In answer to your question @CherryBomb, can I first start with what doesn't make us happy?
There’s a lot of strong research around about the things that genuinely make people happy. And they are not always what we would expect. How many times have you heard someone say that a lottery win would make them really happy?
Funnily enough, lottery winners have been studied about as closely as lab rats. And what we now know is that their happiness is only boosted for about six months. After that first rush of euphoric shopping (McMansion anyone?) they settle back to their previous levels of happiness. So if they were happy people to start with, they still will be. But if they were not happy prior to the win, they will now be rich unhappy people. Strange but true.
The reason for this is something called ‘hedonistic adaptation’. It basically means that material things only make us happy temporarily. Once we get used to having them, or notice that other people have things that are even better, they no longer make us happier than we were before.
The upside of our ability to adapt is that we also return to previous happiness levels after something bad happens. For example, there was a research project on a group of people recently diagnosed with kidney disease who needed 15 hours of dialysis a week. Not a situation that we would expect to lead to much happiness. But what the researchers found is that while the patient’s happiness levels dropped in the short-term, they came back to their pre-diagnosis levels within a few months. We are remarkably adaptive creatures which is a great advantage when so much seems to be out of our control.
I reckon we can all think of examples from their own lives when something great hasn’t made us as happy as we expected or something tough didn’t bring us down for as long as they anticipated.
