Three ways to increase your happiness (The pursuit of happiness, Part 2)

Last Thursday I started a short series on the pursuit of happiness.

That night, Mike and I walked down to the Khan River to try a new restaurant. It’s been storming nearly every day here for the past two weeks (something I’m very grateful for on a personal level as it cools everything down, but worried about on a broader level – these rains have started about two months too early). Everything is bursting green and both rivers – brown and increasingly turbulent – are rising every day.

Over purple sticky rice, stir-fried chicken with basil, and river fish sautéed with ginger, we talked about happiness.

“Three good things?” Mike asked me.

I would like to be able to report that I had a deep, meaningful, and lyrical reply to this shorthand query, but I can’t actually remember what I said now. I can, however, almost guarantee one (or more) of my comments centered on food – food hits my “good things” radar quite a lot at the moment. I bet I talked with anticipatory fondness of the ice cream I was determined to obtain during our walk home.

“Three good things” is something we started doing after I wrote the first chapter on positive psychology for this distance-learning course I’m drafting. It comes out of a research article on positive psychology interventions (PPI’s). In non-academic speak, PPIs are “things you can do to make yourself happier” – not just the cheery mood, buoyant, smiling, fun brand of happiness, but the deeper and calmer sort of long lasting happiness that’s more akin to wellbeing or flourishing.

There are, it turns out, a number of exercises you can do that will increase your “wellbeingness”.

In an article published in 2005 (Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions), Seligman and his co-authors tested five happiness related exercises. They found that three of them lastingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms. As outlined during the experiment, those three exercises were:

1. Three good things: Write down three things that went well each day, and their causes, every night for a week. These things do not have to be akin to winning the lottery or saving someone’s life. Ice cream counts.
2. Using signature strengths in a new way: Take an inventory of character strengths and identify your top five “signature” strengths. Then use one of these top strengths in a new and different way every day for a week.
3. The gratitude visit: Write, and then deliver in person, a letter of gratitude to someone who’s been especially kind to you but has never been properly thanked.

Seligman et al reported that doing one of these first two exercises every day for a week increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for six months (measured during one month, three month, and six month follow ups). The gratitude visit caused a large positive change that lasted one month. Those participants who (of their own accord) had continued the exercises past the initial one-week period were happier than those who hadn’t.

Want to try one of these exercises? The three good things exercise is pretty self-explanatory. Mike and I have adapted three good things so that it frequently pops up in dinnertime or before-bed conversation. The gratitude visit is pretty self-explanatory as well, although somewhat harder to do if most people that have been meaningful in your life live in a different country. The third, using signature strengths may take a little more work to get going on, but it’s worth the effort.

To get started on the Using Signature Strengths exercise go to an interesting website that Seligman and his crew have created called Authentic Happiness. Register (it’s free) so that you can access the Authentic Happiness Testing Center. Then take the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. It’s not a short questionnaire, so set aside at least half an hour.

The authentic happiness site will store your results on the survey so that you can review them anytime you return. I’ve taken the VIA Survey twice, five years apart. Interestingly, three of my top five strengths were the same both times but two had changed.

My top five strengths in September last year were:

• Curiosity and interest in the world
• Capacity to love and be loved
• Humour and playfulness
• Gratitude
• Judgment, critical thinking, and open mindedness.

Sound like a lovely constellation, doesn’t it? Yeah, well, let’s leave it there and not address the fact that smack at the bottom of the list, in last place at number 24, came “Modesty and humility”.

Want to read more about happiness? Here are some references to get you started (the Wallis article and the Dan Gilbert’s TED talk are good places to start):

1. Wallis, C. (2005). The New Science of Happiness. Time Magazine.
2. Seligman, M. & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive Psychology: An Introduction. American Psychologist, 55(1), 5-14.
3. Seligman, M. et al. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions. American Psychologist, 50(5), 410-421.
4. Dan Gilbert’s TED Talk: Why are we Happy?
5. Nic Marks TED Talk: The Happy Planet Index
6. Chip Conley TED Talk: Measuring what makes life worthwhile 

Still curious about this topic? Let me know your thoughts and questions and I may do a follow up post down the track…