those who are in need – through healthcare,
unemployment benefits and pensions. In the
past, some economists had simply looked at
the proportion of GDP devoted to the welfare
state, and they had tended to find that
generous spending had surprisingly little
effect on the overall happiness of the
population. In some cases, there even appeared
to be a negative correlation between welfare
budgets and life satisfaction, a discovery that
would seem to argue against government
intervention in people’s lives.
Martela, however, says these studies failed
to consider how that money was applied:
whether the services are efficient and provide
the necessary help when it is required. In some
countries, much of the funding is simply lost
through corruption. “Inefficient systems aren’t
likely to help much, no matter how much
money you pour into them,” he says.CAN WE LEARN TO BE
HAPPY?
We know how to behave to
increase the chances of a long,
healthy life. If you drink alcohol
in moderation, don’t smoke,
follow a good diet with plenty of
vegetables, take half an hour of
exercise a day and aim to have
8 hours of sleep a night, you are
more likely to live into your 80s.
But is it possible to prescribe a
happy lifestyle too? Over the past
two decades, scientists studying
“positive psychology” have
identified many techniques to
raise our happiness from its
current baseline. These methods
cannot work miracles. “Things
like poverty or trauma are
obviously going to affect your
well-being,” says Laurie Santos
at Yale University. “But for many
of us, our happiness is much
more under our control than we
think.”
Santos would know. Her free
online course, The Science of
Well-being, offers lessons on the
mental habits that damage our
happiness.
For a taste of what it involves,
consider our tendency to
compare ourselves negatively
with the people around us, which
is now known to be one of the
most common causes of
dissatisfaction with our lives. By
recognising when those thoughts
have started to arise, we can
consciously shift the reference
point to something more neutral.
If you start to feel dissatisfied
with your current salary and keep
on thinking that you would be
even happier with your boss’s
income, you might try to
remember your financial
situation before you got your
most recent raise. What kinds of
things can you buy now, that you
couldn’t before? With this kind of
counterfactual thinking, you may
start to feel more content.The use of gratitude journals,
where you regularly count your
blessings, work on a similar
basis, says Santos. We have a
tendency for “hedonic
adaptation”, essentially getting
used to the good things in our
life over time, and taking them
for granted, so they no longer
bring us the same joy. By
making a conscious effort to
recognise those things – and
even imagine what our life would
be like without them – we stall
that process.
Other lessons in Santos’s
course include the benefits of
mindfulness and the value of
small acts of kindness. Studies
show that making the effort to
talk to strangers, for example –
be it a barista or someone in the
park – can increase your sense of
social connection, which is
known to have a positive effect
on your mood.POSITIVE RESULTS
In 2021, Santos and her
colleagues published the results
of a paper that compared the
well-being of people who had
taken her course with that of
people enrolled in a more general
Introduction to Psychology
course on the same platform.
Overall, both groups showed
some improvements by the end
of their courses, which isn’t
surprising – taking time to learn
and grow should make you feel
a bit more fulfilled with your life.
However, the gains of the Science
of Well-being students were
about twice as large, indicating
that the suggested interventions
themselves had made a
significant impact over
the 10-week course.
These results chime with
a randomised controlled trial
conducted in the UK of another
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