In every life we have some trouble
When you worry you make it double
Don’t worry, be happy……
There is plenty of doom and gloom surrounding rising unemployment, free-falling equity values, locked-in credit markets and a housing situation that, well, you know. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine panic, dread and misery being a frequent co-pilot among the millions of mass-transiting, ride-share laneing commuters across the world. But beyond the anxiety over our economic security, are we generally more unhappy now?
Paul Ingram, the faculty director of the Columbia Senior Executive Program at Columbia Business School, recently released the results of a longitudinal survey of 500 young executives who are mostly based in New York or London and on the front lines of the financial crisis. Of the survey’s findings, he says “the overall happiness in this group has not changed as the financial crisis has unfolded.”
What the survey uncovers is the notion that how we motivate ourselves, what we value and whether we are forward or backward looking has much more to say about our happiness than the economic conditions of the moment.
We have found that people who are disposed to comparisons are less happy. Of course, relative status matters for happiness, but people who think more about their position compared to others are less satisfied with their lives. In times of loss, it is also happiness-destroying to make comparisons to yourself in the past. It is likely that this has created despondency in a few of the formerly super-rich who are now merely rich. The prescription that results from this evidence is to think less about what others have and to not dwell on what you have lost.
We have also found that people who are vigilant about protecting what they have and value — whatever it is — are happier. We recommend that you make salient what you have now that you want to keep, and be conscious of how you might lose it.
Finally, people who are eager in pursuit of some potential gain are also happier. Be explicit about what it is you want for the future, lay out concrete plans to get it and think about how you’ll feel when you do so.
Our experiments suggest that a useful exercise for putting yourself into the mindset associated with happiness would be to buy a small notebook and regularly write about what you have now that is valuable to you, what threats you must protect against, what you hope for the future and what it will feel like when those hopes are realized. Happily, the same exercise will have positive spillovers on your creativity, risk-management and decision-making abilities. And remember that the relationship between the economy and life satisfaction is muted and that our capacity to adjust to negative events is great. The biggest influence on the ultimate outcome — happiness — is not what happens to us but how we motivate ourselves.
Although we understand the pain the current climate is causing, at Unbound Ideas, we too are focusing on positive motivations and a better tomorrow. With apologies to Bobby McFerrin, we’ll do our best to sing that idea note for note.
