Description of the video:
Faculty presenter Nichole Alspaugh Williams, Ed.S, LMHC, NCC:
Hi everyone, welcome back once again to our series on The Power of Positive Psychology, New Habits for Work and Life. We are now in the fourth week of this series, where we will be talking about how we naturally want the wrong things when it comes to our happiness.
Today's agenda: we will review the role of happiness in one's success. How much of our happiness is in our control. “Miswanting,” learning what doesn't make us happy, but that we think will. And then finally I'll give you your tasks for next week.
So, a reminder from a few weeks ago, the traditional formula of success is that if you work hard, you'll become successful, then you'll become happy. So the idea here, success first, happiness second. But the problem with this is that it's broken. And you remember, you may remember why. Well, it's backwards. And more than 30 years of Positive Psychology research proves it.
Happiness comes first and then success follows. So happy—if you're happy and you're optimistic, that will fuel your performance and that will increase your achievement. And Shawn Achor talks about this and calls this "The Happiness Advantage" and how that gives us our competitive edge. So when we're happy, whether at home or at work, we feel more motivated, resilient, efficient, productive, creative. All of this drives our performance upwards, which is something that we all probably want both at home and at work for ourselves, for our co-workers, for our employees.
Now moving into what we can control in terms of our happiness, this pie chart, if you've ever seen anything with positive psychology, you've probably seen this pie chart before. It's very commonly used. And the idea here is that our genetics control 50% of our happiness. Our life circumstances account for 10% of our happiness. But we have control over 40[%]. Our habits and our thoughts control 40% of our happiness.
Now, I've, like I said, I've seen this in every class, every book that I've read on positive psychology. But Sonja Lyubomirsky, who is the one that did this study, did a talk in 2019 in Melbourne where she said, although these factors are correct, the percentages are not exactly correct. And she says that each of these factors are additive, they overlap, and they're not independent. And that actually makes sense.
I mean, my genetics are different than yours, my life circumstances are different than yours. So the percentage of what we control is probably different from person to person. But what I continue to take from this pie chart is that I do have a decent amount of control over my happiness, whatever that percentage is, whatever that 40% actually, truly is for me personally, I do have a lot of control over my happiness.
So moving into “miswanting,” this is something that Laurie Santos talks about in her class and she defines "miswanting" as the act of being mistaken about what and how much you will like something in the future. She says that we are really bad at knowing what makes us happy. And she gives several reasons for that, but I'm going to cover just a couple today.
The first reason she gives is that sometimes our brains just give us the wrong information, that our intuitions are just plain wrong. And she uses these two illustrations to show that. And so the idea here is you're supposed to say which rectangle do you think is bigger and which line do you think is longer? While intuitively, we think one of the rectangles is bigger than the other and we think one of the lines is bigger than the other. But if you were to pause this video and actually measure them, you'd see that they're the same size.
So just as our intuitions are, could have been wrong when, when we see this example, our intuitions can be wrong about what makes us happy, as well. The other reason that I'm going to cover today out of the reasons that she gives for how we are bad at knowing what will make us happy is the idea of reference points. And the idea here is that our minds think in terms of reference points. And the example she shows here is the Ebbinghaus illusion. And this was first in a psychology textbook in 1901. And the question here is which orange dot is bigger, the one on the left or the one on the right. Of course, when you pull the orange dots out, they're the exact same size by the reference points. Those blue dots are what is messing up our judgment and making one of the orange dots look bigger than the other.
So the idea here is that other people and things mess up our judgment. And the example that she gives in her class is that of Olympians, and that bronze medalists tend to be happier than silver medalists. And the reason for that is their reference point. The bronze medalist is just happy that they got a medal at all. So their reference point is no metal. So they're, so they're happy that they got a mental. Silver medalists tend to have the gold medal as their reference points. So they're bummed that they didn't get gold. And that's not true of all medalists. But in general, the bronze medalists are happier than the silver medalists. So the idea again here is that reference points affect how we see things in our lives.
So what is it that we think makes us happy but doesn't really? I will bring all of these up here and we'll go in-depth into them on the next few slides. But we've got good job, lots of money, awesome stuff, true love, perfect body, and good grades. So I will talk about good grades. I know most of you are not in school right now, but you might have kids, they're in school, so I'm going to include that anyway. So there are a couple that have to do with reference point. So the first one is lots of money. Our definition of a good income increases as our in- income increases. So the more money we make, the more money we think we need in order to be happy. It's also affected by what, what others make. And this is where we start talking about social comparisons. So in the past, we've all heard the term "Keeping up with the Joneses". Joneses. Yeah. That's keeping up with the people in your neighborhood, the people that you're surrounded with. But with TV, with celebrities, with reality TV, with social media and social media influencers, we are, our reference points are just messed up because we're not comparing ourselves with the people that are surrounding us. We're comparing ourselves with people that are just way out of reach, for the most part.
This is another one that's a hard sell or I guess this is the one that's the hard sell for when I'm talking with my students about this. And there was a study done that our, that our happiness goes up with our income until $75,000 and then it plateaus. Now. I know and you know, that $75,000 in Indianapolis or a small town in Indiana is very different than $75,000 in Boston or New York City or San Francisco. But the idea here is that your happiness level goes up with income until you get to a level where you are comfortable. You feel that you can pay your bills, you're getting some stuff in savings. So once you get to that level of comfort, that's when your happiness starts to plateau and it doesn't increase as your income increases.
So good grades, and most of you are not in school, maybe some of you are in an MBA program or some further studies, but some of us may have, have kids at home which this could be helpful for. So I don't know if you remember this feeling, but I sure do. And that is that students feel better if others also fail.
So I remember if I didn't do well on the test, and I found out that my friends also didn't do well on the test, that just made me feel better. So the reference point there comes into play. And then students tend to get a boost of happiness after good grades. "Yes, I got an A!" But then, you know, a week or two later, are they still "Yes, I got an A!"? No, it's worn off.
The next four have to do with how we adapt or hedonistic adaptation, which basically means you get used, we get used to what we have and it doesn't make us happy anymore. So a good job. This is obviously important to our students who are getting their internships, their first jobs. But the same are true of us when we get a new job. So we're excited when we first get the job. But after a while, it becomes our job.
And that's not to say that our job can't bring us joy, it absolutely can. But that initial burst of happiness when we first get that new job, it, it wears off after time and our happiness plateaus.
Awesome stuff. Our stuff gets old, we get used to it. Whether it's something new to wear, a new suit, some new jewelry, a new car. And now I'm not talking to the car people out there. My dad is a car guy. I understand how cars for car people can continue to give joy. But we're talking about the every, everyday driver here. You get a new car, you drive it off the lot. It's perfect. It smells. Got that new car smell. And then you spill your coffee in it, or you drive it out in the slush and snow, and it gets salt and sand all over it. Or somebody dings your door. Stuff gets old, we get used to it. And the happiness that we get from Awesome Stuff wears off.
True love. Absolutely, true love makes us happy, makes us happier. But it makes us happier for only one to two years. And then we go back to our original level of happiness according to research.
And then finally, perfect body. This is a little more complicated. So it turns out that happiness actually decreases after weight loss and after plastic surgery. And that could be because, you know, when we are thinking about these changes we're going to make to our bodies, We think, Oh my gosh, when I lose that weight I'm going to get a whole new wardrobe, and my life, I'm gonna be so much happier. And it turns out that your life doesn't change all that much when those things happen, and so your happiness ends up decreasing.
Another thing that can happen is that you just have a new goal. So you lost a certain amount of weight and then, then the goal post moves and you want to lose a little more weight where you've toned up your arms. Now you want to tone up your legs so that, or you do some sort of change plastic surgery-wise and you're like, oh, I need to change something else so that goal moves.
So looking at all of these things, typically what I would do at this point is to ask my students, what do they have in common? Well, what they have in common, that I can see, is that they are, it's short-term happiness. It's fleeting happiness. It's things that happen that make us happy in the short-term. But then it wears off.
And what we're going to talk about next week, and what we've been talking about all along as I've been giving you this happiness homework and these happiness habits, are things that have been proven to keep us happy in the long term.
So I'm going to talk about two new happiness habits in detail. And the first one is the VIA character strengths. And I talked about this in an earlier session, but VIA stands for values. And it's an assessment that was created with Chris, by Chris Peterson and Martin Seligman. And you may remember Martin Seligman as the father of positive psychology.
The assessment itself lives on the same Authentic Happiness website that you went out to the first week to take the survey. The same one that is on the University of Pennsylvania website for the Center of Positive Psychology. And that will be in the Resources. By the way, that's a preview of some of your homework.
The happier—or the VIA Character Strengths survey is one of the top three happiness interventions proven to increase your happiness. Using those strengths is one of the top three happiness interventions.
There was a study done of depressed people. And those participants, after taking the survey or after taking the character strengths survey, chose a different strength to focus on each week for six weeks. Depression, what normal range. And a year later they were still free of depression.
So utilizing your character strengths, is, is pretty important in increasing your happiness. We've all heard of strength-based leadership, I'm sure. But this is a different kind of strengths. This is, these are strengths that go deep into your character. This is not necessarily that you're great at relational databases. This is, you know, what character strengths do you have that are in your core? You can use those strengths at work; that will increase your job satisfaction.
There's also a child's VIA that is at a fifth grade reading level. So if you have a little bit older child at home, that maybe I mean, it's helpful for any child, but, you know, if your kids have been learning online and have been home a lot, you know, everybody could use a happiness boost right now. And so give that, have them take the VIA and encourage them to use their character strengths each day.
The next happiness habit I'm going to talk about, the final one I'm going to talk about today, is that of a gratitude visit. And this was first introduced in the book Flourish by Martin Seligman. And this is also one of the top three happiness interventions.
And so what you do with the gratitude visit is to think of someone who did or said something to you in the past that made a difference in your life, that changed your life. Write them a letter of gratitude, and this letter needs to be concrete. Talk about specifically what they said, what they did, and how it affected you, how it made you feel, how it changed your life.
Aim for approximately around 300 words, and then reach out to them to schedule a time to meet. Of course, when these studies were done, the meetings were typically in-person. They were encouraged to be in-person. But you could also get the same benefit by doing it over Zoom or FaceTime. Read them the letter, asking them not to interrupt, and then discuss what you wrote and your feelings for each other. And this has been proven to boost your happiness for weeks afterwards.
So what's your homework for this week? Well, I would like you to continue your gratitude journal. By the way, that is the third of the top three interventions for boosting your happiness. That's why I've, that's the one that I've continued for every week.
Do a gratitude visit. Sorry. Yeah. Do a gratitude visit. We just talked about that a second ago. So go through those steps, you can back up, pause it, see what those steps are, and do a gratitude visit this week. Take the VIA character strength survey. The link will be in the resources. And use one of your top strengths every day this week, and bonus if you can use it in a new or an innovative way.
And then finally, we're going to keep the meditation going five minutes a day or longer if you're feeling more comfortable with it. And don't forget, you can do any of the habits from previous weeks that are no longer on the list. But if you've really enjoyed them, they’re over there on the bottom right hand side of the screen. So thank you once again for your attention. Thank you for coming, and I will see you next week when we're going to talk about the top habits that increase our happiness. See you all then.