How To Living An Authentically Happy Life
Why do we strive to achieve certain milestones? Things like finding a romantic partner, moving up the ranks in our company, or getting a raise? It’s because we believe these things will make us happier. And in reality, they might – but not profoundly.
Why are we so anxious to avoid certain traumatic events? Events like divorce, being fired, or receiving a drastic pay cut? That’s because we believe these things will make us unhappy. But that story is more complicated, too.
It turns out that many of us are going about the pursuit of happiness all wrong. But we can still find long-term happiness by making small adjustments to our everyday lives.
There’s no recipe for happiness.
When will you be happy? Will you be happy when you meet and marry the partner of your dreams? When you finally make it to the corner office?
We’re conditioned to pin our hopes for happiness on reaching socially prescribed milestones like these. It’s true that attaining these milestones might bring an initial thrill and even have a net positive effect on our lives. But they rarely bring lasting happiness.
A joint experiment conducted by Harvard University and the University of Virginia concluded that we have a tendency to overestimate the degree of happiness a positive event will bring into our lives. At the same time, we have a tendency to overestimate the negative impact that a misfortune – like illness or financial stress – will have on the trajectory of our lives.
In other words, we arrange our lives around milestones, both positive and negative. We strive toward the positive milestones, believing they will bring us authentic happiness. And we do everything in our power to avoid the negative milestones, believing they will devastate us.
But the reality is, our positive accomplishments can quickly turn anticlimactic when they don’t live up to our expectations. Meanwhile, we avoid taking risks and making changes because we’re desperate to avoid life’s negative events.
In truth, these events are rarely as irrevocably bad as we imagine them to be. In fact, recent studies suggest that people who’ve experienced some degree of trauma and adversity in their lives are, on the whole, happier than those who haven’t.
There are two key explanations for this. The first is that surviving hardship once equips us with the skills to overcome it again. The second explanation is that profoundly negative events, like losing a job, can catalyze beneficial changes in life, like finally pursuing a dream career.
While we could work toward positive events or strain to avoid negative events, neither approach brings true happiness. Instead, we need to abandon the harmful myth that happiness, or unhappiness, hinges on achieving or failing to achieve superficial milestones.
We quickly adapt to the thrill of love and happiness.
Your wedding day is supposed to be the happiest day of your life, right? That seems kind of crazy, given how much stress and social pressure weddings involve!
Even crazier? The expectation that your marriage will bring you a consistently high level of happiness throughout your life. It won’t.
In fact, a 2005 study shows that the average newlywed reports an uplift in happiness in the first two years of their marriage. After that? Their happiness levels return to normal.
This surprisingly brief uptick in newlyweds’ happiness is just one example of hedonic adaptation. This psychological term describes humankind’s capability to adapt to a positive change in circumstances. Simply put, we experience an initial thrill when we get something we want. Soon enough, however, our improved circumstances become our new normal.
The theory of hedonic adaptation applies to all areas of life. But things are a bit more complicated when it comes to romantic relationships. When we first fall in love with someone, we typically experience passionate love. This kind of love is thrilling, all-consuming, and sexually charged. In passionate love, we lose interest in everyone besides our new partner. We find it difficult to concentrate on everyday tasks because we’re always thinking about our partner. We’re also terrified of rejection in this initial stage.
Passionate love has a limited life span – a few months to a few years. And that’s a good thing! Imagine how your work, your other relationships, and your mental well-being would suffer if you thought of nothing but your romantic partner day in and day out!
After passionate love comes companionate love, a love that is rooted in trust and respect for our partner. We’re evolutionarily conditioned to experience passionate love for others. After all, it’s ensured the biological survival of our species. But we’re also evolutionarily conditioned to experience companionate love. This is the grounded, practical type of love that helps us navigate challenges like child-rearing, illness, and financial setbacks.
So, if you’re feeling like the thrill of your relationship has worn off, don’t download Tinder just yet. Celebrate the fact that you’re in a healthy new phase of attachment. And if you still want to keep the spark alive? Well, here are a few tips.
Relationships don’t need to be new to be thrilling.
Let’s say you and your partner have been together for a couple of years. Dinner dates at hot restaurants have given way to takeout and box sets on the couch. Once upon a time, you’d look at your partner and think, I can’t wait to tear their clothes off! Now, you’re just as likely to think, I should remind them to pay the gas bill.
All this is normal. It’s the result of hedonic adaptation and of passionate love metamorphosing into companionate love. Does that mean you should settle down and resign yourself to living a satisfying, yet spark-free, life? Absolutely not!
When hedonic adaptation creeps into a relationship, it doesn’t mean the relationship has stopped being positive. We’ve simply stopped noticing its positives. But there are three simple strategies that will help you perceive all the positives in your relationship with fresh eyes.
First up? Cultivate appreciation for your partner. In the early days of your relationship, appreciation probably came naturally to you. But as you adapt yourself to their good qualities, you face the danger of taking your partner for granted. So, resist the urge to adapt, and focus your awareness on the things you love about your partner. You could try simply writing these down – or, write them a letter outlining all the ways they make your life better.
Second, keep things surprising. Hedonic adaptation isn’t an inevitability. Psychologists have found that people are far less likely to exhibit hedonic adaptation in dynamic situations. Resist the routine, and find simple ways to surprise your partner. Be more adventurous as a couple and as individuals. You can’t expect your relationship to stay surprising if you’re stuck in a rut yourself.
Finally, get physical – and not just in the bedroom. Both sexual and non-sexual physical touch is a hugely significant part of most romantic relationships. Even simple contact, like brushing your partner's arm, can activate your brain’s reward system and reduce stress and anxiety. What’s more, touch has an important role to play in nonverbal communication. It can signal love, gratitude, and sympathy. Deployed correctly, it can de-escalate tension and foster intimacy.
So if you’re feeling physically distanced from your partner, try touching them more. Stroke their forehead, hold their hand, kiss them when they leave for work. These small, simple gestures can help you rekindle your passion for one another.
Remember: happiness and passion are still present in comfortable, long-term relationships. You might just need to work a little harder to find them.
Divorce is tough – but probably not as tough as you imagine.
It’s a myth that marriage leads to happiness. But there’s also a mythical flip side to this belief – that happiness is impossible after divorce or the breakdown of a long-term relationship. This myth is so entrenched in our imaginations that many people persist in broken marriages. They think they’re saving themselves from the unhappiness of a divorce.
Of course, it would be disingenuous to say that divorce doesn’t bring unhappiness. But that unhappiness probably won’t be as debilitating or as permanent as you imagine it will be.
Disentangling your life from your partner’s can be fraught with emotions, legal bureaucracy, and practical problems like splitting finances and custody. But in spite of all these short-term challenges, there’s some hope. Numerous surveys show that happiness levels among divorcées rise substantially in the long term.
How can people be happy after going through such a traumatic, life-shaking event? It’s simple – humans possess an incredible capacity for resilience. We have an almost supernatural ability to cope with trauma, find the positive in the negative, and grow from crises. Yet, in many of us, this potential remains untapped. That’s because we avoid traumatic events like divorce. We believe they’ll leave us permanently broken. They won’t.
Remember hedonic adaptation, our ability to grow accustomed to newly positive circumstances? Well, it works in reverse, too. In the two years after a divorce, respondents to a 1991 study reported feeling increased psychological distress. After that? They rebounded. In fact, they reached a higher happiness level than they’d reported having in their marriage.
When we visualize divorce, all we imagine is the pain. But there’s so much more to everyday life. We don’t visualize the daily uplifts, like a delicious cup of coffee in the morning or a spectacular sunset, that bring happiness to even our worst days. And we don’t visualize the work commitments, social obligations, hobbies, errands, and more that fill our days – even during a divorce.
In fact, in a 2000 study, half of respondents who were considering divorce were asked to list all the commitments and activities that would fill their days post-divorce. The other half weren’t. The participants were then asked to visualize how bad divorce would be. Unsurprisingly, those who had imagined their life in more detail had a more moderate view of the pain of divorce. Divorce won’t make you unhappy forever. But a toxic marriage just might.
There is no perfect job.
You hate the sound of your alarm on weekday mornings. By the time you arrive at your desk at 9:00 a.m., you’re already counting down the minutes until you can leave. You’re disengaged in meetings, your coworkers irritate you, and you perform your tasks with all the enthusiasm of a robot.
It wasn’t always like this. Your first few years in this job were enjoyable and challenging. But that’s definitely not the case these days.
Maybe you need to change jobs. Or maybe you need to admit to yourself that you’ve bought into another widespread happiness myth – that you’ll be happy as soon as you have a better job.
Unless you’re stuck in a toxic workplace or itching for a career change, a new job might not bring you more satisfaction than your old one. A five-year study from 2005 tracked the happiness levels of managers who were promoted or transferred to a new city. After an intense surge in satisfaction in the first year, their happiness levels swiftly returned to baseline. Thanks to hedonic adaptation, the managers quickly became accustomed to the perks of their new positions. So chasing better and better jobs in search of happiness may not be such a good idea.
Then again, maybe the source of your job dissatisfaction isn’t your job, but someone else’s? In the age of social media, it’s never been easier to compare ourselves with others. All too often, instead of asking ourselves, “Does my job bring me satisfaction?” we ask, “Is my job as glamorous, or important, or well-paid as my neighbor’s?”
We are conditioned from an early age to compare ourselves to those around us. We can’t kick the habit completely. But the next time you’re feeling inadequate, it's worth checking in on that self-evaluation. Are you unhappy with yourself because you failed to meet your own internal standards, or are you just comparing yourself against the achievements of others?
Want to be happier at work? Cultivate an appreciation for the things you do enjoy about your job to stave off hedonic adaptation. And don’t base your job satisfaction on superficial comparisons to other people’s careers.
Money can buy happiness – but only up to a point.
Remember that old saying, money can’t buy happiness? Well, psychological study after psychological study has proven it to be false. After all, money can buy comfort and security, take care of fundamental needs, and provide pleasures and luxuries. Generally speaking, the more wealth someone has, the higher levels of happiness they’re likely to report. But there might be a grain of truth in the old saying, too.
People who don’t have much money experience a marked surge in happiness when they acquire more. But this happiness has diminishing returns. When someone has a lot of money, acquiring still more will make them happy – but not by much, and not for very long. The wealthier someone is, the more quickly they adapt to having more money.
So, when it comes to happiness, material comfort does play a role. But it’s not the be-all and end-all we sometimes think it is. And being thrifty might actually be good for your happiness.
Let’s use the example of buying a house. You can derive a lot of positive emotion from making a purchase. And purchases don’t get any bigger than a luxurious house with a sprawling garden. But the mind quickly gets over the pleasure of the purchase. Soon, you’ll even be used to the positive experience of living in a plush house.
While we adapt to positive experiences quickly, negative experiences can take longer to bounce back from. And paying off the high mortgage attached to that luxurious house is a negative experience that will likely cause stress and tension at monthly intervals – years after the pleasure of the house itself has waned.
But there’s a way out. Let’s say you sell your big house, and purchase a more modest home. You’ll face less day-to-day unhappiness and stress, even if you don’t get the short-term rush of making an extravagant purchase. What’s more, you’ve reduced your negative experience overall. A 1997 study shows that diminishing a negative experience can create three to five times as much happiness as simply creating a positive experience. Paying off your credit card, for example, will make you at least three times as happy as charging a new TV to it would.
So yes, money is an important component of happiness. But you can’t completely buy your way to happiness, either.
A difficult diagnosis is life-altering, but happiness is still possible.
Every life is marked by events that come, out of the blue, to disrupt our happiness and comfort. A life-changing event like that can rock us to our very core. A diagnosis of a serious or terminal illness is one such event.
If you or your loved one is dealing with a difficult diagnosis, you may feel you have no capacity for happiness anymore. But you do. And now, more than ever, it’s essential that you tap into it.
When we receive bad news, it’s tempting to focus on that, to the exclusion of all else. But consider the words of the philosopher William James. He said: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” In other words, our reality is shaped by the things we choose to focus on. Sure, a random negative event can make us feel like reality is spinning out of our control. But if we refocus our attention, we can gain back some of that control.
What we attend to and what we overlook can shape our reality, even during a serious illness. We can try focusing on the pleasure of watching the garden grow, rather than on the pangs of sickness. We can try appreciating the fact that we can still climb the stairs, rather than getting discouraged because we can’t manage our morning jog. When we choose to focus on the positives, we create a more joyful reality.
That’s not to say that this mental work is easy. It requires huge determination and effort. To train your attention, try meditation. This practice revolves around focusing on your breath, on your thoughts, or on a combination of the two. As a 2007 study confirms, meditation markedly improves our capacity for directing and maintaining our focus.
You might wonder, What’s the point of trying to be positive in the face of devastating news? Well, psychologists have identified a phenomenon called the Matthew effect. In the Bible, Matthew says: “For to all those who have, more will be given, and it will be given in abundance.” And, in an emotional context, psychologists have found this to be true. A positive emotional experience generates more positive emotional experiences. This leads to what’s called an upward spiral.
Even in the midst of trying times, any happiness that you can create for yourself will act like a magnet, inviting more happiness into your life.
Regrets are compatible with happiness.
There are dreams that you grow out of, like a childhood wish to be an astronaut or a princess. And then there are dreams you are forced to give up – the dream of making partner at your firm, the dream of professionally pursuing your love of painting, the dream of being married or having a child.
These second kinds of unfulfilled dreams often harden into regret. And regrets, so the myth goes, keep us from being truly happy. But they don’t need to.
In fact, facing up to our regrets is a critical part of living a happy life. It’s healthy to deal with what psychologists term our lost possible selves. Imagine two college athletes – let’s call them Lucy and Alejandro – who both dream of Olympic stardom. These aren’t empty dreams, either. The athletes are incredibly talented, and they get the chance to try out for the Olympic team. But they both narrowly miss out – and are both bitterly disappointed. Over the next decade, the two athletes continue to pursue their dream. Eventually, age and injury force them to give up.
Lucy takes some time to come to terms with the blow. Then, she recalibrates her life. She gets a nine-to-five job and coaches sports on the weekends. She still competes in a local league. She’s proud of her athletic achievements. She’s happy.
Meanwhile, Alejandro hates being reminded of his athletic past. He’s thrown away all his old trophies and never participates in athletics anymore. He’s unhappy.
Lucy faced her regrets and mourned for her lost possible Olympian self. In examining her regret, she asked what she could learn from it. Her takeaway? She has a passion for sports. So she arranged her life to serve that passion.
Alejandro turned away from his regret. He believed that dwelling on it would make him unhappy. But his refusal to acknowledge past regrets has soured his present. It cut him off from what was once a source of joy.
Our regrets can be our teachers. They can reveal the kinds of lives we want and the things that are important to us. More painfully, they can show us where we’ve made mistakes in life. But admitting to these mistakes keeps us from repeating them.
All lives have regrets. To live a happy life, have an honest reckoning with yours.
There’s no recipe for happiness. But the first step to living an authentically happy life is to let go of a couple of myths – like thinking that attaining socially approved milestones will make you happy, or that facing certain events will bring permanent unhappiness. Freeing yourself from your expectations will make room for true happiness in your life.
Action plan: Share the wealth.
Studies show that more money doesn’t really bring happiness to those who are already wealthy. But one thing that can bring happiness to affluent people? Sharing their good fortune with others. A 2008 study found that spending money pro-socially, or for a good cause that we don’t personally benefit from, increases happiness levels more than spending money on ourselves.
