Going through major life changes tends to promote bouts of intense introspection, and even more so when the life-changes in question are brought about by failings on the part of oneself which occasion great unhappiness for others about whom one cares, and however more so when the personal failings stem from deep-rooted problems within one's own character that force one to re-evaluate long-held assumptions about one's own values and even character. Going through major life-changes also tends to promote the use of obscenely lengthy sentences.
As tends to accompany bouts of painful introspection, I have been reading quite a bit recently, on many topics, including the topic of happiness. Topics relating to psychology have always been of interest to me, and especially studies related to happiness. We happen to live in an age when the mind can be explored in ways that were utterly unimaginable 70 years ago - today we can literally see so much more of what occurs in our brains that the potential for unlocking the secrets of our minds is greater than ever before.
To wit, did you know that the area of the brain devoted to the fingers of the left hand is significantly larger in professional violinists? Or that London cabbies have extra portions of their brains assigned to tasks involving orientation and directions? In other words, whatever you devote time to, the brain begins to devote more of its own physical real-estate to. And how long do these changes take? Well, microscopic changes begin instantly, but within 3 months the changes are large enough to be seen on scans of the brain. 3 MONTHS to change the structure of your brain sufficiently to be visually perceived!!! Amazing. 70 years ago we would have had no way of knowing such information - today, this information and all its implications lie before us, just asking to be applied.
Now - on to happiness. What does the research tell us about happiness? First off, we all know that some people seem to be naturally happier than others. Can we change how happy we are? The answer is about 40-50% of your happiness is permanently fixed or hard-wired by genetics. It isn't going to move for you, unless you explode or disable certain parts of your brain or hormonal system. On the other hand, this means with some work you could be 50% happier, and that sounds like a pretty fair prize to me. (If you told me I could be 50% better-looking in 3 months or so, I reckon I'd take you up on the offer!)
So what makes us happy? Well, oddly enough, not what most of us automatically assume would make us happy. When studies ask us humans what they think will contribute to our happiness, we tend to go for physical goods - material items. We believe that these things will make us happy, yet the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that whatever material goods we buy have only a short-term effect on our happiness, which declines quickly. Furthermore, our goods can actually cause us less happiness as they wear out, become shabby, or begin to malfunction. (Damn ipod won't sync! Aaaarrrgghhh!!!!!)
So as time goes by, possessions we spent money on not only stops contributing to our happiness, but slowly can come to have a reverse effect. Experiences, on the other hand, actually have a reverse trajectory. Though the experience may (though need not necessarily) be stressful, time-consuming, etc, our minds have a way of editing, or coloring our memories, so that we experience long-term joy upon recalling these experiences that grows with time, so that we actually derive more joy from experiences when recalling them significantly later than we derived from them at the time. In a way, you can almost think of it as a financial investment. Nobody enjoys putting a 1,000 dollars into an investment instead of saving it, in fact it can be painful. The satisfaction, however, grows with the investment, as does one's sense of control over life.
Which brings us to our next point - control over your life. There are two ways to look at happiness - increase your joy, or decrease your stress and misery. Well, what do you think is the primary cause of stress-related hormones in the body? A perceived lack of control over one's life. Feeling that events are out of our control, and that we are subject to the whims of fate, produces a stress reaction which is, quite literally, damaging to your body. Studies show that people who have control over just one small item in their life show significantly better health outcomes over even relatively short amounts of time. So, take control wherever possible.
And finally - when in doubt, fake it. A study was done in which people were assigned to do a simple paper-and-pencil game. All the subjects were then given a pencil, and told to hold it in their mouth throughout the game. Half were told to hold it in their teeth, not allowing their lips to touch it. The other half were told to hold it in their lips, not allowing it to touch their teeth. Thus half of the subjects were forced into a pseudo-smile, while the other half were pushed into a pseudo-frown. When asked at the end to rate how enjoyable the game was, the forced-smile group reported perceiving the game as significantly more fun than those who had been forced into frowning.
Similarly, people who are told to sit up straight while doing a math task not only report feeling more positive afterward, but score better than those who were instructed to slump. This finding was very solid for males, but not, oddly enough, for females. The researchers could only speculate that sitting up straight forces one's chest to project, which may create a feeling of self-conciousness. Which may just serve to underline the importance of being happy with yourself in the first place.
