There is a book written by Sonja Lyubomirsky called the “How of Happiness,” which I found fascinating because any such books I love, because they are written by passionate people with dedication and experience.
The first reason I read them is because I love new information that I see is all of a sudden a part of mainstream culture and becoming accepted fast into the business and social genre.
The other reason is that these books are a valuable contribution to people who will not be able to find time for meditation in their lives, unfortunately. Why I say unfortunately is that solid research discovered by psychologists and also mentioned in this book is that over- thinking contributes to a very great degree to people’s unhappiness. And meditation slows the mind down through the process of watchfulness.
Can we be really happy?
What Sonja Lyubomirsky says, amongst other things is that our genes predestine us to be happy or unhappy, but only to about 50%. The empirical data drawn from the Happiness Twins study led to the conclusion that the evidence in favour of this presumption was strong.
The good news is that even though this implies that at least half of our happiness predisposition is hard wired in us there is another 50% we need to look at. She says the other half of the Happiness Pie is 40% intentional activity and 10% circumstances.
The researchers interviewed many people over a period of time that were very sick, those had won lotto, those who had just had children, formed new relationships and a myriad of other happy and unhappy events. The happy events have a component called a hedonic adaptation: that is after any really happy event the level of happiness tends to deteriorate as we all know.
Remember your first car, fancy dress, luxury holiday or any holiday, first flush of love or romantic affair or even the hope of a new one?
The real surprise was that after the tests were done, there was no difference between those people who had had a happy event occur in their lives and those that did not. This was the 50% set point part of the pie that we have hard wired into us.
Whilst action is important and considered to equate to 40 % intentional activity, happiness is more a state of being rather than one of doing. But it is important at some stage to do something and even meditation requires a little initial effort.
So to recap, the ten percent represented by Life’s circumstances makes no difference to our happiness so don’t think winning the lottery will make you happy, the 50% set point part of the pie, which is our gene disposition we can do little about, but we can influence our lives by 40%, a very big achievement.
Chris Borrett
P.S. Having done many things in life I have seen that there is an easier way than the route most people take.
Image Credit- FreeImages.com:Michel Pitstra
If by chance, you have not encountered my previous posts outside this blog, one of my favourites is about “How To Make A Decision and Stick To It”. You have the luxury of reading it by clicking here.