The Dark Side Of The Modern Pressure To Be Happy (M)
What the continuous pressure to be happy is doing to some people’s emotions.
Category: Happiness
How To Get A Bigger Buzz From Upbeat Music
How you can get that beautiful chills-down-the-spine feeling.
How you can get that beautiful chills-down-the-spine feeling.
Upbeat music sounds better when you make a concerted effort to enjoy it, rather than just listening passively.
While many people let music flow over them; making the effort to enhance your emotions can be an incredibly rewarding experience.
Across two studies, researchers looked at the effect of music on positive emotions.
In one experiment, people visited a lab five times over two weeks to listen to music they’d selected for 15 minutes:
- Half were told to just listen to the music and not think about their happiness.
- The other half were told to try and feel happier and think about their happiness.
Although both groups said they’d enjoyed the music equally, it was the group that tried to feel happier that actually felt happier after the two weeks.
Another experiment confirmed the results, with participants listening to upbeat music, and trying to make themselves happy, feeling better than those who just listened passively.
Crucially, though, trying to make yourself happier only worked when the music was upbeat.
The study’s lead author, Yuna Ferguson, pointed out a pitfall with actively seeking happiness from music.
She counsels against continually asking yourself “Am I happy?”:
“Rather than focusing on how much happiness they’ve gained and engaging in that kind of mental calculation, people could focus more on enjoying their experience of the journey towards happiness and not get hung up on the destination.”
The study’s co-author, Professor Kennon Sheldon, said the study demonstrates our potential to change our own levels of happiness:
“…we can intentionally seek to make mental changes leading to new positive experiences of life.
The fact that we’re aware we’re doing this, has no detrimental effect.”
Why not try it right now with your own favourites, or one of the upbeat pieces of classical music used in the study (Aaron Copland’s ‘Hoe-Down’ from the ballet ‘Rodeo’):
Related
The study was published in The Journal of Positive Psychology (Ferguson & Sheldon, 2013).
2 Personality Traits That Predict Happiness
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Two personality traits that lead to a happier and more satisfying life.
Young adults who are more outgoing go on to lead happier lives.
Being more emotional stable also predicts happiness in later life, psychologists discovered.
The study looked at data from 2,529 people born in 1946.
They first answered a series of questions about their personalities at 16 and 26-years-of age.
Forty years later, in their early sixties, they were asked about their well-being and satisfaction with life.
Dr Catharine Gale, the study’s first author, explained the results:
“We found that extroversion in youth had direct, positive effects on wellbeing and life satisfaction in later life.
Neuroticism, in contrast, had a negative impact, largely because it tends to make people more susceptible to feelings of anxiety and depression and to physical health problems.”
High extroversion is linked to being more sociable, having more energy and preferring to stay active.
High neuroticism is linked to being distractible, moody and having low emotional stability.
Increased extroversion was directly linked to more happiness.
Greater neuroticism, meanwhile, was linked to less happiness via a susceptibility to psychological distress.
Dr Gale said:
“Understanding what determines how happy people feel in later life is of particular interest because there is good evidence that happier people tend to live longer.
In this study we found that levels of neuroticism and extroversion measured over 40 years earlier were strongly predictive of well-being and life satisfaction in older men and women.
Personality in youth appears to have an enduring influence on happiness decades later.”
The study was published in the Journal of Research in Personality (Gale et al., 2013).
This Is The Most Underrated Key To The Good Life — Beyond Happiness & Meaning (M)
The ‘good life’ is more than only a meaningful and happy life, there is a third path to fulfilment.
2 Key Choices From Your 20s Predict A Successful Future (M)
Find out which early-life choices predict future flourishing.
Surely This Is The Weirdest Way People Communicate Their Happiness (M)
One more reason why happiness is so infectious.
The “Big Three” Habits That Shape Young Adults’ Happiness (M)
Discover which everyday habits matter most for boosting mental well-being.
Why Some Songs Make You Cry While Others Give You Goosebumps
The real reason some people enjoy listening to sad music.
The real reason some people enjoy listening to sad music.
Music that makes you cry gives pleasure.
This might help to explain the enduring popularity of sad music.
The results come from a study that tested the cathartic effect of sad music.
Participants in the study were divided into two groups based on their responses to four questions:
“While listening to music, how frequently do you (1) get goose bumps, (2) feel shivers down your spine, (3) feel like weeping, and (4) get a lump in your throat?”
The researchers dubbed these the chills group (first two questions) and the tears groups (second two questions).
Then both groups listened to music that invoked their favourite feeling: either the chills or the tears.
The study’s authors explained the results:
“A song that induced chills was perceived as being both happy and sad whereas a song that induced tears was perceived as sad.
A tear-eliciting song was perceived as calmer than a chill-eliciting song.
These results show that tears involve pleasure from sadness and that they are psychophysiologically calming…”
It’s pretty easy to see why music that invokes chills would be pleasurable.
However, the study’s authors were slightly at a loss to explain what is so special about sad music:
“…sad songs induced strong pleasure.
It is difficult to account for why people feel sad music as pleasurable; however, the current results suggested that the benefit of cathartic tears might have a key role in the pleasure generated by sad music.”
One answer could be that music is such an ambiguous form, that it is easy to see your own life reflected in it.
The authors write:
“…listeners could identify with the sad character of the sad song and felt as if the singer knew their own sad experiences, making them feel understood and bringing pleasure…”
Related
The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports (Mori & Iwanaga, 2017).
How Nature Promotes A Deeper Sense Of Wellbeing (M)
The benefits of natural spaces go beyond relaxation, they touch our authentic selves.
Why We Sabotage Our Own Happiness By Putting Off Enjoyable Activities (M)
How our brains trick us into avoiding the very things that bring us joy.
