Progress Daily

There is less value in a short but happy life than in a long and happy life. The level and duration of happiness are combined in Ruut Veenhoven’s index of “Happy Life Years,” which is computed by multiplying life-expectancy in a country by average happiness on a scale of 0 to 1. (See “Apparent Quality of Life: How Long and Happy People Live and “The Four Qualities of Life: Ordering Concepts and Measures of the Good Life.”)

These days, the average citizen can expect to live 62 happy years in the U.S, 51 happy years in the EU-8, and 47 happy years in Japan. This is much more than the expected 13 happy life years in present-day Zimbabwe. These numbers are much higher than would have been the case two centuries ago in Western nations, when life was much shorter and probably less happy.

Over the last 33 years, no less than 6.2 additional Happy Life Years were added in the EU, 4.5 in Japan, and 6.2 in the U.S. This increase in overall quality of life is unprecedented in human history.

One of happiness’s biological functions is to serve as a “go signal” (”What Good are Positive Emotions?“). Research shows that the effects of happiness are typically positive. Happiness adds to creativity, facilitates social functioning, and tends to enhance good citizenship (”The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?“). It also protects physical health and lengthens life (”Healthy Happiness: Effects of Happiness on Physical Health and the Consequences for Preventive Health Care“).

People appear to live the happiest lives in free, democratic societies, and the strongest correlates of happiness are independence and activity (”Happiness as an Aim in Public Policy: The Greatest Happiness Principle“).

“The Data Tell a Different Story,” by Ruut Veenhoven

Norbert Schwarz, et al., calculates “gross national happiness” by using the day reconstruction method in which people are asked to recollect memories of the previous working day by writing a short diary.

They are told to think of their day as a series of episodes in a film and are asked a series of questions about how they felt during each event or activity.

They then give a mark on their enjoyment of each episode on a scale of one to 6. The totals are divided by the number of hours taken by each activity to produce a simple score for the day.

The researchers assessed how 909 US working women felt during 28 types of activity and found that sex, relaxing with friends and having lunch with colleagues brought the most enjoyment. This was followed by watching television alone, shopping with a spouse and cooking on their own.

Commuting, housework and too much contact with their boss rated as the least pleasant activities.

Taking care of children was also among the less enjoyable activities.

Norbert Schwarz: “When we sample all the times that parents spend with their children, the picture is less positive than parents expect. Saying that you generally don’t enjoy spending time with your kids is terrible but admitting that they were a pain last night is quite acceptable.”

Women who slept poorly, on average, enjoyed their day as little as a typical person enjoys commuting. Those who usually slept well enjoyed their day as much as most people enjoy watching television. Tight work deadlines were also a powerful factor in upsetting women’s daily moods.

General life circumstances — such as wealth, job security, or whether someone is single or married — had a relatively small impact on happiness.

As long as the women were not battling poverty, income did not have an influence.

“[C]ommuting is a very negative experience that takes up considerable time every day. Income, however, has relatively little influence on daily feelings. You may be better off arranging for more sleep than working for a pay rise.”

People spent the bulk of their waking hours engaged in the activities they enjoyed the least, including work, housework and commuting.

“Happiness is the new economics,” Sarah-Kate Templeton

Zindel Segal, Helen Mayberg, etc., had 14 depressed adults undergo cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which teaches patients to view their own thoughts differently — to see a failed date, for instance, not as proof that “I will never be loved” but as a minor thing that didn’t work out. Thirteen other patients received paroxetine (generic Paxil). All experienced comparable improvement after treatment. Brain scans showed that the patients responded differently to the 2 kinds of treatment: CBT muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic and higher thought (as well as of endless rumination). Paroxetine, by contrast, raised activity there. On the other hand, CBT raised activity in the hippocampus of the limbic system, the brain’s emotion center. Paroxetine lowered activity there. As Mayberg explains, “Cognitive therapy targets the cortex, the thinking brain, reshaping how you process information and changing your thinking pattern. It decreases rumination, and trains the brain to adopt different thinking circuits.”

Greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex than in the right correlates with a higher baseline level of contentment. The relative left/right activity is seen as a marker for the happiness set point, since people tend to return to this level no matter whether they win the lottery or lose their spouse.

Richard J. Davidson wondered if mental training could produce changes that underlie enduring happiness. To find out he (with the help of the Dalai Lama) recruited Buddhist monks to meditate inside his functional magnetic resonance imaging tube while he measured their brain activity during various mental states. For comparison, he used undergraduates who had had no experience with meditation but got a crash course in the basic techniques. During the generation of pure compassion, a standard Buddhist meditation technique, brain regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter.

The monks showed a significantly greater activation in a brain network linked to empathy and maternal love. Connections from the frontal regions to the brain’s emotional regions seemed to become stronger with more years of meditation practice, as if the brain had forged more robust connections between thinking and feeling.

While the monks were generating feelings of compassion, activity in the left prefrontal (the site of activity that marks happiness) swamped activity in the right prefrontal (associated with negative moods) to a degree never before seen from purely mental activity. The undergraduate controls showed no such differences between the left and right prefrontal cortex. This suggests that the positive state is a skill that can be trained.

“How The Brain Rewires Itself,” by Sharon Begley

Meditators sometimes identify the negative emotions they are feeling in order to free themselves of them, and brain scans have recently shown that this process calms the part of the brain associated with emotional processing.

Matthew Lieberman hooked 30 people up to functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, & asked them to look at pictures of faces making emotional expressions. Below some of the photos was a choice of words describing the emotion — such as “angry” or “fearful” — or 2 possible names for the people in the pictures, one male name and one female name.

When the participants chose labels for the negative emotions, activity in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex region — an area associated with thinking in words about emotional experiences — became more active, whereas activity in the amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional processing, was calmed.

By contrast, when the subjects picked appropriate names for the faces, the brain scans revealed none of these changes — indicating that only emotional labeling makes a difference.

“In the same way you hit the brake when you’re driving when you see a yellow light, when you put feelings into words, you seem to be hitting the brakes on your emotional responses,” Lieberman said.

In a second experiment, 27 of the same subjects completed questionnaires to determine how “mindful” they are.

Meditation and other “mindfulness” techniques are designed to help people pay more attention to their present emotions, thoughts and sensations without reacting strongly to them. Meditators often acknowledge and name their negative emotions in order to “let them go.”

When the team compared brain scans from subjects who had more mindful dispositions to those from subjects who were less mindful, they found a stark difference — the mindful subjects experienced greater activation in the right ventrolateral prefrontral cortex and a greater calming effect in the amygdala after labeling their emotions.

“Brain Scans Show Meditation’s Effects,” by Melinda Wenner

A small study (”Efficacy of physical activity in the adjunctive treatment of major depressive disorders“) has found that depressed women who exercised had significant improvements in their symptoms over the next 8 months. Those who didn’t exercise showed only marginal improvements.

Before the study, all of the women had tried taking antidepressant medication for at least 2 months but had failed to improve.

The study included 30 women ages 40 to 60 who’d been diagnosed with major depression. The researchers randomly assigned the women to either stick with antidepressants alone or to start an exercise program. All of the patients continued to take their medication.

The exercisers worked out as a group twice a week for one hour, using cardio-fitness machines. At the beginning of the study and 8 months later, women in both groups completed standard measures used to assess depression severity.

Women in the exercise group showed marked improvements in their depression symptoms, while those on medication alone made only modest gains.

Physical activity seems to affect some key nervous system chemicals — norepinephrine and serotonin — that are targets of antidepressant drugs, as well as brain neurotrophins, which help protect nerve cells from injury and transmit signals in brain regions related to mood.

“Exercise may help with hard-to-treat depression,” Scientific American

Unremitting stress damages the immune system. Two years ago, researchers at UCSF looked at white blood cells from a group of mothers whose children suffered from chronic disorders like autism or cerebral palsy. They found clear signs of accelerated aging in those study subjects who had cared the longest for children with disabilities or who reported the least control over their lives.

The changes took place in microscopic structures called telomeres, which are often compared to the plastic wrappers on the ends of shoelaces and which keep chromosomes from shredding. As a general rule, the youngest cells boast the longest telomeres. But telomeres in the more stressed-out moms were significantly shorter than those of their counterparts, making them, from a genetic point of view, anywhere from nine to 17 years older than their chronological age.

People with low self-esteem are more vulnerable to stress. According to Jens Pruessner, the hippocampus — a finger-size structure located deep in the brain, which helps you form new memories and retrieve old ones — is particularly sensitive to the amount of cortisol flooding your cerebrum. So when cortisol levels begin to rise, the hippocampus sends a set of signals that help shut down the cortisol cascade.

Using several different types of brain scans, Pruessner has shown that people who test below average on self-esteem also tend to have smaller-than-average hippocampi. (The differences become clear only when you compare groups of people.)

Samuel Melamed: “[I]f there is no relief [from stress] and the cortisol stays up for long periods of time, the body stops responding and readjusts the level.”

If you provide mice with an escape route, they typically learn quickly how to avoid a mild electrical shock that occurs a few seconds after they hear a tone. But if the escape route is blocked whenever the tone is sounded, and new shocks occur, the mice will eventually stop trying to run away. Later, even after the escape route is cleared, the animals simply freeze at the sound of the tone– despite the fact that they once knew how to avoid the associated shock.

Animal research has shown that there is a relatively small window for reversing the physiological effects of chronic stress. And once a person’s cortisol level gets completely blunted, it may stay that way for years.

“6 Lessons for Handling Stress,” by Christine Gorman

Studies of mice and monkeys show that repeated stress — and a high-fat, high-sugar diet — release a hormone, neuropeptide Y, that causes a buildup of abdominal fat.

Manipulating levels of that hormone could melt fat from areas where it is not desired and accumulate it where it is needed.

Stephen Baker said it could also reduce or eliminate the need for extremely expensive fat replacements used in breast and facial reconstruction and in other surgeries.

Zofia Zukowska divided mice into 4 groups: 2 received a conventional diet, and 2 received a diet high in fat and sugar. Then one group from each diet was forced to stand in cold water for an hour every day, “like the Northern European experience of waiting for a bus with wet feet.”

The remaining groups were exposed to an aggressive alpha male for 10 minutes each day, “like having a bad boss.”

For the mice on the normal diet, “it really didn’t matter whether they were stressed or not. They didn’t have much difference in weight. If anything, the stressed ones weighed less.”

But the stressed mice on the “fast food” diet accumulated twice as much belly fat in the first 2 weeks as those that were not stressed. Over 3 months, they became grossly obese.

Biopsies of the fat showed increased levels of neuropeptide Y, or NPY, a hormone discovered nearly 25 years ago. In the brain, NPY stimulates appetite. In the periphery of the body, it is a growth factor that stimulates enlargement of cells and the production of new blood vessels to supply nourishment.

Zukowska and Lydia Kuo found that the hormone not only enlarged fat cells, but stimulated the production of new fat cells and blood vessels to support them.

A buildup of abdominal fat is a prime contributor to “metabolic syndrome,” which affects 60 million Americans, and sharply increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

The researchers attempted to mimic the process of fat formation by implanting NPY in a slow-release tablet under the skin of mice and monkeys. In each the production of new fat was stimulated around the tablet.

Next, they implanted human fat in nude mice, which have an inhibited immune system and are unable to fight off such transplants. Normally, this fat is reabsorbed by the animal within a couple of weeks. But when they implanted NPY along with it, 99% of the fat was retained after three months.

When the researchers implanted a slow-release tablet of a small molecule that blocks the cellular receptor for NPY, the fat buildup did not occur. Implanting the molecule in a fat deposit caused the fat “to just melt away.”

Within two weeks the fat deposit in the mice had shrunk by half.

The hormone and the receptor are nearly identical in mice, monkeys and humans.

There is a Northern European population that, due to a genetic abnormality, secretes excessive amounts of NPY when stressed. That population is unusually susceptible to obesity and diabetes. In contrast, a Swedish population with a genetic mutation that lessens the receptor’s efficacy is resistant to obesity.

NPY has been injected into humans with no apparent side effects, but its long-term effects have not been studied.

“Stress can be fattening, study finds,” by Thomas H. Maugh II

A study by Michael French looked at 2002 data from a survey of U.S. households representing more than 31,000 adults.

The survey contained questions about alcohol consumption, health behaviors and chronic health conditions. Moderate drinking was defined as 4 to 14 drinks a week for men and 4 to 7 drinks a week for women.

The male participants who reported moderate drinking were 1.3 times more likely to report above-average health, compared with those who were lifetime abstainers and former light drinkers. The moderate drinking women were more than twice as likely as abstainers to report above-average health.

“Moderate Drinking May Boost Your Health,” by Krisha McCoy

The largest contributor to happiness is the genetically determined set point (or set range). According to KM Sheldon, Sonja Lyubomirsky and David Schkade (Pursuing Happiness, 2003),”The set point likely reflects immutable interpersonal, temperamental and affective personality traits, such as extraversion, arousability and negative affectivity, that are rooted in neurobiology,… are highly heritable… and change little over the lifespan.”

Current estimates suggest that this genetically determined set range accounts for around 50% of an individual’s happiness.

In general, married, well paid, secure, healthy and religious believers are more likely to report themselves as being happy.

Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi (Money and Happiness, 2000) surveyed 7167 students across 41 countries. Those who valued love more than money reported far higher life satisfaction scores than those who seemed to be money focused.

The correlations between such variables as money, job security, marriage, etc. and happiness are relatively small. Sheldon et al argue that in total all circumstances account for only around 10% of the variations in people’s happiness.

Schkade and Daniel Kahneman (”Does living in California make people happy?“) show that whilst “living in California” was an appealing idea for many Americans, it didn’t actually boost long run happiness. That is to say, people living in California were about as happy as other Americans on average. So whilst moving may provide a temporary increase in happiness, it is soon adapted into the perception of the “norm.”

David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald (Money, Sex and Happiness, 2004) find that sexual activity enters strongly into happiness equations.

People are happiest when they achieve their aims, so set yourself goals which stretch you, but are achievable.

“If It Makes You Happy,” by James Montier

In 1956, the average teenager’s weekly income/allowance was $10.55, equal to the disposable income of a family in the early 1940s.

About 10% of burials in NYC in 1889 were in potter’s fields. In 1900, 1.75 million children between the ages of 10 and 15 — almost 1/5 of all children in that age cohort — were in the work force. Children provided 1/4 to 1/3 of the incomes for working-class families, which spent more than 90% of their household earnings on food, shelter and clothing. In 1900, Americans spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine, and less than 2% of Americans took vacations.

By the end of the ’50s, the number of Americans enrolled in colleges exceeded the number of US farmers.

A 1962 Gallup poll found that only 10% of mothers hoped their daughters would emulate the choices they had made in their lives.

More than two-thirds of women who turned 18 during the ’50s claimed to have slept with only one man by their 30th birthday. Compared to only 2% of women who reached adulthood during the ’70s.

“Land of Plenty,” George F. Will’s review of Brink Lindsey’s The Age of Abundance