5 studies on happiness and why you should get a pencil (II)

We’ve been inundated by positive thinking gurus  (not to be confused with positive psychologists) to set our minds to positive thoughts only, and to banish negative thinking from our system. The most trenchant advocates of these are motivational speakers who sprinkle their sermons with fantastic stories of how positive thinking can miraculously change our lives. […]

We’ve been inundated by positive thinking gurus  (not to be confused with positive psychologists) to set our minds to positive thoughts only, and to banish negative thinking from our system.

The most trenchant advocates of these are motivational speakers who sprinkle their sermons with fantastic stories of how positive thinking can miraculously change our lives.

But is this the case? What happens when we actively try to remove distressing thoughts from our minds? For example, when boarding an aeroplane and your mind chose that particular moment to think about plane crashes, how successful were you in banishing that thought?

Dostoyevsky noted this human tendency a long time ago.

In his Notes on Summer Impressions, he wrote: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.”

When  Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner encountered these words, he decided to check out the evidence by designing a simple experiment in the  mid-1980s.

In the study, the participant was put in a room alone and was asked to think about anything they wanted except Dostoyevsky’s Bear.

The participants were further instructed to ring a bell any time they thought of the bear.  Before long, the bells were ringing non-stop. They couldn’t stop thinking of the bear.

A similar study was conducted by Jennifer Borton and Elizabeth Casey of Hamilton College. They asked participants to describe the most upsetting thought about themselves.

Thereafter, they divided them into two groups.

One group was asked not to think about the upsetting thought For the next eleven days. The other group was asked to carry on life as usual.

Every day, each participant recorded how much they thought about the upsetting thought, their mood, level of anxiety and self-esteem. The results were similar to the white bear experiment.

Those who were asked not to think about the upsetting thought-thought more about it were more anxious and recorded lower self-esteem.

Richard Wiseman commented about these intriguing set of studies:

“More than twenty years of research have demonstrated that this paradoxical phenomenon occurs in many different aspects of everyday life, showing, for example, that asking dieters not to think about chocolate causes them to consume more of it and asking the public not to elect fools to positions in government encourages them to vote for George Bush.”

Can we make ourselves happy? Or are people born happy?

You can answer that question with three percentages: 50%, 10% and 40%.

Commenting on the work of  Sonja Lyubomirsky and colleagues in his book, “59 Seconds” Wiseman wrote:

“The bad news is that research shows that about 50% of your overall sense of happiness is genetically determined, and so cannot be altered. The better news is that another 10 per cent is attributable to general circumstances (educational level, income, whether you are married or single, etc.) that are difficult to change. However, the best news is that the remaining 40 per cent is derived from your day-to-day behaviour and the way you think about yourself and others. With a little knowledge, you can become substantially happier in just a few seconds.”

And one way to make yourself happier within second is by smiling.

Smiling signals to the world that we are happy. In other words, happiness makes us smile or happiness causes smiling. There is, however, another area of psychology that tells us to consider the reverse: smiling causes happiness. This area of research is called proprioceptive psychology.

In one significant study, the results show that smiling made people happier even if they don’t know they are smiling.

In the study, Fritz Strack asked participants to rate how funny they found some cartoons. The participants were divided into two groups. One group held a pencil between the teeth and were instructed not to allow the lips to touch the pencil. The other group held the end of the pencil with the lips without touching the teeth. Then they were asked to rate how happy they felt.

Without realising it, those in the teeth only group forced their lower faces into a smile and those in the lips only forced their faces into a frown.

Results show that those who were forced into a smile found the cartoons funnier and felt happier even though they didn’t know they were smiling.

The last part of these series will discuss how gratitude will change your life completely and how it can make you happy beyond your imagination.