Start by asking what's right with your life, not what's wrong , writes Maureen Gaffney
A few years ago a group of eminent psychologists expressed the view that it was time that psychology changed direction and began to concentrate on what makes people happy and successful - what makes them flourish - instead of focusing on what was wrong with them. Thus was born the positive-psychology movement. Note the word movement, signalling the almost evangelical zeal for this new approach. In the past few years this has resulted in an outpouring of research on happiness, wellbeing, optimal functioning and individual strengths.
This research is having a significant effect on other areas of psychology, such as psychotherapy and how we understand stress and coping. It is even spilling over into business, with companies taking a new interest in what is called positive organisational psychology.
This new research has given us a better scientific handle on understanding what happiness is, what causes it, what its effects are and how it can be increased. In particular, there is increasing evidence that happiness has major consequences for your physical and emotional health, your longevity and your economic and career success.
Much to the consternation of the puritans among us, there is sound empirical evidence that happiness is associated with success. If you have a successful marriage or a successful career, you are likely to feel happy.
The assumption was that it was the success that made people happy. And, of course, that's true. But now evidence is emerging that, at the very least, this works two ways - that happiness creates success.
Trying to establish the cause and effect is a fascinating psychological detective story, involving many different types of research. Psychologists have examined groups of people to try to establish the links between happiness and life success at any one time. They have compared happy and unhappy people and tried to understand how individuals with positive and happy feelings behave, and what personal characteristics they have that are associated with success. They have put people into laboratories and experimentally induced happy moods to see if this makes people more successful in various tasks. Most importantly, from a scientific point of view, they have followed people over a long period, trying to find out whether happiness precedes or follows success.
There is increasing evidence, from the longitudinal studies in particular, that happiness is a major factor in creating success. One study, for example, surveyed young people at the age of 18 and again at the age of 26. Those with positive emotions at 18 were found at 26 to be more financially independent, to experience more career success and to have jobs that they saw as more meaningful and allowed them more autonomy and variety at work, in comparison with those who had negative moods at 18.
In addition, the positive people were evaluated more favourably by supervisors in terms of quality of work, dependability and team work. They had less absenteeism. The positive aspects of their work further increased their initial positive feelings, creating a virtuous cycle.
Happier people were less likely to have lost their jobs and, if they did, were likely to be re-employed more quickly. Other studies have shown that happier students at age 18 earned more money when in their 30s - even allowing for their parents' income. Happier people receive more pay increases.
But it's not just all work and no play. Happier people have more friends and people they feel they can rely on - the quantity and quality of their relationships are higher. They report higher satisfaction with friends, are less jealous of others, are less likely to experience loneliness and themselves receive more support from colleagues and supervisors at work.
Before marriage, happier people are more likely to describe their current romantic relationship as being of high quality. They are more likely to marry and have more fulfilling marriages; to describe their partner as being their great love. Not surprisingly, they tend to have partners who are more satisfied with the marriage. Even if they get divorced, happier people are more likely to remarry. Needless to say, being stuck in an unhappy marriage seriously diminishes the happiness of even the most positive of people, but you are likely to avoid such an outcome if you are happy, or can increase your happiness levels, before you get married.
Happier people have better mental and physical health. They report fewer symptoms; have fewer allergic reactions; report less pain. They miss less work due to illness. They are less likely to suffer respiratory illness, sports injuries, heart attacks and strokes. When they do get sick, they pay fewer visits to the doctor; they take less medication. They recover much better after cardiac surgery, survive longer after breast cancer, renal disease and spinal injuries, and enjoy a better quality of life when diagnosed with cancer.
After all that, you won't be surprised to learn that happier people live longer. The real impact of unhappiness is shown by the findings that while smoking knocks five years off a man's life and seven and a half years off a woman's life, persistent negative feelings knock 10 years off an individual's life. People with high levels of positive feelings live, on average, seven and a half years longer even allowing for age, sex, socioeconomic status, loneliness and so on. In terms of living longer and healthier, positive feelings are more important than body mass, smoking and exercise.
So, what exactly do happy people do, how do they behave and what characteristics do they have that produce such good outcomes? One of the most robust findings about happy people is that their level of engagement with other people is high. Happy people actively seek out other people. They have more positive attitudes to other people, liking and trusting them more. They are open and friendly to people they don't know. In social situations they are more outgoing, warm, gregarious, sociable, lively and energetic. They enjoy social activities more.
Happier people are more likely to want to help, and to actually enjoy helping, other people. They volunteer more and invest more hours in volunteer effort. They are more likely to donate blood and give to charity. They express more desire to contribute to society. If you feel good, you are more likely to do good. Why? Because positive mood increases your liking of others. This is true all the way from happy preschoolers to senior citizens.
If, after reading this far, you think that such paragons of virtue and sociability must be intensely dislikeable, you would be wrong. The opposite is the case. In fact, they are more likely to be judged by others as more physically attractive, more intelligent and competent, less selfish, more socially skilled, more self-confident. They are more likely to have personal characteristics that are associated with happiness: a sense of humour, a sense of meaning in life, a natural optimism.
Another robust finding about happy people is that they seem to have the knack of seeing any activity - even routine day-to-day activities - as intrinsically motivating and worth doing. They are masters of the art of transforming a duty into a meaningful project. In general, any activity that provides an experience of belonging, of feeling personally competent or of acting independently seems to work particularly well in terms of its happiness-increasing potential.
Having selected an activity, happy people like to set goals for themselves and register and affirm their progress towards the goal. They are optimistic. They like finding new ways to solve problems and approach issues in their daily lives; and they keep performing well even when they encounter setbacks. As a result, they are more likely to regard themselves as personally competent, and that in turn boosts their self-esteem and gives them a sense of mastery and control over their lives.
Happy people work on being happy, paying attention to and amplifying the positive. There is growing evidence that the active and steady build-up of positive emotions - pleasure, contentment, interest, love, gratitude, eagerness, confidence, pride - creates very specific cognitive effects.
Positive feelings expand attention, encouraging the person to approach rather than to avoid challenges, explorations and novel situations, people, behaviours and strategies. They don't give up, they broaden their ways of thinking and they're not afraid to take an open, trial-and-error approach to life. Happy people are fast learners.
This isn't to say that happy people have perfect lives. They encounter stress and setbacks. But when they do, they seek the positive side, seeing the stress or setback as a valuable learning experience. In other words, they build up positive feelings in the face of negativity. This turns out to be really important, because positive emotions undo the adverse effects of stress on cardiovascular functioning. Positive emotions - even fairly mild ones if experienced immediately after a stressful event - can undo the effects of negative feelings and stress reactions such as increased heart rate and raised blood pressure. Positive emotions experienced during chronic stress help people to cope better and to attend to important information, even if it is negative. For example, optimists pay more attention to medical diagnoses and treatment details than pessimists do, optimising their chances of recovery.
Compared to unhappy people, happy people perceive, interpret and frame the same events in a more positive way. Faced with a challenge, they feel more in control and have more confidence in their ability to cope. In fact, their sense of control, competence and optimism is likely to be slightly exaggerated. But these positive illusions serve them well and keep them motivated in the face of setbacks. They note negative feedback but are not thrown off balance by it. Even when experiencing negative events, they maintain their optimism, expecting things to get better in the future. Crucially, they compare themselves less to others, especially unfavourably.
They tend to be happier with what they have, even if it is not their first choice. The important point here is that happy people are not just simply passively happier with their lot. Rather, they actively work to find the positive in a negative or uncertain situation.
Unhappy people do the exact opposite. In an effort to make themselves feel better, they frequently compare themselves to a lot of other people. It is a poor strategy, leaving them open to negative upward comparisons - that is, comparing themselves negatively to more successful people, and thus falling prey to envy.
In a competitive situation, both happy and unhappy people get a boost in self-esteem when peers do less well than themselves. But when peers do better than themselves, happy people are not affected by their peers' success. Unhappy people, in Gore Vidal's immortal phrase, die a little every time they hear of a friend's success.
There is a now a growing body of evidence on the interventions that work to increase happiness in individuals, relationships and organisations. But as a serviceable and more immediate blueprint for happiness, one study provides a simple formula. Unhappy participants were instructed to copy the behaviours of their happier peers, irrespective of how they were feeling. As a result, they actually felt happier. Now you know how happy people think and behave, simply imitate one of their strategies, even if it does not feel right. As Alfred Hitchcock famously said to Grace Kelly when she complained that she could not feel the part: "Then fake it, my dear." And, like Kelly, you may find that simply faking it creates the feeling.