Tag Archives: Negative Emotions

Proudly presented: the For A State of Happiness Blue Monday Quiz!

22 January 2019 21:00 ,

Blue Monday is definitely a thing now. Dreamt up by marketeers and bogus scientists in 2005, the term has entered the public discourse by now. Media are full of tips to prevent Monday blues, and marketeers take it as a change to drive holiday sales and shopping in an otherwise dull January month. One could call it fake news.

And actually, I’ve also jumped on the Blue Monday bandwagon myself. Even though Blue Monday itself is bogus, there is such a thing as a winter depression, and January is still well in the dark season. Just as we meet family around Christmas, it’s sensible to meet up with friends around Blue Monday for celebration.

Since a few years, my wife and I tend to organise Blue Monday Eve drinks, inviting some friends to ensure we enter Blue Monday with a jolly feeling instead. We try to make it feel different from an ordinary house party; inviting friends on a Sunday instead and playing games (we still procured some wine though).

This year, we also played a happiness quiz with our guests, and on special request I post the questions and answers of the For A State of Happiness Blue Monday Quiz here – maybe you want to use them next year, or at a last minute Blue January event? You still have a week, and if not, February can be pretty blue too.

 

The For A State of Happiness Blue Monday Quiz 2019

What is the happiest country of the world?

According to the 2018 edition of the World Happiness Report: Finland.

What is hygge?

Hygge is a Danish concept that roughly translates to ‘cosiness’, typically felt sitting in front of the fire place with a hot chocolate during a storm. It stands for comfort, togetherness and wellbeing, according to Meik Wiking, author of a book on Hygge and director of the Copenhagen-based Happiness Research Institute.

What are the four elements making people happy at work, according to Pracuję bo lubię?

Energy, flow, purpose, and positive emotions. For more detail (but slightly different naming), see my post after sitting down with Aleksandra Grabska from Pracuję bo lubię (‘I work because I like it’).

Who are happier: people with cats or with dogs?

My post on this is not online yet, but the (unsurprising to most) answer is: dog owners tend to be happier.

Does the weather influence our quality of life?

This is the one many people get wrong: no, it doesn’t. Why not? Two psychological process explain why: ‘focus illusion’ and adaptation.

Which country invented Gross National Happiness?

Readers of my blog will know: Bhutan!

What ranking does Poland have in the World Happiness Report for 2018, out of 156 countries?

The answer is: 42, a bit higher than Poles would suspect. Compared globally, quality of life in Poland is pretty strong, and it has seen major improvements in the last 25 years. Still, Poland is a country where one has to find happiness in unhappiness.

When is the International Day of Happiness?

In 2012, on Bhutan’s initiative, the United Nations decided to institute an International Day of Happiness. It is celebrated each year on 20 March.

Name six positive emotions.

Naming six positive emotions may sound like a lot, but researchers identified even more of them. At Warsaw University, they listed ten: enchantment, love, inspiration, pride, amusement, hope, interest, calm, gratitude, and joy.

What motivates our behaviour more: positive or negative emotions?

Again, a question based on lectures at Warsaw University. While negative emotions can trigger strong responses to difficult events, ultimately positive emotions have a stronger impact on our actions than negative ones.

Character 'Sadness' from Inside Out - she is blue for a reason.

Character ‘Sadness’ from Inside Out – she is blue for a reason.

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Happiness in the past, present and future

13 May 2015 08:24 ,

Robert Biswas-Diener is one of the most original thinkers on happiness I know. His work provides a smart counterweight to the ‘happiologist’ part of positive psychology. A happiness consultant himself, he observes that within the ‘happiness biz‘, there are a lot of people who appear to see happiness at work as the one and only goal.

Interestingly, Biswas-Diener does not agree. He points that when people are happy, they are likely to have a ‘good enough’ philosophy. Gratitude and acceptance form one aspect of happiness. But being grateful with what you have can also hinder self-improvement. Instead, Biswas-Diener believes in the ‘upside of your dark side’: negative emotions like guilt, grief and anger can drive our actions and help us grow.

This is a very helpful contribution to the discipline of positive psychology, which sometimes appears to believe that acceptance and gratitude can take away real problems. Being positive can help in dealing with problems, but cannot take them away. A positive mindset should inspire real actions to face difficulties.

Happiness is in the past..

Only last week I came across Biswas-Diener’s TED talk, with the tile ‘Your Happiest Days are Behind You’. In his talk, Biswas-Diener answers one of the fundamental questions:

How can I be happier?

The common tendency of individuals is to see happiness as something in the future. One of the main reasons why people are unhappy is that they project happiness on goals they haven’t achieved yet. And often, these goals are conflicting:

‘If only I met a nice girl’.

‘If only I had a child’.

‘If only I had that dream job at the Commission.’

‘If only I could work less, and have more holidays’

As Biswas-Diener formulates it: the future is an unreliable sources of happiness. How can we escape from our own expectations about the future? There are various ways out. One of them is by manufactured or ‘synthetic happiness‘, as psychologist Dan Gilbert says. What my answer is, I’ll say below. But first, let’s look at Biswas-Diener’s answer.

The past is the source of happiness…

In his very, very worthwhile talk, Biswas-Diener says that the past, not the future, is the source of happiness. The happiest days are behind you. And with a personal story that I absolutely recommend you to watch, he tells us why he so much believes in the past as a source of happiness. The gist is as follows: by remembering happy moments of the past, you will be able to recreate moments of happiness, and you will experience them again.

Have you watched the story? Can you imagine the race between Robert and the little girl in the slum of Calcutta? Great!

Robert states that memories like this race are the ones that are the answer to the question ‘how can I be happier’. And I agree that remembering happy experience is a very significant part of the answer. But I wonder how reliable the effect remains when one remembers the same memory more often. I would expect there is a somewhat limited life span, as the ‘happiness impact’ of these emotional moments may wear off when you tell or relive the story more regularly.

Compare it to a band playing their hit singles: initially it’s great to see the crowd cheer when they hear your top hit. But if concert after concert, day after day, all the audience wants to hear is the same songs, it doesn’t feel the same anymore. A diverse set of top hits (and happy moments!) thus is important.

… or is it the present?

Therefore, I’d argue that neither the future, nor the past are truly reliable sources of happiness. Instead, I would focus on… the present. Ultimately, our life is lived in the now, not in the future nor in the post. Our aim should be to spent our ‘nows’ – the moment that is easiest to control – in a way that makes us happy. We can go out on a day when the weather is nice. We can do sports, meet friends, or work on goals that are important for us. And by doing so, and appreciating the great moments along the way, we both work on a happy future and create a supply of happy memories that we can enjoy again.

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The power of negative emotions – and two other lessons of the Foro Bienestar

3 December 2014 20:55 ,

I just came back from two weeks in Mexico. During these weeks, I fled the Brussels grey, rain and cold to replace it by the occasional Mexico City grey, the jungle rain, and Pacific coast warmth. Moreover, I spent a couple of days at the Foro Bienestar (International Forum of Well-Being and Development) in Guadalajara, where I was invited to speak. In the next two weeks, I’ll offer some thoughts about my own presentation on happiness and public policy and about the question ‘why are Mexicans so happy’ that was the leitmotiv of the conference. However, today I wanted to share some insights about the main points that I took home from the conference. Are you ready? Here we go!

Don’t forget the power of negative emotions

IMG_1937

Speaking of negative emotions: this slide by Stefano Bartolini (University of Siena) shows the problem of social comparisons and happiness very well.

Most of the speakers were academics and the good thing about academics, contrary to some happiness consultants, is that they don’t allow themselves to be carried away by their enthusiasm so much that they forget that being happy all the time is not possible and not desirable. Negative emotions are a necessary counterweight to positive ones. In a simple metaphor: feelings are a mountainous landscape. Without the valleys of anger, frustrations and anxiety, the happy peaks of joy, tranquility and exaltation would not be happy peaks but part of a plain.

Robert Biswas-Diener, often labelled as a positive psychologist, brought this forward most prominently. Answering his own question ‘how happy should an individual be?’, he suggested that the ideal rate of positive and negative emotions might be positive 80% of the time and 20% negative of the time. Being happy all the time does not do justice to real and important feelings as guilt, grief and anger. For instance, as he also discusses in his book ‘The Upside of your Dark Side‘, guilt can motivate us to work harder and accomplish more than we ever could do if we’d be simply content with everything.

Measuring happiness is very, very simple and very, very, complex

A large part of the conference was dedicated to one simple question: how do you measure happiness? It is clear that there are many ways to do so: the World Happiness Database at the Erasmus University Rotterdam knows 963 different methodologies, said Jan Ott.

But professor John Helliwell, one of the authors of the UN World Happiness Report, explained these can be summarised in a couple of simple ways. One way is to ask people how happy they are in a specific moment. This can be happiness in the ‘now’, to grasp a person’s feelings most accurately, or a moment like ‘yesterday’ or even longer ago, to prevent that events limited in time have a major influence. Such a question can be answered very quickly, without a lot of thinking. A second way is to ask a more reflective question, asking how satisfied you are with your life as a whole. Questions asking about positive or negative emotions typically give more random and diverse answers.

The debate is open on happiness as a policy objective

Picture from the opening session. Source: La Jornada de Jalisco.

Picture from the opening session. Source: La Jornada de Jalisco.

In my opinion, it should be obvious that governments would aim to increase quality of life and well-being – happiness if you want – especially where incomes increase and poverty reduces. Still, using insights about happiness and well-being in public policy is quite scarce: another research to welcome that Jalisco, the region where Guadalajara is located, is facing the challenge. Meik Wiking, from the Danish Happiness Research Institute, identified that taking happiness as a political goal is a trend. But there is also a counter-trend: skepticism about government efforts to formulate happiness policy objectives.

Professor Bruno Frey strongly advanced the argument that with happiness as a policy objective, there would be major incentives to governments to manipulate data, for instance by excluding people with lower happiness and by  falsification of indicators. In a high-level debate – the Tyson vs Ali of  happiness researchers – he was taken on by professor Helliwell, who thought these risks could be reduced as methodologies will be tweaked over time and that manipulation could be constrained in a democratic society.

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