Chasing 'happiness'

How happy could you really be in your life? Is there a meter, calibrated by your genes, that says, “that’s it! You can only be this happy‘?” And would people, given the same set of circumstances, achieve the same level of happiness?

That is an almost impossible question to answer, for science or even for other disciplines. First, people are messy things to study — not only do they move and think a lot, they also change when they know they are being studied. Second, what really is “happiness”? Charlie Brown and Snoopy think it is Gershwin; a close friend of mine thinks it’s a fruit-scented bath; and I think it is Royce chocolates. Science through psychology thinks it means good health, family and friends and meaningful work but how much can we stretch all that to boost our own capacity for joy?

Six years ago, my research said “only up to a point.” I wrote a column then on this topic intrigued by the study done by Dr. Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania. He concluded from his findings then that people must have a level of happiness that they go back to, even after episodes of sadness or bursts of joy. This was called the “set point” theory of happiness. His findings agreed with previous studies done on paraplegics who have revealed that they go back to the original level of happiness they had before the episode that caused their condition. He also cited studies done on lottery winners who reverted back to their level of happiness after some time basking in the rewards of having met Lady Luck. This meant that “nature,” a.k.a. “things that happen to us BEFORE we are born,” called the shots when it came to how happy we could be.

That just sucks, I thought then. In my own family as I think in many others, there seems to be a pattern of behavior that occurs so consistently in many of my family members that I was inclined to think that, uh-oh, we are doomed to certain peaks and troughs of joy. Sometimes, I just observe them and wonder: if I could sum up all the levels of happiness each of us have had and then get their average, would it eerily show that we all were within the same range? I feel like retreating to a Buddhist monastery just thinking about it and resurrecting as a bee.

But my respect for data also made me look at it as one of those cold realities that we probably have to face as human beings: that we are born with capacities deeply embedded in our genes, even the capacity for happiness. On the other hand, the science of happiness is not like the science of gravity — I can still continue to resist total surrender to these “set levels” of happiness without completely falling from reality.

Now, my brewing resistance has been quelled by the latest studies on happiness. It appeared in the Oct. 4, 2010 online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gert Wagner, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Germany, did the study and mainly concluded that people’s level of happiness can change overtime, in fact, by almost a third. He studied 150,000 German adults and followed them for 25 years and he saw that shifts do happen when it comes to one’s state of happiness. And this, they think, makes a strong case for “nurture,” a.k.a “things that happen to you AFTER you are born.” This means that there is no set ceiling for how happy you can be and that there is no genetic pump inside you that limits your fountain of satisfaction. In other words, you can still be happi-ER than your happiest moments.

Reflect on the personal stories we each live out, and you will find yourself balking at the idea that “happiness” are mere moments of satisfaction that could be compared. Happiness is a richness, a simplicity, a revelation, a synthesis, a transformation, watching the sunset and remembering how it was like when it first rose in particular seasons of your life — it is all these and more. Science will keep on chasing though and like a hand trying to hold itself, it could touch it, yet cannot really hold it.

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