Oh, How Happy (You Have Made You)

Writing in his brilliant thesis on finding happiness, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., asserted “The best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” Unfortunately, and with a greater than a modicum of regret, I only realized the certitude of this proclamation later in my adult life.

Yet another academic scholar in the discipline of human happiness, Sonya Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, proffered in her landmark study, The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, “I use the term happiness to refer to the experience of joy, contentment, or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful, and worthwhile…Happiness, more than anything, is a state of mind, a way of perceiving and approaching ourselves and the world in which we reside.”

Alas, Dr. Lyubomirsky’s perspective is another I discovered in my mature years rather than in my youthful epoch. But, as the ageless aphorism notes, better late, than never. Now, rather than seeking happiness elsewhere, through the actions or words of others, I have taken to looking inward as a starting point for contentment. And, as Dr. Csikszentmihalyi offered, I seek out the more strenuous task to stoke my happiness meter much more frequently than gauging it via the successful accomplishment of some rather easy task. Since embracing these stratagems I have experienced much more happiness – both in terms of frequency and intensity – than previous.

In Dr. Lyubomirsky’s momentous happiness science-based premise the erudite UC Riverside scholar also established that 50% of anyone’s happiness derives from a genetically determined “set point.” She added, “The set point for happiness is similar to the set point for weight. Some people are blessed with skinny dispositions: Even when they’re not trying, they easily maintain their weight. By contrast, others have to work extraordinarily hard to keep their weight at a desirable level, and the moment they slack off even a bit, the pounds creep back on. So those of us with low happiness set points will have to work harder to achieve and maintain happiness, while those of us with high set points will find it easier to be happy under similar conditions.”

Though I have never attempted to quantify my happiness set point level, my life experiences and intuition indicate to me that it had been at least hovering around the norm for most of my life. During the last couple of years, however, I have noticed a marked decrease in my ability to find and retain happiness to the degree and at the levels I had heretofore experienced.

Fortunately, it is possible to reignite your set point. Being kind to yourself and embracing optimism with gusto are two of the foremost strategies. Furthermore, as outlined in a 2021 Psychology Today article by Nina Josefowitz, Ph.D., titled, Languishing? Learn How to Raise Your Happiness Set Point, the following are also helpful steps along the pathway toward resetting one’s happiness set point:

• Do something you enjoy and that you think will boost your mood. Make a plan and do it regularly over at least a few weeks. It will take a while for you to start to feel better, so keep at it.
• Be grateful for what is going well in your life.
• Try to minimize what is going badly. It can be helpful to figure out what parts of a problem you can control and what parts you can’t. It can also be helpful to talk to someone you trust—sometimes just sharing makes the load lighter and friends or family really can think of novel approaches to an issue.
• Try to repair any relationship that has hit some difficulties or reach out to someone you have not seen in a while.
• Do one kind thing for someone each week. For example, call a friend who is struggling, be extra nice to someone you live with, or do an unexpected errand. (Research has found that doing a different kind act every week is more effective than doing the same kind act.)

In their 1966 hit pop song, Shades of Bule crooned “Oh how happy (you have made me).” While I agree this is a beautiful message and it is one, I would never tire of hearing from a friend, colleague, intimate partner, or family member now that I have reset my happiness set point, I am signing a different tune. Now, oh how happy (you have made you) is my personal anthem.

- George