The happiness thermostat

The happiness thermostat

Dr P V Vaidyanathan Aug 25, 2008

WE all constantly seek happiness, which means different things for different people.
Many of us look forward to positive events, like a marriage, the birth of a child, passing an examination, winning a contest, achieving a landmark of goal that we have set for ourselves, which make us feel happy.

But recent research indicates that all of us are born with a happiness ‘thermostat’ which is responsible for keeping our levels of happiness at a particular level, in spite of ups and downs in life.

This study, based in Germany, and appeared in the Economic Journal, studied the life patterns of hundreds of people, over a 20 year period.If was discovered that positive events like a marriage or birth of a child did make people happy, but this happiness slowly started to go down, and by the end of a two year period, most people had come back to their previous happiness level, the level at which they were, before the event (marriage/ child birth) had occurred.

Likewise, the researchers discovered that traumatic events, like a divorce or a death in the family, caused one to become sad and depressed, but eventually with time, the person regained his or her previous levels of happiness.

This has given rise to the concept of all of us being born with a happiness ‘thermostat’, something that always pulls our emotions of well being back to a set point.

What this means is that we normally cannot remain eternally happy or sad, following positive or negative events.

This thermostat perhaps functions differently and is set at different points for different people, and hence we see people who are happier or sadder than others. This gives credibility to the old saying ‘Time heals all wounds’, and is what we commonly know as adaptation.

Another study, conducted by the Edinburgh University involving 900 twins discovered that at least 50 per cent of our happiness levels are genetically determined.
The remaining 50 per cent of happiness comes from factors like career, lifestyle and relationships. Though the research indicated that much of our being happy depends on our genes, it also goes on to say that this is not something permanent.

Many of our day to day activities influence this level. Also, writing a dairy, being grateful, willfully becoming positive in one’s outlook---many such characters can help us to override this genetically determined levels of happiness and can make us happier that what nature has programmed us to be.

Happiness and sorrow—both come with an expiry date, as the human mind is equipped with a thermostat like quality, which helps it to bring back our emotional state to a pre-fixed or pre-determined level.

Also much of how happy a person is, is determined by genes, although working hard to raise one’s positivity can help to change this level.

All this research also makes us think about things we have learned in the past, like Newton’s law, which says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction, and the various philosophies like Vedanta and Advaita, which stress on the duality of life, and have always been saying the everything in life comes together are two sides of a coin - night and day, good and bad, happiness and sorrow, light and dark, pain and pleasure.

This current research does bring about a meeting of science and religion, so to speak.