Achieving Sustainable Gains In Happiness.
Change Your Actions, Not Your Circumstances.
by Kennon M. Sheldon and Sonja Lyubomirsky.
Journal of Happiness Studies (2006) 7:55-86 ©Springer 2006.
DOI 10.1007/s10902-005-0868-8.
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This work was supported in part by grants from the Positive Psychology Network.
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Abstract. Although attaining happiness is a nearly universal goal, surprisingly little research has focused on how happiness can be increased and then sustained. Three studies test predictions of a model (Lyubomirsky⁽*⁾ et al., 2005) positing that sustainable happiness is possible through intentional activity changes, more so than through circumstantial changes. Study 1 shows that less hedonic adaptation is reported in response to activity changes than to circumstantial changes. Study 2 tests a dynamic process model, showing that while both positive activity changes and positive circumstantial changes predict rank-order increases in subjective well-being from Time 1 to Time 2, only activity changes predict maintained gains at Time 3. Study 3 replicates the Study 2 findings and extends them to psychological well-being (Ryff and Keyes, 1995). Implications for positive psychology and “the pursuit of happiness” are discussed.
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⁽*⁾[Wikipedia]: Sonja Lyubomirsky {pron. lou-bo-mere-ski}, born December 14, 1966) is a Russian-born American professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of “The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want”. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in Social/Personality Psychology from Stanford University. She has received a John Templeton Foundation grant, a Science of Generosity grant, a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize, and a million-dollar grant (with Ken Sheldon) from the National Institute of Mental Health. In 2021, she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel. “The How of Happiness” was published in 2008 by Penguin Press. The book has been translated into twenty-two languages. The premise of “The How of Happiness” is that fifty percent of a given human’s long-term happiness level is genetically determined, ten percent is affected by life circumstances and situation, and a remaining forty percent of happiness is subject to self-control. “The How of Happiness” led to an iPhone application called “Live Happy”, produced by Signal Patterns, and the author is on the company’s scientific advisory board. “The How of Happiness” has also led to a song, “The How of Happiness Book Tune”, a mnemonic to remember the content within the book. “The Myths of Happiness”, published by Penguin Press, claims why major life events that should make a person happy don’t, and that what shouldn’t make us happy often does.
External links.
Prof. Lyubomirsky’s webpage about The How of Happiness.
Prof. Lyubomirsky, PhD, at Happiness and Its Causes 2016.
Happiness Across the Lifespan; Frank B. Roehr Memorial Lecture.
Seaver Distinguished Lectures; Dr. Lyubomirsky, The Science of Happiness.
(2024 Wikipedia Encyclopaedia).
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The “Pursuit Of Happiness”.
The “pursuit of happiness” is an American cultural obsession, beginning with the Declaration of Independence, where it is pledged as an important right for all citizens. Today, happiness remains a topic of tremendous interest for groups as diverse as philosophers, policy makers, and poets, and, increasingly, for economists, popular psychology writers, and happiness “coaches”. As any bookstore visitor can attest, rows of self-help books in any major bookstore are committed to the literature on happiness. Furthermore, the pursuit of happiness is becoming ever more global, as people seek to realise the promises of capitalism and political freedom (Freedman, 1978; Diener et al., 1995).
Reflecting this burgeoning interest, research on subjective well-being (SWB) has exploded over the last twenty years, with hundreds of citations per year. A variety of correlates of happiness, positive mood, and life satisfaction have now been identified (DeNeve and Cooper, 1998). For example, well-being has been shown to be associated with certain demographic variables (e.g., Argyle, 1999; Diener et al., 1999), personality traits and attitudes (e.g., Diener and Lucas, 1999), and goal characteristics (e.g., McGregor and Little, 1998).
Ironically, however, very few of these studies speak to a central assumption of the “American dream”—namely, the idea that one can achieve and maintain relatively greater well-being, compared to an earlier period in one’s life. At least three waves of data are required to test this assumption, but the vast majority of studies of well-being have used data from only one time period. In other words, most studies have been cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. Thus, researchers still have little understanding of how well-being varies over time, and what factors influence these changes (but see Atkinson, 1982, for an early discussion of this issue, or more recently, Lucas et al., 2003).
In addition, little is known about what factors, if any, might bring about stable changes in levels of well-being, either positive or negative.
Reasons for Pessimism Regarding Sustainable Increases in Well-Being.
Doubtless, part of the reason researchers have neglected to study sustainable well-being change is the difficulty of conducting longitudinal and prospective studies. However, we believe another reason for this neglect is the considerable scientific pessimism over whether it is even possible to achieve sustainable increases in happiness. One source of pessimism is the idea of a genetically-determined set point for happiness. Lykken and Tellegen (1996) have provided evidence, based on behavior-genetic studies, that the heritability of well-being may be as high as eighty percent (although fifty percent is a more widely accepted figure; Diener et al., 1999). Regardless of the exact coefficient, the large magnitude of these estimates suggests that each person has a chronic or characteristic level of happiness, from which it will be difficult, if not impossible, to depart. Thus, although there may be substantial variation around this baseline level in the short-term, in the long-term, people perhaps cannot help but return to their set point: “What goes up must come down” (e.g., Headey and Wearing, 1989).
A second source of pessimism comes from the concept of hedonic adaptation (Brickman and Campbell, 1971; Frederick and Loewenstein, 1999), which suggests that gains in happiness are impermanent, because humans so quickly adapt to change (see also Kahneman, 1999; Scitovsky, 1976). That is, although new circumstances may cause temporary increases in happiness or sadness, people rapidly adjust, and the effect of these new circumstances on their well-being then quickly diminishes or even entirely disappears. For example, Brickman et al. (1978) showed that recent lottery winners were no happier than controls and, furthermore, that recent victims of paralysis were not as unhappy as one would expect (see also Dijkers, 1997).
Reasons for Optimism Regarding Sustainable Increases in Well-Being.
Do the arguments for pessimism described above lead to the conclusion that the pursuit of happiness is fruitless—that, rather than chasing happiness, people may be better off by simply accepting their current personality and happiness levels (McCrae and Costa, 1994)? For three reasons, we believe not.
First, some researchers have had preliminary success, albeit short-term, in using interventions to enhance happiness (e.g., Schulz, 1976; Fordyce, 1977, 1983; Lichter et al., 1980; Fava, 1999; Sheldon et al., 2002). The potential of happiness-increasing interventions is further demonstrated by recent research showing that practicing certain virtues, such as gratitude (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), forgiveness (McCullough et al., 2000), and thoughtful self-reflection (King, 2001; Lyubomirsky et al., 2004) can bring about enhanced well-being.
Second, many different motivational factors have been associated with well-being, factors that are presumably amenable to some volitional control. Examples of motivational factors include the successful pursuit of life goals that are intrinsic in content (e.g., Kasser and Ryan, 1993, 1996), concordant with an individual’s interests, values, and motives (Brunstein et al., 1998; Sheldon and Elliot, 1999), and internally consistent (e.g., Emmons and King, 1988; Sheldon and Kasser, 1995). Thus, one might find greater happiness by choosing particular kinds of goals.
Third, a variety of cognitive factors have been linked to well-being, factors that are presumably also amenable to some volitional control. These include pausing to count one’s blessings (Emmons and McCullough, 2003), eschewing social comparisons and contingent self-evaluations (e.g., Lyubomirsky and Ross, 1997), and choosing to feel a sense of optimism or efficacy regarding one’s life (Taylor and Brown, 1988; Seligman, 1991; Bandura, 1997). Thus, by changing one’s patterns of thought and ways of construing events, one might find greater happiness.
To summarise, there appears to be a paradox: Some theoretical perspectives and empirical data imply that well-being can be increased, while other theories and data suggest that it cannot.
How can these conflicting perspectives on the possibility of lasting happiness change be resolved? Also, if increases in happiness are indeed possible, what kinds of circumstances, actions, or habits of mind are most likely to bring gains, especially gains that can be maintained?
A New Model of Longitudinal Well-Being.
In this article, we test important predictions from a new model of longitudinal well-being recently advanced by Lyubomirsky et al. (2005). The model specifies three major determinants of well-being at time t: (1) the person’s genetic set point or set range (which reflects personality and temperament), (2) the person’s current circumstances (demographic, geographic, and contextual), and (3) the person’s current intentional activities (behavioral, cognitive, and conative). We focus on these three major categories because they have historically received the majority of attention in the well-being literature (Diener et al., 1999), and because they allow consideration of several important issues and paradoxes, such as the question of whether it is even possible to “become happier” given strong genetic influences on happiness, the question of why past well-being research has found such weak associations between demographic/ circumstantial variables and happiness, and the question of how a person might appropriately take action to “pursue” happiness.
We assume that the set point remains constant across the lifespan, reflecting the person’s basic temperament, constitution, and personality traits. Because the factors that determine the set point (i.e., the person’s basic temperament and personality traits) are, by definition, stable, they should have little or no impact on variations in well-being over time. Thus, the set point is not formally measured or modeled in the current research.
Instead, we assume that it is best estimated by the person’s average well-being score (Lykken, 1999) and, furthermore, that it accounts for the considerable expected longitudinal stability in well-being. Although some personality measures may tap the set point relatively directly, we assumed that including such constant measures in our models would not affect the dynamic patterns observed.
What then accounts for variations in an individual’s level of well-being? Our model specifies that the person’s current circumstances (e.g., his health, income, or the region where he lives) can either add to or detract from his constant set point, as can the person’s current intentional activities (e.g., her behavioral activity of exercising regularly, her cognitive activity of trying to accentuate the positive, or her conative activity of trying to gain admission to a professional program). As Lykken (2000) has argued, despite a genetically-determined baseline for well-being, humans are capable of increasing their happiness relative to this baseline through various “happiness makers”. In this article, we subdivide these happiness makers into two types—activity-based and circumstance-based.
As evident from the above descriptions, activity-based changes, by definition, involve continual effort and engagement in some intentional process, whereas circumstance-based changes are, by definition, one-time changes that tend to occur independently of effort and engagement. Of course, the distinction between activity and circumstantial changes may not always be clear, as activity may be required to change one’s circumstances, and because many circumstances involve activity. Despite these challenges, we attempted to separately measure these two abstract categories, hoping to illustrate with psychometric and hypothesis-confirmatory results that they are valid and important.
A central assumption of Lyubomirsky et al’s (2005) model is that hedonic adaptation occurs more quickly with respect to circumstantial changes than to activity changes. In other words, the effects of positive circumstantial changes (such as securing a raise, buying a new car, or moving to a sunnier part of the country) tend to decay more quickly than the effects of positive activity changes (such as starting to exercise, changing one’s perspective, or initiating a new goal or project). This differential adaptation assumption is rooted in the proposal that circumstances (e.g., salary, car ownership, place of residence) represent relatively static and constant “facts” about one’s life.
Thus, although changes in circumstances can trigger increases in well-being, such boosts tend to be short-lived, because people quickly begin to take those new circumstances for granted and cease to derive positive experiences from them. Indeed, hedonic adaptation to stable situations may explain why life circumstances such as income, health status, and geographic region have been more weakly associated with cross-sectional well-being than expected (Diener, 1984; Diener et al., 1999)—in cross-sectional studies, participants are undoubtedly sampled at various lengths of time following the onset of particular circumstances, “watering down” the effects of circumstances, overall.
In contrast, intentional activity focuses a person’s energy and behavior in a variety of different ways, leading to a more diverse and varied set of experiences, relative to the experiences produced by circumstances. Also, intentional activity can bring about an expanding array of new opportunities and possibilities, potentially leading to sustained positive effects in the person’s life (Fredrickson and Joiner, 2002; Sheldon and Houser-Marko, 2001). Finally, intentional activity can directly counteract the tendency toward adaptation, as people might make the effort to keep varying how and when they engage in the activity. These three features of intentional activity should help to forestall adaptation.
In sum, Lyubomirsky and colleagues’ (2005) model of longitudinal well-being makes clear predictions regarding what should be found in a three-wave investigation of well-being. Positive circumstantial changes occurring between Time 1 and Time 2 should produce enhanced well-being at Time 2, but this effect should disappear by Time 3, because people quickly adapt to circumstantial changes, and cease to derive positive experiences from them. In contrast, positive activity changes between Time 1 and Time 2 should produce enhanced well-being at both Time 2 and Time 3. This is because changed activities are more likely to continue providing positive experiences over the long-term. These predictions are tested in Studies 2 and 3.
Study 1.
In Study 1, we set the stage for the longitudinal test by evaluating an important prediction of Lyubomirsky and colleagues’ (2005) model—namely, that hedonic adaptation occurs more rapidly for circumstantial than for activity change. To this end we ...
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Study 2.
Study 2 was designed to provide a direct test of our dynamic process model, by comparing the longitudinal effects of circumstantial change and activity change on gains in well-being in a three-wave study of a large sample of individuals...
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Study 3.
In Study 3, we sought to replicate the basic Study 2 findings concerning changes in SWB (Diener, 1984, 1994). However, we included additional measures of well-being, to evaluate the breadth of the phenomenon identified in Study 2. Specifically, we...
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General Discussion.
These studies tested an important proposition of Lyubomirsky and colleagues’ (2005) longitudinal model of well-being. Again, the model distinguishes between two types of beneficial life changes, circumstantial changes and activity changes, reflecting theoretical distinctions often employed in the SWB literature...
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Limitations and Remaining Questions.
These studies have several limitations. First, we only examined three waves of data in Studies 2 and 3, and the full model test focused on a relatively short period of time (i.e., one semester). Thus, it remains to be seen whether the positive activity effects demonstrated herein would persist...
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Conclusion.
A central presumption of the “American dream” is that, through their own efforts and hard work, people may move towards greater happiness and fulfillment in life. This assumption is echoed in the writings of philosophers, both ancient and modern. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (1985) proposed that happiness involves engagement in activities that promote one’s highest potentials. And, in the Conquest of Happiness, Bertrand Russell (1930/1975) argued that the secrets to happiness include enterprise, exploration of one’s interests, and the overcoming of obstacles. The current studies provide important new support for these ideas. But do they also glorify the ideals of pleasure and self-gratification, which are also endemic to American culture? We believe not.
Indeed, the fact that activity changes require considerable effort to enact is more consistent with the Puritan version of the American dream, rather than the “easy living” or the “quick fix” ideals that have partially supplanted this foundational vision. In other words, our data suggest that effort and hard work offer the most promising route to ppiness. In contrast, simply altering one’s superficial circumstances (assuming they are already reasonably good) may have little lasting effect on personal well-being. We believe these are potentially potent prescriptions to keep in mind.
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Note: Full Text in Wayback Archive (pdf file).
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