Inspiration Coaching

Happiness has become a hot scientific topic over the last two decades. Recently the BBC presented a six part series called The Happiness Formula. This series covered topics such as:

• Think yourself happy

• The politics of happiness

• The power of happiness

• The happiness recipe

The scientific tests supporting the series suffered, to some extent, because happiness relies upon the subjective self assessment by an individual of their own happiness rather than an objective measure. However, that suggests that happiness is something that can be objectively measured and that may not be so. Perhaps each of us have our own definition of happiness that are all equally valid.

The instigator for this article was not the BBC series but a lecture that I heard while waiting to pick up my wife and son from the airport after they had competed in the Gold Coast Marathon Running Festival. The lecture was delivered by a guy called Daniel Gilbert. He is a professor in psychology at Harvard University. He has an entertaining delivery style and uses humour to communicate his messages about what makes us happy. Examples of this included:

• Stating that heroin is not a misery drug but a happy drug. He claimed that the moment of taking the drug was the happiest time for the addict. However it was the rest of the addict’s life that was a misery.

• We can sit through hours of a baseball or cricket match where nothing much happens but we can go home happy because we witnessed one or two minutes of magic. Similar to this I remember telling my dad in the 1980s that I could still enjoy seeing my football team lose each week as long as “Roachy” took a specky.

• We can convince ourselves that we are happier with a $85 pair of socks than a $5 pair of socks that perform the same function.

He questioned the belief that it is children that make us truly happy. My two youngest did not like this part of the lecture. He stated that similar to the sporting matches it is the relatively short magic moments that children provide that help us believe our lives our happier overall. Those moments include such times as when they look in our eyes and tell us they love us or give us the unexpected hug.

His overall point is that happiness can be synthesised or manufactured rather than externally found or bought. The science that he uses to justify this includes:

• There was no difference in happiness six months after the event between a person who was made a paraplegic and a person who won the lottery.

• People were asked to rank six Monet prints from their most preferred to their least preferred. They were then told they could choose their 3^rd or 4^th favourite to keep. Most people chose their 3^rd favourite. Some months later they were asked to rank the six Monet prints again. The average results were that the original 3^rd favourite print was now the 2^nd and the original 4^th favourite print was now the 5^th favourite.

Another point made both in the BBC series and by Gilbert is that despite being wealthier than prior generations we are not happier. The assertion here was that it is comparative wealth that makes us happier. That is if everybody is as comparatively as wealthy as us we are not likely to be any happier.

Gilbert is saying that we have the brain power to make us happy no matter what our circumstances. It may be easier to be happy while eating chocolate than it would be when eating brussel sprouts but our brain gives us the power to be happy no matter what our taste buds are experiencing. It is therefore, the tortoise who will win the race to happiness as it take it’s time to make the most of what it is experiencing now as it heads towards its goal.