1124 Is There a Formula for Joy?

 

 

http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030120/scmhappy.html
Is There a Formula for Joy?

New books tout the secrets of happiness. Here's a look at how
their recipes compare
By Richard Corliss

Posted Sunday, January 12, 2002; 8:31 a.m. EST
In the past two weeks, we'll bet 150 people have wished you happy New
Year. And at the supermarket or dry cleaner, someone wanted you
to "have a nice day." The Democrats used to chorus, "Happy days are
here again." The noted self-help guru Bobby McFerrin
counseled, "Don't worry, be happy." Other pop singers tell us that
happiness is "a thing called Joe" (Judy Garland), "what my life's
about" (Vanessa Williams), "when you feel really good with somebody"
(Al Green), "a warm gun" (John Lennon), "an option" (Pet Shop Boys).
The old saloon singer Ted Lewis used to ask, "Is everybody happy?"

No. But enough people want to be—and will pay for the chance to
forget their troubles, come on, get happy—that a huge industry of
happiography has sprung up to feed the need. From Wholly Joy: Being
Happy in an Unhappy World to The Lazy Person's Guide to Happiness,
from the Buddhist Eight Steps to Happiness to I'd Rather Laugh: How
to Be Happy Even When Life Has Other Plans for You (by Linda Richman,
Mike Myers' mother-in-law), hundreds of books purport to help you
feel a bit better. They speak to a primal yearning in the
species. "Human beings want to have meaning," says Martin Seligman,
University of Pennsylvania psychologist and director of the Positive
Psychology Network. "They want not to wake up in the morning with a
gnawing realization that they are fidgeting until they die."

Some of the happy-talk books may help their readers get through one
or two dark nights of the soul. But the wisdom they ladle out is
often scattershot, anecdotal, an Oprah sermon in paperback. Few of
them are written by psychiatrists or psychologists; few are based on
solid research.

That could be due to the suspicion with which health professionals—
and many other educated adults—view the systematic pursuit of
happiness. They see the happiness industry as a case of the bland
leading the bland. Happiness may be an American doctrine, but it also
triggers images of a blinkered, Father Knows Best '50s and of TV news
anchors grinning through the latest report of troop movements or a
lagging economy. To the army of skeptics, happiness is forgetting
that a billion people go to bed hungry each night. Happiness is being
too shallow to realize how miserable you should be. It's cocooning
yourself from reality. When displayed wantonly in public, it is the
cause of other people's unhappiness. Happiness, the argument goes, is
abnormal—can it be cured?

For something so widely desired, so hotly derided, happiness hasn't
got much attention from researchers. One reason is the difficulty of
quantifying happiness: it is a condition that is diagnosed and
defined not by the doctor but by the patient. Another is the medical
community's tendency to study pathology, not normality. "In spite of
its name and its charter," Seligman avers, "the National Institute of
Mental Health has always been the National Institute of Mental
Illness." He notes that when the NIMH was created in 1947, "academics
found that they could get grants if their research was about curing
mental illness."

Dan Baker, a psychologist who directs the Life Enhancement Program at
Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Ariz., supervised a survey of the mental-
health canon. His team found 54,000 studies on depression and only
415—less than 1%—on happiness. Even today, Baker asserts, "the
medical establishment continues to pooh-pooh happiness, because
there's no money in it."

He means grant money. A serious researcher into happiness can still
get a book deal. Baker's What Happy People Know (Rodale; 256 pages)
and Seligman's Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology
to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment (Free Press; 336
pages) buttress their pep talks with frequent citations of supporting
studies and thoughtful hints for getting—and staying—happy.


Seligman defines three categories of happiness. "The first is 'the
pleasant life': the Goldie Hawn, Hollywood happiness—smiling, feeling
good, being ebullient. The problem with the pleasant life is that not
everyone can have it." And that, he says, is a matter of genetic
predisposition. Perhaps half of us have it, which means the other
half don't ever get to feel like Goldie.

But, says Seligman, "these people are capable of the second form of
happiness: 'the good life.' It consists first in knowing what your
strengths are and then recrafting your life to use them—in work,
love, friendship, leisure, parenting. It's about being absorbed,
immersed, one with the music."

Seligman calls his third and ultimate level "the meaningful life." It
consists, he says, "in identifying your signature strengths and then
using them in the service of something you believe is bigger than you
are." And you don't have to be conventionally happy to achieve
it. "Churchill and Lincoln," Seligman says, "were two profound
depressives who dealt with it by having good and meaningful lives."

Circumstances don't always define emotional states. Seligman
acknowledges that extreme poverty is a downer, but says, "Once you're
above the safety net, people in wealthier nations are not by and
large noticeably happier than those in poorer nations." Climate isn't
a crucial factor: "North Dakotans are just as happy as Floridians."
Nor is money: "If you look at lottery winners, they get happy for a
few months. But a year later, they're back where they were." Even a
catastrophe—cancer, say—does little to alter one's overall
outlook. "On average," Seligman observes, "people with one life-
threatening disease are not more unhappy than the rest of the
population. Of course, a cascade of bad things happening can make a
difference. But if you have one really bad thing, generally you're
not more unhappy."

The two factors that may matter most are marriage and religious
belief, Seligman says. "Married people are happier than any other
configuration of people. And religious people are usually happier
than nonreligious people." Are you single? Agnostic? You can still
beat the odds by lowering your stress level, says Dr. David Spiegel,
director of Stanford's Psychosocial Treatment Laboratory. "We did a
study of metastatic-breast-cancer patients in which we measured
diurnal levels of cortisol [a stress indicator]," Spiegel says. "The
women who had the highest levels had survival rates a year and a half
shorter than women with the lowest cortisol levels." He also cites a
study of psoriasis patients: "Half were given their salve treatments
listening to music while the other half listened to meditation tapes.
Those who learned meditation healed faster." The deductions? Don't
worry, be happy. And hatha yoga is better than none.

Baker had a good reason for having stress, depression and neurosis:
the death of his infant son. Yet he says he used his own techniques
to put his personal anguish in perspective. He cites the national
tragedy of Sept. 11: "In its aftermath, we know that many people have
a greater sense of what's truly important, a greater awareness of
their relationships and values."

To Baker, happiness isn't so much a woozy state of self-satisfaction
as it is a full-time job. It can be practiced and mastered. "A lot of
people think you can't manage emotion," he says. "That's baloney.
Look, we can manage our behavior: eat healthy, exercise. We can
manage our thought processes: bite our tongue, curb our anger. I
think that people even in a painful situation can begin to manage
their grief, agony, sadness—keep it within sensible limits and not
let it overwhelm them. Happy people are very good at managing
emotion." And what makes us happy? It is "the ability to practice
appreciation or love," says Baker. "That sounds sappy, but studies
show that when people engage in appreciative activity, they are using
more neocortical, prefrontal functions—higher-level brain functions."
There you go, skeptics: happiness is an exercise for smart people.

So, is the glass half empty, half full or, as the engineers say,
twice as big as it needs to be? Happiness may consist in recognizing
that we can't always be happy; that ambitions are worth fighting for
but not dying for; that a sense of humor, even of the absurd, is
necessary for a lifesaving sense of proportion. Consider this as
well: that we can work to attain happiness, but that it can still
sneak up and surprise us...for instance, when we finish reading a
brisk, informative article on happiness.

—Reported by David Bjerklie/New York