1This post is in partnership with Inc., which offers useful advice, resources, and insights to entrepreneurs and business owners. The article below was originally published at Inc.com.
It’s easy to think of happiness as a
result, but happiness is also a
driver.
One example: While I’m definitely into finding ways to improve personal productivity (whether
a one-day burst,
or a lifetime, or
things you should not do every day), probably the best way to be more productive is to just be happier. Happy people accomplish more.
Easier said than done though, right?
Actually, many changes are easy. Here are 10 science-based ways to be happier from Belle Beth Cooper, Content Crafter at
Buffer, the social media management tool that lets you schedule, automate, and analyze social media updates.
Here’s Beth:
1. Exercise: 7 Minutes Could Be Enough
Think exercise is something you don’t have time for? Think again. Check out
the 7 minute workout mentioned in
The New York Times. That’s a workout any of us can fit into our schedules.
Exercise has such a profound effect on our happiness and well-being
that it is an effective strategy for overcoming depression. In a study
cited in Shawn Achor’s book
The Happiness Advantage,
three groups of patients treated their depression with medication,
exercise, or a combination of the two. The results of this study are
surprising: Although all three groups experienced similar improvements
in their happiness levels early on, the follow-up assessments proved to
be radically different:
The groups were then tested six months later to assess their
relapse rate. Of those who had taken the medication alone, 38 percent
had slipped back into depression. Those in the combination group were
doing only slightly better, with a 31 percent relapse rate. The biggest shock, though, came from the exercise group: Their relapse rate was only 9 percent.
You don’t have to be depressed to benefit from exercise, though.
Exercise can help you relax, increase your brain power, and even improve
your body image, even if you don’t lose any weight.
We’ve explored
exercise in depth before, and looked at what it does to our brains, such as releasing proteins and endorphins that make us feel happier.
A
study in the Journal of Health Psychology found that people who exercised felt better about their bodies even when they saw no physical changes:
Body weight, shape and body image were assessed in 16 males and
18 females before and after both 6 × 40 minutes exercising and 6 × 40
minutes reading. Over both conditions, body weight and shape did not
change. Various aspects of body image, however, improved after exercise
compared to before.
Yep: Even if your actual appearance doesn’t change, how you
feel about your body does change.
2. Sleep More: You’ll Be Less Sensitive to Negative Emotions
We know that
sleep helps our body recover from the day and repair itself and that it helps us focus and be more productive. It turns out sleep is also important for happiness.
In
NutureShock, Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman explain how sleep affects positivity:
Negative stimuli get processed by the amygdala; positive or
neutral memories gets processed by the hippocampus. Sleep deprivation
hits the hippocampus harder than the amygdala. The result is that
sleep-deprived people fail to recall pleasant memories yet recall gloomy
memories just fine.
In one experiment by Walker, sleep-deprived college students
tried to memorize a list of words. They could remember 81% of the words
with a negative connotation, like “cancer.” But they could remember only
31% of the words with a positive or neutral connotation, like
“sunshine” or “basket.”
The BPS Research Digest explores
another study that
proves sleep affects our sensitivity to negative emotions. Using a
facial recognition task throughout the course of a day, researchers
studied how sensitive participants were to positive and negative
emotions. Those who worked through the afternoon without taking a nap
became more sensitive to negative emotions like fear and anger.
Using a face recognition task, here we demonstrate an amplified
reactivity to anger and fear emotions across the day, without sleep.
However, an intervening nap blocked and even reversed this negative
emotional reactivity to anger and fear while conversely enhancing
ratings of positive (happy) expressions.
Of course, how well (and how long) you sleep will probably affect how
you feel when you wake up, which can make a difference to your whole
day.
Another study tested how employees’ moods when they started work in the morning affected their entire work day.
Researchers found that employees’ moods when they clocked in
tended to affect how they felt the rest of the day. Early mood was
linked to their perceptions of customers and to how they reacted to
customers’ moods.
And most importantly to managers, employee mood had a clear impact on
performance, including both how much work employees did and how well
they did it.
3. Spend More Time With Friends/Family: Money Can’t Buy You Happiness
Staying in touch with friends and family is one of the
top five regrets of the dying.
If you want more evidence that time with friends is beneficial for you, research proves it can make you happier right now, too.
Social time is highly valuable when it comes to improving our
happiness, even for introverts. Several studies have found that time
spent with friends and family makes a big difference to how happy we
feel.
I love the way
Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert explains it:
We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.
George Vaillant is the director of a 72-year study of the lives of 268 men.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study
subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant
Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really
matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
He shared insights of the study with Joshua Wolf Shenk at
The Atlantic on how men’s social connections made a difference to their overall happiness:
Men’s relationships at age 47, he found, predicted late-life
adjustment better than any other variable. Good sibling relationships
seem especially powerful: 93 percent of the men who were thriving at age
65 had been close to a brother or sister when younger.
In fact, a study published in the
Journal of Socio-Economics states than your relationships are worth more than $100,000:
Using the British Household Panel Survey, I find that an increase
in the level of social involvements is worth up to an extra £85,000 a
year in terms of life satisfaction. Actual changes in income, on the
other hand, buy very little happiness.
I think that last line is especially fascinating:
Actual changes in income, on the other hand, buy very little happiness.
So we could increase our annual income by hundreds of thousands of
dollars and still not be as happy as we would if we increased the
strength of our social relationships.
The Terman study, covered in
The Longevity Project, found that relationships and how we help others were important factors in living long, happy lives:
We figured that if a Terman participant sincerely felt that he or
she had friends and relatives to count on when having a hard time then
that person would be healthier. Those who felt very loved and cared for,
we predicted, would live the longest.
Surprise: our prediction was wrong… Beyond social network size,
the clearest benefit of social relationships came from helping others.
Those who helped their friends and neighbors, advising and caring for
others, tended to live to old age.
4. Get Outside More: Happiness is Maximized at 57°
In
The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor recommends spending time in the fresh air to improve your happiness:
Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge
advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good
weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and
improved working memory…
This is pretty good news for those of us who are worried about
fitting new habits into our already-busy schedules. Twenty minutes is a
short enough time to spend outside that you could fit it into your
commute or even your lunch break.
A UK study from the
University of Sussex also found that being outdoors made people happier:
Being outdoors, near the sea, on a warm, sunny weekend afternoon
is the perfect spot for most. In fact, participants were found to be
substantially happier outdoors in all natural environments than they
were in urban environments.
The
American Meteorological Society published
research in 2011 that found current temperature has a bigger effect on
our happiness than variables like wind speed and humidity, or even the
average temperature over the course of a day. It also found that
happiness is maximized at 57 degrees (13.9°C), so keep an eye on the weather forecast before heading outside for your 20 minutes of fresh air.
The connection between
productivity and temperature is another topic we’ve talked about more here. It’s fascinating what a small change in temperature can do.
5. Help Others: 100 Hours a Year is the Magic Number
One of the most counterintuitive pieces of advice I found is that to
make yourself feel happier, you should help others. In fact, 100 hours
per year (or two hours per week) is the
optimal time we should dedicate to helping others in order to enrich our lives.
If we go back to Shawn Achor’s book again, he says this about helping others:
…when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their
recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities–such as
concerts and group dinners out–brought far more pleasure than material
purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money
on other people, called “prosocial spending,” also boosts happiness.
The Journal of Happiness Studies
published a study that explored this very topic:
Participants recalled a previous purchase made for either
themselves or someone else and then reported their happiness. Afterward,
participants chose whether to spend a monetary windfall on themselves
or someone else. Participants assigned to recall a purchase made for someone else reported feeling significantly happier immediately after this recollection;most importantly, the happier participants felt, the more likely they were to choose to spend a windfall on someone else in the near future.
So spending money on other people makes us happier than buying stuff for ourselves. But what about spending our
time on other people?
A
study of volunteering in Germany explored how volunteers were affected when their opportunities to help others were taken away:
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall but before the German
reunion, the first wave of data of the GSOEP was collected in East
Germany. Volunteering was still widespread. Due to the shock of the
reunion, a large portion of the infrastructure of volunteering (e.g.
sports clubs associated with firms) collapsed and people randomly lost
their opportunities for volunteering. Based on a comparison of the
change in subjective well-being of these people and of people from the
control group who had no change in their volunteer status, the
hypothesis is supported that volunteering is rewarding in terms of
higher life satisfaction.
In his book
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, University of Pennsylvania professor Martin Seligman explains that helping others can improve our own lives:
…we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the
single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we
have tested.
6. Practice Smiling: Reduce Pain, Improve Mood, Think Better
Smiling can make us feel better, but it’s more effective when we back it up with positive thoughts, according to
this study:
A new study led by a Michigan State University business scholar
suggests customer-service workers who fake smile throughout the day
worsen their mood and withdraw from work, affecting productivity. But
workers who smile as a result of cultivating positive thoughts–such as a
tropical vacation or a child’s recital–improve their mood and withdraw
less.
Of course it’s important to
practice “real smiles” where
you use your eye sockets. (You’ve seen fake smiles that don’t reach the
person’s eyes. Try it. Smile with just your mouth. Then smile
naturally; your eyes narrow. There’s a huge difference in a fake smile
and a genuine smile.)
According to
PsyBlog,
smiling can improve our attention and help us perform better on cognitive tasks:
Smiling makes us feel good which also increases our attentional
flexibility and our ability to think holistically. When this idea was
tested by Johnson et al. (2010), the results showed that participants
who smiled performed better on attentional tasks which required seeing
the whole forest rather than just the trees.
A smile is also a good way to reduce some of the pain we feel in troubling circumstances:
Smiling is one way to reduce the distress caused by an upsetting
situation. Psychologists call this the facial feedback hypothesis. Even
forcing a smile when we don’t feel like it is enough to lift our mood
slightly (this is one example of embodied cognition).
7. Plan a Trip: It Helps Even if You Don’t Actually Take One
As opposed to actually taking a holiday, simply
planning a vacation or break from work can improve our happiness. A study published in the journal
Applied Research in Quality of Life showed
that the highest spike in happiness came during the planning stage of a
vacation as people enjoy the sense of anticipation:
In the study, the effect of vacation anticipation boosted happiness for eight weeks. After
the vacation, happiness quickly dropped back to baseline levels for most people.
Shawn Achor has some info for us on this point, as well:
One study found that people who just thought about
watching their favorite movie actually raised their endorphin levels by
27 percent.
If you can’t take the time for a vacation right now, or even a night
out with friends, put something on the calendar–even if it’s a month or a
year down the road. Then, whenever you need a boost of happiness,
remind yourself about it.
8. Meditate: Rewire Your Brain for Happiness
Meditation is often touted as an important habit for improving focus,
clarity, and attention span, as well as helping to keep you calm. It
turns out it’s also useful for
improving your happiness:
In one study, a research team from Massachusetts General Hospital
looked at the brain scans of 16 people before and after they
participated in an eight-week course in mindfulness meditation. The
study, published in the January issue of Psychiatry Research:
Neuroimaging, concluded that after completing the course, parts of the
participants’ brains associated with compassion and self-awareness grew,
and parts associated with stress shrank.
Meditation literally clears your mind and calms you down, it’s been
often proven to be the single most effective way to live a happier life.
According to Achor, meditation can actually make you happier long-term:
Studies show that in the minutes right after meditating, we
experience feelings of calm and contentment, as well as heightened
awareness and empathy. And, research even shows that regular meditation
can permanently rewire the brain to raise levels of happiness.
The fact that we can actually alter our brain structure through
mediation is most surprising to me and somewhat reassuring that however
we feel and think today isn’t permanent.
9. Move Closer to Work: A Short Commute is Worth More Than a Big House
Our commute to work can have a surprisingly powerful impact on our
happiness. The fact that we tend to commute twice a day at least five
days a week makes it unsurprising that the effect would build up over
time and make us less and less happy.
According to
The Art of Manliness, having a long commute is something we often fail to realize will affect us so dramatically:
… while many voluntary conditions don’t affect our happiness in
the long term because we acclimate to them, people never get accustomed
to their daily slog to work because sometimes the traffic is awful and
sometimes it’s not.
Or as Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert put it, “Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.”
We tend to try to compensate for this by having a bigger house or a better job, but these compensations just don’t work:
Two Swiss economists who studied the effect of commuting on
happiness found that such factors could not make up for the misery
created by a long commute.
10. Practice Gratitude: Increase Happiness and Satisfaction
This is a seemingly simple strategy but I’ve personally found it to
make a huge difference to my outlook. There are lots of ways to practice
gratitude, from keeping a journal of things you’re grateful for,
sharing three good things that happen each day with a friend or your partner, and going out of your way to show gratitude when others help you.
In
an experiment where
participants took note of things they were grateful for each day, their
moods were improved just from this simple practice:
The gratitude-outlook groups exhibited heightened well-being
across several, though not all, of the outcome measures across the three
studies, relative to the comparison groups. The effect on positive
affect appeared to be the most robust finding. Results suggest that a
conscious focus on blessings may have emotional and interpersonal
benefits.
The Journal of Happiness studies
published a study that used letters of gratitude to test how being grateful can affect our levels of happiness:
Participants included 219 men and women who wrote three letters
of gratitude over a 3 week period. Results indicated that writing
letters of gratitude increased participants’ happiness and life
satisfaction while decreasing depressive symptoms.
Quick Final Fact: Getting Older Will Actually Make You Happier
As we get older, particularly past middle age, we tend to naturally
grow happier. There’s still some debate over why this happens, but scientists have a few ideas:
Researchers, including the authors, have found that older people
shown pictures of faces or situations tend to focus on and remember the
happier ones more and the negative ones less.
Other studies have discovered that as people age, they seek out
situations that will lift their moods–for instance, pruning social
circles of friends or acquaintances who might bring them down. Still
other work finds that older adults learn to let go of loss and
disappointment over unachieved goals, and focus their goals on greater
well being.
So if you thought getting old will make you miserable, it’s likely
you’ll develop a more positive outlook than you probably have now.
How cool is that?
