Helping Clients Find Happiness
by Mike Hovancsek, M.Ed., P.C.
Back when I was in my 20s I knew a guy named Roger who hung wallpaper for a living. The one thing I remember about Roger was that he was always happy. I would often see him on worksites, zipping around with a bounce in his step, singing gleefully under his breath, and generally annoying everyone around him.
I remember feeling puzzled by Roger. I knew that if I had to hang wallpaper six days a week I would be pretty miserable. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could possibly get any joy from working such a mind-numbing job.
Eventually, I decided that I was going to try to figure out what made Roger tick. One day I asked him, “If you could do anything in the world what would you do?”
Without any hesitation Roger said, “I would go to Hawaii…and hang wallpaper!”
“But how would you even know that you were in Hawaii?,” I protested, “You would be stuck inside looking at wallpaper all day.”
“But I would be in Hawaii…,” Roger said, with a tone that fell somewhere between pity and disbelief. In that moment I realized that Roger was as confused by my ignorance as I was by his happiness.
My conversation with Roger reminded me that I should not judge other people’s happiness according to the things that make me happy. This was when I began to realize that happiness is a complex and highly personal issue.
As Americans we spend a lot of time worrying about whether or not we are happy and whether or not we are happy enough. There are reasons to be wary of this pursuit. As the 17th century philosopher John Stewart Mill once said, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”
Certainly as counselors we can think of examples of people who harmed their lives by recklessly seeking happiness. Our waiting rooms are full of people who have tangled themselves into addiction, debt, and unhealthy relationships in the search for happiness.
The reality is that as human beings we are blessed with a wide range of emotions that serve us in many ways. We need to experience a variety of emotions in order to efficiently store information, retrieve information, and respond properly to our environment.
In fact, discontent is a wonderful motivator. Would we seek out food if we didn’t get hungry? Would we seek out more knowledge if we were content with the knowledge we already had? The truth is that if we were happy all the time we would stop growing, learning, and striving for our own self-preservation.
In his “Communist Manifesto,” Karl Marx warns us that in a capitalist society people can become willingly enslaved by the pursuit of material comforts. He hypothesized that people would work long hours in order to make money so they could pay off all the material goods and would effectively become slaves to their own debts. In a day and age in which the average American works more hours than previous generations and carries thousands of dollars in credit card debt, it is hard to ignore Marx’s point.
In “Brave New World,” Aldous Huxley imagines a world in which perfect happiness is maintained through a regimen of behavioral control, genetic engineering, intense training, and a synthetic drug called Soma. While Huxley’s book is fiction, it bares an uncomfortable resemblance to modern life, in which the news is loaded with celebrity scandals, and we are encouraged to use pharmaceutical answers to our common problems.
Americans have certainly sought out their own version of Huxley’s Soma. In his 2008 book, “Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation,” Charles Barber reminds us that in 2006 the United States made up 66 percent of the global antidepressant market.
With all of the arguments above in mind, why should we bother to study happiness? One reason is because its opposite, depression, is taking an increasingly heavy toll on society. In his book “Authentic Happiness,” Martin Seligman points out that, “Depression is now ten times as prevalent as it was in 1960, and it strikes at a much younger age.”
A 2001 report in Health and Medicine Week concluded that depression affects an estimated 17 million people in the United States each year. According to a 1996 report by the Center for Disease Control, the death rate from suicide remains higher than for Alzheimer’s, chronic liver disease, homicide, arteriosclerosis, or hypertension.
There is also a significant economic impact. Consider the following findings:
· According to a 2004 World Health Organization study major depressive disorder is the leading cause of disability in the United States for people between the ages of 15 and 44.
· A 2001 article in the Wall Street Journal concluded that depression among workers in the United States costs the businesses annually about $70 billion in medical expenditures, lost productivity, and related costs.
· A 1999 National Institute of Mental Health report concluded that $11 billion a year is lost as a result of workers who were less productive or who made mistakes due to depression.
Recognizing the need for the study of happiness and healthy adjustment, Martin Seligman pushed for the development of positive psychology. This is a massive shift in thinking. The field of psychology had spent much of the previous hundred years focusing on the things that were wrong with people. Sigmund Freud, for example, once stated that the best that can be hoped for in life is “the transformation of hysteric misery into common unhappiness.” For those who want more than “common unhappiness,” there is positive psychology.
People are surprisingly inaccurate at predicting their own happiness. In his 2007 book “Stumbling on Happiness,” Daniel Gilbert reports that we tend to make judgments about the future based on our current feelings and that we fail to take into account our ability to adjust. For example, we may predict that life would no longer be worth living if we were to become quadriplegic. Research suggests that this conclusion is quite inaccurate. According to Martin Seligman, “Of people with extreme quadriplegia, 84 percent consider their life to be average or above average.”
We also tend to assume that various things will make us happy when research suggests that they do not. For example, we may think that we will be happy if we have more money. Martin Seligman reminds us that, “Mounting over the last 40 years in every wealthy country on the globe, there has been a startling increase in depression.” Seligman also sites studies of lottery winners that found people who win the lottery tend to have a brief burst of happiness for an average of three months before they return to the bass line of happiness that they experienced before winning the lottery.
Indeed, research has failed to show a significant correlation between happiness and material wealth once a person reaches a point where he or she has a place to live and a little something to eat. Similarly, research has been unable to find a correlation between happiness and attractiveness; happiness and health; or happiness and popularity.
One important finding in positive psychology research is that we often neglect the things in life that truly make us happy in the quest for things that we think will make us happy. We may, for example, neglect our family and friends in order to focus on getting a promotion at work. Soon after we get the promotion, however, we return to the emotions that we had before the promotion.
So, what actually makes people happy? There are several different practices that clients can use to find happiness in their everyday lives, including:
Having a sense of control in one’s life
Daniel Nettle points out that people who have a strong sense of control in their lives report a significantly higher level of happiness than people who have a poor sense of control. As a result, clients are likely to benefit from shifting their focus away from the things they cannot control (e.g. the behavior of other people or things that happened in the past) and toward things they can control (e.g. changing their own behavior in a way that is likely to improve a bad situation). I often describe this to clients as shifting from a “victim” role to a “survivor” role.
Savoring small pleasures in everyday life
Daniel Gilbert reminds us that, “We are served more by frequency of happy events more than by intensity of happy events.” This suggests that we don’t need to win the lottery to be happy, we just need to enjoy a lot of small pleasures in everyday life. Counselors can challenge their clients to make a list of simple, healthy pleasures in their lives and to make a commitment to spend time being mindful with a few of those pleasures every day.
Having positive cognitions
In “Hamlet,” Shakespeare writes, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Indeed, anyone who has even a passing familiarity with cognitive therapy knows that the cognitions we choose to interpret our world have a profound effect on how we feel and act.
According to Martin Seligman, “Optimistic people tend to interpret their troubles as transient, controllable, and specific to one situation. Pessimistic people, in contrast, believe that their troubles last forever, undermine everything they do, and are uncontrollable.” Encourage clients to focus on the transient, controllable, and situation-specific elements of their problems.
Recognizing problems as opportunities
Tal Ben-Shahar encourages his students to “Learn to fail or fail to learn.” This is a phrase that I find myself using with clients on a regular basis. It challenges them to think about each problem as a learning tool, rather than as proof that the world is a terrible place. When prompted, clients can almost always cite examples of past difficulties that helped them to learn and grow. Recognizing this, they can view their current problems as one more opportunity for learning and growth.
Focusing on gratitude
I often encourage clients to create a gratitude journal. I challenge them to spend a few evenings each week documenting things that they are grateful for in their lives. Once there is a journal to fill, clients will often go through their lives looking for things that they can include in it. This can change their perspective significantly.
Having a sense of attachment to others
In “American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty,” David Myers states, “there are few stronger predictors of happiness than a close, nurturing, equitable, intimate, lifelong companionship with one’s best friend.” Clients can make a commitment to spend more time with the people who are important to them. When clients report that they are not close to anyone I suggest that they write down a list of their interests. Then, we look for the social manifestations of those interests. For example, if a person likes to read he may want to join a book club. If a person likes animals she can volunteer at the local animal shelter.
This principle extends to the larger community as well. In their 1998 article, “Social Well-being,” Corey Lee M. Keys and Shane Lopez report that the degree to which a person is engaged in society is positively correlated with measures of happiness, generativity, optimism, life satisfaction, and a sense of safety in one’s environment.
Having a sense of attachment to the universe
People tend to report more happiness when they have a sense of meaning and connection in their lives, whether it is their spirituality or through a secular sense of connection to humanity. As a result, clients are likely to benefit from redirecting their focus toward their own spiritual or humanist values.
Being altruistic
Research suggests that altruistic people are more likely to be happy and happier people are more likely to be altruistic. Challenge clients to find charitable activities that are meaningful to them. This can get them engaged in their communities, give them a sense of purpose, and shift their focus away from dwelling on their own problems.
It is actually a lot of fun to help clients explore their own positive psychology. Most of them will have good results in a relatively short period of time by working the above techniques into their daily lives. These skills are also a great form of self-care for professionals in the mental health field. Have fun!