“A multitude of small delights constitute happiness.” — Charles Baudelaire

 

One surprising finding from the research on happiness is how terrible we are at predicting how something will make us feel in the future. Psychologists call it the “impact bias”.

We pursue things we think will bring us pleasure (a shiny new car, a better job, a bigger apartment). We get the thing, and the pleasure is real – but it quickly fades, usually within weeks. This leads to what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill”: our baseline of happiness stays fairly stable even as we keep running after things we think will make us happier.

Most of the happiness you can achieve in life comes from avoiding sources of misery than chasing sources of happiness. This might sound pessimistic, but it’s not. Removing what you dislike from your life is a powerfully reliable guide to a much happier life, whereas chasing new things is much less reliable and likely to just cause frustration and disappointment.

Dirty tricks of the mind

In The Social Leap, William von Hippel explains the evolutionary function of happiness, asking, “Why did evolution play this dirty trick on us, giving us dreams of achievements that will provide lifelong happiness but then failing to deliver the emotional goods when we achieve our goals?”

In short, to strive for more and not be complacent. Evolution didn’t design us to be happy all the time. It designed us to continue pursuing more because this increases the odds of passing our genes on to the next generation.

After the shine has faded from the latest thing we’ve chased and gotten, we hop back on the treadmill and start again, never really experiencing the sustained joy we expect.

There’s a silver lining with the hedonic treadmill: it goes both ways.

The adaptation principle

Think of some of the best things that could happen to you and then think of some of the worst things. You might soon come up with “winning the lottery” on one end of the list and “becoming paralysed” on the other.

As it turns out, our baseline foundation of happiness is more stable against abrupt external changes (good and bad) than you might expect.

Lottery winners (after their initial delight lasting a few months) revert much (not all) of the way to baseline happiness about one year later. They’re still happier, but not as euphoric as you might imagine.

People who become paralysed go through a period of devastation lasting about a year (maybe two), but when this passes the person returns to a level of happiness that’s much closer to baseline than you might expect. They do take a sustained dent in their happiness, but not by as much as you might think. This resiliency is the flipside of the hedonic treadmill, the “adaptation principle”, at work.

How much money do you need?

Money’s real power lies in reducing insecurity and stress rather than buying pleasure. For years, researchers believed happiness plateaued at around $75,000 a year, meaning more money didn’t make people much happier beyond that point. That figure referred to individual income in the US and roughly marked the point at which most people had met their essential needs and achieved financial security.

But newer large-scale studies tell a more nuanced story: emotional well-being continues to rise with income, just at a much slower rate. The difference an extra dollar makes shrinks as people earn more, but there’s no clear ceiling where money stops mattering. Once basic needs and stability are met, the biggest happiness gains come from relationships, purpose, and health.

The most important idea

The late Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, was once asked to name the most important idea from his lifetime of work. He identified it as the focusing illusion: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.”

In other words, when you’re hyper-focused on distinct aspects of something, you inflate in your mind how much of an impact it will have on your overall life, including your happiness. Quoting Kahneman:

“Paraplegics are often unhappy, but they are not unhappy all the time because they spend most of the time experiencing and thinking about other things than their disability. When we think of what it is like to be a paraplegic, or blind, or a lottery winner, or a resident of California, we focus on the distinctive aspects of each of these conditions. The mismatch in the allocation of attention between thinking about a life condition and actually living it is the cause of the focusing illusion.”

This is why we often take our thoughts about life more seriously than life itself – fixating on small details and missing the bigger picture.

Happiness “hacks”

However, there are some things that are resistant to these cognitive distortions, giving us an opportunity to “hack” our happiness. While many big life events don’t make or break happiness, there are smaller factors that reliably boost it. Here are some of the most effective ones:

• Spending time with people we like. This lifts our mood, even for the biggest introverts.
  
• Exercising. Cardio, lifting weights, and playing sports give you repeated boosts of energy, satisfaction, and well-being.
• Staying healthy. Good health and wellbeing are robustly linked.
• Building and maintaining a strong relationship. On average, married people are happier.
• Volunteering or helping others creates lasting feelings of purpose and connection and a positive self-image, which are all crucial to happiness. (Even better, do it and don’t tell anyone – I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out why).
  
• Spending time outdoors in nature consistently restores calm and perspective.
• Practicing gratitude and appreciation for what you have can enhance your perspective and your happiness, with the caveat that gratitude shouldn’t feel like a moral or performative obligation.
• Attending a religious service weekly is roughly equivalent to roughly equivalent to a 10–20% increase in income on a person’s happiness.
• Practicing mindfulness. Learning how to be more present and less lost in rumination or mental wandering makes people happier.

And of course, there are countless thieves of happiness. Life offers us far more ways to undermine our happiness than to enhance it. This is reflected in the makeup of our minds. We have twice as many negative emotions (anxiety, dread, fear, grief, and so on) as positive ones. And we have twice, and maybe three times, as many words for negative states as positive ones.

The biggest happiness hack is avoiding the factors that make you miserable. A few examples, most of which will be a surprise to no one:

• Financial loss (major losses or bankruptcy). In a detailed study, this emerged as the single most damaging event to happiness because it undermines both emotional security and perceived control over one’s life. Unlike other setbacks, financial hardship damages multiple areas of life at once: relationships, health, social standing, and daily stability.
• Chronic interpersonal conflict. Being in a strained marriage or toxic work environment has a persistent negative effect on happiness.
• Loneliness. Humans adapt poorly to isolation, and social deprivation strongly predicts lower well-being.
• Poor sleep. Consistently disrupted or inadequate sleep continues to harm mood, focus, and health rather than becoming something people “get used to.”
• Chronic daily annoyances. Think of all the things you do that stress you out, irritate you, and cause you dread. Write them down. Find a way to reduce these things from your day (yes, easier said than done). If you succeed (and I bet you can) this will have a profoundly positive impact on your happiness.
• Noise pollution. Living near a busy road, under a flight path, or with constant construction noise tends to erode well-being (unlike scents, unpredictable and intermittent sounds are hard for the brain to tune out effectively.)
• Long slow-moving commutes. Yes, it’s a “first-world problem”, but heaping guilt on it won’t help. Long commutes are generally miserable and people don’t easily adapt to them. They simply stress the body. One source put it like this: “A person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 per cent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office”.
• Consistently choosing short-term hedonism at the expense of long-term advantage. Indulging every whim and following the path of least resistance leads to an unfulfilling, unhappy life in the long run. The party gets old.

The last point touches on something crucial to your happiness: your “time preferences”, a simple idea that refers to how much you value the present versus the future. Getting this balance right is pretty much the holy grail of life. Read more about it here.