the happiness advantage

shawn achor

Depression rates today are ten times higher than they were in 1960. That’s a bad story, one the numbers help tell. These numbers are themselves unreliable, because we want to see a trend, because if we see a trend we can get published, which shows other researchers our dicks are big. If the data has an outlier, it gets treated like human outliers. It gets deleted because it’s clearly a measurement error, and it’s clearly a measurement error because it’s screwing up the data. This tactic isn’t just ethical, it’s taught. That’s why there exist countless formulas and statistics packages to help enterprising researchers eliminate these “problems.” And to be clear, this is not cheating; these are statistically valid procedures—if, that is, one is interested only in the general trend. The problem is it’s created a cult of the average in the behavioral sciences. If someone asks a question such as “How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?” science changes that question to “How fast does the average child learn to read in the classroom?” And when we only study the average, we will remain average.

Sure, we can eliminate depression without making someone happy. We can cure anxiety without teaching someone optimism. You can return someone to work without improving their job performance. If all we strive do is diminish the bad, we’ll only attain the average and miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average. The numbers of the numbers tell the story of our misery, because as late as 1998, there was a 17-to-1 negative-to-positive ratio of research in the field of psychology. In other words, for every one study about happiness and thriving there were 17 studies on depression and disorder. This is very telling. As a society, we know very well how to be unwell and miserable and so little about how to thrive. Turn on the news, and the majority of airtime is spent on accidents, corruption, murders, abuse. This focus on the negative tricks our brains into believing that this sorry ratio is reality, that most of life is negative.

In 1998, Martin Seligman, then president of the American Psychological Association, announced that it was finally time to shift the traditional approach to psychology and start to focus more on the positive side of the curve. Concurrent studies showed how quickly and easily we could change how we saw the world in as little as 3 months. The brain is a plastic thing.

Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things. Positive emotions actually expand our peripheral line of vision

Often, the most enjoyable part of an activity is the anticipation. Anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centers in your brain much as the actual reward will. Not only can we infuse positivity into our lives by thinking about the happy-causing things we’ll do, but also can we infuse positivitity into our surroundings, like keeping a bookcase full of the things we’ve learned right inside our front door, constantly reminding us of the things that make us us, that make us unique.

Psychologists have found that people who watch less TV are actually more accurate judges of life’s risks and rewards than those who subject themselves to the tales of crime, tragedy, and death that appear night after night on the ten o’clock news. That’s because these people are less likely to see sensationalized or one-sided sources of information, and thus see reality more clearly.

Activity can boost mood and enhance our work performance in a number of other ways as well, by improving motivation and feelings of mastery, reducing stress and anxiety, and helping us get into flow—that “locked in” feeling of total engagement that we usually get when we’re at our most productive

I like the idea of potential being based on our perception of our potential. It’s why self-deception is such a persistent trait, because if we can convince ourselves something false is true, we can act in ways that make people treat us how we want to be perceived, creating a perfect self-fulfilling prophecy.

It makes what’s true relative, reinforced by Achor’s plug for Einstein’s theory of relativity by saying what’s real changes by how it’s being looked at. It’s ‘relatively’ similar to Schrodinger’s superposition in that you can’t know what something’s like until you look at it.

Langer seems to take this even further by throwing a twist on placebos with her experiments measuring mental construction’s effect on physical aging. That’s a hilarious study, and whether intentionally or not, it pays a longstanding homage to Dr. Cobb’s sham surgeries in the ‘50s. He and some other physicians took patients with blockages in cardiac blood vessels and split them into groups. One group was opened up and had certain blood vessels tied off to relieve the chest pain, while the others were opened up and sewn right back up with nothing done. Both groups were measured at several points after the procedure and it turns out the treatment group who’d had the sham surgery reported the same level of pain relief as those who’d been given the actual surgery. His point was that when the mind thinks the body’s been fixed, it starts to ignore the pain receptors firing in response to what it thought was now mended. The brain can change the body, and like Langer demonstrated with the physical aging and mental construction study, it can work in all sorts of ways. We don’t do sham surgeries in America anymore, but Europe is still doing them to show the placebo effect at work. Something I’d never come across before was the reverse placebo effect, seemingly having the same sort of physiological outcomes as a result of perception. Next time I brush up against poison ivy I’m going to convince myself it was oregano.

Perception as reality seems to act a lot like mirror neurons, where our brains light up in the areas of activity when watching activities. Kinsborne’s Expectancy Theory explained it succinctly, talking about how the brain is wired to act on what we think will happen next. That makes sense when thinking about mirror neurons, since our predictions of something happening cause the same set of neurons to fire as if that something was actually happening. Those neurons firing triggers our body to release neurotransmitters and chemicals in preparation for what we think is coming, causing the physiological outcomes as if that thing has happened. It’s beautiful, like when your palms sweat in an interview because your body thinks it has to fight or flee so the sweat glands activate to give your grip the advantage of fluid friction in order to climb away from danger. The takeaway is a dangerous thing, though. What we think of something is more important than what’s actually happening. There is no objective.  

The workplace consequences are obvious. We can frame things how we like, and see what we want. Celeste Headlee talks about that through the lens of influence in her book We Need to Talk. She says if you ever go into a conversation with the intent to persuade someone who disagrees with you, you’ll always lose, because arguing with someone only causes them to entrench further in their established beliefs. If, instead, you go into a conversation with the intent to learn something, then you’ll always win. No matter what, you’ll gain insight into another’s perspective, and by proxy, the other person will feel heard, which is the largest precursor to influence. It’s kind of paradoxical; if you want to influence, don’t influence.

I also love the idea of the productivity paradox, where working more is counter productive because you’re disallowing yourself the things that recharge you enough to do more work.  

When books mention authors from other books you covet, it gives you the feeling that you’re getting closer to a truth, capital T. That’s what it felt like when Achor plugged Dweck’s Mindset, people believing they can improve on their abilities takes priority over how they feel about their current abilities. “The power to fashion happiness for ourselves,” she said. It strikes a cord.

The job crafting hit a different cord, one which I think I’ll use with my next customer service class. Trainees are often eager from day one to jump into their next position, which is great, but it also artifactually makes them undervalue their current role. I’m going to try having them turn their job descriptions into calling descriptions to engender the meaning their jobs innately have. I can tell them their jobs are important all day, but having them realize it for themselves? That’s something else entirely. It’s still a stepping stone position, but asking how their current job will be connected to their larger purpose may go a long way in helping them derive meaning from the get-go.

As a trainer, and for others who have managers, the idea that how we think influences how those we manage or those we train think also hits home. People become the box we put them in, and are motivated by how we expect them to be, so we should burn the box.

I know this is the chapter we were all waiting for, but I consolidated it a little more than I did with the fulcrum and the lever. Repetition’s cognitive afterimage is great, and great for managers to be aware of. Awareness that our brains are set up to see negatives as a side-effect of long-ago threat detection is detrimental to the development of subordinates because it means we’re a lot better at seeing what went wrong rather than what went right. If we know that, we can ignore it.

I disagree that negativity undercuts creativity and lowers motivation. As Achor contradicts his nose-thumbing of research removing outliers by doing the same with his own research, he himself undercuts that a lot of people are motivated by stress. Stress and anxiety are great creative stimulants if you look at any performance curve in relation to at what point people start work against a deadline (or lifeline). I know he’s saying this with the asterisk of *this holds true for people with trouble compartmentalizing their negativity* and I’m with him there. Him plugging James is brilliant, though, in that our “experience is what we agree to attend to.” That’s plaque-worthy. By the same token, he says, our inattentive blindness will forever make us miss what we’re not looking for.

This inattentive blindness is what he says causes two people to see different things, like seeing a person not reciprocating a smile and one thinking nothing of it while the other assumes bad intent. That one’s admittedly hard to break away from, because bearing your teeth is an evolutionary sign of passivity. Seeing someone hide their smile is an anthropological flag of aggression. Again, though, his plea for awareness goes a long way (supplemented with our core values) in that we should always assume positive intent.

The idea of predictive encoding seems a little contradictory to me. I love the phrasing that expecting a favorable outcome readies our brain to see outcomes when they arise, but I anecdotally know several pessimistic opportunists. Maybe in my head, ‘seeing what’s good’ doesn’t directly overlap with ‘seeing what’s possible.’ I say that hypocritically, since like I mentioned in the last meeting I will prime myself with positives when I’m experiencing a certain amount of stress.

Since I was a kid I’ve journaled, and before reading this I found the power in positive journaling. I journal about 500 words a day before I go to bed, and what I noticed a few years ago is that placing this activity at the end of the day turned this introspective exercise into a medium for venting. I’d talk about what bugged me, what I hadn’t done, what could’ve gone differently, and it wasn’t really serving me well. So now, for the past few years, I’ve used it as a way to talk about the positives of the day, or at least, to talk about something neutrally or unrelated to the day altogether. I feel differently because of it, I just can’t place when that differentness happened. It’s nice to see that exercise validated by research.

I think this whole chapter can be summed up with the idea of utilizing positive counterfacts. Achor says we make these mental maps to survive and predict what will happen, and because we’re overzealous threat-detectors it’s resulted in convincing ourselves that failure is bad. It’s only those who see failure as an opportunity for growth that get a chance to experience growth. We don’t do a lot of contemporary favors in engendering Post-traumatic growth, as shown in the military when government-sponsored psychologists tell soldiers they’ll either come back fucked up or fine. What should happen is helping people understand that what happens to them doesn’t define them. They’re defined by what they do with what happened. It’s a language change, like replacing deadline with lifeline, except here it’s no longer bouncing back, it’s bouncing forward.

Failure is innovation fodder, because the world never transforms after something’s gone right. Failure’s also necessary because it’s the only thing that can teach us how to deal with it. Those who see it negatively tend to protect themselves by overlearning from the experience and sheltering themselves by being convinced that one dead-end path is proof all paths are dead ends. We can instead select a positive counterfact to focus on what we gained from our loss, but that’s something that is somewhat decided by how someone’s predisposed to explain their past themselves. Optimists see adversity as acute and fleeting, pessimists see failure as global and permanent. This way we think brings about representative consequences down the line. See positively, invited positive consequences. See negative, invite negative. We can always dispute a negative reaction just like we can in metacognition. Nothing is fact. All is belief, and all beliefs deserve challenge.  

Again, this chapter can be divined into a simple take-away: start small, then grow. When changing, we’re always more likely to feel in control to the extent we feel confident in our ability to change successfully. An easily way to hijack confidence is to change things you know you’ll change successfully: the small things. It makes us feel more in control than we might be, and that’s the name of the game. People who are predisposed to think control happens outside of them can learn to shift their locus of control this way. People only think things are out of their control because they’ve learned, through experience or education, that that’s how it goes. Give them control over small change, though, and that can change.

When we’re under pressure, the body starts to build up too much cortisol, the toxic chemical associated with stress. Once the stress has reached a critical point, even the smallest setback can trigger an amygdala response, essentially hitting the brain’s panic button. When that happens, our emotional hindbrain hijacks our logical prefrontal cortex, spurring us into action without conscious thought. Instead of “think, then react,” we “fight or flight.” 

Neuroscientists have found that financial losses are processed in the same areas of the brain that respond to mortal danger. In other words, we react to withering profits and a sinking retirement account the same way our ancestors did to a saber-toothed tiger. However, we can counteract this weird response by journaling to express the stress to regain control.

Principle 6: 20-Second Rule

Common sense is not common action - As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. 44% of doctors are overweight. If we want to create lasting change, we should “make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.

As we progress through our days learning new facts, completing new tasks, and having new conversations, our brains are constantly changing and rewiring to reflect these experiences. With apologies to the delicate nuances of neuroscience, here is what is happening in a nutshell: Within our brains are billions upon billions of neurons, interconnected in every which way to form a complex set of neural pathways. Electrical currents travel down these pathways, from neuron to neuron, delivering the messages that make up our every thought and action. The more we perform a particular action, the more connections form between the corresponding neurons. (This is the origin of the common phrase “cells that fire together, wire together.”) The stronger this link, the faster the message can travel down the pathway. This is what makes the behavior seem second nature or automatic

the reason so many of us have trouble sustaining change is because we try to rely on willpower. We think we can go from 0 to 60 in an instant, changing or overturning ingrained life habits through the sheer force of will. The reason willpower is so ineffective at sustaining change is that the more we use it, the more worn-out it gets. You may know this intuitively, but it took renowned researcher Roy Baumeister hundreds of chocolate chip cookies and a lot of disgruntled research subjects to prove it as fact. The point of these experiments was to show that no matter how unrelated the tasks were, they all seemed to be tapping the same fuel source. As the researchers wrote, “many widely different forms of self-control draw on a common resource, or self-control strength, which is quite limited and hence can be depleted readily.” Put another way, our willpower weakens the more we use it.

Inactivity is simply the easiest option. Unfortunately, we don’t enjoy it nearly as much as we think we do. In general, Americans actually find free time more difficult to enjoy than work. If that sounds ridiculous, consider this: For the most part, our jobs require us to use our skills, engage our minds, and pursue our goals—all things that have been shown to contribute to happiness.

Technology may make it easier for us to save time, but it also makes it a whole lot easier for us to waste it. In short, distraction, always just one click away, has become the path of least resistance.

I like to refer to this as the 20-Second Rule, because lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me form a new life habit. Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt, and raise it for habits you want to avoid. In essence, the more effort it takes us to obtain, say, an unhealthy food, the less we’ll eat of it, and vice versa.

When we make a positive social connection, the pleasure-inducing hormone oxytocin is released into our bloodstream, immediately reducing anxiety and improving concentration and focus. Each social connection also bolsters our cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune systems, so that the more connections we make over time, the better we function. With employees, the more socially connected they felt, the more they took the time to figure out ways to improve their own efficiency, or their own skill set. At work, good teams have glue guys - the type of employees that quietly hold teams together.

Ties do not extend outward in straight lines like spokes on a wheel,” they write. “Instead, these paths double back on themselves and spiral around like a tangled pile of spaghetti, weaving in and out of other paths that rarely ever leave the plate.”

This theory holds that our attitudes and behaviors don’t only infect the people we interact with directly—like our colleagues, friends, and families—but that each individual’s influence actually appears to extend to people within three degrees. So when you use these principles to make positive changes in your own life, you are unconsciously shaping the behavior of an incredible number of people. As James Fowler explains it, “I know that I’m not just having an impact on my son, I’m potentially having an impact on my son’s best friend’s mother.”2 This influence adds up; Fowler and Christakis estimate that there are nearly 1,000 people within three degrees of most of us. This is a true ripple effect—by trying to make ourselves happier and more successful, we actually have the ability to improve the lives of 1,000 people around us.

mirror neurons: specialized brain cells that can actually sense and then mimic the feelings, actions, and physical sensations of another person.3 Let’s say a person is pricked by a needle. The neurons in the pain center of his or her brain will immediately light up, which should come as no surprise. But what is a surprise is that when that same person sees someone else receive a needle prick, this same set of neurons lights up, just as though he himself had been pricked. In other words, he actually feels a hint of the pain of a needle prick, even though he himself hasn’t been touched. If this sounds incredible, believe me when I tell you it has been replicated in countless other experiments involving sensations that range from pain to fear to happiness to disgust.

Because mirror neurons are often right next to motor neurons in the brain, copied feelings often lead to copied actions—suddenly you are moving like you’re swinging a golf club without even knowing it.

The amygdala can read and identify an emotion in another person’s face within 33 milliseconds, and then just as quickly prime us to feel the same. In addition to this subconscious process, people also consciously assess the mood of those around them and act accordingly. Both processes together make it possible for emotions to jump from person to person in an instant. In fact, studies have shown that when three strangers meet in a room, the most emotionally expressive person transmits his or her mood to the others within just two minutes.

Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else’s toxic state.

Emotions are so shared, organizational psychologists have found that each workplace develops its own group emotion, or “group affective tone,” which over time creates shared “emotion norms” that are proliferated and reinforced by the behavior, both verbal and nonverbal, of the employees.

Smiling, for instance, tricks your brain into thinking you’re happy, so it starts producing the neurochemicals that actually do make you happy. (Scientists call this the facial feedback hypothesis, and it is the basis of the recommendation “fake it till you make it.” While authentic positivity will always trump its faux counterpart, there is significant evidence that changing your behavior first—even your facial expression and posture—can dictate emotional change.