Thursday, March 27, 2014

Do you know what it takes to be happy?

New research may change your view about leading the happy life.  Consider these two questions:

1.       Is it the ordinary, or extraordinary, that makes us happy? and

2.       Does happiness lie in feeling good or doing good?

Hedonic vs. Eudaimonic Happiness 
If it’s hedonic happiness that you’re after (that is, happiness derived from pleasure), you’re not alone. After all, who among us doesn’t spend a portion of our time pursuing “the good life.”  And it’s not that we’re selfish – for years health experts have instructed us that happiness breeds well-being.

But a new study, out of the University of North Carolina and UCLA, has us rethinking the link between happiness and health. The researchers took an entirely unique approach, examining happiness from a biological view – measuring the difference between hedonic happiness (happiness desired from pleasure) and eudaimonic happiness (happiness based on “meaning” or a sense of purpose). Their findings surprised even long-time researchers.

Wrote Steven Handel, in a piece for www.theemotionmachine: “The researchers found that individuals who scored high on meaningful happiness ('eudaimonic well-being') showed healthier gene expression than those who only scored high on pleasurable happiness (or 'hedonic well-being'). The implication of this study is that meaningful happiness can improve our well-being on both a psychological and biological level.”

According to a report from www.wharton.upenn: Lead researchers “[Steven] Cole and [Barbara] Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in their lives — proverbially, simply here for the party — have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronic adversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response.”

Handel quoted Frederickson and Cole who pointed out that “feelings of loneliness, grief, and loss can often activate a stress response in our genes. They put our bodies into an unhealthy state where we feel like our lives are being physically threatened. However, having a sense of meaning and purpose in your life can often give you a sense of connectedness and belonging, especially with other people, which counteracts this ‘threat mode’ response.”

This study’s bottom line: feeling good (pleasure, hedonic pursuit) may not be enough for long-term health. 


Ordinary vs. Extraordinary
What experiences generate the most happiness: the extraordinary (e.g., sky diving, deep sea fishing, mountain climbing) or the ordinary (dinner with family, social gatherings of friends and family)?  The answer has more to do with how old you are (or how old you think you are) than the experiences themselves.  That’s the chief finding drawn from a series of studies by Wharton marketing professor Cassie Mogilner and then-Wharton PhD candidate Amit Bhattacharjee.

Explained Mogilner: “Irrespective of how old you are, experiences that are self-defining make you happy. But as you get older, there is a real shift in what experiences you use to define yourself.”  

In large part, the researchers found, a person’s view of happiness correlates to how many years they believe they have left on earth.  In one of their eight studies, the researchers focused on age, but not a person’s actual age – instead, they asked participants about how much time they thought they had left in life.

Their chief hypothesis and finding: participants who felt as if they had more time left on earth were more likely to derive greater levels of happiness from extraordinary experiences, while those who thought they had less time ranked ordinary and extraordinary events equally. “We were thinking less in terms of age and more in terms of ending,” Bhattacharjee says. “You take the day-to-day stuff for granted when you have plenty of days left for experiences.”

Added Bhattacharjee: “Practitioners have this notion that extraordinary experiences are inherently better than ordinary ones, and the more they convert ordinary to extraordinary, the more they will sell. But it really depends on the brand and the goal of that brand.”

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