Why Some People Are Happier Than Others

[Guest guest]

Why Some People Are Happier Than Others

Surprisingly, the answer isn't wealth, beauty, relationships, or careers.

By Marci Shimoff

From 'Happy for No Reason' by Marci Shimoff with Carol Kline. Copyright 2008

by Marci Shimoff. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of Simon &

Schuster, Inc.

If you and I were sitting over some tea at a sidewalk café and I asked you, " Are

you happy?, " what would your answer be?

A few of you might say, " Absolutely—if I were any happier, I'd be twins! " (Okay,

that would be a very few of you.)

A lot of you would probably reply, " Sometimes. "

But I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least half of you would say, " No, not

really. "

Some people enjoy their lives no matter what happens, while others can't find

happiness no matter how hard they try. Most of us fall somewhere in between.

Stop looking for external validation. Instead give yourself the gift of

feeling valued and valuable.

The reason for this puzzling disparity is the happiness set-point. Researchers

have found that no matter what happens to you in life, you tend to return to a

fixed range of happiness. Like your weight set-point, which keeps the scale

hovering around the same number, your happiness set-point will remain the same

unless you make a concerted effort to change it.

In fact, there was a famous study conducted that tracked people who'd won the

lottery—what many people think of as the ticket to the magic kingdom of joy.

Within a year, these lucky winners returned to approximately the same level of

happiness they'd experienced before their windfall. Surprisingly, the same was

true for people who became paraplegic. Within a year or so of being disabled,

they also returned to their original happiness level.

Whatever the experience—positive or negative—people return to their happiness

set-point. Further research has shown only three exceptions to this phenomenon:

losing a spouse, which can take more time to recover from; chronic unemployment;

and extreme poverty.

Okay, you may be thinking, if my happiness level is set—how did it get there?

Dr. Lykken, a scientist at the University of Minnesota, had the same

question. To determine how much of a person's happiness comes from nature and

how much from nurture, Lykken and his team, in the late 1980s, began studying

thousands of sets of twins, including a number of identical twins who had been

raised apart. After extensive testing they found that approximately 50 percent

of our happiness set-point is genetic and the other 50 percent is learned. Half

of the reason you walk around generally cheery or perennially dreary is that you

were born that way, the other half is determined by your thoughts, feelings, and

beliefs formed in response to your life experiences.

In a recent review of the literature and studies on happiness, positive

psychology researchers Sonja Lyubomirsky, Kennon Sheldon, and Schaade

confirmed Lykken's earlier findings that 50 percent of our happiness comes from

our genetics. But more exciting was the new information they uncovered about the

remaining 50 percent. It appears that only 10 percent of our happiness set-point

is determined by circumstances such as our level of wealth, marital status, and

job. The other 40 percent is determined by our habitual thoughts, feelings,

words, and actions. This is why it's possible to raise your happiness set-point.

In the same way you'd crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly

day, you actually have the power to reprogram your happiness set-point to a

higher level of peace and well-being.

The discovery of the happiness set-point and our ability to change it turns

everything we've all believed about being happy upside down. We spend our entire

lives searching for happiness, yearning for it, trying to get the things we are

sure will make us happy: wealth, beauty, relationships, career, and so on. But

the truth is, to be truly happy, all you have to do is raise your happiness

set-point.

I sure wish I'd known I was just one of those people who had a low happiness

set-point before spending so much time and energy chasing after reasons to be

happy. From my interviews, I've come to see that genuinely happy people are

Happy for No Reason.

[Guest guest]

Very interesting, . Thanks.

Jeanne in WI

Why Some People Are Happier Than Others

Surprisingly, the answer isn't wealth, beauty, relationships, or careers.

By Marci Shimoff

From 'Happy for No Reason' by Marci Shimoff with Carol Kline. Copyright

2008 by Marci Shimoff. Reprinted by permission of Free Press, a Division of

Simon & Schuster, Inc.

If you and I were sitting over some tea at a sidewalk café and I asked you,

" Are you happy?, " what would your answer be?

A few of you might say, " Absolutely-if I were any happier, I'd be twins! "

(Okay, that would be a very few of you.)

A lot of you would probably reply, " Sometimes. "

But I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that at least half of you would say, " No,

not really. "

Some people enjoy their lives no matter what happens, while others can't

find happiness no matter how hard they try. Most of us fall somewhere in

between.

Stop looking for external validation. Instead give yourself the gift of

feeling valued and valuable.

[Guest guest]

That was great . Thanks for sharing.

God bless

Little linda

LINDA

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