THE SCIENCE OF SPREADING JOY
Turns out, “joy” is best when it’s shared with others. Recent studies on the hows and whys of human happiness are suggesting that we can boost our individual happiness quotients (HQ) significantly when we pool them together.
Yesterday, we cited a study that showed how people who sing together are way happier than soloists.
First of all, singing in front of others, even if you are a pro, takes nerve. Those butterflies in your tummy, whether they are faint or heavily a flutter, release endorphins which are essentially one set of key ingredients in your joy juice cocktail. It gives you a “singer’s high.”
Hearing other people sing around you releases dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure, and serotonin, another chemical related to euphoria. While singing in groups releases oxytocin in all participants, helping you all to forge bonds and chill out with each other.If something bad is stuck in your brain, like thinking about death, sing about it together, and you will experience collective consolation. There's evidence that suggests that when a choir sings about death, such as in Mozart's Requiem, there is an increase in s-IgA, an immunoglobulin that enhances our immune defense.
Check out Eric Whitacre’s mind blowing virtual choir as presented in his TED talks for the ultimate sing-along bliss.
A Virtual Choir 2,000 Voices Strong
A Choir as big as the Internet
Video: "Happy Together," The Turtles. The Orchard Music
And, if you sing, or listen to upbeat music, vs mellow or melancholy tunes, you will be even happier still. Crank up the old favorite “Happy Together” by the Turtles and see what we mean.
When we listen to music, our brain responds primarily through the main emotional sensors. While the beneficial effects of music on our brain functions is not a new discovery, a new research study conducted by the University of Missouri, entitled “Trying to Be Happier Really Can Work: Two Experimental Studies,” has shown that upbeat music delivers specific superior boosts to our happy state of mind and body, as recently published in The Journal of Positive Psychology. Dr. Yana Ferguson, the study’s lead author, is most interested in activities and personal goals that can predict happiness and general well-being.
If you aren’t into music at the moment, simply sharing some good news can give you a joy bump.
A recent study by Nathaniel Lambert and colleagues at Brigham Young University has found that talking to close friends or loved ones about positive events in your life can actually make you happier. It can give you heightened well-being, increased overall life satisfaction, and even more energy.
Believe it or not, for most of us, the majority of our experiences are, in fact, positive but we tend to become desensitized to these and only focus on the negative ones, especially when talking with friends. We love to commiserate. And we hate to brag. But.... we’d do better to reverse the ratio of sharing good/bad news.
The study was performed by inviting participants and a single friend or romantic partner into the laboratory. The participant was then asked to write down a positive event that happened to them that day and either share it or not. Those that actually SHARED the news benefited the most, especially if the sharers received an “active-constructive” response to good news (enthusiastic support).
While sharing joy with your colleagues, friends, and family is a great way to spread joy to your world, the more intimate you get, the more benefit you get. Recent studies confirm that married people are happier than bachelors, bachelorettes, divorcée, and widows.
A recent survey by U.K.'s Office of National Statistics of 165,000 British people found that marriage is much more important to happiness financial or material wealth. In fact, it was shown to be 20 times more important than income and 13 times more important than owning a home. Only health and employment status beat marriage in ranking happiness factors in life.
And, it turns out, marriage improves your health and helps you live longer, as recently reported in the Telegraph. Another set of recent studies, conducted by Michigan State University and Duke University Medical Center found that married people are better protected against age-related declines and early death. In fact, people who were never married were more than twice as likely to die early.
But why does happiness matter so much? It helps us to evolve as a species. Our cognitive evolution is primarily fueled by joy. As imagine and consider many different decisions and outcomes, we find that the ones that make us the happiest tend to improve our physical and emotional lives. So, if we are higher on the evolutionary ladder, we go higher still when we make happy choices. We keep advancing as we choose more happiness.
Once we attain a level of happiness, we tend to want more.... built in greed... because we become “bored” with current happiness and we reset, once again, looking for a new joy fix.
A recent article in the Wall St. Journal looks at evolution as the happiness driver, citing economist Arthur Robson’s explanation. He frames this as what economists call a principal-agent problem. “Evolution is the principal, trying to get organisms (its agents) to increase their fitness. But how can it get those dumb animals to act in accordance with this plan?”
Once you get past the base of Maslow’s pyramid, getting your basic food and safety needs met, your higher level cognitive functions require a more sophisticated motivational system. You require more to keep you happy. And the more you get, the stronger you are as an individual procreator. That’s why the grass is always greener over “there.”
Who are the most evolved among us? Turns out, if you are 23 or 69 years old, you drink coffee, you are a conservative Republican, and you live in San Jose, CA, you are at the top of the joy heap.
A recent article published in the Atlantic Wire cites four separate pieces of research to focused on identifying the happiest human prototypes.
When you are 23 years old, you have high expectations, with many opportunities ahead of you. That’s a happy place to be. And, when you are 69 years old, you have already largely gotten over the sense of loss from missed expectations. That is also a happy place to be. So says the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics
The 23 year old is even happier if he or she lives in San Jose, according to Career Bliss. Why? You’d be in bliss too if you worked in a place that was chillaxed on things like work hours, dress codes, “office” spaces -- and gave you happy perks like massage-on-demand and gourmet meals-at-the-beckon and, as Atabaad Santos points out, paintball!
The Harvard School of Public Health suggests that you add coffee to the mix. Caffeine is an antidepressant. And, finally, according to the Journal of Politics/Brock and Ryerson Universities/Pew Research, conservative Republicans were happier than Democrats. Hmmn.
Tech guru Philip Bump notes that the study is “a little off” in that the university studied perceived happiness in psychological terms, not political ones.
The good news is: even if you are not in the “desired” age, political, geographic, or beverage-drinking groups cited, all you need to do is join a sing-along, share some happy ideas with your friends, and find some marital bliss, and you are all set for a happier, healthier, more beautiful life.
Check out The Happiness Project and maybe start your own. Find out more in The Happiness Project blog and "The Happiness Project"
Check out the rest of our posts on Joy this week in Arts/Design, Food/Drink, Mind/Body, Place/Time, Nature/Science, and Soul Impact. And enter this week's photo competition. The theme: Joy (Deadline, August 4th, 2013).
