In this video I describe some of the concepts of positive psychology and its emphasis on thriving, growth, and well-being. I discuss optimism, upward and downward comparison, gratitude, and the adaptation level phenomenon or hedonic treadmill, as well as how these concepts relate to happiness.
Coates, Brickman, & Janoff-Bulman (1978) Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative? http://pages.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Happiness_Readings_files/Class%203%20-%20Brickman%201978.pdf
Kahneman & Deaton (2010) High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being https://www.princeton.edu/~deaton/downloads/deaton_kahneman_high_income_improves_evaluation_August2010.pdf
Martin Seligman – Learned Optimism: https://amzn.to/2I4GoZz (Amazon affiliate link)
Daniel Gilbert – Stumbling on Happiness: https://amzn.to/2HKiTFR (Amazon affiliate link)
Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this final video in the unit on stress and health, I’d like to introduce some concepts from positive psychology. So positive psychology refers to a movement within psychology to emphasize the positive. The idea is that there’s been too much focus on negatives, on how things can go wrong. Emphasis on our biases, our errors, our failures, things like mental illnesses, and so instead focus on the potential we have for growth, for improvement, for thriving, how we can improve things like our subjective well-being, which is the term that researchers prefer when talking about happiness. Alhough you’ll notice that when it comes to best-selling books the term “happiness” is still very much preferred.
So one of the areas of research in positive psychology looks at optimism. Optimism refers to a trait that includes a tendency to expect the best. This is the idea that people who are optimistic assume that good things will happen or that the best outcome is what will occur. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re blindly optimistic, that they think things are great. This is not “the best of all possible worlds” as Dr. Pangloss might say in “Candide”, but instead that, even though things are bad, we’re in a negative situation, there’s a possibility for improvement, there’s a possibility that good things will happen in the future. This is in contrast to a pessimistic view that things will remain bad or will get worse.
And it seems that this tendency towards optimism is slightly heritable, but there’s also some evidence that it can be learned. This brings us to Martin Seligman‘s idea of learned optimism. This is the opposite of his idea of learned helplessness we talked about in previous videos. The idea of learned optimism is that we can train ourselves to be more optimistic, we can teach ourselves how to look for the best possible outcome and develop a belief that those are the things that will occur. There is some evidence that this is possible, one study with college students found that those who were given this training in optimism had better health outcomes in the following years after this program. So optimism is associated with positive health outcomes and with faster recovery from illness. And it seems we can, at least to some degree, improve our ability to be optimistic and learn how to be more optimistic.
Now we might wonder how much the environment matters to our well-being. If we’re going to study something like subjective well-being or happiness, then we might wonder how much the environment matters. Does it make a difference if I live in a palace or a tiny apartment? Does it matter if I’m driving a luxury coupe or an old clunker? What influence does the environment have on how I feel? It turns out that environmental changes do have effects on our well-being, but these effects don’t last as long as people expect, and they’re not as strong as people expect.
One of the classic studies of this looked at lottery winners and paraplegics, so people who had won the lottery within the past year, or people who had become paralyzed in an accident in the previous year. What the researchers found is that the effects on subjective well-being were not as strong as you might expect. People who had experienced horrible accidents were not completely destroyed in terms of their subjective well-being. They were certainly feeling worse, they were less happy overall, and people who won the lottery tended to be a little bit happier, but these effects weren’t actually that large and they seemed to dissipate over time so that people tend to return to their baseline level of well-being, despite these large environmental changes. So if you were to suffer an accident and become paralyzed, you might think this would have a strong effect on your well-being, and in the very short-term it would, but over time you’d probably end up about as happy as you are now. And the same is true if you won the lottery. You might think this would permanently change your life and you’d just be euphorically happy for the rest of your life, but that turns out not to be the case. You’d be happy for a little bit, and then this would dissipate. You’d gradually return to what we might think of as your happiness set-point.
Now the good news here is that for when bad things happen, we can expect that we’ll get through them and we’ll get back to our happiness baseline. You might wonder if there’s a downside to this, which is that changes to our environment that are positive won’t really do much to permanently boost our well-being. This leads to the idea on the negative side, that we have a psychological immune system. We have the ability to recover psychologically from negative things. So this is what Dan Gilbert calls our psychological immune system and he points out that we tend to forget that we have it.
We think something bad happens, our relationship ends, we’re injured in an accident, we would be permanently unhappy. This would affect us for the rest of our lives. This doesn’t seem to be the case and this bring us to the point that we’re not very good at predicting our future emotional states. This is what’s called affective forecasting. We’re not good at predicting this. When we think about how happy we’ll be a year from now, 5 years from now, when we think about how happy we’ll be if we won the lottery, we’re not very good at making these predictions.
We can see this with simpler situations. Like you’ve probably had the experience of finishing a very large meal, maybe you just had your Thanksgiving dinner, and you think “I can’t even look at food. I’m not going to need to eat for a week. I’m not going to eat for several days after this.” And of course, tomorrow, you know, you’re hungry again. And so your prediction about your future state was wrong, right? You felt like you could never imagine eating again, and then of course, very soon, that changes. The same might be true for thinking about something like your happiness.
You might think well “if I won the lottery I’d be happy forever” and it turns out that’s probably not the case. And yet people still blindly chase happiness in the form of money. We think we know what’s going to make us happy in the future and this can lead us to chasing the wrong things. So we might think that we could buy happiness. “Well, those people in that study, they just spent their lottery winnings incorrectly. If I won the lottery I would use the money in the appropriate way that would make me happy forever. I could buy happiness”.
So can we buy happiness? Well, we can, to a certain degree. And we can if we’re in circumstances that would truly make us unhappy. If we’re suffering from real true poverty that is devastating to people’s well-being. And this is something I talked about in a previous video, but there’s a large number of negative health outcomes associated with living in poverty. And getting money in this situation does actually improve well-being in a measurable way. We can see that as people who are living in poverty get more money, they have boosts to their well-being that last. And so financial security boosts our well-being. If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, then having enough money that you can know where your next meal is coming from is going to boost your well-being. But we experience diminishing returns. This means that as we get more and more money, each dollar contributes less to our well-being. So eventually we get to the point where each additional dollar doesn’t really do anything for our well-being.
This brings us to some research by Daniel Kahneman that has suggested that this improvement in well-being seems to flatline somewhere around $70-75,000 per year, at least for people living in the United States. And so before that increases in our income can contribute to increases in our well-being being, but eventually we have a flattening off of this situation where additional money doesn’t seem to improve well being. And this brings us to the idea that well, of course, this would be true. We should think this makes a lot of sense, because money doesn’t solve all of our problems. And we all know that. And yet we still often chase more money thinking it’s going to make us happier.
But most of the large problems that people face, if we think about the social readjustment rating scale that I talked about in the previous video, that looks at the stressfulness of different life events, what you see is many of the very stressful life events that people face these major stressors, are things that money doesn’t help with. You know, if you’re going through a divorce or if a friend or family member dies or is very ill, or you get diagnosed with an illness, these are things that money isn’t going to solve those problems. And so thinking that if you just had more money, you’d always be happy doesn’t make a lot of sense. And yet we still chase money.
So why do we do this? We always feel like we need more. If we just had a little more money, we’d be happier. This brings us to what’s called the adaptation level phenomena. Or it’s also referred to as the hedonic treadmill. This is the idea that we continually adjust to our environment. So we have new positive experiences and new surroundings. And these improve our well-being in the short term. They give us temporary boosts, but it doesn’t last. And the reason it doesn’t last is that we adjust so quickly.
So as you begin earning more money, your comparisons start to change. So you might think if you’re earning $25,000 a year, that you know if you were just making $75,000 a year, then that would solve all of your problems. You’d be so much happier if you could just make $75,000 a year. Then of course when you get to the point of making $75,000 a year, your comparisons start to change. You start thinking about things a little differently, you start thinking about I just a lot of these people around me now are making $100,000 a year. If I could just make 100,000 then then I’d be set okay then I can get them. So I just need to work. I just need to get a little bit more money, right? And of course once you get to 100,000 you’ll notice that other people around you are making 150 and you’ll start thinking well maybe 150,000 is the solution to my problems and so on and so on. You constantly adjust to this new comparison.
So this brings us back the idea of Leon Festinger‘s social comparison theory. And when it comes to determining how much money is enough, it turns out enough is going to be based on the people around us rather than some objective measurement of exactly how much I need in order to improve my well being. So we start looking to people around us think these people all have more if I have less compared to them then I need more. I need more. And so this brings us to us called relative deprivation. And many people in the United States who think that they’re suffering and they’re living in in poor conditions is often the result of relative deprivation that’s causing their unhappiness because compared to the rest of the world, they’re probably fabulously wealthy. And so the problem is we have this relative deprivation when we engage in what’s called upward comparison. When we start looking at just the people above us. So if you look to people who are better off than you, you’re going to feel that you’re not good enough, that you’re not doing well enough, that you’re not earning enough money.
So for instance, imagine you got a new job, you get promoted to a new position, and now you’re driving your reliable old Toyota that you’ve had for a long time and you used to think was perfectly adequate for your needs. It got you from home to work and back again and now. you’re driving this old Toyota into a parking lot filled with shiny new Mercedes. And suddenly you might find yourself thinking, man, I really need a new car. Of course, you don’t need a new car. Your car gets you to work and gets you home and gets where anywhere else you need to go. But when you’re comparing it to all these Mercedes, suddenly it stops looking so good. It stops looking like the luxury that it is.
But if you were to engage in download comparison, you might consider people who are worse off, people who don’t have a car at all. And you might start thinking, actually, your Toyota looks pretty good compared to people who are worse off than you. And then you might recognize that well, your old Toyota is pretty good compared to walking or taking the bus and then you might think in terms of time and you might think that your old Toyota is really quite amazing and really something you should be grateful for when you consider that for most of human history, people didn’t have cars at all. Most people who’ve ever lived. never dreamed of the type of transportation that you could have from an automobile. And so in that case, you consider yourself extremely lucky and incredibly grateful for this old Toyota that you’re driving instead of concerning yourself too much with the fact that it’s not quite as shiny as that new Mercedes.
And so this brings us to idea that if you’re watching this video, you probably should be feeling pretty grateful compared to millions or billions of other people. You’re probably better off and there’s millions or probably billions of people who would gladly trade places with you without giving it a second thought, without any hesitation. And when we think historically, this is certainly true. When we think back to previous time periods, we really should feel incredibly grateful for the time period that we live in. You know, as I said, the fact that you can watch this video online is amazing and even kings and emperors of the past would give up their entire kingdoms or their entire empires for things that we take for granted, for things like air conditioning or antibiotics or this Internet thing. I mean, the amount of knowledge that almost all of us have access to, you know, instantaneously is, would be completely overwhelming to anybody from the past.
And another way you can think about this that I that I really like I heard from Russ Roberts on his excellent podcast, EconTalk, and I think he heard it from somewhere else first, but it’s asking people this question of would you rather have $70,000 a year today or $70,000 a year, 100 years ago? Now you might think, well, $70,000 a year, 100 years ago would be I would be fantastically wealthy, you know, that was very, very high. That would be amazing. But then you realize the things that you could do with that money would be greatly reduced. A lot of the things that you take for granted today just wouldn’t exist. And so it wouldn’t matter that you were incredibly wealthy in that time period because you couldn’t have the things that you’d like to have, the luxuries of modern life. And that puts things in perspective in a pretty interesting way.
So what can we do to improve our well-being? Just having more money isn’t going to satisfy this. Well, some of the things are things that I’ve talked about in previous videos. One of these is physical exercise. This is an excellent way to improve your mood, to improve your feelings of well being. And another is what I was just talking about with downward comparison, gratitude, recognizing all of the things that you have. And it’s easy to take these things for granted because of this hedonic treadmill. We’re always motivated to want more. And so we need to take some time to look back on what we do have and think about the opportunities and the luxuries that we take for granted and be grateful for these and people who engage in things like gratitude journaling, where they just take a few moments once in a while to write down the things they’re grateful for, this is associated with improvements and well being. And we also have another behavior that we can engage in, which is acts of kindness. If we do something nice for other people, recognize that that helps us to feel good and hopefully it also helps them to feel good too. They see the world as a kinder place.
And this brings us to probably the most important thing we can do, which is focus on things that are meaningful to us. If you’re. looking to earn more money just because you think more money will make you happy. That’s probably not the right approach. But if you focus on the things that bring you a sense of meaning and you spend your time doing those regardless of how much money they might bring you, then you have a better chance of feeling that you’re achieving your goals, feeling that you’re doing things that are worthwhile and that sense of meaning is going to be far more important than the balance in your bank account.
And this brings us to how I might summarize all of the ideas in this stress and health chapter, which is to go back to the idea of allostasis and to think about balance. So allostasis I mentioned as this different way of thinking about homeostasis. So homeostasis is the idea what they have some optimal state that we want to maintain. And so we will do things to maintain that state. But allostasis points out that the optimal state is always changing, that something like your blood pressure always changes what the optimal state is. If you’re sitting on a couch, there’s a different optimal blood pressure than if you’re sprinting. And so the optimal state is always changing. And that means we need to constantly be adjusting our blood pressure in order to meet those demands.
And so the same can be applied to all sorts of other situations. We can think about our level of perceived control, how much control we want to feel is going to be changing depending on the situation. There’s going to be an optimal state, but it’s not always in the same place. Sometimes you want to perceive more control to feel that you can do things, you can accomplish what you need to do. Other times, the chaos and instability of life means that we have to recognize there are things we can’t control. There are things that are out of our hands, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And we need to be willing to accept that. if we think that we need to control everything, then that’s not going to be very useful in some situations. On the other hand, if we feel we have no control, then we’re entering into learned helplessness. And that’s also negative. So we need to find that balance depending on the situation. We need to find a balance between challenging ourselves, exercising, challenging ourselves cognitively and overwhelming ourselves, making it excessive. We need to find where’s the balance between those things?
We need to balance our desire for social support and social capital within our groups and our communities. We want to cultivate these things. We want to make sure we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t need to be extreme, where we start shunning outsiders or attacking them because they’re not part of our group. We want to look upward occasionally, we want to engage in upward comparison because that’s how we see people who are motivating people who are inspiring to us. You see the people who are doing better than you are and hopefully that inspires you to work harder, to try to accomplish more than you thought you could.
At the same time you want to do that without feeling this relative deprivation, without feeling that you’re just worse than everybody else. If you’re constantly looking upward and never being grateful for what you have, then that’s not necessarily a good thing either. That brings us to the last point, which is gratitude. We want to engage in downward comparison. We want to look and see that we’re better off than so many people and that they would gladly trade places with us. We want to do it without developing a sense of superiority. We don’t want to feel that we are inherently superior to these people, but we want to recognize that we’re lucky for what we have and that we’re better off than we could be.
And if we can apply all of these ideas and find a balance between all these things, I think then we’ll find more meaning in our lives and hopefully we’ll improve our sense of well being. So I hope you found this helpful. If so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
