Men's Health on happiness; Yes, real men can be happy

The typical Men's Health magazine story is on 'How to Get Six Pack Abs' or 'Eight Easy Ways to Get Her in the Mood'. However just as LifeTwo has discovered that happiness is something very much in our control (and thus worth the same level of effort that goes into fitness and nutrition), Men's Health has as well. It makes sense when you think of it. Why bother having pecks as big as tree limbs or knowing every smooth pick up line if in the end you feel no more happier. In the latest issue of the magazine Men's Health has put together a detailed article on the men's happiness with an accompanying 7-question quiz on your pursuit of happiness. (It's a worthy read by either gender though the examples are definitely written for a male audience.)

Whenever the topic of happiness comes up, unless you have a degree in positive psychology, it's natural to wonder about the following (as Men's Health did):

What makes people happy? Why do millionaires often seem wretched, whereas slum dwellers in Calcutta profess to be content? Why do we find satisfaction in activities that are painful in the actual experience, like running a marathon or rowing a 5000-meter crew race -- or being branded in a tribal ritual? If real happiness lies in our relationships with family and friends, as research suggests, how do we cultivate these relationships -- and not let these people drive us out of our skulls?

Worse, what most people think they know about happiness is wrong. We tend to equate increased happiness with increased things, such as the new promotion, a bigger house, a new car, winning the big game. Sadly, research has shown that single acquisitions or events rarely make the significant impact we think they will. Humans, in fact, are notoriously bad at understanding what makes them happy though this might not be all bad. One researcher noted that believing that something will make us happy (like winning the big game) might be the thing necessary to motivate us to go out there and try as hard as we can at those things.

Interesting, humans are also pretty bad about understanding what made them happy in the past.

In one experiment, for instance, test subjects' memories of their vacations were much happier than the feelings they expressed during the vacations themselves. This flawed memory made them more willing to repeat the vacation experience. The "peak/end rule," put forth by Prince-ton psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Ph.D., provides a possible explanation. Kahneman points out that there are 20,000 or so 3-second "moments" in the average waking day. Keeping track of them all is just too damned hard. So, as a sort of shortcut, people's memories of an event are disproportionately influenced, according to Kahneman, by the peak moment and the ending.

Finally, and worst of all, most of us have a built-in bias to be negative.

...focusing on what can go wrong helps us deal with danger. An angry face grabs our attention more urgently than a smile does because it represents a potential threat. Psychologists say "negativity bias" was built into our minds during millions of years of evolution, because early humans who wandered up to the local watering hole a little too casually tended to be eaten by lions. Staying alive to enjoy your moment of happiness in the sun meant having a quick eye for the unhappy possibilities.

After reading the above, one wonders how people ever figure out how to become happy.

...evolution has also equipped our brains with the opposite tendency, a "positivity offset," simultaneously encouraging us to approach rather than to withdraw, and thus enabling us to ask somebody out on a date, or apply for a big job, or elbow our way to the bar.

The balance between these can help determine your general outlook (also called "set point") and that there are a number of activities (many that are surprisingly easy to do) to move this set point toward increased happiness. Paraphrasing Men's Health, we have a culture that understands that one needs to go to the gym to improve one's level of physical fitness so why is it surprising that there are corresponding activities for improving one's overall feeling of well-being?

Readers of this book will be familiar with the exercises proscribed to improve happiness. These include:

The "blessings" exercise, patients take time each night to write down three good things that happened that day. "The brain is wired to be negative. So we don't remember the good things as well," says Rashid. Writing them down helps change that. "Maybe they saw a sunset. Or an old friend from Barcelona called. It gives them a sense that ‘Gee, my life is not so miserable.'"

[Gratitude exercise.] Write a letter of thanks to someone who has played an important part in their lives. Then they arrange to visit with their benefactor and read the letter aloud. The face-to-face experience of saying "thank you" is life changing for some people, [researcher] Rashid says. The "very raw expression of goodwill" tends to open up channels of communication and build stronger relationships.

The obvious goal of these activities is to get you to savor your life before it's too late. More than one person with a serious illness has wondered why it took something so tragic to get them to make the changes in their lives necessary for them to be happier.

The Men's Health article also discussed the concept of "flow." (For more of this refer to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience).

...some researchers suggest that flow -- and happiness -- often occurs when we set difficult goals for ourselves and go about achieving them -- even at a cost of considerable pain. For instance, Carnegie Mellon University economist George Loewenstein, Ph.D., describes mountaineering as "long periods of stultifying boredom punctuated by brief periods of terror." So, what's the appeal?

Mountain climbing might seem like the ultimate instance of the hedonic treadmill: the peak, once achieved, often feels anticlimactic. But Loewenstein writes that it's almost impossible to fake it when you're climbing a mountain. In addition to the potential for flow, for living in the moment, this makes it "an ideal venue for self-signaling," he says. He suggests that a sense of well-being depends on the need not just to build a good name and impress other people, but also "to impress oneself." Science underrates the importance of such motives, says Loewenstein, basically because it hasn't yet figured out how to measure them.

Finally, happiness requires that other people be involved. We are, it seems, innately social animals.

Our happiness depends finally on other people and on the strength of our connections to them. This may be hard to swallow. We like to think, after all, that we're rugged individualists. But it turns out, when we get back down from the mountaintop, that we are still social primates with a physiological, intellectual, and emotional need for companionship.

I have now read this basic message in academic journals, women's magazines and men's magazines and with each reading I am becoming more comfortable with the concept that my happiness is my responsibility (just as are my job performance and my weight). I also believe that there is a science and methodology behind maximizing happiness. Many of my favorite activities (running, biking & swimming) involve discomfort and many of the pleasurable things I can do (e.g., play video games, watch TV) leave me feeling empty.

With of all this in mind, LifeTwo is going to put together a one week happiness improvement program with Greg, me and possibility one or more of our contributors doing the above exercises and more and tracking our changes in happiness. We invite you to participate and the exercises will be taken from the book "Happier" by Harvard professor Tal Ben-Shahar. Sign up for the LifeTwo newsletter (look at the upper right-hand column) to receive the happiness week details.