Speaking of Psychology: How to be happier, with Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD

Want to be happier? Some of our happiness level is due to genes or life circumstances, but research shows much of it is within our control. Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, talks about the habits and mindsets that lead to lasting happiness, the complex relationship between money and happiness, whether technology is making us less happy, and whether it’s possible to worry too much about being happy.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, is professor of psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of the bestselling books The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness. Her research on the possibility of lastingly increasing happiness has been honored with many awards, including fellow status from three different scientific societies, an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, and a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize.

Kim Mills: You know those people who always seem to be happy? Who go through life seeing the sunny side of every situation, or who seem to be at peace and content, even when facing challenging times? Do you ever wonder—what is their secret?

Today we’re going to talk to a psychologist who has spent decades studying the science of happiness, about how much of our own happiness is within our control and what we can do to become happier. Some of the questions we’ll discuss: What actually makes us happy? What habits or mindsets make the biggest difference? Why don’t success and money always lead to lasting satisfaction? And is the modern world of technology and social media making us less happy, as many people worry?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I’m Kim Mills.

My guest today is Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California Riverside, where she studies what makes people happy and how happiness can shift over time. She’s won many awards, including fellow status from three different scientific societies, an honorary doctorate from the University of Basel, and a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize. Her work has been funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, among others. She’s also the author of two bestselling books, The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness, and she recently began publishing a newsletter called The Happiness Files. 

Dr. Lyubomirsky, thank you for joining me today.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD: It’s a pleasure to be here, Kim. Thank you.

Mills: Well, let’s start by talking about a question I posed in the introduction, which is—how much of happiness is really within our control? In your book, The How of Happiness from 2008, you estimated that about 50% of our happiness level is due to genes, 10% is due to life circumstances and about 40% to factors we can control. Do you still think that’s about right?

Lyubomirsky: No, and I really never did. I think that that pie chart theory of happiness has been widely misinterpreted, although maybe it’s my fault. Those numbers were really meant to be very, very not set in stone, and they were based on data that we had at the time in the early 2000s. And I actually wrote an article with my coauthor, Ken Sheldon, kind of revisiting the pie chart model. But basically, I guess the bottom line, how I would describe it today is that I would still say there are kind of three main contributors to happiness. Kind of like three buckets of contributors to happiness. One is our genetics for sure. That’s very powerful. We all know that as psychologists. The second is our life circumstances, and depending on how good or bad they are, they’re going to influence our happiness more or less. So if you’re relatively comfortable, moving to a nicer apartment isn’t going to make you a lot happier. But if you are living in poverty, moving into a nice safe place, it’s going to—of course—make you a lot happier. And the third kind of bucket or contributor to happiness is what we actually can do, the ways that we behave and the ways that we think in our daily lives. So I certainly still believe that those are the three main contributors to happiness. I just wouldn’t put numbers on them.

Mills: Okay, that makes sense. So for people with happy genes, if you will, with the biological component you mentioned, are they blessed with more endorphins or other brain chemicals that are associated with happiness? We know that the reverse can be true, that there are people who are chronically depressed because they have a chemical imbalance.

Lyubomirsky: Yeah, I’m not a neuroscientist, so I can’t speak really specifically to this. I think if you’re kind of born with a set range for happiness that’s higher than other people, my guess is that there are many contributors, biological contributors and genetic contributors to that and probably they have, some of that have to do with different levels of hormones, whether it’s serotonin and dopamine and all the kind of usual suspects, or maybe a susceptibility to learning or maintaining good happiness habits. So for some people it’s easy to look on the bright side of things, be optimistic, express gratitude, be social, extroversion for example, as a personality trait that has a strong heritable component that is very much correlated with happiness. So people are happier, are also more likely to be extroverted anyway. So I guess my answer to the question is that this is all very, very complex and so we don’t really know what the biological contributors are, but there are probably many.

Mills: How do you define and measure happiness in your research? Are you looking at momentary positive feelings, a general sense of life satisfaction, or is it even more complicated than that?

Lyubomirsky: We look at all of those things, and of course there’s the famous idea that if you can’t measure something, you can’t change it, you can’t really study it. So I think it is important to study, to start with measurement. Happiness is something that’s really subjective. There’s no thermometer for happiness. So we use self-report as kind of our gold standard and we really use multiple measures. So the idea is I and many researchers in well-being science subscribed to Ed Diener—he really founded the field of the science of happiness—his idea that there really two components of happiness. There’s an affective emotional component, and there’s also a cognitive or judgmental component. So the affective component is how often do you experience positive emotions in your daily life? And so to measure that, we ask people, maybe it’s by the minute or hour or day or week, how often do you experience joy, curiosity, pride, serenity, enthusiasm, all the different positive emotions and negative emotions as well? But then the cognitive or judgmental component of happiness is basically the sense that your life is good, that you’re progressing towards your life goals at a good pace, that you’re satisfied with your life. So that sort of measuring life satisfaction is also important. That’s something that’s not going to be as likely to change minute to minute, but it certainly could change week to week, month to month, year to year.

Mills: Can you really measure happiness in a lab or do you have to have people going about their lives and maybe carrying some sort of a tracker or some way of telling you from minute to minute or hour to hour how they’re feeling?

Lyubomirsky: I think you could do both. There are certainly biases inherent in all of these measurements in terms social desirability. Some people just want to appear happy to the experimenter. I really like to measure happiness in daily life, as people go about their lives, I think they tend to sort of forget they’re in a study. And so maybe some of those biases are a little bit reduced. So yeah, I guess the way I feel about it with measurement in any area of psychology that there’s always going to be, it’s never going to be a perfect science. There’s always going to be biases involved. But the more we can triangulate on this problem, the more different ways we can measure, so measuring maybe with the tracker, but also every once in a while, asking people to really reflect on their lives. You can also of course get peer reports. You can also get more objective or biological measures. None of them are really better than others. So we try to triangulate by having multiple measures.

Mills: What can people do to boost their happiness on a day-to-day basis? I mean, in your research, what have you found that actually works?

Lyubomirsky: That’s really the question that I’ve devoted my career to. I’ve been studying happiness for 36 years, so it was 1989, but I guess since basically about 1999, so the last 26 years, my lab started doing what we call happiness interventions. And happiness interventions are basically like clinical trials, but instead of testing a new drug, we’re testing a happiness strategy or happiness exercise. And there are three types of activities that we focused on studying the most. We’ve done a lot of gratitude experiments and so are, again, these are all randomized control trials. We randomly assign a group of participants to express gratitude, say write a gratitude letter to anyone you want once a week for a month or for 2 months. And then we have various control groups and we follow people across time. So one, yeah, kind of category of happiness strategies we’ve been testing is gratitude.

Another is acts of kindness. And so we ask people to do more acts of kindness in their daily life or their weekly life than they would otherwise do. We all do acts of kindness for others every day, but this is going over and above. And then the third of set of activities we’ve been focusing on is just asking people to be more social, engage in more social interactions and conversations.

So basically the bottom line—listeners signing up to my new happiness newsletter, the first thing that I tell them is, what is my number one happiness tip? And everyone wants to know that is. So basically after 36 years of research, my lab, my students and I have landed on a cliche, which is that what we’ve discovered is almost everything that works in randomized controlled trials to make people happier works because it makes them more connected somehow to other people. Although it can be to God or to a pet, it doesn’t have to be a person. It makes people feel more connected. Not everything. I mean, you could imagine physical exercise or meditation, which really has nothing to do with other people. But even that, even meditation exercise often has to do with others as well.

But in our studies, basically connection is the key to happiness. So anything you can do to strengthen a relationship, to strengthen a connection. In more recent years, my lab and I have started to focus on studying social interactions and conversations because how do we connect to other people in our lives, in our culture? Well, I’ll say you could connect by touch, you can connect with dance. There’s lots of ways to connect, but the most common way in our culture to connect is by talking. It’s just simply talking to others like what you’re doing in this podcast. I actually did a podcast a few months ago where the host said the reason he started it is that he was missing basically deeply connecting to people in his life. And so he decided to have an excuse to really have deep conversations with people. Anyway, so now we’re studying conversations, we’re studying how to have conversations that go well, which kind of conversations make people happier. We’re beginning to study listening because active, high quality listening is one of the keys to having a really great conversation. And finally, my longtime colleague, Harry Reis and I—Harry is a relationship scientist at the University of Rochester. We just finished a book called How to Feel Loved, and that book is basically about how to increase connection, social connection in your life.

Mills: So you just mentioned it’s not just people. You could feel connection to God, you could feel connection to your pets. More and more, there are these AI chatbots out there that can be your friend. Is that a good substitute? I mean, can people really feel happiness as a result of interacting with something that is just technology?

Lyubomirsky: Such a fun question. We have a little section about this in our new book. People report they really do feel connected to a chatbot. People report even falling in love with chatbots, as you may know. I mean, the obvious answer is this is not really a great substitute for real human connection. On the other hand, I think it’s just so much more nuanced. I think it could be added value to your life if you’re a lonely person or you’re isolated. So I don’t want to say, let’s not allow people to connect with chatbots because there is something that happens when it feels like you have real authentic conversations. For the same reason that we cry at movies, we also feel like a something real with something that’s not real. We see a movie and if we know it’s not real, we know it’s actors, and yet our brain fools us into thinking it is. For some similar reasons and even more powerful reasons, I think a chatbot can, we can have a really deep conversation. So I dunno, I think it’s a really nuanced question and it’s easy to say like, oh, it’s terrible, and let’s not do this. I would love to see a world where chatbots can supplement our day-to-day connections and maybe even help us increase it. It could be a coach that helps a shy person have more connection in their everyday life, et cetera, et cetera.

Mills: You can practice how to interact.

Lyubomirsky: Exactly.

Mills: In your book the Myths of Happiness, you challenge the idea that achieving life milestones are guaranteed happiness boosters. The idea that if I just get that promotion or if I get married, I’ll be happy. Why do these milestones not always lead to lasting happiness?

Lyubomirsky: My biggest answer is hedonic adaptation, which is the phenomenon that humans are great at becoming accustomed to any change in their life, especially positive changes. And I would bring evolutionary theory into this that you could argue that human beings would never make progress if we were really, really happy with our milestones and then kind of didn’t want to achieve anything more, right? Progress would stall. We’d kind of get to that mountain or find that mate or that friend, and then we’re done because we’re just sort of happy. And yet we’re not finished because every time we achieve a goal, we’re happy for a little bit, and then we now have a newer, even bigger goal in mind. So I think that’s evolutionarily adaptive, but it has hedonic costs. So when we want to get that job, we want to have a baby, we want to have a new boyfriend, we want to get a new car.

At first, it makes us happy—and it does make us happy. I don’t want to say that those milestones don’t make people happy, and sometimes they actually make us durably happy. Marriage can make us durably happy really forever. But there’s some amount of adaptation. I don’t think it is almost ever where there’s no adaptation at all. So I moved into an apartment that has a beautiful view, and I think views are something that we don’t tend to adapt to as much. Maybe again, for evolutionary reasons, we kind of like to see views of mountains or water, but I have adapted to it. I haven’t adapted to it 100%. Maybe I’ve adapted to, it’s like 50%. So it’s not as like wow as the day I moved in. And same thing maybe with a good marriage. So you’re not as excited, not as passionate the 10th year than the first year. So yeah, so I think hedonic adaptation is my biggest answer to that.

Mills: Why doesn’t money make us as happy as we think it will?

Lyubomirsky: Well, again, it’s the same kind of category where we adapt. We always want more. So lots of reasons. So one is, well, our social comparisons change. So we get that new car and suddenly we’re comparing ourselves to people who have even nicer cars. One of the examples I used from a long time ago is that a friend who got wealthier and built a mansion, then she started talking about how, and she flies first class, then she started talking about how her new friends, they have private jets. So suddenly she was unhappy because she was flying first class, but they were flying in a private, they were going private. So there’s always someone who’s better off than you are. Always. Even when you think about the richest person imaginable, there’s always someone that they can say, oh, but whatever. Their view is a little bit nicer than my view anyway. So we always want more.

And again, maybe that’s adaptive, but we always want more because that promotes progress. So we’re getting back to money. There’s actually a lot of nuances about money. One of my favorite recent findings is that money does make people happier, but only if you’re a happy person to begin with. So happy people who make more money are happier when they make more money. But unhappy people are not that happy when they make more money.

And then of course, the other answer is it depends how you spend it, right? So if you spend your money on, and the nice way to think about it, sort of three basic needs that we have for connection, autonomy, and competence or for personal growth, connection and contributing to the world. If you spend your money in ways that contribute to those basic needs, then people are happy. So if you spend your money on philanthropy, helping others or taking out your nephew to the zoo and you spend your money on personal growth, learning a new language, traveling, doing something, learning something new, and you spend your money on connection, taking out your friends to dinner or something like that, then that makes you happy. But if you spend your money on possessions, material things that you just put in the closet or the garage or on your shelf, we tend to adapt to those things. So that doesn’t make us happier. We just want more.

Mills: Every year researchers publish something called the World Happiness Report, and this year the big headline was that in many countries, young adults are less happy than they used to be. Young adulthood used to be a pretty happy time of life on average. Why do you think that might be changing?

Lyubomirsky: Interestingly, I think one of the reasons, one of the theories that the U.S. is dropped out of the top 20 or top 24 countries is because particularly in the U.S. young people, I think ages 14 to 28 or 14 to 24 are particularly unhappy. Well, one obvious answer is social media and screens and lack of connection. Again, getting back to social connection is the key to happiness. Anyone who has less social connection, greater loneliness, is going to be less happy. We know a lot about how starting in whatever is it, 2008, with the introduction of the smartphone, with the introduction of the button on Facebook, young people have been spending more and more time on screens, less and less time in person with one another. And again, I want to be a little bit, again, more nuanced about this. Some people get a lot of connection through Facebook or whatever, through social media, through texting, through listening to music.

So I don’t want to just say it’s all bad, but that is just kind of an obvious answer to that question, that they’re spending less and less time in person. And there’s data. Jean Twenge has some great data in her book, iGen, on how if you compare generations, my generation basically what is it that she shows that the 12th graders today look like eighth graders in our generation in terms of how much the time they spend not with their parents, how much time they spend working outside the home, driving and even quote negative things like alcohol, sexual behavior, early sexual behavior. They’re just doing it all much, much later. They’re just spending a lot less time in person.

If you look at weekend activity, teenagers are, it used to be that you were kind of an outcast if you spent the whole weekend alone in your room. And now I think I’ve seen stats that are something like 50% or even maybe two-thirds don’t really see anyone in person on the weekend outside of school, whereas it used to be that almost everyone did. So anyway, to me that, to my mind, that must contribute to the reduced happiness.

Mills: Eventually sad things will happen to pretty much everyone. You live long enough, bad things are going to happen. How do happy people handle negative emotions? Are they different in the way that they cope with things going south?

Lyubomirsky: From my understanding, of course, happy people are just as hit by negative events as unhappy. So I guess if I were to draw kind of it visually an unhappy, happy person, it might take a similar hit. And we’ve even done studies where we give negative feedback to happy and unhappy people. And both the types of participants get that hit, whether it’s to their self-esteem temporarily or to their mood, but happy people seem to recover faster. So they’re basically, essentially they’re more resilient. They kind of bounce back faster. How they bounce back, I think there’s lots of reasons that there’s coping strategies that they might use that are more effective. Unhappy people tend to ruminate more. I spent 10 years studying rumination, which is sort of dwelling in circles over and over again on how you’re feeling and things are not going well. And that just contributes. That creates a vicious cycle, which makes you more anxious, more depressed, more sad, more angry. Whereas as I mentioned, happy people tend to bounce faster from those negative events.

Mills: Why study happiness? What got you going down this particular path?

Lyubomirsky: For me, it was—happiness is sort of the holy grail. Most people around the world say that they want to be happy or they want their children to be happy. I’m from the Soviet Union where, and this is actually part of the answer, where people talk about the importance of suffering to build character or to gain salvation into the next life. People aren’t happy when you pass them on the street. That is not really the full picture. I think that’s sort of a public persona. But I actually did a study a long time ago where I went back to Russia and asked people, what do you want most for your children? And Americans, Russians basically gave the same answer, which is that they want their children to be happy. So maybe kind of dependent on how you asked the question.

Anyway, so I immigrate to the United States when I’m 9-1/2 years old, and that was the first thing I noticed, the differences in happiness. So I think I was interested from an early age, why are Americans so much happier than Russians? I met with my college advisor a few years ago after 30 years of not having seen him. And he told me that in college that I was interested in happiness. I didn’t remember that. He said I talked a lot about happiness. And the reason I say this is because the story I’ve always told myself and others is that it was really serendipitous the research on happiness. The very first day I went to Stanford for my PhD, my advisor was Lee Ross, really brilliant thinker, who was one of the world’s experts on conflict and negotiation, nothing to do with happiness. You could even argue maybe the opposite of happiness. And the very, very first day that I met him, we took a walk around campus and we started talking about happiness. I don’t remember who brought it up, it was probably him. But we started asking each other questions, why are some people happier than others? Kind of the question that you asked, you began the podcast with: What is the secret to happiness? And that first conversation literally on the very first day of grad school, led me to start doing research on happiness. Back then, Ed Diener was really the only person in the field, and he was studying what he called subjective well-being. I didn’t know—there were some books about happiness, but I didn’t know anyone else studying it. That was 1989.

Mills: I understand you’ve recommended that we do more research into MDMA or ecstasy to understand how it can lead to more social connection. And by extension of course, happiness. Why should we be interested in finding happiness and connection through drugs? Isn’t that essentially cheating?

Lyubomirsky: So I started studying MDMA because I thought like, wow, this is perfect to study if you’re interested in deep connection, because it makes people feel deeply connected, deeply understood and loved, and you’re grateful and you’re trusting and you feel, you see beauty in other people, in everything. And so I thought it was really for two reasons you want to study MDMA. One is, and it’s interesting, the MAPS conference right now, it’s going on in Denver. Today is the last day, and this is the big conference where psychedelics and all other substance are being discussed. So the one reason is I think it could provide a window into the study of deep connection. It’s really, really hard to manipulate that in the lab. How do you, for an hour and a half, an hour get a participant to feel really, really deeply connected to someone?

And using that substance is kind of, again, sort of a shortcut or a window. So the idea is that you get people to feel deeply connected, which we have actually in the lab. I have a collaborator in University of Chicago where we give people either MDMA or a control substance. We did a study where we gave some participants methamphetamine as a control. Actually, interestingly, a good control for MDMA, both of them have amphetamine components. And then you can look at, again, I’m not a neuroscientist, but you can look at the brain pathways that are involved when, that are activated, when you’re feeling deeply connected, you can look at psychological mechanisms that are operating. And that could be, as a basic scientist, that could be really revealing.

But also I think it could be used, and again, I’m not a clinician, but I think MDMA could be used clinically or therapeutically and not as something that you would necessarily take once a week or once a month. It’s possible that say you’re someone who’s lonely and has never really felt deeply connected, and you take that substance once and you suddenly realize like, wow, this is something that’s possible. Or you have some insights into your relationships, so maybe you only take it once or maybe only you take it several times. And just as you know, there’s a resurgence of psychedelic science where people are studying, both neuroscientists and psychologists, clinical psychologists are studying the usefulness of all kinds of substances, psychoactive substances. MDMA I think is one that’s a really, really interesting one. It has not shown to have many harms there. Certainly. I mean, I would very forcefully argue that something like alcohol is much more toxic and harmful than MDMA. It just happens to be legal. MDMA happens to be right now schedule one. Anyway, I think it’s a fascinating topic to study.

Mills: Are you only looking at MDMA? I mean, I’ve talked to psychologists, for example, who are studying psilocybin, and they feel like you can have these experiences that will actually persist for very long times and maybe even for a lifetime. Are you seeing that with MDMA?

Lyubomirsky: So fascinating. I personally have not studied psilocybin. Some of these other psychedelics, yes, they produce a feeling of a connection, often not with an individual. I’m really more interested in studying relationships with particular other individuals in your life and not necessarily a grand sense of connection with living beings or all of earth, the whole universe. I mean, I think that’s really fascinating, that’s just not my particular area. I think MDMA, again, we need to do more studies, but I do think it has the potential to have lasting effects. Certainly people report that taking MDMA even a few times has changed their lives, has made them into in a more loving person, and to someone who has given up on small talk and only has deep conversations with people. What happens with MDMA is that your walls come down. And so one way to think about all of society is that we’re kind of all walking around with a wall around us, and we really don’t share very much. We don’t take off those walls very easily. And I think the world would be a better place if some of those walls came down.

Mills: There’s a lot of emphasis, I think, in American culture around being happy. It’s sort of an expectation. The American dream involves ultimately being happy. Is it possible for people to worry too much about being happy and then making yourself unhappy by the constant worrying about I’m not happy enough?

Lyubomirsky: Absolutely. And there’s really great work by Iris Mauss and June Gruber that are showing how when people are too preoccupied with happiness, that can backfire. And there’s lots of reasons for that. So if you’re constantly monitoring your happiness, it’s kind of like when you’re trying to lose weight and you’re constantly measuring, you’re weighing yourself. Or if you are constantly looking at the stock market, you don’t want to look every hour because it’s going to go up and down. So if you’re constantly asking yourself, am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? Am I happy yet? That is going to backfire. If you’re too focused on the end goal, this sounds like so hokey, but if you’re too focused on the end goal as opposed to being focused on the journey to get there, that can sort of backfire and lead you to be dissatisfied.

Yeah, if your standard for happiness is too high, you’re going to be disappointed if you don’t reach that standard. And really what the things that make you happy are not focusing on happiness, but it’s focusing on something else that’s going to lead to happiness, whether it’s connecting to other people, expressing gratitude, doing acts of kindness, meditating, savoring, whatever, following really significant life goals. That’s really what makes you happy. And focusing too much, again on the end goal might backfire, might make it too much of an extrinsic goal, right? I’m only doing this, I’m only being kind to you because I want to make you happy. And I heard that that’ll make you happy. And so yeah, I’m not a big fan of too much of a obsession or preoccupation with happiness.

Mills: So what’s left to study? You’ve obviously been looking at happiness for many years as you’ve said. What are the big questions that remain to be answered?

Lyubomirsky: I guess lots of big questions, including the neuroscience of happiness, which some people are studying. One major project I’m involved with Liz Dunn at UBC and others are heading is a mega study that is looking at giant happiness interventions across all cultures. Because all these studies that we’ve been talking about are generally small studies. I mean, not necessarily tiny, but we need replicability. We need to be confident in the findings. We need to look at cross-cultural differences to see if these are universal type of happiness strategies, or we already know that some of them do look different in different cultures. And so that’s a huge goal and huge project that’s probably going to take quite a few years to accomplish these mega—I think these mega studies are really important to accomplish in our future.

And then you mentioned chatbots. I mean, AI is going to change everyone’s life maybe a lot sooner than most people think. And so can we harness that technology to promote happiness, to promote flourishing as opposed to creating a dystopian reality that some people are worried is going to happen? So that is what I’m thinking about a lot these days. In the future, how do we leverage AI technology to make sure that it makes people happier as opposed to less happy?

Mills: Well, Dr. Lyubomirsky, I want to thank you for joining me today. It’s been very interesting.

Lyubomirsky: Thank you. I love these questions. It’s been a pleasure to speak to you today.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. 

For the American Psychological Association, I’m Kim Mills.