, about 90 percent of research on emotions focused on the negative.
But studying happiness “is as important as studying depression,” said Jason Berman, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. This summer, he’ll study with two happiness experts in Pennsylvania.
Research shows that happiness and its related mental states, optimism and hopefulness, seem to limit the severity or reduce the risk of such health problems as diabetes, hypertension and even the common cold.
A special Time magazine issue on happiness cites studies showing the relationship of religion to happiness. The more believers incorporate religion into their daily lives, the better off they seem to be in at least two ways: an overall sense of satisfaction with life and the frequency of positive emotions.
Other studies have shown that some people are genetically predisposed to be happy. But that doesn’t mean anybody else can’t be, Niven says.
“The basic realities of life for happy and unhappy people are basically the same,” Niven said. “Happy people don’t have a magic button to get them out of traffic jams, or that mutes an impolite boss. But they draw different messages and meanings from such situations.”
Perhaps Dawn Spellman Rummel knows that more than most of us. Her husband, Joe, died at home late last month, two years after his colon cancer was diagnosed. He was 35. And despite almost unspeakable tragedy, shortly before his death she said she considered herself happy.
“I think happiness changes with your situation in life,” said Rummel, 37. “Right now, it’s peace, being at peace with the process that’s happening.”
Now that Joe has passed away, she still sees happiness in her life, but in another role.
“Could I call
myself happy?” she asked. “At this point, happiness is like a bright light that’s far away. The distance between me and it is the grieving process I have to go through. Every time I go outside and play with my dog, or a friend makes me laugh, the light gets closer. I have to travel through grief and loneliness and sorrow and emptiness to get back to it, but it’s still there.
“I know it’s at the core of my being … one of the greatest gifts my husband gave me before he left was to tell me he wanted me to be happy, and to go on and live my life.”
Good health, perhaps surprisingly, isn’t “the top determinant of happiness,” as economist Richard Layard writes in “Happiness: Lessons From a New Science” (Penguin Press; $25.95).
“Healthy members of the public generally overestimate the loss of happiness that people actually experience from many of the main medical conditions,” he writes.
Still, health ranks fifth in a list of five factors Layard cites that affect happiness in some way. (In order, the others are family relationships, financial situation, work, and community and friends.)
Many people assume money could propel them into the realm of happiness. In reality, it matters only a bit, when it can lift people out of poverty, Layard writes. Indeed, people in some countries without such American basics as digital cable and computers rank high on the happiness scale.
According to a Time magazine poll, happiness levels increased with incomes up to $50,000. After that, more income did not have a dramatic effect.
“We spend so much of our energy and effort chasing something that ultimately won’t affect how we feel about our life,” Niven said. “Ask a person, ‘Would money make you happier?’ They’d say, ‘Yes, of course.’”
Yet lottery winners, he said, “are some of the least happy people you can find. They almost always wind up enmeshed in disputes: friends and family asking for money or bad investment advice.”
Maybe they just need to realize that our grandmothers were right: Money can’t buy happiness. Instead, Niven said, “Happiness is a matter of finding joy where you are.
“It’s not associating false joy with what you don’t have. It’s really letting the good that’s in your life be visible to you.”
Five years ago, if somebody had asked Nancy Winstead, of Plano, Texas, whether she was happy, she would have answered, “Sure. Why not?”
Now she wonders, “But was I really happy?”
Not until she was found to have breast cancer and finished with the subsequent treatment did she understand what it meant to feel happy, she said.
“It’s an old cliche, saying to stop and smell the roses, but it really is true,” said Winstead, 65. “Sometimes it takes something like this to say life is beautiful, whether you’re religious or not, to be able to walk and talk and enjoy a hamburger, things that didn’t seem important before.”
(info from http://www.bismarcktribune.com/articles/2005/06/07/news/life/lif01.txt)