Do It: Fake It Til You Make It
And by "It" I mean happiness.
For several reasons.
(1) Feigning happiness can sometimes make you actually happy.
(2) If you're unhappy now - wait. When you get old, you're going to be happy again.
(3) Being happy is correlated to longer life, so if you just suck it up, you can get to #2.
(4) Right now, unhappy, you're kind of a drag.
Footnotes
- This doesn't apply to clinical depression and other psychological disorders. Obviously. If you need help - get it.
(1) Studies have shown feigning certain positive emotions leads to experiencing them.
(2) A couple months ago, researchers published a study in Science Direct that concluded happiness is U-shaped. As in you're born. You're happy. You get less happy. You get old. You get more happy.
(3) There's a gabillion studies correlating life expectancy and happiness. Feel free to troll the Gerontology journals going back to the 60's.
(4) I didn't look for a study on this. But it's true.
Labels: WildCard
posted by Martha Flynn @ 9:33 AM
4 Comments:
Um, I kind of love this post.
but wait...there's a series of articles in the Huffington Post about women and happiness by Marcus Buckingham www.huffingtonpost.com/marcus-buckingham/ that says women as they get older are *less* happy and as a gender are less happy than we were 40 years ago. there's more...it's based on many studies over the last 40 years, not just one. sorry to be a downer...i'm unhappy :)
There are a few things to note about the two studies Marcus references for the Huffington article:
1. Study 1: The idea of women being happier 40 years ago than they are now can exist simultaneously as happiness being U-shaped. The former addresses different age cohorts (aka people born of a different time) than the latter and speaks more to changes in cultural female expectations than an individual's happiness.
2. Study 2: The study he references that concludes women end life less happy than they start life is based on data from 21 years worth of data (1973-1994) from the bi-annual GSS (not 40 years worth of data for "many studies" which gives the illusion of multiple published and duplicative peer reviewed results by analyzing that data - the holy grail of science, really, which isn't the case here). I'm not sure if he implies that it was 40 years worth of data, but the questions that were studied only existed in overlap with the GSS for 21 years.
3. Study 2: The primary hypothesis and end game of the study relates to "domain" satisfaction and happiness which is to say it say it attempts to correlate attainment of desirables (e.g. marriage, family, personal goods) with personal weighting of desires (important, not important) and thus generalized happiness. While it's interesting work, the GSS is not designed to measure this hypothesis.
4. The Science Direct study was designed to control for cohort effects (again, that pesky problem about whether you're asking the same person whether they are happy when they are young and again whent hey are old) which the other study admittedly does not.
5. Study 2: Again, while the study Marcus references seeks to find correlates between attainment and happiness, it ignores possibly the largest factor which affects happiness in the elderly set (which is of interest in study of u-shape effects) : personal health. Without this domain, its unrealistic to make any reasonable conclusions about happiness in the elderly.
I could probably go on and on...but I'll stop at five. :):):)
NOW BE HAPPY DAMMIT!
I agree w/ Sophie...I love this post.
This post made me happy. :)
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