Measuring happiness

What really makes us happy? The results of the annual Harris Poll Happiness Index, released last week, indicate that 80% of (American) respondents are satisfied with their lot. This despite the fact that 72% of them feel that their views were not heard at the seat of power and that 66% report that they frequently worry about their financial situation.

Interesting data from the Poll includes the findings that women are generally more happy than men (and married women are happier than their singleton friends), people seem to become increasingly happy as they age and the lucky individuals who earn over $75,000 are significantly happier than those who earn under $35,000. Maybe money can buy a certain amount of happiness - or peace of mind - after all.

Comparison of this year's Poll Index with that of the past two years indicates that White Americans are less happy than they were three years ago, while Hispanics and African-Americans have become happier, and the happiness levels of both of these ethnic groups have surged to surpass the contentment levels of White Americans.

In what might seem to some to be a surprising result, disabled people polled as being marginally more happy than those who do not have a disability.

One finding that I find particularly interesting is that, serious talkers, who talk frequently about topics such as politics, education and the economy are much happier than those who talk about 'light topics' frequently. Generally, talking seems either to indicate happiness, or to keep us smiling; the silent types clocked up far less happiness than their chatty counterparts and the index of their happiness came in far lower down the scale than that of the average adult.

So, if you truly want to experience happiness your best bet is to be a well-paid, married, black female in the autumn of your life, who enjoys a regular debate about health care reform, or the state of the nation.

And what about the rest of us?

You can't do much about your age, gender or ethnicity. You can't necessarily alter how much money you make. You can become more engaged in your society and you can get involved in serious discussion about the larger issues.

So, get out there, get informed and get talking!

Happiness at the click of a mouse

Access to technology can be linked with positive emotions, according to a recent study by BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT. We might like to reminisce about just how happy we felt when we first cradled in our hands our new iPhone, or how devastated we were when our computer crashed while we were performing an important operation, but overall, do we feel happier or more stressed by the gadgets, gizmos and metatags that have become a part of our daily lives? Not one to make idle speculation, before coming to its own conclusions regarding technology and satisfaction, BCS took into account the views of 35,000 people around the world.

It found that women in developing nations and people of both sexes who had low levels of education or low incomes were particularly influenced by their access to technology.

Certainly, technology helps up to connect with friends and family who have spread themselves across great distances and this may be the reason why women, the cogs at the centre of most families, particularly value access to technology.

However, many researchers disagree that technology makes us any happier, including Yair Amichai-Hamburger, director for Internet Psychology at the Sammy Ofer School of Communications in Israel, who argued in an article in New Scientist (December 2009) that technology often acts as a barrier to real-world friendships and blurs the important distinctions between work and leisure time.

Like many things in life, balance appears to be the key to enjoying technology. A little is fantastic, but overindulgence (often manifest in addiction to the Internet) can mean that other areas of our lives suffer.

So is the iPad the answer to eternal happiness? I can't help but think that there is no one universal recipe for happiness, but perhaps a recipe for 'happiness in our times', that many of us could use as a base, upon which to build our own happiness soup.

It seems that as humans, we need to feel connected to one another. We require friendships, personal contact and love to grow in a positive manner. In recent times, western society has become fragmented and technology has stepped into the space created to fill the void with Facebook friends, text messages and blogs. These interactions are better than none at all and the nature of friendships that are supported by technology is such that those friendships can form and grow across great distances and time zones. This means that your Facebook friend might not be able to reach out and give you a hug, but you and they may share interests and ideas, that no one in your local area shares with you.

The argument as to whether technology is friend or foe to our collective happiness must take into account our human desire to be included in our society. Western society is a society that relies upon and revels in its technology and should one not have access to it, exclusion would certainly feel like a loss, if not a social disability. I can't comment on the situation in other cultures, but I would imagine that as technology becomes more pervasive, exclusion from its use becomes a greater issue.

The BCS study suggests that one of the reasons why technology makes people happy is the status that it affords them. Since Adam and Eve first enjoyed a wickedly delicious taste of indulgence, people have derived a certain degree of pride and contentment from displaying status symbols . Whether that status comes from owning the largest herd of cattle; driving the streets in a brand new sports car; or whipping out our brand new gadget to show salivating friends, our enjoyment comes from proving to friends that we are somebody, that we're in the know and that our personal capital is valuable.

All of this said, I don't believe that having access to technology alone will make a life meaningful. Technology is an instrument that allows us to perform certain tasks. What we do with technology and how we do it must be the source of any real meaning.

Learn to be happy and you'll be healthy

I've been dancing around it for a long time but today I'm going to come out and say it: most of us, when we search for the meaning of life, are really searching for the secret to happiness. I've tried not to fall into this trap and, although I think that an unhappy life is not necessarily a life that is devoid of meaning, my inclination when I research philosophy, history, contemporary news stories and when I make observations about my own life, is to presume that happiness is indicative of successful living.

I'm sure that many immoral and cruel individuals experience a certain degree of happiness and I would hate to suggest that their brand of living is a successful model that the rest of us should follow. This said, in the case of most not-totally-insane individuals, personal happiness is usually a sign of a life well lived and a rosey outlook.

Happiness seems to be the secret to successful living, not only for its own ends, but due to the health benefits that accrue when one feels happy. Quite simple, happiness helps us to thrive, both mentally and physically.

Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that focuses upon the origin and impact of positive emotions. Some positive psychologists argue that happiness is an emotion that leads to better learning and it has been linked, in numerous studies, with reduced incidence of stress and heart disease. Researcher Barbara Fredrickson, in an article called 'The undoing effect of positive emotions' hypothesises that positive emotions help a person to return to their normal physiological levels after a period of intense stress.

In the general sense, positive emotions seem to have numerous benefits for human health. People who believe that they can positively influence situations experience lower stress levels, improved immune systems, reduced pain and are in a better position to overcome addiction and dependency than are those who believe that their suffering is outside of their control.

Based on their research, positive psychologists have developed techniques to improve the life experiences of those with perfect mental health, as well as people suffering with depression and other mental illnesses. Such is the evidence to support positive psychology and optimism that these techniques are used by life coaches, HR professionals, psychologists, therapists and counsellors to help people to thrive.

The eminent psychologist, Martin Seligman teaches what he calls 'learned optimism' and finds that those who have been taught to deal with situations in such a way as to reduce negative emotions, experience less stress and are generally more successful in study and work situations.

Seligman's method of teaching optimism is simple. He asks 'students' to understand how and why they react in certain ways to adversity, to analyse the basis for their assumption and then to dispute it in their own minds. In this manner people learn to react differently when faced with challenges and research has shown that after having learnt optimism, individuals experience less anxiety and less stress.

Given the evidence to support happiness, I've chosen this lovely subject as the focus of the next few of my blogs. I can't think of a single reason why happiness might not be the meaning of life and I challenge anyone to suggest why learning to be happy and tending one's mental health and attitudes might not be as vital as is looking after one's general health.

War torn

Last night, I watched a movie called Black Hawk Down, with which I am sure that many of you are familiar. It is a harrowing tale of horrors and terrors the like of which I hope that I will never witness and is based on events that occurred in Mogadishu, Somalia when US soldiers found themselves surrounded by militia forces and badly equipped to defend themselves.

I am finding it more and more difficult to watch graphic war movies, I don't know why. Before I could separate what I saw on screen from the reality that soldiers today experience, but these days, when Hollywood takes me on a trip into the battlefields, I can't seem to stop thinking about those men and women who are far flung and daily in danger. When others might cheer the explosions on screen, I find myself on the verge of tears.

Throughout history we have battered and butchered each other in our battles over land, money, women and ultimately, power. Small men with large egos have commanded the weaker and worthier to march into blood baths on a whim. Others have fought for freedom and for the pursuit of their ideals. Whether the ends were petty or vital, the violence and the horror were the same. There is no getting away from it, we are cruel beasts when we get going.

World War II was the deadliest conflict of all time (to date). Over 60 million people were killed during this truly global conflict.

World War I was essentially a European war. Children as young as 14 entered the trenches and fought as men. Initially, many thought of this war in a romantic sense, believing that they would be tested and have the opportunity to show their valour. They died in their thousands, moan down by gunfire, gassed and starved and frozen.

The Vietnam war has been the dominant conflict in the American consciousness for over 40 years. It was a horrific waste of human life that rocked East Asia even more than it did the United States. The number of military deaths between 1959 and 1975 is widely debated and the final figure depends on how the count is made, for example some figures include the South Vietnames forces killed in the final campaign, others do not. In 1995, the Vietnamese government reported that its military forces, inluding NLF, suffered 1.1 million military deaths and 2 million civilian casualties.

Icasualties.org reports the tally of deaths from 2003-2010 amongst the Iraq coalition (US, UK and other) at 4715. For Afghanistan, icasualties.com totals the number of dead at 1759.

Closer to home, between 1969 and 2001, 3,526 people were killed as a result of the Northern Irish troubles, according to the Sutton Index of Deaths.

These are just numbers and these numbers apply only to those who were killed; many more were injured or suffered mental breakdowns in the aftermath of their experiences.

War is everything counter to life's meaning. It destroys life quite literally and by quashing the spirit of otherwise perfectly good men and women.

It frustrates me when I see the leaders of our cruelest conflicts portrayed on screen as being inhuman monsters. Cruelty is part of our make up, it is all we can do to keep it at bay. In terrible circumstances we would probably all surprise ourselves by what we are capable of. Some people are capable of extremes even when they do not need to rely on such methods for survival.

If there is one very simple lesson that we should learn, but don't seem capable of listening to, it must be this: be peaceful.

Love is the drug

There are many different kinds of love and love is very difficult to define - most of us know it when we feel it, but ask anyone to break love down into its constituent parts and they will likely falter. Romantic love is one of the most exciting manifestations of the love effect.

The anthropologist Helen Fisher and her assistants studied 49 men and women's physical reaction to love and loss. They put each individual into a brain scanner and showed that love is the product of a chemical reaction in the brain. Fisher found that love 'lights up' an area of the brain that is similarly affected when people take cocaine. Certainly, love is one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful emotion that people feel.

In her book, 'Why we love' Fisher discusses the results of her studies of the brains of 17 people who had just fallen in love, 15 people who had just been rejected and 17 people who were still in love after 20 years of marriage. She traces the origin of love and the evolution of love, from the first love poem, which dates from Sumeria over 4,000 years ago, to the present day. Her theory is that romantic love is a primal emotion that exists in order to promote procreation and the survival of the human race.

However, other researchers contend that while sexual relationships have (obviously) happened since complex life existed, romance is a new fangled idea that only came into being in recent centuries. These researchers claim that for a long period, humans did not experience any form of romantic love. Clearly, these researchers have not yet delved into the poetry of ancient Sumeria.

The term 'romance' is certainly not as old as romantic love itself. The term originated from the medieval ideal of chivalry, which was described in romance literature. This literature was based largely upon tales of the adventures of the elite classes and love had little to do with this 'romance' until the late 17th century.

So, today, what do we mean when we seek romance? Candle-light dinners can be lovely, but why does a heart drawn in the sand bring a smile to someone's face? I believe that most of us seek reassurance that our feelings of strong emotion for someone are returned. Grand gestures and thoughtful touches demonstrate clearly that someone cares about us and when we know that someone shares our feelings, we are more confident in demonstrating our own love.

One of the greatest challenges is that of keeping romance alive after the first flutter of sexual attraction has passed. I doubt that there is any full-proof way to keep the embers of romantic love burning, but from what I have observed, I note that the couples who seem happiest after many years together are those who laugh together and work towards common goals, while maintaining a certain independence through their own particular hobbies or interests. My theory is that romance doesn't always come naturally and that you've got to help it along from time to time. Thankfully, the odd weekend away, candlelit dinner and thoughtful gift seem to go a long way towards rekindling the fires. And sometimes the most romantic moments are those that only you and your partner understand, when you share something that means a lot to both of you, but which no one else might appreciate.

Finally, a word of advice from the not particularly wise to those whose fire has almost burnt out: if in doubt, bring flowers (unless your beloved suffers with hay fever that is, in which case arm yourself with anti-hystemines before suggesting any romantic picnics, or long walks in the country. On second thoughts, stick to chocolates and the sea-side and save your loved-one from sneezes and streaming eyes; there's nothing romantic about feeling like a snivelling wreck!).

Down with stress

Quite some time ago, while discussing philosophy and the meaning of life I wrote that this search would not involve mathematics. There is something else that I would like to exclude from this compendium of all things meaningful and that is stress.

Yesterday, I met with a woman who exuded stress the way some people exude confidence. It coloured her every word and movement to the degree that I began to sniff the air for the stench of it.

Stress is one of the most poisonous by-products of modern existence. With all our labour saving devices and life-extending medical treatments, rarely have so many suffered from such a degree of tension since hunting and gathering times.

We obsess about the consumption of carcinogenic foods and have banished smokers from sight in order to diminish our risk of contracting cancer but we accept without question a degree of stress that causes high blood pressure, cancer, skin disorders, ruined relationships and countless disturbed nights of sleep, or lack thereof.

Here are the things that I do to reduce stress:

- jogging is my number one stress busting activity, a good run along the beach near my house seems to melt away tension and make the world seem like a much more pleasant place than it was when I first put trainer to ground.

- sitting in the sun is another wonderful way to relieve stress. It is amazing how the warm rays of the sun cause my shoulders to drop, my face to relax and my mood to lift considerably.

- cooking tomato sauce has always helped me to blend away the day. Maybe this is a cure that is particular to me, but I have always found it enormously therapeutic to stand over a hot pot of sauce, stirring and watching, with little worry that I will ruin the dinner if I drift off into thought for several minutes while I cook.

- there's nothing quite like the talking cure and women are great at this. We talk ourselves into circles and then out of them again.

- sleeping for 10 hours on the trot has an unbelievable (literally, I did not believe that sleep alone would have the effect that it did - try it, it's wonderful) de-stressing effect. I never feel quite so calm, collected and in control as I do when I sleep for 10 hours. Of course, having the time to sleep for half the day is quite a luxury and one of the reasons why, although being unemployed can be enormously stressful, I felt energised throughout much of the time that I was free of the 9-5.

And now that my lunch break is drawing to a close, I must dash outside to take a few gasps of fresh air before I plough on, full speed ahead towards 5.30 and the light at the end of the stress tunnel.

Ash Friday

Seemingly pre-historic events have invaded our post-post-modern airspace. Ice chunks tumbled from a volcano beneath Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull (ay-yah-FHAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl) glacier on Thursday, as hot gases melted the ice. The ash cloud that formed subsequently has grounded flights across Europe.

We are at the whim of the flow and flux of molten metals and sheets of rock. How strange it seems that in this advanced, technological age our high flying plans can be curtailed by something so basic and unpreventable as the lumbering movements of mother earth's belly.

How easy it is to forget that no matter how many life-enhancing super drugs or super computers we invent, our lives here are unstable at best. We may be the most advanced lifeforms on the planet, but the simple truth is that we're no match for that planet, when it flexes its muscles we crumble and bow down before its might.

Why ever we thought that we could become masters of the universe I cannot understand. Why we abused this planet for so long and celebrated our ability to do so, I cannot even begin to fathom. Human life on earth may eventually be brought to an end by the eruption of a super-volcano, or by a meteor that smashes into the surface of the earth, alternatively we may overheat our planet or starve to death due to man-made environmental degradation. It is humbling to know that there are forces more powerful than armies, nuclear bombs and withering looks. I think that it is also useful to be reminded from time to time that the planet is powerful, the planet will out live us by a long way, we're just passengers here and we should respect this position.