Category: Happiness

An easy, everyday activity that makes people feel confident, comfortable, appreciative and reflective.

Taking selfies and sharing them with friends makes people happier.

Participants in the study took smiling selfies every day over a couple of ordinary weeks.

Selfies were not the only types of pictures that cheered people up.

The researchers found that sharing images that made the taker feel happy also worked.

So did sharing photos that the taker knew would make other people happy.

Yu Chen, the study’s first author, said:

“Our research showed that practicing exercises that can promote happiness via smartphone picture taking and sharing can lead to increased positive feelings for those who engage in it.

This is particularly useful information for returning college students to be aware of, since they face many sources of pressure.”

The research was carried out on college students, who often feel the strain going to college for the first time.

Ms Chen said:

“The good news is that despite their susceptibility to strain, most college students constantly carry around a mobile device, which can be used for stress relief.

Added to that are many applications and social media tools that make it easy to produce and send images.”

More confident, comfortable and reflective

The three types of photos people were told to take had subtly different effects:

• Taking selfies was linked to feeling more confident and comfortable.
• Taking photos of things that made them happy was linked to a more appreciative and reflective state of mind.
• Photos that would make others happy made the taker feel calmer and less stressed as well as strengthening social connections with friends.

All the different types, though, made people feel happier.

Professor Gloria Mark, a study co-author, said:

“You see a lot of reports in the media about the negative impacts of technology use, and we look very carefully at these issues here at UCI.

But there have been expanded efforts over the past decade to study what’s become known as ‘positive computing,’ and I think this study shows that sometimes our gadgets can offer benefits to users.”

The study was published in the journal Psychology of Well-Being  (Chen et al., 2016).

The study compared TV show genres to see which makes people happiest.

Watching nature documentaries — like being out in nature itself — can help you feel happier.

The survey of 7,500 people around the world found they felt happier after viewing clips from BBC nature documentaries.

The study compared watching the documentary to the news or a popular drama show.

People reported that after viewing the nature documentary they felt more:

• joy,
• amazement,
• awe,
• and curiosity.

At the same time it reduced feelings of anger, tiredness and stress.

Professor Dacher Keltner, who teamed up with the BBC for the study, said:

“I have long believed that nature and viewing sublime and beautiful nature in painting, film and video shifts how we look at the world, and humbles us, brings into focus our core goals, diminishes the petty voice of the self and strengthens our nervous system.

When the BBC approached me about working together, it was a no-brainer.

I think their video content inspires green tendencies in viewers.”

Here is taster of the study:

Professor Keltner said:

“The importance of the Real Happiness study is that brief exposures to Planet Earth II content bring greater awe, positive emotion, and wellbeing to people in six countries.

The results also show that younger people are highly stressed out, and that viewing videos about the natural world reduces their stress, which tells me that we can turn to other kinds of new social media content to find calm during these highly stressful times.”

The research white paper was published on the BBC Earth website (Keltner et al., 2017).

People who push themselves to feel happy can end up feeling worse.

Putting too much value on being happy, paradoxically makes that happiness more difficult to achieve.

In fact, a greater need to enjoy experiences is linked to more depressive symptoms.

In other words, people who push themselves to feel happy can end up feeling worse.

One reason is down to disappointment.

Imagine listening to some music and trying to force oneself to enjoy it more.

The disappointment felt if it does not work could make one feel worse than if they had not bothered trying to feel happier.

None of this means that pursuing happiness is a waste of time — it just has to be done in the right way.

A happiness culture

There is also a cultural factor to consider.

Culture plays an important part in how we think about happiness, the new study reveals.

Researchers carried out happiness surveys on groups of people in the UK and EU and compared them to previous results from people in the US.

The results showed that people in the US and the UK who valued happiness more also found it harder to focus on and savour positive experiences.

Dr Julia Vogt, study co-author, explained:

“We observed that the inability of participants to focus attention while feeling a range of emotions was a major factor in this idea of not being able to savor a positive experience.”

However, the link was not as strong in the EU, suggesting that culture is a factor.

Dr Vogt continued:

“The relationship between valuing happiness and depressive symptoms was seen far more significantly in UK [and US] participants than those from other nationalities or dual citizens.

We don’t go so far as to test what those differences are, but there seems to be a significant divide between English-speaking western cultures and other cultures when it comes to how our internal value of experiencing happiness shapes our experiences and mood.”

Related

• The Happiness Paradox: 7 Ways Pursuing Pleasure Backfires (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Happiness Studies (Kahriz et al., 2019).

It is possible to have too much free time for your mental health.

When people have about two hours spare time each day they are happiest, a fascinating study finds.

People with between two and five hours spare time a day are equally happy as those with two hours spare.

This suggests that the ‘time poor’ should try and carve out around two hours of free time each day to increase their happiness.

People who have seven hours spare time each day, though, are markedly less happy and satisfied with their lives than those with two hours spare.

This may partly be because people with too much time feel unproductive due to wasting it.

The solution to too much free time is finding and pursuing a purpose.

When people feel purposeful, it makes them happier.

Too busy to enjoy yourself

The findings contradict what many people might imagine: that more spare time is always linked to happiness.

While having two hours is much better than one hour or none, more than this is not linked to higher levels of happiness.

Dr Marissa Sharif, the study’s first author, said:

“People often complain about being too busy and express wanting more time.

But is more time actually linked to greater happiness?

We found that having a dearth of discretionary hours in one’s day results in greater stress and lower subjective well-being.

However, while too little time is bad, having more time is not always better.”

The results come firstly from a set of surveys in which the associations between free time and happiness among thousands of Americans were tested.

These clearly showed that some free time was linked to more happiness, but only up to a point.

Secondly, in a set of experiments people were asked to imagine they had a low (15 minutes), moderate (3.5 hours) or high (7 hours) amount of free time each day.

The results showed that people felt happiest and more productive with a moderate amount of free time each day — around 3.5 hours, or so.

Low amounts of free time were linked to feeling stressed and high amounts to engaging in unproductive activities like watching television and using the computer.

Dr Sharif said:

“Though our investigation centered on the relationship between amount of discretionary time and subjective well-being, our additional exploration into how individuals spend their discretionary time proved revealing.

Our findings suggest that ending up with entire days free to fill at one’s discretion may leave one similarly unhappy.

People should instead strive for having a moderate amount of free time to spend how they want.

In cases when people do find themselves with excessive amounts of discretionary time, such as retirement or having left a job, our results suggest these individuals would benefit from spending their newfound time with purpose.”

Related

• 11 Tiny Habits That Skyrocket Happiness — Without Reinventing Yourself (P)

The study was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Sharif et al., 2021).