We are a non-profit organization Humanity Integrated that is comprised of people who find themselves in the most interesting yet trying times of human evolution – the time of global crisis, which is the first stage of a profound change.
Happy to share with you this profound conversation we had with one of our favorite sages, Elisabet Sahtouris, during the Thanksgiving holidays. Hear her comment on the “ecstasy of unity and connection.” An incredible person, scholar, scientist, and a woman, from whom we draw so much insight and wisdom. An interview worth your time…
We found that happiness can spread like a virus through social networks. In fact, if your friends’ friends’ friend becomes happy, it significantly increases the chance that you’ll be happy.
–Dr. James Fowler, in “Happiness Is… – MSNBC.”
A study by two professors from Harvard and UCSD, Dr. Nicholas Christakis and Dr. James Fowler, found that when a person becomes happy:
Happiness isn’t a solitary experience; it’s dependent on others. Harvard researchers followed 4,739 people for 20 years, measuring how social networks, siblings, friends and neighbors are affected by the happiness of others.
The study controlled factors of age, gender, education and occupation.
Researchers found that close physical proximity is essential for happiness to spread. A happy friend who lives within a half-mile makes you 42% more likely to be happy yourself. If that same friend lives two miles away, the impact drops to 22%. Happy siblings make you 14% more likely to be happy, but only if they live within a mile. Happy spouses provide an 8% boost, if they live under the same roof.
Previous research has shown that people who are happy have healthier hearts, they have lower levels of stress hormones, and they live longer.
–Dr. James Fowler, in “Happiness Is… – MSNBC.”
Text in this post is excerpted from the videos shown above.
Image: "true happiness" by Anton Kudris.
The quotes in this post are all by Martin Seligman, from the lecture “Ideas at the House: Martin Seligman – Well-Being and Happiness,” which can be viewed at the bottom of this post.
Freud and Schopenhauer told us the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable; that the object of human progress, the object of psychotherapy was to reduce suffering to zero. I’m going to argue today that that’s empirically false, it’s morally insidious, and it’s politically a dead end; that there’s much more to life than zero.
30 years ago, the word “happiness” was a tremendously vague word. It meant very many different things to different people, and it could not be measured. But now, we have good measures of the elements of well-being.
Technically, we call these states “positive affectivity” and they are bell shaped. That means, right now, 50% of the people in the world are not cheerful and merry. They are not smiling. It is highly genetic. It is about 50% heritable and most importantly, the best we can to with smiling, being merry, being cheerful, is to raise it by about 5-15%.
In fact, I spent most of my life working on misery and people would ask me: why didn’t I work on happiness? The reason I didn’t, there was a very influential study in the mid-1970s by Phil Brickman in which he found 14 people who had won the lottery and he was able to track their happiness.
It turned out you get very happy when you win the lottery and it lasts for about three months. And then three months later you’re back to where you were, back to your curmudgeonly self. It turns out you can’t change a curmudgeon into a giggler, but you can get those of us who are in the lower 50% of positive affectivity to live at the upper part of our envelope.
Barbara Fredrickson and Marcel Losada go into corporations, 60 American corporations, and they write, they record every word that’s said. And they classify the words into positive and negative words and then they relate this to how the corporation is doing economically. So, it turns out, there is a ratio of positive to negative words said that correlates with economic status of corporations. So:
John and Julie Gottman, two of the leading marital therapists in the world, locked couples in an apartment for a weekend. They listened to every word that was said and computed the ratio of positive words to negative words, and predicted divorce.
One month we said: “Has something awful happened to you?” on the website AuthenticHappiness.org. Within a couple of weeks, 1700 people had answered saying:
One or more of the worst 15 things that can happen to a human being had happened to them. We measured their well-being and their strengths.
Our findings were very surprising:
Now, remember these people survived. They’re on our website. They’ve come to it with- stronger than people who had two. We asked the question then, this is an example of what Nietzsche told us: “If it doesn’t kill us, it makes us stronger.” It seems to be true.
Then, we asked a question: “What strengths predicted the people who would grow?”
And here are the five strengths:
…were the predictors of who would show the most increases in well-being.
We have an exercise that we have young people do. It’s the distinction between pleasure and philanthropy.
I assign my students to do something fun next week, and to do something philanthropic, altruistic. And then, to write up what happens. And what happens, I’ll just tell you emblematically, one of my students, ah, when you do something fun like shopping, going to the movies, hanging out with your friends, it has a square wave offset. That is, when it’s done, it’s done.
When you do something altruistic, something else happens.
For one of my students, her 9-year-old nephew called her on the phone during this assignment. It was her mid-term week, and she needed to tutor him. She’d spent two hours tutoring him in fractions and she said:
“After that, the whole day went better. I was mellow. I could listen to people. People liked me more.”
Then, one of my business students said:
“I’m in the business school because I want to make a lot of money. And, I want to make a lot of money. It’s reasonable. Money brings happiness, it brings security, it brings contentment, it brings control, but I was astonished to find out that I was happier helping another person than I was shopping.”
This, it turns out, to be a human regularity; important to know that. It’s the way we’re built.
The most powerful force in the universe isn’t gravity, hurricane winds, time, or even a strong nuclear force, but rather, it’s love.
Image: "♥ Love Explosion ♥" by Stuart Caie.
The more time, effort or work you put toward someone, the more you’re personally invested in them, and the more you like them and want it to work out.
Do you think this principle of liking people more via investing more in them can be applied in all social relationships, not just relationships among couples? If so, how? We look forward to your comments below…
Image: "Mark Zuckerberg has changed our lives" by Ulisse Albiati.
In 2005, a study was conducted proving that engaging in deliberate acts of kindness leads to increased well-being, with one caveat: it must be done in such a way that exceeds the individual’s propensity to be kind.
Specifically, engaging in an act of kindness per day, for a week, will not lead to well-being benefits, but doing, say, five acts of kindness in a single day, does.
Why is it that just doing little acts of kindness doesn’t really make you feel that much better? Like anything that’s positive for you, eventually you’re going to start taking it for granted over time, and it’s not going to make you as happy as it once did. There’s a term for this, and it’s called ‘hedonistic adaptation.’ Now there’s a trick to scratching this itch of the human condition, and it’s to actively plan out experiences that throw off the pattern.
So why don’t you try it for yourself? Go out and fill a day with doing the world some good.
Image: "Friendship" by Pink Sherbet Photography.
I did my doctoral dissertation on the health effects of social isolation, and what we found was that people who were socially isolated, i.e. people who were either not married, or didn’t have many friends and relatives, or didn’t belong to voluntary or religious organizations, had a mortality risk that was about 3 times as high as people who had many more sources of contacts.
–Dr. Lisa Berkman, director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, discusses research findings showing health risks rise for people who are socially isolated, especially older adults.
Also, here is Dr. Berkman’s abstract for her paper “The Role of Social Relations in Health Promotion“:
In considering new paradigms for the prevention and treatment of disease and disability, we need to incorporate ways to promote social support and develop family and community strengths and abilities into our interventions.There is now a substantial body of evidence that indicates that the extent to which social relationships are strong and supportive is related to the health of individuals who live within such social contexts. A review of population-based research on mortality risk over the last 20 years indicates that people who are isolated are at increased mortality risk from a number of causes. More recent studies indicate that social support is particularly related to survival postmyocardial infarction. The pathways that lead from such socioenvironmental exposures to poor health outcomes are likely to be multiple and include behavioral mechanisms and more direct physiologic pathways related to neuroendocrine or immunologic function. For social support to be health promoting, it must provide both a sense of belonging and intimacy and must help people to be more competent and self-efficacious. Acknowledging that health promotion rests on the shoulders not only of individuals but also of their families and communities means that we must commit resources over the next decade to designing, testing, and implementing interventions in this area.
Image: "008/365: Isolation" by Josh Pesavento.
Image: "Collaboration" by Michael Coghlan.