Introduction
This is a secondary research on positive psychology. Through systematic literature review, Bella aims to formulate not only a framework that explains why people are unhappy but also a practical plan that people can use to make themselves happier. This mindmap is broken down into two parts, analyzation as the first part, strategies as the other.
Misconceptions about Happiness
Our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong.
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For example, though students PREDICTED a significant decrease in their happiness - ACTUAL happiness levels decreased very little or not at all upon learning that they did not get the job. (Gilbert et al. 1998)
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Dan Gilbert also challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned.
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While the reason why those beliefs are so popular and poisonous is deeply rooted in our culture, economy, society, this mindmap examines the misconceptions from the perspective of individuals.
Our wrong expectations
Good Job
- We don’t feel as bad as we think we will when turned down for a job. (Gilbert et al. 1998).
Money
- The American Freshman Survey Data from 2005 shows what are the average freshman’s answers to the question, “what’s very important in life”. In lecture, 70% responded “very well-off financially” and 52% “develop a meaningful philosophy.” The statistics from 2015, linked above, are actually even more polarizing with 82% and 46%, respectively. In 1967, 42% responded “very well-off financially” and 86% “develop a meaningful philosophy” suggesting American values have changed drastically in the past several decades(Eagan, et al. 2015) .Our becoming much better off over the last four decades has not been accompanied by one iota of increased subjective well-being.” Myers (2000)
- The correlation between life satisfaction and income across countries is not a label relationship (Diener & Oishi .2000)
- At a certain point, money can’t buy happiness (Kahneman & Deaton .2010)
- Salary goals rise as salary rises. Lyubomirsky (2007)
Awesome Stuff
- glorifying awesome stuff like a luxury car is pervasive in our culture (MC Big Data .2015).
- glorifying awesome stuff like expensive alcohol is pervasive in our culture (Josephs .2013).
- Those with materialist attitude and goals tend to have lower life satisfaction later in life (Nickerson et al. 2003).
True Love
- We adapt to marriage after a few years and happiness returns to baseline (Lucas et al. 2003).
Perfect Body
- Plastic surgery does not seem to alleviate mental health problems (von Soest et al. 2012).
Perfect Grades
- People overestimate how they will feel about certain grades - inaccurate prediction of future emotion may be a flaw in the research procedure in which people predict one thing but are later asked to report another (Levine et al. 2012)
Genes and circumstances
- Genes and circumstances don’t matter as much as we think, 40% of the "sustainable happiness model” is under the control of our actions and thoughts (Lyubomirsky .2007).
Why our expectations are so bad (psychological cognitive biases)
Our minds’ labelest intuitions are often totally wrong
- Miswanting is the act of being mistaken about what and how much you will like something in the future (Gilbet & Wilson . 2000).
Our minds don’t think in terms of absolutes; our minds judge to relative reference points
- Due to the power of salient reference points, bronze winners tend to be happier than silver medal winners (Medvec et al. 1995).
- Salary goals rise as salary rises, which may be due to changing reference points (Lyubomirsky .2007).
- Reference points mess up good salaries - for every $1.00 increase in your actual income, your “required income” increases by $1.40 (van Praag and Frijters .1999).
- Reference points mess up good salaries - if your coworkers make more money than you do, then you will be less satisfied with your job (Clark and Oswald .1996).
- Reference points mess up good salaries - in a hypothetical earnings situation people would prefer to make less money if their coworkers make less rather than make more money if their coworkers make more (Solnick and Hemenway. 1997)
- Those who are unemployed tend to be happier if the unemployment rate in their area is high (Clark. 2003).
- Television programs - featuring products and activities associated with an affluent lifestyle - act as a harmful social comparison skewing perception of others’ wealth and our own wealth (O’Guinn and Shrum. 1997).
- Watching television programs act as a harmful social comparison and increases spending - you can also read an excerpt from the introduction here (Schor .1999).
- Social comparisons influence our spending - people that live next door to lottery winners are more likely to buy a new car (Kuhn et al. 2011).
- Social comparisons mess up good grades - students would rather miss out on a potential grade increase just so that others in the class don’t get an increase, too (Burleigh and Meegan. 2013).
- Social comparisons mess up our perceptions of physical appearance - looking at models make us feel bad (Kenrick et al. 1993).
- Use of social media makes us compare ourselves to others which lowers our self-esteem - even a manipulated facebook feed featuring people that are worse off than we are does not lead to much higher self-esteem ratings (Vogel et al. 2014).
Our minds are programmed to adapt and ultimately get used to things
- We adapt to earning more money , although we don’t adapt to increases in social status as quickly (Di Tella et al. 2010).
- We adapt to having more money - even in extreme cases of lottery winners (Brickman et al. 1978).
- We adapt to marriage after a few years and happiness returns to baseline (Lucas et al. 2003).
- Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition (Gilbert. 2007).
We don’t realize that our minds are built to get used to stuff
- We overestimate our emotions and getting bad grades won’t make us feel as bad as we think they will - we adapt to bad events, too (Levine et al. 2012).
- Our predictions are worse for negative events - when you think about the future, you tend to focus on the wrong features and overestimate their importance (as seen in adaption to “bad” dorms) Dunn et al. (2002).
- People are generally unaware of their the psychological immune system which is why they tend to overestimate their emotional reactions to negative events - example in lecture highlights professors getting tenure or not (Gilbert et al. 1998).
- We mispredict how we will feel if we break up with a significant other - we think we will feel much worse than we actually do (Eastwick et al. 2008).
- People getting an HIV test anticipate more distress given a positive result and anticipate less distress given a negative result which is more extreme than what they experience when they get their results back (Sieff et al. 1999).
- Affective forecasts (predicting our emotional response given a certain outcome) are too extreme and greater previous experience of an emotional event does not lead to any greater accuracy of the predictions - highlighted in drivers test candidate. Ayton et al. (2007).
- There are some of cognitive biases covered in lecture (Gilbert. 2007) Focalism -the tendency to think just about one event and forget about the other things that happen Immune neglect - unawareness of our tendency to adapt to and cope with negative events
How cognitive biases (Annoying Features of the Mind) impact your daily life
- Bella suggest you to take a break at this point while you are reading this mindmap, and take 2 minutes to reflect how you have been deviated from the “happy” self because of the “lower” self.
Strategies that we should be using (Just hints)
Knowing is only the first step towards change, it is not the half battle, it requires a lot more hard work beyond that
- Knowing is not half the battle. ( Santos & Gendler. 2014). Recent work in cognitive science has demonstrated that knowing is a shockingly tiny portion of the battle for most real world decisions.
WOOP technique
- This is an example of technique we can use, we can choose a technique or steps that we feel free and easy to follow, or we just make strategies by ourselves. But what matters the most is that we need to stick to the plan that we make.
Considering the features of our mind, we have to realize that, to make changes, we need to make both mental and physical effort, which require hard work and perseverance in the long run.
Reference
