So yesterday’s blog was about money, today’s is about happiness and both of them stem from the further instruction on these topics that I received from reading Sapiens.
It turns out (I did know this already) that scientists now believe that happiness levels in humans are probably pre set and genetically coded. This is an amazing revelation because it takes the acceptance of the fact that happiness is a chemical situation that is coded within our brain and not something spiritual. Basically the scientific premise for happiness involves a chemical reaction including the interaction of many chemicals such as endorphins, dopamine and serotonin. It turns out that the amount of receptors that you have for these chemicals is pre coded and therefore you have the ability to achieve ‘an optimum level of happiness’ that is pre set.
To put that simply it may be that my average level of happiness that I can achieve is 6 out of 10, it may be that yours is 8. It means that if I try really hard to control the things that enable me to be happy I can perhaps reach a 7 at the top of my range (my range being from 5-7). It may be that your range is 7-9, that means that I can never achieve an 8 and I can never be as happy as you, but I can be as happy as I can be. This is reflected in research on happiness where people return to a ‘base level of happiness’ after an amazing life experience or a terrible life experience. It seems to be well proven now that if two people are travelling in a car immediately after filling out a subjective happiness questionnaire and one gets out and finds out they have won the lottery and the other travels on and is involved in a car accident which leads to a significant injury, the likelihood is that in a years time both will remain back to the level of happiness they had when they filled out the questionnaire.
This is not to say that you cannot become happier, it is to say that you can only raise your happiness to a specific genetically coded level (if you’re always a miserable ba***rd you might always be a miserable ba***rd). There are certain physical things that you can easily do to increase your level of happiness.
- Control your sleep
- Control your alcohol intake
- Control your screen
- Control what you eat
- Control your exercise
Looking at these things alone they’ve already been proven to improve levels of happiness to your maximum achievable level. The problem with all of this stuff is that society tries to push us away from all the things that will inevitably help us reach our maximum.
All society seems to say is “go on treat yourself – you deserve it”. You work hard you deserve a new car (makes you work harder to pay for the car). You work hard you deserve a donut, the wrong type of food to push you towards happiness. You work hard you deserve a night in front of the telly drinking wine. The secret of this for me (and I have considered and studied this for some years now) is that happiness is ethereal and internal and my happiness is entirely different to somebody else’s. Marketers would love us to believe that all we need to do is buy their product to increase our level of happiness. The truth is it just doesn’t work. Happiness is a project, Charles Handy was right about his white stone, it takes your whole life to work on and only at the end of that you would realise if you got it right or not.
Blog post number: 1379
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