What is the secret to happiness? Does happiness come from within, or is it shaped by external influences such as our jobs, health, relationships and material circumstances? A new study published in Nature Human Behaviour shows that happiness can come from either within or from external influences, from both, or neither – and which is true differs across people.
People have long contemplated the sources of happiness. In recent years, efforts such as the World Happiness Report seek to improve wellbeing across the world.
"We have to understand the sources of happiness to build effective interventions," said Emorie Beck, assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis and first author on the paper.
There are two major models of happiness. The "bottom-up" perspective holds that overall happiness comes from our satisfaction with domains of our life, such as wealth, enjoyable work and satisfying relationships. Surveys such as the World Happiness Report tend to follow this model, suggesting that we improve happiness at a societal level, for example through policies that improve people's income or environmental quality, rather than by targeting factors intrinsic to an individual.
"But we all know people in our lives who experience traumatic events yet seem to be happy," Beck said. Surveys have shown that across populations, only part of the happiness gap between groups of people can be assigned to factors such as wealth and life expectancy. This suggests a "top-down" perspective, where happiness comes not from external circumstances, but from personal attitudes and qualities, implying that we can improve happiness by improving our mental states through practices such as mindfulness meditation or therapy, rather than by targeting external factors.
A third model is bidirectional: The bottom-up and top-down influences interact with each other to generate overall happiness. From this perspective, targeting either intrinsic or external factors should improve well-being.
Surveys of life satisfaction
Beck and coauthors Joshua Jackson of Washington University in St. Louis; Felix Cheung of the University of Toronto; and Stuti Thapa of the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma looked at what determines individual happiness for a group of over 40,000 people. These were nationally representative panels of respondents who had taken part in separate surveys of life satisfaction in Germany, Britain, Switzerland, The Netherlands and Australia repeatedly for up to 30 years. The surveys captured both global life satisfaction over time and satisfaction in five domains: health, income, housing, work and relationships.
"What comes out is that we see roughly equal groups that demonstrate each pattern," Beck said. "Some are bottom up; some are top down, the domains don't affect their happiness; some are bidirectional and some are unclear."
In the latter group, the researchers could not find any clear connection between the five subdomains and global wellbeing. While these individuals may feel satisfied with their lives as a whole as well as with certain domains, they don't appear to influence each other over time. One possibility is that other things in their lives, from broader structural issues to specific events, may override these influences, Beck said.
The findings imply that measuring subjective wellbeing at the population level does not really reflect the experience of individuals. If the goal is to improve happiness across society, policies need to address both external factors such as health, income, housing and jobs and also individual qualities such as personal resilience and purpose in life.
Importantly, the most effective policies will be tailored to the individual themselves, Beck said. Targeting external factors for individuals whose happiness is not determined by them would likely be ineffective.
"These things are treated separately, but they aren't really. They feed into each other at a personal level," Beck said.
The work was supported in part by grants from the National Institute on Aging.
