The science of being happy

A scientific approach to happiness? What could they mean?

Psychologists have an equation for happiness. Happiness - or rather, "subjective well-being" - is the sum of life satisfaction, plus positive effect, minus negative effect.

Well, duh, you might say. How you feel is a result of all that has happened to you so far in life, plus the things that are either bugging you, or pleasing you, right at this minute.

Yet bear with me, because psychologists believe they may be on to something new. They say that since their discipline has existed, they have been pretty much focused on unhappiness - mental illness, the things that go wrong. It is the medical model of patching up what seems broken. But why not also develop a positive psychology, a science of how to allow people to feel better?

And there are some surprises. For instance, research suggests that happiness is 50 per cent innate, 40 per cent how you deal with life, and only 10 per cent about life itself - the good and bad that life throws at you.

"Most people would expect it to be the other way round, that it would be 40 per cent about the events that happen and only 10 per cent how you viewed them," says Canterbury University happiness researcher, Alison Ogier-Price.

The innate component can be something of a surprise as well. Or at least the extent to which we have a natural set-point of life satisfaction to which our feelings tend to return.

Ogier-Price says a famous experiment compared the happiness ratings of lottery winners and paraplegics. Winning a million dollars was of course rated as a moment of extreme pleasure, a crippling accident as a deeply unhappy event. Yet when interviewed a year later, both winners and victims had returned to near average levels of life satisfaction.

There are some life events that are more difficult to get over. Divorce and unemployment create a more lingering effect. (And even paraplegics felt they were more happy overall before their accidents.)

But Ogier-Price says it is time psychology focused on the sizeable 40 per cent chunk of happiness that is in fact under our control - the part of happiness that can be learnt as a set of mental habits.

We meet at the central city apartment that Ogier-Price uses for her happiness classes. For about four years, while she continues her PhD research (tentatively titled Still Happy? Thwarting Hedonic Adaptation), Ogier-Price has been holding weekend and evening sessions for up to 20 people.

Some several hundred Cantabrians - from builders to housewives - have been trialling a scientifically validated approach to getting more enjoyment out of their lives.

Ogier-Price explains her background. She was a high flying IT project manager in South Africa before arriving in New Zealand 12 years ago. She suffered a major depression and being a systematic person, she wanted to understand how best to feel happy again.

"I was doing this honours course on emotion and thought, excellent, I can study my depression. But studying depression was counter- productive really, so I started looking at the other side of the coin. How to be actually happy rather than just less depressed."

As her research project, Ogier- Price decided to review the many self-help paperbacks, mostly written by American gurus like Dr Phil, to see if there was any evidence to back up their advice.

She was largely out on her own. The idea of positive psychology as a serious field was still very new. Martin Seligman, president of the American Psychological Society, was only just starting to push the movement internationally.

Ogier-Price found enough enthusiasm with other fellow psychologists, like school counsellor Tom Matthews, to start a New Zealand Association of Positive Psychology.

And now she has developed her own six-step programme based on what she discovered works. How to learn to be happier. Nothing airy-fairy, or happy-clappy. Just a tool-kit of techniques which exploits the 40 per cent that we can do something about.

Savouring

The first lesson Ogier-Price teaches sounds merely common- sense - do more of what you enjoy. Ogier-Price laughs at its obviousness, but says it also amazes her how many in her classes are too busy, too caught up in what they feel they have to be doing, to set aside time for the activities they know make them happy. So homework is the task of creating a beautiful day.

"It doesn't have to be anything grand," says Ogier-Price. "One woman organised with a friend to go for a picnic with their kids to Bottle Lake Forest." But the lesson is a reminder to people they probably lead highly structured lives that squeeze out the moments of simple savouring. And when they do have spare time, the temptation is just to flake out on the couch, watch television. So the quickest way to increase the flow of happy moments is to get organised.

Gratitude

Lesson two is about recognising that good things are happening to you. The class has to keep a gratitude diary where every night they write down three nice moments in the day.

"About 80 per cent of our thoughts are negative. And this is natural as we are always having to look out for threats, for what could go wrong. But then we ignore what goes right for us. So this is an exercise to get people into the habit of scanning for good things."

Ogier-Price says the homework is not just to note the events themselves, like "my mum phoned", but also to consider their causes. "So perhaps mum phoned because I have maintained a good relationship, for example. We are always blaming ourselves for the bad things that happen to us - they must be our fault - but not taking credit for the good."

She says studies confirm that this gratitude exercise can have powerful long-term effects.

Even after just a week of practice, six months later people reported they were still in the habit of remarking on daily reasons to feel pleased about life.

Strengths

Lesson three is to understand your strengths. Ogier-Price says just as people increase their unhappiness by over-responding to the negative aspects of the world, so they also concentrate on their own deficiencies rather than their virtues.

So first they have to discover their strengths - which could be humility, curiosity, zest, prudence - then not only practice them (because doing what you are good at makes you happy), but also spend the week finding completely new ways to apply them.

- © Fairfax NZ News