Do patients have a “happiness set point?”

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥    @HeartSisters

How happy are you? Dr. Art Markman, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote this in a Fast Company essay:

“People seem to have a happiness set point.(1)  Generally speaking, in the weeks and months after a significant positive or negative life event, you tend to return to roughly the level of happiness you had before that event – that’s the set point. It doesn’t mean that events can’t have a long-term influence on how happy you are – just that the best predictor of how happy you will be several months after either a major positive or negative event is how happy you were before it happened.”

In my book ,“A Woman’s Guide To Living with Heart Disease, I wrote about the interesting happiness research from behaviour scientists like Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California Riverside. Her research echoes Dr. Markman’s findings. Here’s how she described the concept:(2)

“Life’s turning points do not have to become major crises after all. In fact, our research has found that life events do not actually have as much of an impact on optimism or happiness as you might expect. 

You may be familiar with the landmark 1978 study called ““Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?”(3)   Researchers compared people who had experienced positive life events (winning the lottery)  with people who had experienced negative setbacks (becoming partially paralyzed after an accident) and with a control group who had experienced neither a lottery win nor an accident.

At first, the lottery winners were very happy, and the accident victims were very unhappy. But over several months, the paraplegic accident victims were not as unhappy as expected, and both groups began to rank their general level of happiness as essentially similar to how they would have ranked it before those life events, positive or negative. In fact, lottery winners now rated “the pleasure of mundane events of everyday life” significantly lower than the controls did.

These findings were called the “hedonic treadmill”.  That word “hedonic” is used by behaviour scientists when describing the amount of pleasure or displeasure a person experiences.

Not every person responds in the same way to every life event, of course. Perspectives and personalities matter (as do the genes we inherited from our parents). And complications like bereavement or severe illness can also affect our responses to those events.

And we may even respond poorly to the name “hedonic treadmill”  – which isn’t universally loved by all researchers.

Take Dr. Mike Rucker, who wrote about this in his Psychology Today column. He believes it would be far more useful to consider life events like navigating a “hedonic current” instead of a hedonic treadmill, describing his river analogy like this:

“As you travel downstream, you learn from your experiences. You master how to best handle the current you ride. In reality, life is not endless and unvarying; it unfolds over time, and change is inevitable. Although evidence does suggest that we likely have a predisposition to a certain level of happiness – our own unique “set point” – most of us have a significant amount of personal control over the fun and delight we’ll experience both by ourselves and in the lives of those around us.”

FULL DISCLOSURE:  Speaking of lotteries, I spent many years working in public relations for our provincial Lottery Corporation. I was the person who interviewed major winners and handed out those big oversized cheques at TV news conferences to deliriously happy winners. I’m not a researcher (although I did spend 20 years of my life living with one – does that count at all?) but even I recognized year after year something almost all of my winners had in common. Even if you might believe that winning the lottery will “ruin people’s lives”  – it all boils down to my decidedly unscientific observation every year:

“The way you are before you win is exactly how you’ll be after you win.” 

And here’s a freakishly weird coincidence: my public relations career also included working for years in the non-profit sector, including for The Salvation Army. My dual roles there were in street outreach and disaster response.  Overnight, I went from meeting the wealthiest people I would ever find, to meeting people who either had nothing, or had just lost everything.

You’d think those newly wealthy lottery winners would be the happiest folks, wouldn’t you?  But on rainy Friday nights while we were handing out bowls of soup or chili to the lineup of our supper clients, my volunteers and I had more fun chatting and laughing with the lineup than on any day I’d spent with my winners. At first, I often wondered how our supper clients could possibly be happy.

All of those lottery winners were indeed over the moon in the moment when I was handing them the big cheque at their news conference, but I often wondered, as later researchers concluded, if these suddenly rich people would also “rate the pleasure of mundane events of everyday life significantly lower” after that huge win.

In her book “The How of Happiness“, Dr. Lyubomirsky has identified certain traits among people whose outlook and happiness set points are relatively positive. Happier people, she explains, generally tend to:

• be more likely to exercise regularly
• practice acts of kindness
• invest in relationships
• have a spiritual or religious practice
• be forgiving
• nurture optimistic thinking
• meditate
• cope pro-actively with adversity (and just maybe they’re coping pro-actively with adversity because of all that other stuff they’re doing first!)

Meanwhile, If you’re a natural-born pessimist who’d like to budge your happiness set point a bit higher, you might try one or more of Dr. Lyubomirsky’s wise suggestions:

• Reduce screen time and do something more active and engaging instead. Researchers agree that the one thing almost all unhappy people have in common is heavy screen use – whether it’s TV, social media, gaming, etc.

• Take up hobbies or work tasks that use and build on your best skills. This may lead you to lose yourself in a task, which some psychologists call an experience of “flow,” an extreme feeling of well-being. I experience this “flow” while puttering out on my tiny perfect balcony garden (right ->)  and I regularly “lose myself” out there. Best time of any day!

• Write down what you’re thankful for. The more detail, the better, but don’t overdue this happy homework. Dr. Lyubomirsky’s research suggests that once a week is more effective than three times a week for these gratitude exercises.

• Write down the way you would like your life to be in 5-10 years.

• Don’t be so self-absorbed. Do something nice for someone else. Pick the good deeds yourself, and vary them to make them more effective.

• When you set goals, keep trying to achieve them even when discouragements occur. This is something that most optimists do.

 

Stuffed animal image:  Pexels, Pixabay

♥

1. Lucas, R. E. “Adaptation and the Set-Point Model of Subjective Well-Being: Does Happiness Change After Major Life Events?” Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16(2), 75-79. (2007). 

2. S. Lyubomirsky, “The Science of Happiness,” lecture at Pepperdine University, Seaver College, W. David Baird Distinguished Lecture Series, Malibu, California, September 25, 2014.

3. Brickman, Coates, Janoff-Bulman. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917–927. (1978)

 

Q:  Do life’s turning points, either negative or positive, have a major impact on longterm happiness – or not?

♥

NOTE FROM CAROLYN:  I wrote lots more about life’s turning points in my book, A Woman’s Guide to Living with Heart Disease (published by Johns Hopkins University Press). You can ask for it at your local library or favourite bookshop (please support your independent neighbourhood booksellers!) or order it online (paperback, hardcover or e-book) at Amazon, or order it directly from my publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press (use their  code HTWN to save 30% off the list price).