The Atlantic: What Makes Us Happy? (Joshua Wolf Shenk)

Happiness - often sought but poorly understood, always desirable yet often frustratingly out-of-reach. Wouldn't we all like to know what defines happiness and how to achieve it?

This Atlantic article talks to the doctor/scientist who has dedicated his career to studying happiness and what exactly that entails. His name is George Vaillant and he is the current director of the Grant Study - a longitudinal study that has followed 268 Harvard men since they were sophomores in 1937. The study continues to this day with most of the living subjects in their late 80s, and is one of the longest studies of its kind. Although the identity of the Grant Study subjects have largely been keep secret, many famous individuals have been revealed as Grant Study men, including President JFK. The purpose of the study was to investigate the physical and mental well-being of "normal" men throughout the entirety of their life cycle. Unlike many psychological studies that focus on abnormality, this study focused on discovering the secrets for a well-adjusted and happy life.

To me, the results of the Grant Study (although still ongoing technically) can be summed up by the trite adage: happiness is what you make of it. To define happiness as some Utopian ideal with absolute standards seems incorrect. Otherwise, it would be an easy task to define happiness: happiness is the person with the most material wealth; happiness is the person with the most friends; happiness is the person with the strongest faith, etc. Instead happiness does not seem to be a quantifiable commodity, rather it is a state of well-being that comes from the ability to cope with challenge. The last point is particularly important in my opinion because of the ever-changing nature of life. To tie one's happiness to something fixed goes against the unpredictable twists and turns that tomorrow always brings. So instead of viewing happiness as a goal to be achieved, I see it more as a measure of how well one responds to the challenges of life changes. In the same vein, Vaillant extols those studied who have found "a way of turning the dross of emotional crises, pain, and deprivation into the gold of human connection, accomplishment, and creativity. 'Such mechanisms are analogous to the involuntary grace by which an oyster, coping with an irritating grain of sand, creates a pearl,' he writes. 'Humans, too, when confronted with irritants, engage in unconscious but often creative behavior.'"

How do humans respond to challenge? In the Freudian tradition, Vaillant suggests that people employ different defense mechanisms to cope with obstacles. The article defines and describes different kinds of defense mechanisms as follows:

"Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship)."

Although it offers no strict prescription for happiness, the Grant Study does indicate that there are a few factors that predict happiness more than others. These include employing the aforementioned mature adaptations, education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Additionally regular exercise in college predicted mental health later in life better that it did physical health. Depression and pessimism also seem to take a toll on one's physical well-being as one ages.

Then what makes us happy? Strive to counter challenging life situations with mature adaptations,and happiness will follow naturally. Vaillant's says of happiness:

"Happiness isn't about me. Try being funny; try making yourself in love; try making yourself forgive somebody....The take home message is enjoy where you are now...This process is fun. It's all change. It is playing and working and loving...and loving is most important. Happiness is love."

What Makes Us Happy?