The How of Happiness | Sonja Lyubomirsky | Talks at Google

thank you so much for coming I was actually pointing to the pronunciation key of my name that I have there lubo Mir ski it means love and peace in Russian which I think is very appropriate for a positive psychologist someone who studies happiness um so I'm delighted to be here uh I live in Santa Monica I just uh drove it took me about four minutes to get here uh and I think Santa Monica and Google U are great places for talk about happiness and so what I'm going to do today is give you a brief overview of the work that I do on happiness uh the work that is described in my book uh and on how people can become happier how people can uh increase their happiness past uh or over and above their uh baseline or what's called a set point we'll talk about that um and I'll try not to give everything away so you can actually read the book um I usually try to communicate in a way that non-scientists can understand and I show graphs and things like that but I I'm sure that this audience will have no problem with with any of the research that I describe um uh the book is very accessible to General audiences um I just realize we haven't got book for [Music] this hello hello great all right we muted them great um so let's get started um raise your hand if you don't mind being a little happier than you are right now okay how about a lot happier who wants to be a lot happier okay good um well I believe that all of us want to be happy even if we don't use the same language to describe that wish and even if we uh define happiness differently or we pursue happiness differently um in every culture that researchers have surveyed uh they asked people what are their top goals in life they found that most people put um happiness at the top of their lists and even in cultures that don't value happiness as much I was born in Russia where uh suffering is valued um and even in those cultures when people are asked what do you want most for your children um most people say I want my children to be happy so I think it's really a universal goal um and indeed throughout history actually I just realized that uh I need a a remote or or some way to advance my slides cuz I my mic is keeping me fixed onto uh or I can have a human remote I guess um so um throughout history human beings from all over the world have uh how about next slide oh these are just uh actually click it again um okay um throughout history people from all over the world have been in infatuated with the idea of Happiness especially in the Western World um this is a famous quote from Aristotle that some of you may uh know about and a couple of surveys have actually found that Americans think about happiness at least once a day which is kind of amazing um you can sort of see if it's true for yourself um next slide you have to kind of Click again you know I wonder it' be easier if we just move my computer just crashed uh oh that's never happened before so I'll just continue then um I also have a quote from William James who is considered to be the father of psychology um and he talks about how uh to be happy is one of the sort of the the goals that most people seek to have in their life okay so here's William James um and I actually I love this uh picture of him because he looks really unhappy so I don't know maybe that's why he was interested in talking about how happiness is a secret motive of all that people do um next slide and um The Pursuit of Happiness clearly also holds a uh an honored position in American society where it's um uh described as one of the inali rights that people have uh US declaration of independence um and the pursuit of happiness I should say is a worthwhile goal to I mean we don't just strive to be happy just because it feels good um it turns out that happy people enjoy a lot of benefits um two of my colleagues and I actually published a paper where we where we reviewed 225 studies on happiness um and we concluded this was a metaanalysis which is a analysis of study of studies we concluded that happy people ACW a lot of good things and uh if you can kind of uh so happy people just kind of click um make more money than unhappy people are more productive at work they're more creative they're better leaders and negotiators they have more fulfilling relationships they're more likely to get married and less likely to get divorced um they have more social support they're more generous and philanthropic and uh they cope better um and really interesting work on health that shows that happier people have stronger immune function they are physically healthier and they even live longer so This research suggests that we should strive to be happy not just because it feels good but because it benefits us in many different ways and it doesn't just benefit the individual it benefits our families um our communities perhaps our our whole society um but is it even possible to become happier um and if it's possible to become ha happy or is it possible to sustain that new level of Happiness um well it turns out that there's relatively little support uh in the scientific literature for the idea that we can sort of change our Happ happiness for the better um so there are happiness boosting techniques that are described in the self-help literature um I'm sure you've all seen lots of self-help books and bookstores um I'm going to show you some examples so happiness is free and it's easier than you think you can be happy no matter what happy for no reason there's one more um my favorite one is you can be the wife of a happy husband that's actually a really terrible book it sort of argues that women should be completely submissive to their husbands to make their husbands happy um so um the recommendations that are described in the self-help books um are rarely um rooted in any kind of scientific research or Theory um and so there's just really not much support for for um sort of the notion that you can become happier um and by the way the some of these book titles are essentially the opposite of what I'm arguing today um so I'm actually going to argue that happiness is harder to attain than you think not easier than you think um so what I'm going to do now is give you three arguments I'm going to be kind of a devil's advocate for why uh raising happiness actually not possible or practical all right so here's reasons why we don't think that it's possible to become a happier person the first one is that we're all born with a uh this is just a this is one of my kids who who happen to be born with a genetically determined set point for the high set point for happiness so it's now quite clear that a large portion of our happiness is genetically determined now this finding comes from research in a field called behavioral genetics and what they do is they compare researchers in this field they compare um the happiness levels of identical twins and the happiness levels of fraternal twins and they find that um identical twins are much more similar in their happiness than our fraternal twins and this suggests that happiness is heritable that it's passed down through our families um and I should add that and so that we're all sort of born with a characterist istic kind of what's called a set point or a baseline of Happiness um I should add that my book has a test that you can take that will help you determine your own set point for happiness although you probably all know already what it is everyone sort of intuitively seems to know whether their natural happiness Baseline is is high or low or or medium um and so This research leads leads some people to conclude that it's feudal or worthless to to try to make people happier because you know it's genetic um okay and the second reason is that happiness appears to be a trait it's an intrinsic part of our personality and we know that personality doesn't change much over time um and indeed Studies have shown that happiness is very stable over people's lives um and so this fact also leaves some people feeling pessimistic you know if happiness is so stable it's like one of your intrinsic traits how can we ever change it and the third one is honic adaptation um and this is actually something I'm really interested in I'm I'm doing uh some new research right now on adaptation and this phenomenon means um that we tend to adapt or get accustomed to new changes in our life so we get a new job we get a job at Google and it's really great and you have this boost in happiness but I have to tell you that that boost is not going to last you know because after all we adapt we get accustomed to any kind of positive change we start taking it for granted there's a very nice study that was done in Germany that followed um 20 5,000 Germans over the course of 15 years a lot of those Germans got married during that time and they found that um getting married gave people a boost in happiness a significant substantial boost um in happiness but that boost lasted on average for two years okay after two years people reverted back to their Baseline that they were before they got married um and there's lots of research like that so basically this work shows that any kind of positive change having cosmetic surgery becoming more beautiful moving to a beautiful house uh getting a new job getting married even um we tend to getting a new car we tend to adapt to those things um and so ultimately that means that our life circumstances don't really impact our happiness very much so I've thought hard about these three reasons um for why people you know can be made any happier and and I argue um in the how of happiness that the pessimism is totally unwarranted and the reason is that despite the fact that a large portion of our happiness is genetically determined and despite the fact that our life circumstances don't have a huge am deal to do with our happiness still a very large portion of our happiness and I I argue that's up to 40% is under our power to control and that's the 40% of the pie that you see on the cover of the book um so up to 40% of happiness is in our power to change to control by how we behave and how we think how we act and how we think um let me show you um a pie chart that I've developed with my colleagues Ken Sheldon and David shotti um so basically this is what it looks like um the set point accounts for about 50% of individual differences in happiness life circumstances account for about 10% and I should say these numbers are estimates and average from previous studies they're not set in stone they're approximations um and so that leaves about 40% for what I call intentional activity which is sort of the things that we can do in our daily lives to make ourselves happier um uh next slide I should also say that um alsoo just say a couple words about how happiness is defined um uh researchers following the work of Ed Diner define happiness usually um as having two components and the first component is the experience of positive emotions so people are happy tend to experience frequent positive emotions they also experience negative emotions of course but they experience more frequent positive emotions so so Joy Pride curiosity interest enthusiasm um and then the second component of happiness is what's called life satisfaction it's a sense that your life is pretty good that you're progressing towards your life goals at a rate that's sort of satisfying to you um and what we do when we define happiness we basically let people Define it for themselves um there's no happiness thermometer you know we can use to sort of figure out how happy you are um it's a subjective phenomenon no one else can tell you how happy you are only you really know how happy you are so we ask people we use self-report scales we ask people how happy are you uh in general um so there's scores of um how to be happy books in bookstores as I mentioned uh but I think that I'm the first author of a how to be happy book who actually does research with my students and um with my colleague Ken Sheldon on how people can be made happier um and I think that's very important some some people don't really care care that happiness recommendations are based on the scientific research um or they don't care to know the details and I and I would argue that you may not care about the details but you should care that it is based on research and I should and I have to say um it's amazing how many people out there who just don't seem to think that it's important that what you do has any kind of validity or Effectiveness um uh there was a Blog I I keep track of some of the bloggers that I write about my book and there was one that was written I believe it was about a week ago uh that sort of made fun of the book and said um I can't believe that uh you know she thinks that uh that happiness strategies that are based on Research are going to be any more effective ones that are that are based on not based on Research they're based on intuition which is just incredible to me that there are people who think that um like would you ever take a drug that's just you know uh not not based on anything um so um uh one reason that's important that any kind of recommendations that you take are based on scientific evidence is that I argue that we really need to put the same kind of effort and commitment into becoming happier if that's what you want to do as you do into any other area of your life into perfecting your body or raising your children or advancing in your career all of those things take effort and commitment and if you're going to put a lot of effort into becoming happier person you you want to make sure that that effort is worthwhile you know that it's based on sound scientific data uh and you choose the strategies uh and we'll talk about that in a moment how you sort of choose the happiness strategies that you do um and also really like the title of the book The how of happiness because it's um it was like maybe the 90th title that we thought of but um but it was a good one um because it it incorporates two different meanings of the word how it's both a how to be happy book but it's also about the scientific how about sort of why and how did these strategies work okay so what are these strategies that I've been mentioning there probably hundreds of Happiness strategies that you can use that exist out there I've chosen about a dozen about 12 to focus in the book because those are the ones that have the most scientific evidence um but they're probably hundreds um and I'll give you sort of a sampling of some of them basically they come from um a lot of them come from research on the happiest people and the idea here the thesis is um if you want to be a happier person you should observe really happy people and see what they do kind of like if you want to be thinner observe a skinny person and sort of watch what they do and and follow what they do um see what happy people do and I've been doing this research for about 18 years now and um I'll show you some of the results of that so research shows that happy people um uh invest a great deal in their relationships uh they enjoy their relationships uh they Express gratitude for what they have they are kind and helpful to others they practice optim is M when envisioning their Futures they Savor life's pleasures and tend to live in the present moment they make physical activity a habit um all many happy people are religious or spiritual and they're deeply committed to lifelong intrinsic goals whether it's uh fighting crime or advancing in their careers or raising um children and teaching their children their most most important values um so um okay I bet none of you are sort of bowled over by looking at this l right I mean unless you've been living under a rock you've heard that you know being grateful and being forgiving and sort of being good at relationships makes people happy right so um so this is nothing new the unique contribution of my book is that I talk about these strategies uh I talk about sort of the research that supports the strategies which are supported which are less supported um and then different ways of accomplishing them and sort of what the interventions say um just a kind of a some side notes I want to mention some personal notes about what it was like what it was like for me to write this book um it was a little bit uncomfortable for me at times because I found it unnatural to give advice um as a basic scientist you know I'm taught to draw very cautious conclusions on the basis of my research um and so it's it's kind of weird and and unnatural to sort of make recommendations uh we're not trained to do that um but I think the caution of scientists can sometimes be misplaced um in that we're never really ready to share the results of our research you know there's always sort of eyes to Dot and te's to cross um but in the real world you know people are living their lives and they want to know how to live a happier and healthier life how to live a more flourishing life uh how to be more fulfilled and and if we don't share our research with with the general public then other people who don't who are not sort of as well versed in it um are going to interpret our findings for us and often misinterpret uh the findings which happens all the time um another source of discomfort uh that I had while writing the book had to do with how um how kind of hokey uh if I may use that word or corny some of the strategies seem to be I mean I'm not the kind of person who reads selfhelp books so when I see things like oh you should uh try to be forgiving uh you should count your blessings more often that just sounds kind of trivial to me kind of hokey like a cliche and why is that I'm not really sure I mean it could be that these are really complex recommendations and when you condense them down and sort of trying to get at their Essence it's it's very hard to condense them basically it sounds like a cliche it sounds trit it also could be that um that when we're sort of turning into Universal maxims things that are really personal and close to the Bone to us um and make them sound watered down kind of like a cliche but the fact that some strategies sound corny to some people and by the way they don't sound corny to others I I actually had some of my chapters were read by by by some of my friends and some of them were kind of insulted and said you know I don't think this is corny at all um I think this is really wonderful um and so people there are individual differences in people's reactions so but but um what's important is that the strategies um have been shown to be effective I mean that's what that's what's important not whether they sound corny um some a scientists who does what are called Happiness interventions and um by interv ition I don't mean you know like there's a show right now called Intervention I don't mean like the kind of meeting that family and friends you know confront a dry addict and you know tell them that they should stop using drugs it's a different it's a different meaning researchers use the word intervention to mean basically an experiment where people try to change something about themselves to have a positive change um and so what I do is I in I have a human research participants and I instruct my participants to practice a happiness strategy over a certain amount of time maybe it's 6 weeks or 10 weeks or 8 weeks and I follow their and I measure their happiness at different points in time and I and I see what happens and I also have other groups of participants who might practice a different strategy or they might practice the same strategy in a different way and I also often have a or usually always I should say have a control group um to compare to um and I'm not only interested in which strategies work I'm interested in sort of how and why the strategies are working um so uh I'm going to give you a list of some of the interventions that I've conducted with my um colleague Ken Sheldon and my students so over the course of a couple a few months volunteers are asked to do various strategies like committing acts of kindness counting Their Blessings um practicing optimistic thinking um and my research the conclusion of my research is that happiness takes work um and I've given this this sort of a version of this talk to different groups i' I've done book signings at at bookstores and people don't like to hear this that happiness takes work maybe it's sort of this American um desire for quick fixed Solutions you know magical Solutions um but if becoming happier were easy then we'd all be happy right if becoming skinny and fit were easy we'd all be skinny and fit and it' be easy for us to keep our New Year's resolutions but it's not easy to keep New Year's resolutions um so it takes a lot of energy and effort and commitment now the good news is that some of those initial efforts that you can you will make in becoming a happier person will become U more habitual over time they'll turn into habits and then there'll be less and less sort of uh work that's necessary so I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of studies that I've done um the first one is a study that we did where we ask people to Count Their Blessings okay so um what we did we tried to induce gratitude in our participants um gratitude is defined as a felt sense of wonder thankfulness and appreciation for life um and there are many reasons why being grateful makes people happier I'm not going to go through them but I just I just note some of them in the slide um you know being grateful prevents us from taking things for granted uh makes us feel good about our lives um helps us cope with stress and Trauma it neutralizes negative emotions you know it's hard to feel jealousy or bitterness or greed when we're grateful right so it's sort of a good antidote to negative emotions okay so in this particular study we had participants Count Their Blessings uh that is keep a gratitude journal for six week weeks and we had three groups uh they either did it once a week which is about every Sunday night you know you write down what you're grateful for or three times a week Tuesday Thursday Sunday and we had a control group that actually didn't do anything we just measured their happiness in other studies we have more appropriate control groups okay so um these are the instructions that people got there are many things in our lives both large and small that we might be grateful about think back over the events of the past week and write down uh up to five things for which you're grateful or thankful okay and then you wrote this week I'm grateful for okay and these are these are these are college students I should say in the study these are some things they they mentioned actually um uh mom was the most popular uh which I liked um and you know um uh actually AOL instant messenger is a is a funny one because you know if you're a professor you know that sometimes students in their classes they're just sort of iming each other the whole class uh it's really annoying um there's one woman who uh was really into lotion and I think she had some kind of skin problem and so she just was saying how grateful she is about this lotion that she has that really um helps her her problem so anyway so some of them are bigger some of them are small um okay we measured happiness uh uh in different ways by using um validated scales of well-being and we use different scales of positive emotion life life satisfaction and happiness and combine them in a single index I'm just going to going to give you a couple of examples this is a scale that actually I developed um with a student basically people are asked very directly you know do you consider yourself a happy person okay and then another example is a this is a life satisfaction scale how do you feel about your life right now on a scale from sort of terrible to delighted um so we kind of combine these measures okay so okay not yet well okay you can you can show that um okay good good good all right so um so we first wanted to see if if uh we successfully induce gratitude in our participants right did we actually make them Grateful by keeping these gratitude Diaries um and we did but interestingly only in the once a week condition so this These Bars represent changes in gratitude from before the study to immediately after the study so if it's above zero that means we there's an increase in gratitude and you can see that um it's only in the once a week group the ones who counted Their Blessings once a week that we showed an increase in gratitude okay we'll talk about why that is what is that scale what is a scale oh it's a scale it's actually um um uh I'm just totally totally blanking on the word but it's uh it's normalized so it's uh yeah so it's because we had all these different scales we had to combine them in one um so yeah that's why the numbers are so small um okay so do we actually succeed in making people happier um so next graph okay and we did but again only in the once a week condition so first of all look at the green bar the control group these are subjects who aren't doing anything and they actually getting less happy so why is that now you can call that adaptation that we sort of naturally get less happy but this is this is a college student sample and I've replicated this many times basically if you take college students at the beginning of a semester or a quarter they're all kind of happy excited right you all remember being in college new new classes new friends but then you know then they start having midterms and assignments and and they get sort of less happy over time I should say the next quarter they'll go back up to their previous level of Happiness so the control condition is not doing so well and by the way when the study ends we're now like midterms of are happening finals are coming up so it's not a really it's kind of a difficult time in the quarter but in the once a week condition people got happier okay those who counted Their Blessings once a week the three even during this sort of stressful time in the quarter the three times a week condition people did not get happier now why is that we have lots of sort of explanations for it um I think the people who counted Their Blessings three times a week did it too often uh perhaps it became kind of a monotonous chore for them it sort of lost its freshness and meaning to kind of three times a week try to think of what you're grateful for there's also something in Psychology called um the effort as information heuristic and basically what that means is that when it takes you a lot of effort to to think of something it might backfire right so if you um if you can't think of things to be grateful for three times a week then you actually might conclude oh I must not have much to be grateful for um there's actually a nice study of of professors where students are asked something like can you name um you know 12 things why what what 12 reasons that you liked your professor this semester or give me you know four reasons why you liked your professor and people who named 12 actually evaluate the professor lower and the idea is that when it's hard to kind of think of 12 things that you like then you you like them less okay um so um okay so it looks like the Gratitude only worked once a week okay so raise your hand if you think that you should try this strategy count you go home and start counting your blessings once a week what do you think okay you're all wrong and the reason you're wrong is that uh counting your blessings is not for everyone I mean it could work for some people it may not work it works for people on average in my study but it doesn't all these strategies work differently for different people and actually this is an important theme that runs through my book and I call it it's called person activity fit you need to find the strategy that fits your particular personality your resources your lifestyle your goals and interests and I I I hate to confess this because I think that gratitude exercises are very powerful but it's not for it doesn't work for me personally I just find counting blessings kind of hokey and unnatural but a lot of people say it's changed their lives by trying to be more grateful so I actually um have developed a diagnostic test that's included in the book uh based on some work by Ken Sheldon that helps people determine when you take the test it'll help you determine which strategies are right for you that you are more likely to benefit from you personally and then you also can just read the parts of the book that are just about those strategies you don't have to read about all 12 of them um okay so again the point is that if you're going to put a lot of effort and energy and making yourself a happier person you want to you better sort of be sure that you're choosing the right strategy for yourself that that strategy is supported by evidence and that you're doing it an optimal way that you're not doing it too often not doing it too infrequently you're not doing it too repetitively you're not doing it uh you're doing it sort of you're spicing it up a little bit with with variety because variety is important um so speaking of variety I want to tell you quickly about another study that I did um this one we um made people do what I call a behavioral strategy not a cognitive one cognitive is something in your head behavioral obviously you something that makes you act where we had people commit acts of kindness okay so in this uh intervention oh actually wait wait wait wait wait go okay so just to just to say a couple words about why being kind to others makes people happy maybe it seems an obvious question um there a lot of cultures sort of have this idea this notion that kindness makes people happy the do Lama talks a lot about that happiness is compassion so there's a CH a famous Chinese proverb that says if you want happiness just one click at a time for an hour take a nap for a day go fishing for a month get married and by the way that should really be for two years right because remember that study that showed that the marital boost lasts for two years for a year inherit of Fortune for a lifetime help somebody else now note the wisdom of the Chinese here the first two are just momentary Pleasures you know taking a nap going fishing obviously that's not going to make you happy for a long time the third and the fourth marriage and money are circumstan there are basically changes in your life circumstances that do make you happy but sort of not for as long as you think that that that doesn't last for that long and then the fifth one is an activity that you can do um that actually can last yeah saying the married at last two years how long does inherited Fortune actually last I are you interested for your person person um um he's got this Uncle um I don't know cuz there aren't really studies of that um but there are studies for example of people who won the lottery um and actually there's some mixed findings because sometimes they get less happy because they feel like their friends now treat them differently and and actually there's a high rate of divorce among lottery winners um so I don't know the answer to that question but it's a very good question uh at least that a few people are interested in okay so in in uh oh I should say our our president who is very wise um agrees with the Chinese about the benefits of helping okay now we can go on all right so kind acts you know make people happy for a lot of reasons I'm not going to go through all of them basically you know when you're generous it makes you feel good like you're a good person um I think maybe the the key is it has a lot of social consequences so when you're kind to others they they tend to like you more they appreciate you they might reciprocate later when you need help um and so there's sort of a lot of uh sort of positive um outcomes of kindness so we tried to test this uh in in an intervention and uh so we did a study where we had people uh do a three or nine acts of kindness per week for a period of 10 weeks and we had um actually a number of conditions I'm just going to sort of simplify this a little bit we had a high variety condition where people what they did is they were um and imagine if you were in this study I would I would ask you to write down a of 15 things that you'd like to do more in the future kind of kind acts that You' like to do more in the future that can be repeatable um then the high variety condition you can do any of those 15 acts every week and then we also had a low variety condition where you had to choose three and repeat them over and over again I don't mean doing the exact same thing but maybe it's um doing a chore in your household that you don't normally do so every week uh you might sort of do that it doesn't have to be the exact same chore but sort of the general category and then we had a control group that simply listed three or nine events that that happened to them each week so they also kept track of things but it was um uh it was uh not kindness not kind acts okay so uh these are the instructions that that we gave our subjects we'd like you to list I'm just going to read the the green we' like you to list 15 acts of kindness that you would like to do more in the future only write down acts of kindness that are easily repeatable and I have some examples um you know if you drive every day let a car enter your lane or go ahead of you okay so something we could all think about um after you make your list we ask you to choose three or nine of these acts and do them during the upcoming week next um okay so um again this is sort of a complicated study I'm just going to show you one graph so um these represent this represents the happiness level of our subject on a scale of 1 to seven um and it's at four different time points before the study right in the middle of the intervention this was 10 weeks right after the intervention and then a month follow blow up um and if you see the uh the red line is the high variety condition subjects so these these subjects who are kind of doing different acts every week um they got happier um during the study and they actually importantly they were able to maintain their happiness a month later so this this so this is a month after they've finished the study they're no longer doing these acts of kindness interestingly the low variety condition which is the green uh line actually got really unhappy and I think again you know it probably was this huge chore for them especially the ones in the nine act condition to sort of do all these acts of kindness okay um you know what I think I might actually I wonder if I should leave a lot of time for questions let's let me skip just skip a I'm going to skip the next uh study we also did um a study where we had people write gratitude letters or practice optimistic thinking we found that they got happier just keep keep going um sorry about that I have these really nice slides you can look at um so in this study so just keep going um we basically were testing also um you know what why don't you stop here we were testing um maybe one more um the question of whether if you're motivated to be happier if you're going to benefit more now interestingly in all of these studies that we do we take participants we pay them or they do it for some kind of credit and then we randomly assign them to some condition that that makes them happier now they not be remotely interested in um wanting to be happy or putting the effort into it they they may not be taking it seriously in the real world who people who want to be happy actually you know really care about it and they go to the bookstore they buy a book you know they actually you know do something in their daily lives and so in this study we actually manipulated motivation so we had half of our subjects I should say this was not an experimental factor because we didn't we couldn't figure out how to do that so we had half of our subjects self- select themselves into a study about happiness like do you want to be happy come be in our study and then half just we're doing a study on cognitive exercises and we found that basically um the motivated which are the red bars the motivated subjects uh benefited more from happiness than the non-motivated ones who practice optimism or gratitude um and actually keep that um we also looked at effort so the more effort that people put into the activity the more they benefited it's so so the red line is um is people who put a lot of effort into the activity so whether they're practicing optimism or gratitude effort effort was important and then we also looked at fit remember I talked about the importance of fit you have to find you have to choose the activity that works for you personally people who felt that the optimism or gratitude strategy sort of fit them as a person the control condition they were just writing down what happened to them every week and you know I guess some people like to do that you know maybe they're kind of organization Freaks and like to write down everything they do I actually I kind of do that sometimes so um the higher the fit the more they benefited from the strategy okay uh all right that I'm going sort of conclude now um these are just sort of some examples of studies we've done and a lot of them are described in the book and then a lot more and all of these findings are basically testimony to the importance of motivation effort fit and commitment when you try to remake yourself as a happier person and I discuss all of these in the last chapter that's called the five House of Happiness which is actually a really important chapter sort of how are these things working um we've done about a half dozen other interventions we've looked at other strategies like saving um uh we are looking right now at cultural differences um again sort of the hypothesis being that the pursuit of happiness is a universal goal but people in different cultures pursue happiness differently might benefit differently from different things um so I guess I kind of want to conclude by saying that uh I want you to consider how much effort that you put you put in to other domains in your life maybe it's physical exercise um some of you might put a lot of time into uh going to the gym or running or Pilates or yoga or whatever it is that you do um and I think you need to think about happiness in a very similar similar way people don't tend to apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives the way they apply to other areas of their life um but if you want to be a happier person you kind of need to put in the same kind of effort and commitment as you do to you know going to the gym um but I think even though that H this effort takes work it's a really rewarding and fine kind of work I mean uh trying to be grateful for what you have trying to be optimistic being kind to others um is very fulfilling um and could be fun so I just I I started with a quote from Aristotle if you remember back then um and I end with a quote that nicely kind of describes the gist of my work which is that happiness depends upon ourselves so thank you that's [Applause] it

Channel: Talks at Google

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Length: 38min 54sec (2334 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 04 2008