Why should we bother about happiness and well-being?

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”

                                                                             Martin Luther King Jr (Baptist minister and Civil Rights activist)

Are there any advantages and disadvantages to increasing our well-being?

Apart from the fact that we all know that it simply feels good to be happy and satisfied with life,  are there any other advantages? The lucky majority of people actually consider themselves as being mostly happy anyway^1,4, so what is the point of increasing our well-being any further? Today, we are going to look at the advantages of positive emotions and well-being, and the reasons why we should seek to increase them.

Advantages of a high level of well-being:

• Positive emotions enable us to think more creatively and to be more effective in problem solving.³ They enable us take appropriate risks where necessary and persevere at difficult tasks.⁴ This makes us more flexible and inventive when dealing with routine situations, and also when we encounter problems in our private or professional life.

• People with a high level of subjective well-being tend to be more productive and successful at work. They also tend to have a higher income on average.⁴

• Happy people find it easier to connect to others; they tend to have stronger and more successful relationships with their life partners, family and friends, and therefore have a stronger social support network. They are also more likely to be compassionate and help others^3,4, and have more peaceful, open and cooperative attitudes.⁴  This does not mean that people with a high level of well-being are a pushover or that they cannot be assertive. It has actually been shown that negotiators who convey a positive spirit are more likely to reach better business deals.³   

• There are also health benefits. Apart from an obvious better mental health,  a high level of well-being is generally associated with a longer life, decreased likelihood of physical illness (particularly cardiovascular and infectious diseases) and decreased likelihood of drug abuse.^1,4

• A positive mindset helps us to overcome set-backs faster, and makes us more resilient against negative life events.^1,3   As you will find out over the next weeks and months, resilience is very important, because it makes us cope with stress at work or at home, and with traumatic life experiences. 

• So overall, if we experience a high level of well-being, we tend to function better and interact in a more effective and positive way with the world and other people. If we do this particularly well, we flourish.³

• An additional benefit is that positivity is ‘contagious’³ and spreads to other people, so that not only you but also others around you benefit from it. When your well-being increases, their well-being increases due to positive interactions. Unfortunately, the same is true for negativity.³

Are there any disadvantages?

Just to clarify: the type of well-being we are talking about here is not a self-centered state of permanent euphoria, pure pleasure-seeking or continuously elevated, positive mood (hedonic happiness), but instead a balanced life incorporating other elements like long-term life satisfaction, achievement, and a sense of purpose/meaning (eudaimonia). It would be unrealistic, undesirable and quite impossible to achieve a permanent state of extremely high well-being. This is for several reasons, including:

• Occasional negative emotions and ‘neutral’ states of mind are not only inevitable but also helpful in order to experience positive emotions as something special and desirable.⁴

• Negative emotions are also necessary, as feelings like sadness, frustration and anger can make us aware that something in our life is not right; negative emotions motivate us to change our behaviour in order to improve the situation.^3,4 In fact, it has been demonstrated that people who experience some negative emotions as well as positive ones are likely to be more creative and perform better than people who regard themselves as 'perfectly happy'.⁴ Some life situation are simply very sad, frustrating or stressful, and it is therefore important to allow ourselves to experience appropriate negative emotions, e.g. grieving after the loss of a family member or friend, or after failing to achieve a goal which was very important to us. Suppressing or denying negative emotions is counterproductive.³

• It has been shown that people who are highly focused on achieving their individual happiness in a self-centered way are often paradoxically less happy. It is therefore important to avoid excessive self-monitoring and self-focusing; conversely, well-being often increases when we turn our attention outwards.⁶

With these caveats, there is not much evidence that striving for a high but balanced well-being has many disadvantages. However, there are a couple of further interesting points:

• Unrealistic optimism can be unhelpful- it can make us complacent and expect overly positive outcomes. For example, many projects (e.g. construction of buildings), take longer and are more costly than initially allowed for because of overly optimistic planners. Also, extremely happy people on the very high end of the ‘happiness scale’ may not take risks, including health risks, seriously enough which may shorten their lives in some circumstances.^1,4
• It has also been demonstrated that depressed people (who will generally have a pessimistic mindset) may sometimes be able to assess the level of control over their environment more accurately than non-depressed people, who seem to overestimate the personal control they have.⁵

So what is the bottom line?

Although most people will on average consider themselves as mildly happy (slightly above neutral), there has been a rapid increase in people affected by depression, anxiety disorders and burn-out syndrome over the last decades across the U.S. and European countries^1,2, despite continuous increases in wealth, physical health and life-expectancy. Even if we do not suffer from any of these mental conditions, many of us experience chronic stress and we may be dissatisfied with at least some aspects of our lives.² This may apply more to people who have highly demanding, stressful jobs (veterinary work is just one of them!) and/or people who experience stress more intensely. We obviously need to be aware that un-reflected optimism has some disadvantages, but overall, increasing our well-being in a balanced way is a very worthwhile goal. Also, even if you are currently considering yourself as very happy, at some point in our lives we all have to go through a rough patch; it is worth to be aware of strategies to help us through the darker and more difficult times.

A truly amazing person- What can we learn from…:

This is not at all a political blog. However, there is clearly an association between individual well-being, politics and social factors.^1,7  Therefore I have decided to include the American actress Meryl Streep in this section- not because of her life achievements but because of what she recently said at the award ceremony for the Golden Globe.

In her speech, she celebrated the diversity of actors contributing to the film industry, and spoke about the importance that people on the public platform are empathic and do not humiliate or act disrespectfully towards others, as ‘it filters down into everybody’s life because it kind of gives permission for other people to do the same thing’.

If you have previously missed her speech, you can watch it here: www.youtube.com

What we can learn from Meryl Streep is that it is important to be aware of our conduct towards others. Negativity often generates more negativity- as she said in her speech ‘disrespect invites disrespect and violence incites violence’.

Hate, resentment and disrespectful behaviour often lead into situations, which are difficult to bear just as Martin Luther King Jr suggested. This is not only true on a greater political/social level but also in interpersonal relationships, when dealing with your friends, your partner or your colleagues. Of course there are times when we have to be assertive and we can also all have a bad day from time to time. But we should be mindful of the effect our behaviour has on others and remember that when we increase our own well-being, it will also affect our interactions with others in a positive way, potentiating the benefits of positivity and well-being. 

More on this topic:

Watch this YouTube video where Barbara Fredrickson, one of the leading researchers in the field of positive emotions and flourishing, explains the benefits of positive emotions.

There are several excellent evidence-based books written on the general topic of well-being and happiness, these include the books Positivity by Barbara Fredrickson, Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman, Happiness by Ed Diener & Robert Biswas-Diener and The Happiness Track by Emma Seppälä (see also references below). These books are all easy to read; each book has a slightly different emphasis but I found them all very informative.

Preview: Next time we will look into which specific factors influence our well-being and start exploring the questions what we can do to improve our lives.

References and further evidence-based reading:

1. Seligman MEP. Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being- and How to Achieve Them. Nicholas Brealey Publishing; London, UK. 2011

2. Seppälä E. The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success. Piatkus; London, UK. 2016.

3. Fredrickson B. Positivity: Groundbreaking Research to Release Your Inner Optimist and Thrive. Oneworld Publications; Oxford, England. 2010.

4. Diener E, Biswas-Diener R. Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth. Blackwell Publishing; Oxford, UK. 2008.

5. Seligman MEP. Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life. Vintage Books; New York. 2006.

6. Layous K, Lyubomirsky S. The How, Why, What, When and Who of Happiness. In: Gruber J, Moskowitz JT (Ed.), Positive Emotion: Integrating the Light Sides and Dark Sides. Oxford University Press; New York. 2014.
7. Chirot D, Seligman MEP (Ed.). Ethnopolitical Warfare: Causes, Consequences and Possible Solutions. American Psychological Association. 2001.

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