|
Summary: We search for
happiness in eager
anticipation and joyful
memories, but we're better
off paying attention to each
moment as it passes.
 Jason
Carpenter was one of those
Red Sox fans -- determined,
passionate and absolutely
convinced that a World
Series win would be a
life-changing event. The
baseball team famously
botched an easy win during
the 1986 championships, and
Carpenter, 13 at the time,
broke down in sobs. Yet he
never gave up on his dream:
that the Red Sox would one
day prove they deserved his
unwavering devotion. "I
imagined crying with
happiness," he says. Last
fall, Carpenter, now 31 and
living in New York City, saw
his dream come true when his
team beat the Yankees --
their blood rivals -- in the
league championships, after
the biggest comeback in
baseball history. Carpenter
was over the moon. "I went
nuts with 200 of my closest
'strangers,' all displaced
Boston fans, partying in the
streets deep in the heart of
enemy territory until 4
a.m."
With the next morning,
though, came the darker side
of triumph. Carpenter's
elation had worn off. "I was
wondering what to do with
myself. I was depressed."
Years of longing for a win
had boiled down to a
fleeting moment of bliss.
What Carpenter had believed
his whole life would make
him happy actually happened
-- and then he
faced...nothingness.
The things we expect will
bring us lasting joy rarely
do. Whether it's losing 25
pounds, getting a major
promotion or watching a
troupe of perennial losers
finally win the big one,
long-anticipated events give
us a swell of glee...and
then we settle back into
being just about as happy as
we've always been. Most of
us have a happiness "set
point," fixed by temperament
and early life experience,
which is very difficult to
shift. Whether you win the
lottery or wind up in a
wheelchair, within a year or
two you generally end up
just about as happy (or
unhappy) as you started out.
Yet the quest for happiness
isn't futile. Psychologists
now believe that many of us
can turn the well-being
thermostat up or down a few
notches by changing how we
think about anticipation,
memory and the present
moment. Our sense of
well-being is intimately
tied into our perception of
time. The problem is that we
usually get it wrong. Memory
tricks us -- we don't
remember our experiences
properly, and that leaves us
unable to accurately imagine
the way we'll feel in the
future. At the same time,
expectations mislead us: We
never learn to predict what
will make us happy, or how
to anticipate the impact of
major life experiences.
Focusing on the moment may
help us understand how to be
happy. Besides, we have a
built-in tendency to grow
more cheerful as we get
older: Aging helps us ignore
the negative and shift our
attention toward the
positive. Finding happiness
isn't hopeless -- it seems
to be just a question of
time.
Youth is a downer, it turns
out. Young people naturally
pay more attention to the
negative. Older people are
faster than younger people
to orient to smiling faces
rather than scowling ones in
advertisements, finds Linda
Carstensen, a professor of
psychology at Stanford who
studies how age influences
time perception and goals.
Similarly, young people are
quicker to pick up on
negative stimuli. This
youthful attention to the
bad may be a necessary part
of growing up -- a cognitive
mechanism that helps with
survival. Since the young
are focused on new (and
therefore possibly
dangerous) experiences and
acquaintances, they may be
more likely to put
themselves in harm's way.
"Young people need to take
risks, and as such, they
need to pay attention to the
potentially negative, to
recognize the lion or bear
that is going to jump out at
them," Carstensen explains.
As we grow older, though, we
are increasingly drawn to
the familiar, like close
friends and relatives. If
given a chance to meet
either their favorite author
or a close friend for lunch,
younger people chose the
former, while older people
preferred the latter.
Carstensen's findings
shatter the stereotype of
seniors as a crabby bunch.
When she spent one week
frequently monitoring the
moods of 184 adults, aged 18
to 94, she saw that older
people experienced highly
positive emotional
experiences for longer
periods of time than younger
people, and their highly
negative emotional
experiences subsided more
quickly. In other research,
she showed that their
memories were in general
more positive. The sunny
habit of revising history
may explain why seniors tend
not to wallow in bad moods:
Pleasant memories are always
invading their thoughts, and
these fond recollections may
"wash away" anger or
sadness. "There is no
empirical evidence that
older people are grouchy,"
she says, although
personality studies have
revealed that they do tend
to care less about what
other people think of them.
Carstensen thinks this shift
toward the positive occurs
because as we age, we become
aware, consciously or not,
that time is running out.
The awareness of life's
fragility turns our
attention to the present
moment, so we worry less.
The potential missteps and
possible catastrophes that
cloud a young person's
vision of the future fade
away. "If you think about
the things you worry about
-- getting a job, finding a
mate or an apartment -- they
are almost always concerns
about the future," she says.
The gap between ambition and
achievement, a major source
of stress and unhappiness
for young people, also
narrows with age. As we get
older, we either achieve our
goals or replace them with
more reachable aims.
Older people's positivity
bias can even boost their
memories. The elderly
generally do poorly on tests
of short-term memory. But
when Joseph Mikels, a
post-doctoral fellow in
psychology at Stanford and
researcher in Carstensen's
lab, showed them joyful
scenes of babies and
puppies, older adults
demonstrated better visual
memory than their younger
counterparts. He theorizes
that they are able to
overcome their cognitive
handicaps because they are
highly motivated to remember
images that match up with
their personal goals of
fostering warm
relationships.
These cheerful habits of
mind can also be adopted by
young people, especially
when a chapter of life is
coming to a close. Think of
getting ready to move to a
new city. Annoyances or
grudges toward local friends
recede; memories of good
times flood your mind. Your
awareness that your time
with them is finite pushes
the things you'll miss about
them to the foreground, and
the present moment comes
more clearly into focus.
Mikels says that conjuring
this state of mind, simply
by appreciating life's
brevity, could help young
people find the contentment
that comes more naturally to
their elders.
Carstensen and her team are
now studying Buddhist
meditators, to see how their
practice alters their
perception of time. Her
theory is that meditation
may cultivate a mind-set
similar to an old person's,
since it shuts out thoughts
of the past and the future
in favor of the present.
"The religion is centered
around the fact that we
could die at any moment,"
she says.
Related research by
psychologist Richard
Davidson at the University
of Wisconsin has in fact
shown that meditation may
change how the brain works.
He measured brain activity
in people who had finished
eight weeks of meditation
training and found
significantly more activity
in the left prefrontal
cortex, a region associated
with positive feelings and
pursuit of goals. More
recently, Davidson traveled
to India to measure the
brain activity of Buddhist
monks who had each spent at
least 10,000 hours in
meditation. The activity in
their left prefrontal cortex
far exceeded that in their
right prefrontal cortex,
which is the brain's home
for negative emotions and
anxiety. Most of us don't
have 10,000 free hours to
devote to brain
resculpturing. But the
finding suggests that if we
train ourselves to become
more mindful and slow down
our sense of passing time,
we can learn to monitor our
moods and thoughts before
they spiral downward. We
can, in other words, make
ourselves happier.
In the quest for happiness,
most of us try to guess what
the future might bring, then
project our current selves
-- with all of our hopes,
quirks and predilections --
into that unknown. We use a
fuzzy image of the future to
make all kinds of decisions,
whether it's what to make
for dinner or whom to marry.
Those predictions are
essential to happiness --
and they are almost always
wrong, finds Daniel Gilbert,
professor of psychology at
Harvard. As a result, our
efforts to improve our lives
often fall flat.
Working with Tim Wilson,
professor of psychology at
the University of Virginia,
Gilbert has shown that we
are remarkably bad at
"affective forecasting," or
predicting how we'll feel in
the future. The good things
are never as good as we
imagine they'll be; the bad
things are never as bad. We
think of ourselves as both
more fragile and more easily
satisfied than we really
are. We overestimate the
impact of a good turn of
event: We think that a fresh
career or a new relationship
will permanently change us,
when all it does is provide
a short-term mood boost. On
the other hand, we are also
much more resilient than we
give ourselves credit for.
Most of us do recover
emotionally from life's
traumas, whether it's the
death of a close friend or a
bitter divorce.
"Memory is a flawed partner
to anticipation," explains
Gilbert. "If I ask you to
remember a terrorist attack,
you will instantly think of
Sept. 11, not because it's a
prototypical act of
terrorism but because it's
so unrepresentative." But if
your memory provides you
with the example of Sept. 11
as a representative for all
terrorist attacks, you're
very likely to mispredict
how you'll feel in response
to future attacks. You
expect that you will feel
the way you did after Sept.
11, yet because the vast
majority of terrorist
attacks are very small and
involve the loss of
relatively few lives, you
would probably be a lot less
upset and recover more
quickly. The bright side to
forecasting errors like this
is that they expose our
built-in psychological
immune system, as Gilbert
calls it, which ensures we
will survive future horrors
we can't predict.
There are many other reasons
why we have such trouble
imagining how we'll feel in
the future: We don't account
for our own internal
spin-room, the
rationalization techniques
we use to explain away bad
situations. ("She wasn't
right for me anyway.") We
also tend to anticipate the
most dramatic symbol of a
future event. If it's a
promotion, for example, we
fantasize about the moment
the boss breaks the news.
What we forget is that life
goes on after the
congratulatory handshake --
there will still be a job to
do, a commute to endure and
a family to raise.
Even simple choices between
concrete alternatives are
plagued by forecasting
errors, shows Christopher
Hsee, an economist from the
University of Chicago. As a
result, we have a hard time
picking the job, the house
or the car that will make us
happiest. That's because
there is a big difference
between the criteria we use
to choose something and the
criteria we use to evaluate
it later. If, for example,
you're hemming and hawing
over whether to buy a
top-of-the-line camera that
is bulky and heavy or a
second-best model that's
easier to carry, the
comparative difference in
picture quality may steer
you toward the unwieldy
model. Once you get the
fancy camera home, though,
you no longer have the
lesser-quality photo to
compare it with. All you
notice is that it's a hassle
to lug around -- and as a
result you barely use it. A
better strategy is to try to
get a holistic impression of
each experience or product
you're contemplating, Hsee
says. Just consider the
first camera and imagine how
it would be to use it,
without immediately
comparing it with the
second.
Gilbert has another solution
to the prediction problem:
asking other people for
advice. "Grandmothers,
rabbis and philosophers have
been telling us for years
that we shouldn't want shiny
new things, but it's
impossible not to," he says.
"The important lesson is to
learn how to predict more
accurately what will give us
lasting pleasure versus
short-term pleasure, because
there are things from the
mundane to the
transcendental that really
do bring pleasure and
happiness." His remedy is
surrogation, or quite
simply, asking people who
have already done what
you're considering doing how
they liked it. "Most of the
futures you're contemplating
are someone else's memory,"
he says. While it helps to
have a lot in common with a
"surrogate," even a randomly
chosen person can probably
give you a better estimate
of how much you would enjoy
an experience than would
your own impulses.
Yet few people are willing
to use this technique. To
his dismay, Gilbert's
research shows that people
would rather close their
eyes and imagine a vacation
spot, or a new job, than ask
someone what that holiday or
that career was like for
them. This is because
although we are remarkably
similar in our emotional
reactions to events, we like
to think of ourselves as
unique, Gilbert says. We can
correct our forecasting
errors, but at a high cost
to our self-image -- we
would rather be original
than happy.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman
grew up near the Bois de
Bologne in Paris, and from
time to time, his parents
would take him on a trip to
the woods. Young Danny,
engrossed in some other
activity, would scream
bloody murder at the
prospect of being
interrupted. Yet once he got
to the woods, he'd get so
involved in his play that
when it was time to go home,
he'd cry again. For Kahneman,
those fits of tears are
proof that he was a happy
child. "When you don't want
to stop what you're doing,
that's a happy condition,"
he says. "There is something
sad about people who live
their lives wanting to be
elsewhere."
Kahneman won the Nobel Prize
in economics in 2002 for his
insights in irrationality
and decision-making, but has
since turned his attention
to well-being. That has led
him to study the value of
time, "the ultimate finite
resource." He's examining
the difference between
immediate and remembered
experience and has zeroed in
on the fact that our actual
experience and our memories
of life operate on separate
tracks, and affect our
happiness in completely
distinct ways. Most
psychologists who study
happiness have focused on
how we think of our lives in
retrospect, but Kahneman
believes that there's a lot
to be learned from looking
at "online" happiness -- or
how we feel in the moment.
Because our memories are all
we keep of our experiences,
we have a built-in bias that
favors memory over immediate
experience. Our experiencing
self, the part of us that
registers events as they
happen without anticipation
or reflection, doesn't have
much of a voice in
influencing how happy we are
with our lives, he says.
Instead, memory dominates.
Imagine you've thrown a
marvelous party. You've
spent hours reveling, but
just as the night is winding
down, two drunk guests get
into a vicious argument.
Even though your pleasure
during the preceding hours
was real, you will remember
the event as a total
disaster.
That spoiled night is a
clear example of the
"evaluating self" at work,
explains Kahneman. To create
a narrative out of life's
thousands of disconnected
moments, our evaluating self
focuses on the most intense
moments and the final
moments of an experience.
That's the way we're built,
but our tendency to rely
mostly on memory to judge
our well-being can lead us
to make counterproductive
decisions that undermine our
own happiness.
For instance, many parents
believe they'd be happier if
they spent more time with
their children. But because
spending more time together
might not raise the
intensity or change the
concluding moments of the
experience, it won't be
reflected in rosier
memories. "If you double the
time that you spend with
your children, it may have
very little effect on what
you will remember about that
time," Kahneman says. If
memory is all that matters,
spending additional time
with your children
accomplishes nothing.
Another example: You had a
great time on summer
vacation in Italy last year,
so you consider going back.
But since returning to the
same place wouldn't give you
many new memories to savor,
your evaluating self might
decide against it -- even
though your experiencing
self would clearly enjoy the
trip.
"The point is that we
shouldn't measure our lives
on the quality of our
memories alone," says
Kahneman. He doesn't simply
mean we should be more
spontaneous -- in fact, he
points out that since time
is our most valuable
resource, we should pay
careful attention to how we
spend it. We need to
vigilantly protect our time
from the biases of our
evaluating self by not
relying on memory alone.
Otherwise, we risk wasting
it in ways that contradict
our values and don't bring
us happiness.
Well-being is also a product
of "focal time," or how we
direct our attention. This
is the key idea behind the
different roles that
pleasures and comforts have
in creating happiness, a
distinction originally
posited by the late Stanford
economist Tibor Scitovsky.
Comforts are objects or
experiences we tend to take
for granted: a computer that
doesn't crash, boots that
don't leak or even a spouse
who is supportive and warm.
Pleasures, on the other
hand, are stimuli that you
focus your attention on: a
good meal, a silky shirt, a
boisterous evening with
friends. The difference
isn't intrinsic to the thing
itself but rather lies in
our attitude toward it:
whether it captures our
attention or recedes into
the background.
Our evaluating self misleads
us by giving more weight to
comforts, those things that
make life easier, but that
we become accustomed to. Our
experiencing self,
meanwhile, prefers pleasures
-- absorbing events or
interactions that hold us
captive. If you ask someone
with a Lexus if she likes
it, she'll probably say yes,
since its high quality
really does bring happiness.
But that's only while she's
thinking about it -- and she
probably doesn't think about
it very often. "Suppose you
are driving in your car with
your spouse and you are
quarreling," Kahneman
posits. "Are you better off
if you're driving an Escort
or a Lexus?" You're much too
busy arguing to pay
attention to the Lexus'
smooth ride, so at that
moment the quality of the
car hardly matters. At the
same time, something trivial
that grabs your focus and
interest, like getting
flowers, will bring you
happiness. If you got
flowers every day, though,
it would become routine, and
neither garner your
attention nor bring you much
pleasure. Kahneman's point:
Nothing is as important as
it is when you're thinking
about it.
As he's explored the role of
attention and
moment-by-moment experiences
in happiness, Kahneman has
identified factors that have
a powerful effect in
determining immediate mood.
When asked how they feel "in
the moment," he's found that
people report being happier
when they are with friends
than when they're with a
spouse or child. It sounds
counterintuitive, but it
makes sense: When we're with
friends, we're intensely
engaged, whereas we don't
pay as much focused
attention to family -- they
recede into the background,
since we see them all the
time. Similarly, getting
enough sleep is crucial,
probably because it is
difficult to be engaged with
the things you enjoy when
you are tired. And people
under time pressure at work
don't report much happiness,
as they are unable to pay
attention to anything other
than their impending
deadlines.
Kahneman acknowledges the
power of the well-being "setpoint,"
but he still thinks that we
can influence our own
happiness in small ways --
by attending to the moment,
and by choosing activities
that engage rather than numb
our minds. If we heed what
does give us immediate
pleasure, and if we are
skeptical of our
error-riddled memories and
predictions, we can learn to
spend our money, time and
attention in ways that make
us happier. If it's simply
our nature to root for a
cursed team or to chase a
dream that, when realized,
will never be as sweet as it
is in our mind's eye, then
we can try to appreciate the
joy that comes in the
striving. PT
Article courtsey of
www.psychologytoday.com
|
