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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