Category: Happiness

It seems only common sense that happiness should be good for our physical health, but psychological research has sent mixed signals in recent years. Some studies have found it is, while others have found no effect, and some even a negative effect.

In a new article published in the Journal of Happiness Studies, Professor Ruut Veenhoven of Erasmus University offers a possible solution to this question. In reviewing 30 studies, he finds that the neutral and negative findings for the effects of happiness on health are in studies on people who were ill at the time.

Continue reading “Happiness Could Add 10 Years to Your Life”

There are two requirements for decision-making that will bring happiness in the future. First we need to know how a particular decision will make us feel in the future. To do this accurately we need to avoid the systematic biases that affect how we predict our future emotional states.

This is no mean feat in itself – the distinction bias, projection bias, impact bias, memory bias and belief biases are tricky customers.

Continue reading “4 Ways We Fail to Choose Happiness”

“Life is the sum of all your choices.” –Albert Camus

Happiness is in our hands if only we could make the right decisions in life. Decisions often rely on making accurate predictions of how we will feel in the future. Unfortunately for us psychologists have shown that there are five major biases in the way we predict our future emotional states.

Continue reading “How to Choose Happiness: Combat 5 Decision-Making Biases”

The rapidly developing Chinese economy has a hard lesson to teach developed nations about the happiness of the majority.

We all have an intuitive sense that the society we live in has a huge effect on our lives. It’s almost impossible not be influenced by the way other people treat us, the values they hold and the way they behave.

Continue reading “Why The Chinese Are Getting Richer But Not Happier”

If money doesn’t bring happiness, then why do people behave as though it does?

It seems only natural that happiness should flow from having more money. Even if they don’t admit it, people still behave as though it were true. More money means you can have what you want and do what you want. The house you dream of? It’s yours. The new car you desire? Here are the keys. The freedom to enjoy your favourite pastimes? Here’s your racket, the court is down there, just past the pool.

Continue reading “The 3 Reasons Money Brings Satisfaction But Not Happiness”

A new and blossoming field of psychology – positive psychology – has begun to uncover fascinating, evidence-based answers to many questions about happiness. I’ve been sizing up the most recent findings to reveal the emerging science of happiness.

Continue reading “The New Science of Happiness”

The psychological literature clearly shows there is a strong relationship between success and happiness. For example, people who have a comfortable income, or high status in society are usually happiest. But which one comes first, happiness or success?

Continue reading “9 Ways Happiness Leads to Success”

Because happiness is something most of us aim for, how we define it has important implications for how we conduct our lives. To see why, compare these two competing definitions of happiness:

1. Happiness is all about minimising pain and maximising pleasure.
The underlying idea here is that there is a kind of mathematics of happiness. Imagine if on our deathbeds we were able to add up all the moments of pleasure in our lives and then all the moments of pain. The amount by which the pleasures exceeded the pains would tell us how happy we were during our lives.

Continue reading “What is Happiness?”

“If a little is not enough for you, nothing is.” –Epicurus

Philosophers down the ages have been keen to tell the rest of us how to live and how to be happy. Certainly their advice comes to us with the lustre of intellectual achievement; it is both high-brow and high-powered, but can we understand any of it and how does it fare against modern psychological research?

Continue reading “Hedonist Philosopher Epicurus Was Right About Happiness (Mostly)”