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What is Happiness?
by John G. Agno
Published on this site: April 25th, 2006 - See
more articles from this month
Many of us are attempting to discover the answer to the question,
"What is happiness?"
The most popular course at Harvard this year teaches happiness.
"Positive Psychology," a class whose content resembles
that of self-help books but is grounded in serious psychological
research, has enrolled 855 students, who learn about creating, as the course description puts it, "a
fulfilling and flourishing life," courtesy of the booming
new area of psychology that focuses on what makes people feel
good rather than the pathologies that can make them feel miserable. "Positive Psych may be the one class
at Harvard that every student needs to take," said Nancy
Cheng, a junior majoring in biology.
After decades spent focusing on the psyche's dark side, now
there's the emerging field of scientific research into what
makes people happy. One happiness researcher attracting attention
is Stanford's Brian Knutson. He is a professor of psychology and neuroscience who uses brain-image
technology to measure satisfaction. Some of his research is
designed to track how money affects the brain. In one study,
he had subjects play a video game that involved, at certain
points, the anticipation of winning money, and, at other points,
actually taking possession of that money. He measured the
difference in oxygen flow in the brain between those two activities. His conclusion:
gearing up to do something can make you happier than actually
doing it.
"Anticipation is totally underestimated," says Prof.
Knutson, whose work is funded in part by the National Institute
on Aging and the MacArthur Foundation. "Why do slot machines
have arms? You could just have a button-but the arm heightens the anticipation." 'I'll be happy when....'
is the way many people think they are living their lives.
Yet, happiness is not something that happens to you. Happiness
is inside you now. You are motivated from within. You only
have to allow happiness to surface.
Happiness is being aware, not only of the positive events
that occur in your life but, that you yourself are the cause
of these events-that you can create them, that you control
their occurrence, and that you play a major role in the good
things that happen to you. Happiness, said Benjamin Franklin,
"is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune
that seldom happen as by the little advantages that occur
every day."
Happiness isn't off in the future, but in living in the "now"
and loving the moment of our daily experiences. We form an
impression in every business or personal interaction. In the
business world, we don't speak much about the heart. Yet,
the purpose of doing our life's work should come from the
heart-since all businesses are ultimately people serving people.
We all need connection, belonging and meaningful contribution.
Viktor E. Frankl in "The Will of Meaning" states
the paradox of happiness, "To the extent to which one
makes happiness the objective of his motivation, he necessarily
makes it the object of his attention. But precisely by so
doing he loses sight of the reason for happiness, and happiness
itself must fade away. Success and happiness must happen,
the less one cares for them, the more they can."
The circumstances in life have little to do with the satisfaction
we experience. Health, wealth, good looks and status have
astonishingly little effect on what the researchers call "subjective
well-being" according to "The Science of Happiness"
by Geoffrey Cowley (with Anne Underwood) in Newsweek, September
16, 2002.
Psychologists have amassed a heap of data on what people who
deem themselves happy have in common. Mood and temperament
have a large genetic component. In a now famous 1996 study,
University of Minnesota psychologists David Lykken and Auke Tellegen surveyed 732 pairs of identical
twins and found them closely matched for adult happiness,regardless
of whether they'd grown up together or apart. Such findings
suggest that while we all experience ups and downs, our moods revolve around the emotional baselines or
"set points" we're born with.
John G. Agno, certified executive & business coach
Signature, Inc., PO Box 2086, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Telephone:
734.426.2000 (US Eastern Time Zone)
Email: mailto:[email protected]
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