Evidence-based happiness

Earlier this year, we had motivational posters in the elevators of our office building, reminding us that 19 February 2024 is national random acts of kindness day, and we were supposed to engage in random acts of kindness to make us and others happier.

Every time I got into the lift, I wanted to rip these motivational posters off the wall. Not because I am German and cynicism is a birth right to me, but because there is no evidence that random acts of kindness make you happier.

As many people who know me are aware, I like to investigate happiness research partly because it is fun and partly because I want to be happier in life and am looking for evidence-based steps to improve my happiness. In other words, I am being completely egoistic in my interest in happiness research.

As part of my endeavour to improve my life, I, among other things, have adopted a no asshole rule. I systematically remove people from my life that are assholes or who are unkind. And I am trying to be as kind to other people as possible, so they don’t remove me from their lives. Hence, I am a strong advocate for more kindness in this world. But my lord, we sure don’t need a national day for that.

Having said that, there are national days for everything and today (3 May) is, among other things, National Montana Day in  the US, National Textiles Day, National Space Day, but also National Garden Meditation Day, National Specially-abled Pets Day (I swear, I am not making this stuff up), National Lumpy Rug Day (seriously, look it up if you don’t believe me) and National Paranormal Day.

Especially the last one irked me at first, but then I realised it is also National Raspberry Popover Day and National Chocolate Custard Day, so I had a chocolate custard and immediately calmed down enough to put on two different-coloured shoes because it is also National Two Different Coloured Shoes Day.

Where was I?

Ah, random acts of kindness. There are all kinds of studies that pretend to show that doing this or that will make you happier in life. Unfortunately, many of these studies don’t hold up to scrutiny and are subject to p-hacking. Which is why I am grateful to Dunigan Folk and Elizabeth Dunn for their article in the Annual Review of Psychology. They screened 5,953 papers on happiness in the psychology literature and filtered out only those studies that were pre-registered.

Pre-registered studies publicly file the experimental setup together with the hypothesis that are being tested and the expected outcome. This way, it is harder (though admittedly not impossible) to fudge the data after the experiment has been performed to come to a statistically significant result or rephrase the hypothesis after the fact to match the result. Of those several thousand studies, only 65 individual studies in 48 papers matched the strict quality criteria of the authors.

So here is your evidence-based guide to what does (and doesn’t) make you happy.

Things that do not make you happy even though some studies claim they do so:

• Looking on the bright side. Seeing the positive in otherwise negative events can sometimes make people feel better about the specific stress factor at hand, but there is overall very little evidence that looking on the bright side makes people happier or improves mood in general.

• The authors could find only one pre-registered experiment on the impact of diet on happiness and that experiment found no evidence that changing your diet makes you happier.

• Similarly, the authors could find only two pre-registered studies on the impact of meditation on mood and neither one of these studies found evidence for the positive impact of meditation on mood and happiness.

• There is no evidence that acts of kindness improve mood and happiness as I mentioned already.

• Similarly, there is no evidence that volunteer work improves happiness and in general there is mixed evidence that helping others makes you happier. Indeed, it seems that if there is any increase in happiness from helping others it is likely to be very small. And please stop sending me hate mail about this one, I am only repeating what the study found. You are making me very unhappy if you insult me.

Things that truly seem to make you happy:

• The most compelling evidence has been found for people who act in a more sociable way. People who are nicer and more sociable with work colleagues, friends, and family are systematically happier than people who are less sociable. Take that you grumpy people!

• Expressing gratitude to people who do something nice for you, or simply expressing gratitude for the food on the table or something as mundane as your morning coffee does make you happy. However, this is only a short-term effect and there seems to be no longer-term effect on happiness. However, one may hope that regularly expressing gratitude leads to long-term effects as short-term improvements in happiness become habitual. But there are no studies that have tested that.

• Smiling and acting happy does make you happier, but only if it comes naturally. People who act happier (for example by consciously putting on a smile) reported increased happiness afterward. However, people who were forced to act happily (for example by holding a pen in their mouth which makes them adopt a smiling pose) did not feel happier. In other words, as long as you are at least in a neutral emotional state, acting happy makes you happy. But if you are sad, stressed, or angry, it most likely won’t help.

• Injecting novelty into familiar experiences helps to improve happiness. For example, when people were asked to treat their regular weekends as vacations and go sightseeing in their hometown, they reported feeling happier. So, change things up from time to time to look at your world a little bit differently. You may be surprised what you find.

• Buying yourself time, in other words, hiring other people to perform mundane and tedious tasks for you, does increase happiness. Shame though that someone else now has to do the task for you and I bet this person isn’t going to enjoy that work either.

• Speaking of money, one thing that also seems to make people happier is to provide financial support to people in need. In particular, giving cash directly is the most effective way to improve happiness and the situation of a person in need. This seems counterintuitive given all the news about people exploiting the welfare system and squandering money on drugs and alcohol, etc. but these stories are outliers, not the norm. In fact, one of my preferred charities is GiveDirectly, which has shown in practice how effective it is to send cash to people in developing countries rather than giving them a goat, installing a water pump, or subjecting to one of the many well-meaning interventions charities perform.

• Reducing the use of smartphones and social media does not increase happiness in the short term, but it does have two long-term effects that improve happiness. One, people who spend less time on their smartphones or on social media tend to spend more time with other people, and this sociable behaviour increases happiness. Two, while short-term abstinence does not feel good, long-term abstinence leads to higher wellbeing. This is essentially nothing more than to say that smartphones and social media are like cigarettes. You have to push through the withdrawal symptoms before you feel better.

So, there you have it. Now go and think about your life and make changes to improve your happiness. I promise it will be worth more than what you pay for this substack. Wait, this substack is free…