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Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
—ARISTOTLE
IN BRIEF: Happiness is not only fulfilling and fun, it’s healthy; our mental outlook has a profound effect on our overall well-being. The secret to happiness remains a secret, but family, friends, and making time for what really matters are often part of the happiness equation.
When New York City journalist Norman Cousins was diagnosed with a crippling connective tissue disease, he laughed it off . . . literally. Given a 1 in 500 chance of recovery by his doctors in the 1960s, he started taking massive amounts of vitamin C and, instead of working, spent his days watching comedies. He later would write in a famous account, “I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep,” adding, “When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and, not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.”1
Cousins said that due to his self-prescribed regimen of laughter, he recovered. He lived until 1990, decades after his original diagnosis.
Happiness is not a luxury, nor should it become a casualty of our busy lives. It is one of the reasons we were born, one of the things that makes life so very worth living, and it is the root and goal of all vices.
And while happiness is a reward in and of itself, as Cousins’s case reminds us, sometimes it can help us in surprising ways and really be the best medicine. Regardless of what some skeptics say, the idea that positive thinking plays a central role in health has been shown time and again.
We turn not older with years, but newer every day.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist, has made a career of studying the mind’s influence on health. In the 1980s, she recruited eight men in their seventies and had them live in an apartment in New Hampshire that had been retrofitted as a time capsule, with music, movies, TV shows, books, and magazines from 1959, when the men in the study were in their prime. There were no mirrors in the dwelling and the men were told to make an attempt to be the person they were twenty-two years before. They were told that if they did that, they would feel as they used to.
The results, which were staggering, included improvements in dexterity, agility, posture, and eyesight. This wasn’t the first or last time Langer’s work produced spectacular results. Previously she had found that nursing home residents who were in the early stages of memory loss did better on memory tests when they were given incentives for remembering. In another classic study, she gave plants to different groups of nursing home residents. One group had to take care of the plants themselves; the other group had the plants taken care of by the staff. A year and a half later, twice as many residents who took care of their plants themselves were alive than those whose plants were taken care of for them.
More recently, Langer and a student, Alia Crum, studied eighty-four hotel chambermaids who reported they did not exercise much. One group was told how much exercise they actually got while cleaning rooms, and it was explained to them that this was as much, and possibly more, exercise than the surgeon general recommends. Once their mind-set had been changed, the maids lost more weight relative to a control group who had not been given a new perspective about the exercise inherent in their work.2
In 2010, Langer was a coauthor of a study at a hair salon where women were given blood pressure tests before and after a haircut and or a hair-coloring appointment. Participants said they felt they looked younger after the makeover, and they also had lower blood pressure.3
In Bruce Grierson’s 2014 New York Times Magazine article about Langer, Jeffrey Rediger, a psychiatrist, said of her: “She’s one of the people at Harvard who really get it. . . . That health and illness are much more rooted in our minds and in our hearts and how we experience ourselves in the world than our models even begin to understand.” Much of her work examines people’s perception of the world around them and their need to focus attention on what is right in front of them. In other words, their need to be there.4
Research into the ways positive thinking helps our health still is ongoing, but it’s also clear that the opposite is true: negative thinking can have a dramatic effect on us. Extreme grief even can precipitate death from a “broken heart,” which, although it may sound made up, is a real thing. According to the American Heart Association, “Broken heart syndrome, also called stress-induced cardiomyopathy or takotsubo cardiomyopathy, can strike even if you’re healthy.” Some potential emotional shocks that can precipitate broken heart syndrome include the death of a loved one, bad news including a negative medical diagnosis, losing (or winning) at a casino, the loss of a job, or the breakup of a marriage, as well as physical shocks including accidents, major surgery, or even some drugs.5
When actress Debbie Reynolds died in 2016, just a day after the death of her equally famous daughter Carrie Fisher, some speculated a broken heart was the cause. Though that turned out not to be the case (Reynolds died of a stroke), her son, Todd Fisher, said grief was a factor.
Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough.
—EMILY DICKINSON
Though the mind-body connection is not fully understood, and serious study of the issue has sometimes been hijacked by the “wellness” industry and its clever marketing slogans, the connection between what we think and what we feel is real. Which brings us to the obvious next question: How do we obtain happiness?
If we knew that, we’d be doing more than just writing this book, but we can tell you many of those who have studied happiness conclude that the things we think will make us happy—winning the lottery, a big promotion at work, etc.—often provide less of an uptick in joy than we expect. Lasting happiness doesn’t come just from what we drink, eat, or do—not even the great things we’ve talked about drinking, eating, and doing elsewhere in this book. Instead, it comes from the people with whom we do all those things and the kindness we share. Family and friends can make us crazy sometimes, but they also offer the keys to contentment.
Passing stranger! You do not know how longingly I look upon you,
You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking,
(it comes to me, as of a dream,)
I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you.
—WALT WHITMAN
According to research presented at the 125th annual convention of the American Psychological Association in 2017, loneliness and social isolation present a greater public health hazard than obesity. Those with stronger social connections had a 50 percent decreased chance of death, while the impact from the isolation and loneliness epidemic continues to grow.
“Being connected to others socially is widely considered a fundamental human need—crucial to both well-being and survival. Extreme examples show infants in custodial care who lack human contact fail to thrive and often die and, indeed, social isolation or solitary confinement has been used as a form of punishment,” Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Brigham Young University, said when the research was presented. “Yet an increasing portion of the U.S. population now experiences isolation regularly.”
About 42.6 million people over age forty-five in the United States are estimated to be suffering from chronic loneliness, according to AARP’s 2010 Loneliness Study. And the picture gets more solitary from there: Most recent U.S. census data showed more than a quarter of the population lives alone, more than half of the population is unmarried, and marriage rates and the number of children per household have declined.6
In 2009, George Vaillant, the longest-serving former director of one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies on healthy male adults, the Harvard Study of Adult Development (previously known as the Grant Study in Social Adjustments), was asked by The Atlantic what he thought was the most important finding of the study, started in the 1930s. He replied, “The only thing that really matters in life are your relations to other people.”7
As if a phantom caress’d me, I thought I was not alone,
walking here by the shore;
But the one I thought was with me, as now I walk by the shore—the one I loved, that caress’d me,
As I lean and look through the glimmering light— that one has utterly disappear’d,
And those appear that are hateful to me, and mock me.
—WALT WHITMAN
So visit or call your mother, daughter, sibling, or grandparent and take a walk together. Or simply take a hike with your four-footed best friend, gaze in awe at the horizon, relax your eyes, rest your mind, and savor the moment in nature. Make new connections with those in your community by joining a volunteer, exercise, or spiritual group, or by signing up for a class. Or best of all, hug somebody. A hug a day really can keep the doctor away. In a 2015 study involving 404 healthy adults, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University examined the effects of social support and hugs on the susceptibility of developing the common cold after being exposed to the virus. Those who got more support and hugs were less likely to get a cold, or if they did develop a cold were more likely to have milder symptoms.8
But what about connections made via technology, through smartphones, the Internet, and social networks? These are more complicated.
In a 1998 study, Robert E. Kraut, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, found the more that participants used the Internet, the more their depression increased. More recently, Kraut says that has changed. When his 1998 study was conducted in the early days of the Internet, people were communicating with people they did not know across the globe, what Kraut calls “weak ties.” As Adam Piore writes in Nautilus, “Kraut’s more recent research has found that today most people spend their time online communicating with people with whom they already have strong ties. In those cases, he argues, the findings are unequivocal: Online connection decreases depression, reduces loneliness, and increases levels of perceived social support.”9
But as anyone who has gone out with friends or family who were constantly looking at their smartphones knows, technology can be a double-edged sword when it comes to real connections. In addition to robbing us of actual face time with those physically near us in the real world, technology can rob us of an essential element of happiness and a modern vice that is increasingly difficult to come by: free time.
In a 2016 report, an app tracked the cell phone habits of more than ninety smartphone users. They found people tapped, swiped, and clicked on their phones an average of 2,617 times a day.10 While some of these “touches” are no doubt responses to work emails, important texts, and even trivial but harmless fun updates, it seems likely that smartphone use is also an addictive habit. Like so much else we discuss in this book, the key is moderation. Computers, phones, and technology in general can be useful—while writing this book we emailed, texted, and collaborated in real time with digital documents. This is one example of the many ways we find technology helpful in our daily lives, but we always try to make sure we are the ones using the technology, not the other way around.
Phones also can increase our FOMO (fear of missing out) and lead us to clutter our lives with busy but unrewarding activities as we attempt to keep up with the Joneses, or at least the upbeat way the Joneses portray themselves online.
Of all the things that matter in life—friends, family, good food, good entertainment, fresh air, fresh water—very little of that has been improved by technology. Ultimately, the things that always have mattered to humans still matter: the quality of how we conduct and share our lives with people around us and with nature.
Even potentially good things, like school and work, can be thieves of time.
The satirical paper and website The Onion once ran the headline: “Health Experts Recommend Standing Up at Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.” “We observed significant physical and mental health benefits in subjects after just one instance of standing up, walking out the door, and never coming back to their place of work again,” said the made-up authors of the fictional study. “We encourage Americans to experiment with stretching their legs by strolling across their office and leaving all their responsibilities behind forever just one time to see how much better they feel. People tend to become more productive, motivated, and happy almost immediately.”11
This tongue-in-cheek article is not as far off as you might think.
Americans are retiring later, and the health of the elderly is declining. As The Boston Globe reported in October 2017, new data suggests that “Americans’ health is declining and millions of middle-age workers face the prospect of shorter, and less active, retirements than their parents enjoyed.”12
School or work, despite their obvious benefits, can sometimes be unhealthy. Sitting for eight uninterrupted hours a day in a windowless office or classroom isn’t good for us; neither is the eyestrain caused by constant reading, often on electronic screens. Spending so much of our lives indoors being sedentary can diminish our mental, emotional, and physical health.
None of what’s been discussed in this chapter means we shouldn’t grieve the loss of loved ones or avoid all stress in search of a blissful, blemish-free life. Happiness, like the other vices in this book, is best when enjoyed in moderation. It’s okay to be sad, it’s okay to be angry, but when our defense mechanism, or vital force, is working well, we should not get stuck in never-ending cycles of sadness, anxiety, fear, or anger. And when you do get sad or angry, allow yourself that sadness. In other words, don’t worry too much about not being happy, and don’t despair if you’re not presently jumping for joy. While many studies have found a link between positive and happy feelings and health, one large study of more than a million middle-aged women in the UK found no increased chance of death for less happy women over a ten-year period.13
The nice thing about fun is even when it’s not helping us healthwise, it’s certainly helping our mental state because it’s, you know, fun. Elsewhere in this book we’ve talked about many vices that we and others enjoy. To maximize your enjoyment, we recommend looking forward to one or more each day and really savoring that joyful experience, paying attention while you’re engaging in it, and telling others about it. In a nutshell, try to live la dolce vita, “the sweet life.” The book Living La Dolce Vita: Bring the Passion, Laughter, and Serenity of Italy into Your Daily Life by Raeleen D’Agostino Mautner celebrates some of the most important aspects of the sweet life. These include making the simple decision to prepare and share healthy delicious food and drink with friends and family in a fun, loving, positive, and open environment.14
So limit stress, but don’t avoid it entirely. Take heart in the words of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
If you forget everything else about this book, remember these four words: Don’t worry, be happy.