AS I SEE IT
BY MARIANNE HERON
If I have wished friends and contacts happiness once over the festive season, I have done it hundreds of times in greetings. But what chance is there of living happily ever after like Cinderella with her Prince? Even though we know that real life isn’t like that and that Cinderella and her man will have rows just like everyone else, the myth endures. We expect to be happy and when we aren’t we wish that something – a wand-waving fairy godmother, a pill or a Lotto win –would come along and make our dreams come true.
“The bad news is there is no happiness pill,” says Donna McCallum, author of The Fairy Godmother’s Guide To Getting What you Want. Perpetual happiness might not be very happy anyway, without the contrast of other feelings but happiness is good for us, happy people do better and live longer.
We all have our share of ups and downs but that is not to say that we don’t have an element of personal choice about how much sunshine we let in to our lives. The most hopeful myth busting quote – don’t ask me who said it – I ever came across is: “Happiness is not a destination, it’s a by-product.” It isn’t a permanent state but comes about as a consequence of the things we do and the way we deal with life. There may not be a happiness pill but people want to know how to get a bit more of that happiness state.
When the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI) ran a free online 10-week course on Happiness And Health during the pandemic, nearly 200,000 people signed up for it. How to find happiness books take up a sizeable stretch of the self-improvement section in bookstores, making their publishers happy.
The extent to which we can influence our capacity for happiness depends on a trio of factors in particular: our personality (about 50% is down to heritability) our circumstance (surprisingly only 10%) and the 40% actually within our own control.
Whatever else, happiness is a word that we use as shorthand for a whole variety of states from joy to contentment and is part of that general state of well- being which psychologists call Positive Psychological Well-Being.
Imagine asking “Are You PPWB today?”
There is the quick-fix which gives a transitory mood uplift, like eating chocolate or buying a new dress or the long-lived contentment which comes from experiencing loving relationships or good friendship. Another durable kind of happiness is like a by-product of doing things that you really love doing, that are you good at, that come naturally because they are in tune with your talents and skills.
When you are engaged with in such activities time flies and you experience what Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmilhalyi terms ‘flow’. It is that kind of engagement in a meaningful challenge with something that matters to you, that charges up your happiness batteries and builds up your reserves of resilience. It means being in tune with who you really are, to self-actualise which psychologist Carl Jung termed individuation.
Guarding against things that make you feel down helps: avoiding perfectionism when ‘good enough’ will do and becoming aware of the negative things your inner voice is telling you and reframing or challenging them.
Some of the things that we imagine may make us happy may not have as much influence as we imagine.
Take money, once you have enough to get by, becoming wealthier doesn’t make a big difference, but rather what does seem to matter is how well off you are relative to others. But it seems that as nations become wealthier surveys suggest that they become less happy.
Martin Seligman, proponent of positive psychology in his book Authentic Happiness, has a useful acronym PERMA for the things that contribute most to a happy mental state. The five letters stand for Positivity or having a glass half-full take on life, Engagement, being involved. Relationships, with strong bonds with your nearest and dearest as well as wider social contact, plus Meaning doing something that is important to you and in tune with your values and Achievement, the sense of having done what you set out to do.
Now I’ve written this I feel happier!
