Happier for the Holidays
Proven Strategies for Increasing Your Happiness – Dr. Julie Neal, ND
I’ve been feeling a palpable heaviness in the air. Maybe it’s the aftermath of the election, the recent snowy weather, my recent viral illness that took two weeks to resolve, or the stress of planning the upcoming holidays. Either way, I can feel a shift in my mood.
I am generally a positive person and I don’t like being stuck in a bad mood for any length of time. What I recently learned through the work of Arthur Brooks, a social scientist dedicated to happiness research, is that you can actually do things to increase your happiness. With the right strategies, techniques and practice, you can get happier right now.
“Every single person can get happier and we know what they need to work on to get happier. But they need the knowledge,”
said Brooks, a professor at Harvard University and the author of 13 books including From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (2022) and Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier (2023), which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.
The Macronutrients of Happiness
According to Brooks, you can get happier if you focus on these three big areas of your life.
#1 – Enjoyment
Enjoyment occurs when you are doing a pleasurable activity that incorporates people and memories. With some small exceptions, like walking alone in nature, pleasurable activities that you do alone are not going to bring you happiness. According to Brooks, you need people and memories to make an experience enjoyable.
For example: Drinking alcohol alone in your apartment may give you pleasure but it won’t give you enjoyment. Instead, make a list of your favorite activities and find other people to join you.
#2 – Satisfaction
Satisfaction is the joy you experience after a struggle. You can’t feel joy without enduring real struggle in the process. Brooks uses the example of cheating on an exam. If you cheat on an exam and you get an “A” you won’t get any satisfaction. It’s the struggle of putting in the hours to study that allows you to feel satisfaction when you pass the test. Look at your struggles as beneficial. It is actually normal to go through hard things and in the process you achieve joy and satisfaction.
One of the problems with satisfaction is that it is short-lived. For example, buying a new house may give you satisfaction temporarily but eventually it wears off. Brooks talks about the ratio of your haves over your wants. He says the fastest way to get lasting satisfaction and increase your happiness is to decrease your wants. He suggests making a reverse bucket-list where you intentionally let go of the attachment to wanting more.
#3 – Meaning
Meaning is the most important aspects of building happiness. According to Brooks, meaning is a combination of three things — coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence suggests that things happen for a reason. Purpose refers to your life having a direction. Significance asks why does your life matter?
Brooks boils meaning down to two important questions:
1: Why are you alive?
2: For what are you willing to die today?
Brooks says there are no wrong answers but the important thing is to have an answer. Many people don’t have answers to these questions, which creates a meaning crisis in their life.
The Challenges of Happiness Today
Brooks says most people don’t prioritize their happiness in the same way they prioritize eating vegetables and going to the gym. For many people happiness is a “nice-to-have” especially if they are busy with little kids, multiple jobs, aging parents, house and car payments, etc. To add to that, research has shown that social media, used by 5.17 billion people worldwide, has been catastrophic for happiness, creating more social comparison, addiction, distraction, and dissociation from life. Political contempt from elections and the isolation from Coronavirus have additionally pushed happiness farther out of reach for most people. According to Brooks, there has been a decline in American happiness over the last 50 years. Today there are twice as many people who report being unhappy as compared to the people who report feeling happy.
Faith, Family, Friends and Service
According to Brooks, your happiness investment plan should be made up of four things – faith, family, friends and meaningful work. The majority of happiness research shows that the happiest people invest their time into these four areas of life.
Faith is the ability to zoom out on life, focusing less on “me” and more on the awe of the larger world. It’s the transcendence from the day-to-day “me-world” that’s important.
Connecting with family and friends is another way to build your happiness bucket. Moving past family disagreements and loving family members for who they are is critical. Maintain at least one or two friends that aren’t connected to your work. Real friends are not deal-friends, and real friends can see your true self.
Finally, the act of service, even the smallest of gestures to one person, can raise your happiness exponentially. As Brooks says, serving others is not about helping large scale communities. It is about the small acts of kindness that we can all do for each other every single day.
As we enter the holiday season there will be many opportunities to recommit to your faith, family, friendships and serving others. What are some of your favorite ways to cultivate and sustain happiness during this time? I wish you good health and a happier holiday season.
Best, Dr. Julie Neal
