How to increase your happiness... FASTER
I am excited to announce that I finally got a chance to analyze the data from my well-being survey. This survey revealed NEW insights into how people can increase their happiness and well-being. Below, I reveal 3 major insights from the data that will help you increase your happiness faster:
- You need to believe happiness is a skill that can be learned.
The research clearly shows that happiness is not something we find - we learn happiness, just like we would learn any other skill. It makes sense when we think about it. We wouldn’t expect to just find being good at algebra or find speaking a foreign language. We know that these are skills that have be learned. But research shows that, just like these others skills, we need to learn how to change, manage, and create our emotional experiences - including happiness.
“If we simply believe that happiness is something we can learn, we are likely to be happier.”
Our data from the Berkeley Well-Being Institute shows that the more someone believes that happiness is a skill they can learn, the greater their happiness. This makes sense right? How can you change something that you don’t think you can change? If we simply believe that happiness is something we can learn, we are likely to be happier. The lesson here is that we need to believe that happiness is a skill before we are able to increase it.
Take home message: Believe that happiness is a skill that you can learn!
- There are different types of emotion skills that contribute to happiness.
You may know that you need to see the bright side, practice gratitude, or limit worrying to increase your happiness. But how are you supposed to find the time to develop, grow, and practice all these different skills? The answer is: If you practice building skills that are very different from each other, you can increase your overall happiness more effectively.
For example, imagine you want to develop your artistic skills. You could practice drawing with pencils, crayons, and charcoal. You are improving your overall artistic skill a bit by practicing these different drawing skills. But what if instead you practiced pencil drawing, photography, and sculpture. Your artistic skills, overall, would be improved a lot more in the same amount of time. This same logic can be applied to improving your overall happiness.
“We found 7 happiness constellations that you can use to more efficiently increase your overall happiness.”
Our data from the Berkeley Well-Being Institute shows that some emotion skills are more similar to each other than others. So just like pencil drawing and charcoal drawing are more similar to each other than pencil drawing is to photography, some emotion skills are more similar to each other. We found 7 happiness constellations that you can use to more efficiently increase your overall happiness. The lesson here is that you can get more bang for your buck by practicing one emotion skill from each constellation than if you spent your time learning all the skills from 1 constellation.
The Seven Happiness Constellations:
Negative thinking - The ability not to generate or dwell on negative thoughts and experiences.
Emotional intelligence - The ability to understand your emotions and emotional processing.
Coping - The ability to resist using unhealthy behaviors to avoid or manage emotions.
Social interaction - The ability to develop strong, supportive relationships.
Authenticity - The ability to be yourself and live your life your life according to your values.
Forward movement - The ability to continue moving forward towards your goals and life purpose.
Positive thinking - The ability to respond to life's ups and downs with a positive perspective.
Take home message: Variety is the spice of life. Learn 1 emotion skill from each of the 7 happiness constellations to more efficiently increase your happiness!
- Some emotion skills tend to predict happiness more than others.
Research shows that many different emotion skills can increase happiness. But which ones are likely to have the greatest impact? Well, to find out how much impact each skill is likely to have, we need to understand how closely related each skill is to our goal.
For example, let’s say that Sam has a goal to work in sales when she graduates college. To reach this goal, Sam takes classes in math, science, and communications. When Sam graduates and starts working in sales, her math and science skills may help a little bit, but her communications skill is the one that makes her wildly successful at sales. If she just focused on communications, she would be almost as successful in nearly a 3rd of the time. This same logic applies to happiness. If happiness is the goal, we should spend most of our time learning the skills that are most closely related to happiness.
“We found that positive self-views was the most related to happiness.”
Our data from the Berkeley Well-Being Institute shows that some emotion skills are more related to happiness than others. We found that positive self-views was the most related to happiness. So just as learning communication skills helps us better reach a goal of being successful at sales, learning to have positive self-views helps us better reach our goal of being happier. The lesson here is that instead of practicing all of the emotion skills, you can choose the most impactful skills from each constellation to make the most efficient progress.
The most impactful emotion skill from each of the 7 constellations
Positive self-views - The ability to have self-compassion and positive perceptions of the self.
Purpose - The ability to see that your life has meaning.
Autonomy - The ability to make your own decisions and take self-directed action.
Relationships - The ability to develop relationships with people you enjoy spending time with.
Behavioral regulation - The ability to resist using substances, food, or other self-harm to manage emotions.
Clarity - The ability to understand your emotions.
Judgement - The ability to accept yourself and your emotions, non-judgmentally.
Take home message: Make an impact! Focus on learning the most impactful emotion skills across happiness constellations to increase your happiness!
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Check out Click Here for Happiness - for my Psychology Today blog. For more goodies, visit berkeleywellbeing.com.
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I'd like to thank Arianna Beneditti for her help conducting these analyses.