No Kidding, Happiness Is Really Within Your Reach

“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

Is that pearl of wisdom from a psychiatrist or social worker? No, it’s from a man born in poverty and who was largely self-educated: Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States.

To explore this idea of happiness, I visited with Neil Pasricha, one of the world’s leading authorities on intentional living.

In 2008, his world came crashing down with a sudden divorce and the death of a close friend. Rather than succumbing to despair, he channeled his energy into his blog 1000 Awesome Things, which counted down one small pleasure—like snow days, bakery aroma, or finding money in your coat pocket—every day for 1,000 straight days. While writing his blog, he worked as Director of Leadership for Walmart.

Today, Pasricha is the New York Times bestselling author of six books that have sold more than a million copies, including The Book of Awesome (gratitude), The Happiness Equation (happiness), and You Are Awesome (resilience).

This Harvard MBA offers advice that can help people in any profession or at any phase of their personal lives.

The first question I asked was simple: In our stress-filled world, what factors seem to take the biggest tolls on people’s happiness?

A lot of things, Pasricha says, and he mentions two: cell phones and social media. He cites a study by University of Bologna professors published in the Sloan Management Review showing that anxiety spikes when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day. Another study found that when cellphone users couldn’t answer their phones while the phones were ringing, they experienced increased heart rate, blood pressure, and anxiety.

“So, we crave our phones,” he says. “And what are we doing on them? Well, a tremendous amount of phone time is devoted to social media. Adolescents who spend more time on phones are more likely to report mental health issues.”

Social media feels like connection, Pasricha says, “yet it gives us the feeling of comparison, of not being good enough, of forever robbing us of joy. I think we need to raise the age of social media from 13 to 16 and ban cell phones from classrooms. Perhaps it's no wonder we're seeing such a spike in loneliness, which is worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. I feel the solution to much of these issues is carving out more in-person time with those we love. Connection with friends and family is the number one driver of long-term happiness.”

What effect does people’s use of social media seem to have on their happiness?

Pasricha says social media causes four problems, and they all start with P:

• The first is psychological—it encourages us to compare the director's cut of our lives to everyone else's greatest hits.
• The second is physical—trained thumbs, spines, and eyes. Looking down at our phones adds 60 pounds of pressure to our spines!
• The third is physiological—our sleep is disrupted by looking at bright screens within an hour of bedtime, our brains literally produce less melatonin, the sleep hormone, overnight.
• The fourth is productivity—31% of our days are now spent bookmarking, prioritizing, and context switching instead of doing what we actually want or need to do.

Every one of these alone would decrease happiness, Pasricha says, but most of us are getting a dose of all four every day.

A lot of people these days seem to regard themselves as victims. Pasricha offers them advice.

“My mom was born in British Colonial Kenya in 1950 to an East Indian family that moved from Lahore to help build the railroad,” he says. “She wasn't born the ‘right’ person for her location or her culture. What do I mean? Well, she wasn't white, and she wasn't male. White people ran the country, and men were prized in her family's culture. My mom has told me that her life had a fatalist feeling of finality before she'd even gotten started. There was no sense of possibility, no options other than getting married and serving her husband's family. There was no ... dot-dot-dot. Just a full stop. We all have this fatalist feeling of closure in our lives sometimes, which can sometimes lead to seeing ourselves as a victim. The question becomes: what do you do when you see the future you're walking towards, but you don't like it? Sometimes the hardest thing is to keep going, to see past the period, to add a dot-dot-dot. Just keep moving. Take it day-by-day. Stay in the game. Keep going. Add a ‘yet’ to any sentence you find yourself mentally beginning with ‘I don't,’ ‘I can't,’ or ‘I'm not’ so you're saying things to yourself like ‘I don't qualify for that job... yet, I'm not creative... yet, I'm not social... yet.’ Overcoming victimhood means seeing the free will that exists just past the period.”

Pasricha holds the view that life is 10% what happens and 90% how we react to it. If that’s true (and research seems to support it), a lot of people apparently didn’t get the memo. So, what’s the key to taking personal responsibility for our own happiness?

He cites the research of Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky. “She wrote a wonderful book called The How of Happiness and posits a model that says 50% of your happiness is based on your genetics, 10% of your happiness is based on your circumstances, and 40% of your happiness is based on your intentional activities. Your genetics are of course part of how you react, but it's that 40% of intentional activities that can make a big difference.”

Pasricha says the first step to taking personal responsibility for our own happiness is just realizing that what you do in the world is four times more important than what’s happening to you in the world. “What can you insert into that 40%? So many research-proven, happiness-inducing activities: Exercise! Journaling! Nature walks! Reading fiction! Phoning a friend! Dancing! You are so much more powerful than you think.”

Gratitude has a big impact on people’s ability to deal with adversity, Pasricha says. He cites a 2003 study by researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough. They asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, five hassles, or five events that happened over the past week for ten straight weeks. “What happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier than the other two test groups. Physically healthier! And they didn't even go to the gym. Far and away the single best happiness and resilience practice for me has been writing down one awesome thing—a small pleasure, a tiny joy—every single night since 2008. For the first four years I posted them on 1000 Awesome Things and now I send them out at midnight every night. I recommend this practice to anyone. I always say that if you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.”