Spend less time chasing, and more time protecting your health and your relationships, he suggests.
I put that idea to Kern. After mulling it over, she had a different take: life happens.
We all want to avoid big negative events, but many, such as the death of a loved one, are unavoidable.
By constantly trying to avoid negatives, we can become too focused on them, she says. Better instead to focus on the positives because the more you look for them, the more you will find.
Will buying a new house actually make you happy? The science is in
A friend of mine is pondering selling his apartment to buy a new house.
The house is bigger (he’s thinking about having kids soon), nicer and probably offers him better capital gains than hanging onto the apartment. The trade-off is a larger mortgage.
Is it worth it? Science, I told him, may have one answer: hedonic adaptation.
Humans have a sort of hardwired happiness set-point, this theory goes. Whatever happens to us in life – big pay rise, new house, redundancy, divorce – affects our happiness in the short term, but over time, we return to our set-point.
“So…” my friend said to me, “you’re saying I shouldn’t buy the house?”
Maybe! Let’s dive into the science of getting (and staying) happy.
Born happy
Scientists split happiness or wellbeing into two metrics: emotional and cognitive, also known as hedonic and eudaimonic.
Emotional wellbeing is what you might think of as feeling happy: pleasurable sensations, a stress-free life, getting a pay rise, winning the lottery, having a dream wedding.
Cognitive wellbeing is a deeper measure of life satisfaction. “A meaningful and purposeful life. A deeper sense of really being content,” says Associate Professor Peggy Kern, from the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Wellbeing Science.
Now, about half of our wellbeing does not come from life circumstances or choices – it is evolutionarily hardwired in our genes, studies suggest. How? Take the gene that is critical for the metabolism of serotonin (a neurotransmitter that influences feelings of happiness) in the brain. Some people simply have a version that makes more than other people.
So genes account for half our wellbeing, but this still leaves room for our choices to play a role. We should simply be able to do things that make us happy – like buy a new house – and see a long-term rise in happiness.
Here’s where hedonic adaptation gets in the way.
Return to baseline
Evidence suggests that over time, our emotional wellbeing – that sense of feeling great – returns to the same point.
Consider this 2020 study using data from a survey tracking about 14,000 Australians since 2001; each year, every volunteer was surveyed about what had happened in their life and how they were feeling.
The researchers could see how a life event directly affected a person’s emotional wellbeing, but also what happened over time.
Life events have major short-term effects on emotional wellbeing. A new job can make us happy. A job loss makes us unhappy. But eventually, emotional happiness returns to baseline.
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“Virtually everything settles back down to where it came from by two to three years later,” says Nick Glozier, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Sydney and one of the authors of the study.
This is hedonic adaptation. We possess a hard-wired wellbeing set-point. Over time, we return to it.
Does this mean there’s not much we can do to improve our happiness? Should my friend cancel his house hunt? Maybe. Certainly, the evidence seems to suggest that small wins – buying material possessions, getting a promotion – don’t matter much in the medium term.
“Our happiness levels go back to baseline. Until we get that next thing, that next pay rise,” says Andrea Downie, an honorary fellow of the Centre for Wellbeing Science.
“We’re in this constant vicious cycle. It’s a really dangerous way of living, and it’s not sustainable.”
A second type of happiness
But here’s where the second type of wellbeing comes in.
Cognitive wellbeing measures deeper life satisfaction. It tends to be more long-lasting than emotional happiness and less prone to hedonic adaptation.
We see this in the study. Falling pregnant produces a short-term shot of emotional happiness and a long-term boost to cognitive happiness, presumably as people take joy in their offspring. The same thing happens when people marry.
And you can see the reverse in negative events, such as separation from your partner. Your emotional wellbeing recovers over time, but your life satisfaction can remain depressed for years.
The question about buying a house then becomes: will this lead to deeper life satisfaction? Maybe it enables you to have the type of life you want, or expand your family, or spend more time with a loved one?
I asked the scientists I spoke to what they made of the data and how they might use it for their own lives. Two strategies emerged.
The first, from Dr Nathan Kettlewell, a University of Technology Sydney economist and another of the 2020 study’s authors, is to be defensive about your happiness.
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“If I really chase this promotion, it’s not going to bring me a huge amount of satisfaction,” he says. “Look at where the big drops in happiness are coming from: deterioration of relationships and health.” Spend less time chasing, and more time protecting your health and your relationships, he suggests.
I put that idea to Kern. After mulling it over, she had a different take: life happens. We all want to avoid big negative events, but many, such as the death of a loved one, are unavoidable. By constantly trying to avoid negatives, we can become too focused on them, she says. Better instead to focus on the positives because the more you look for them, the more you will find.
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