The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science

by Jonathan Haidt

that most people show an asymmetry: more activity either in the right frontal cortex or in the left frontal cortex. In the late 1980s, Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin discovered that these asymmetries correlated with a person’s general tendencies to experience positive and negative emotions.

A big part of cognitive therapy is training clients to catch their thoughts, write them down, name the distortions, and then find alternative and more accurate ways of thinking.

The pleasure of getting what you want is often fleeting. You dream about getting a promotion, being accepted into a prestigious school, or finishing a big project. You work every waking hour, perhaps imagining how happy you’d be if you could just achieve that goal. Then you succeed, and if you’re lucky you get an hour, maybe a day, of euphoria, particularly if your success was unexpected and there was a moment in which it was revealed (… the envelope, please). More typically, however, you don’t get any euphoria.

The first he calls “pre-goal attainment positive affect,” which is the pleasurable feeling you get as you make progress toward a goal. The second is called “post-goal attainment positive affect,” which Davidson says arises once you have achieved something you want.

“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.”4

In the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you. Good fortune or bad, you will always return to your happiness setpoint—your brain’s default level of happiness—which was determined largely by your genes.

In every permanent situation, where there is no expectation of change, the mind of every man, in a longer or shorter time, returns to its natural and usual state of tranquility. In prosperity, after a certain time, it falls back to that state; in adversity, after a certain time, it rises up to it.

The most widely reported conclusion, from surveys done by psychologist Ed Diener,26 is that within any given country, at the lowest end of the income scale money does buy happiness: People who worry every day about paying for food and shelter report significantly less well-being than those who don’t. But once you are freed from basic needs and have entered the middle class, the relationship between wealth and happiness becomes smaller.

You can increase your happiness if you use your strengths, particularly in the service of strengthening connections—helping friends, expressing gratitude to benefactors. Performing a random act of kindness every day could get tedious, but if you know your strengths and draw up a list of five activities that engage them, you can surely add at least one gratification to every day.

In his more recent book, Luxury Fever,

Humans are the only creatures on Earth whose young are

utterly helpless for years, and heavily dependent on adult care for more than a decade.

There is a window of time—just a few weeks or months after the tragedy— during which you are more open to something else. During this time, achievement goals often lose their allure, sometimes coming to seem pointless. If you shift toward other goals—family, religion, or helping others—you shift to inconspicuous consumption, and the pleasures derived along the way are not fully subject to adaptation (treadmill) effects. The pursuit of these goals therefore leads to more happiness but less wealth (on average).

When bad things happen to good people, we have a problem. We know consciously that life is unfair, but unconsciously we see the world through the lens of reciprocity.

if a child’s environment feels safe and controllable, the child will (on average) develop a more positive affective style, and will be less anxious as an adult.35

But if the environment offers daily uncontrollable threats (from predators, bullies, or random violence), the child’s brain will be altered, set to be less trusting and more vigilant.

We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world.45

“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Aristotle wasn’t saying that happiness comes from giving to the poor and suppressing your sexuality. He was saying that a good life is one where you develop your strengths, realize your potential, and become what it is in your nature to become.

Life offers so many chances to use one tool instead of another, and often you can use a strength to get around a weakness.

The self is the main obstacle to spiritual advancement, in three ways. First, the constant stream of trivial concerns and egocentric thoughts keeps people locked in the material and profane world, unable to perceive sacredness and divinity.

If the third dimension and perceptions of sacredness are an important part of human nature, then the scientific community should accept religiosity as a normal and healthy aspect of human nature—an aspect that is as deep, important, and interesting as sexuality or language (which we study intensely).

If religious people are right in believing that religion is the source of their greatest happiness, then maybe the rest of us who are looking for happiness and meaning can learn something from them, whether or not we believe in God.

My despair was particularly strange because, for the first time since the age of four, my life was perfect. I had a wonderful girlfriend, great friends, and loving parents. I was captain of the track team, and, perhaps most important for a seventeen-year-old boy, I got to drive around in my father’s 1966 Thunderbird convertible. Yet I kept wondering why any of it mattered. Like the author of Ecclesiastes, I thought that “all is vanity and a chasing after wind” (ECCLESIASTES 1:14).

When a computer breaks, it doesn’t fix itself. You have to open it up and do something to it, or bring it to a specialist for repair. The computer metaphor has so pervaded our thought that we sometimes think about people as computers, and about psychotherapy as the repair shop or a kind of reprogramming. But people are not computers, and they usually recover on their own from almost anything that happens to them.

You can’t fix a plant; you can only give it the right conditions—water, sun, and soil—and then wait. It will do the rest.

Newberg believes that rituals that involve repetitive movement and chanting, particularly when they are performed by many people at the same time, help to set up “resonance patterns” in the brains of the participants that make this mystical state more likely to happen.

The final version of the happiness hypothesis is that happiness comes from between. Happiness is not something that you can find, acquire, or achieve directly. You have to get the conditions right and then wait. Some of those conditions are within you, such as coherence among the parts and levels of your personality. Other conditions require relationships to things beyond you: Just as plants need sun, water, and good soil to thrive, people need love, work, and a connection to something larger.