The Noncomplaining Project: What's Wrong With Our Happiness Gurus

After we attempted to define mindful complaining in the second entry of our no-whining project [2], Hanna and I vowed to get to the root causes of our kvetching [3]. So we consulted the psychologists who study happiness to see if they could help us figure out the science behind our whines, and how to prevent such carping in the future. We focused on two books written by experts in the field of positive psychology: Martin Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of What You Can Change and What You Can’t [4], and Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Riverside and the author of The How of Happiness [5]. We also downloaded the companion iPhone application to Lyubomirsky’s book, called LiveHappy.

Both Lyubomirsky and Seligman agree that happiness is partially genetically determined and partially a result of free will, and they help you figure out your natural happiness level. Seligman’s book advises you on which problematic parts of your personality are impossible to change and which can be altered, while Lyubomirsky’s book offers scads of activities to help you fix those problems once you’ve identified them.

According to Lyubomirsky’s The How of Happiness, everyone has a happiness set point that they naturally fall to without any effort. This is something like a weight set point—a naturally thin person can be slender without diet and exercise, just as a naturally happy person does not need to work on being cheerful. But that genetically predetermined set point only makes up 50 percent of one’s total happiness. Forty percent of happiness comes from intentional activity, and the other 10 percent is circumstantial. So that lady you see humming merrily in the 68-person line at the DMV could be 40 percent happier if she worked on it and she could be reaching her happiness potential if she were also a toilet-paper heiress who lived in a beachfront Hawaiian villa and never experienced a major tragedy.

So what is my happiness set-point? Lyubomirsky’s book and the LiveHappy iPhone app use the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire [6] as an arbiter. The OHQ uses a scale from one to six, with one being the bottom of the bell jar, while six is Osmond-level toothy grins. The first time I took the test, I got a 4.42. The average is around 4.30. While I answered queries about my personal satisfaction (“I laugh a lot”) with high marks, I found that I was responding to the questions like "I do not think that the world is a good place" with "strongly agree," which made my score lower.

In What You Can Change, Seligman argues that you can fix surface problems, not problems with depth. A problem has depth if it is biological, if the beliefs underlying that problem are difficult to disprove, and if the belief is part of your essential worldview. Seligman gives the example of transsexualism as the deepest “problem” because “it is biologically laid down in gestation, virtually undiscomfirmable and pervades all of life. It is also totally unchangeable.”

Using a quiz Seligman has in the early part of What You Can Change, I realize that anxiety is at the root of many of my complaints, and that it is also something that can be helped. Of course, I didn’t need a damn quiz to tell me I’m high-strung. I leave for the airport four hours before my flight because I worry about traffic, about security lines, about lost luggage, about acts of God.

But these worries are not difficult to disprove, and they’re not biological, so I tried using some of the techniques that Lyubomirsky presents in The How of Happiness to try to quell my anxiety. She focuses on a particular subset of anxiety that she calls “self-focused rumination” or “overthinking.” According to Lyubomirsky, “overthinking is thinking too much, needlessly, passively, endlessly and excessively pondering the meanings, causes, and consequences of your character, your feelings, and your problems.”

The object of my self-focused rumination in the past week was an incident with a friend. I was dealing with a family emergency (more on that in a second) and had been extremely short with him. Even though I had apologized after my curtness, I kept replaying the conversation in my head, in my worst moments worrying that he wanted to dump me as a buddy. This led me to want to complain about my friend’s coldness, even though I was the one who was rude.

I used Lyubomirksy’s “Stop!” technique to help change my negative thinking. It’s pretty simple: Every time you feel your mind going down the anxiety highway, you think, say, or even shout, “Stop!” or “No!” Then you force yourself to think of something mundane or soothing. Every time I wanted to bitch to my fiancé about my friend, I would think, stop! And shifted to thinking about what I was going to have for dinner that night.

But back to the family emergency, and why it reveals a major problem with the advice of the happiness gurus. Part of the reason I was a bit nasty to my friend was because my grandmother is dying. Optimists give her a month. Three weeks ago, she was reading the entirety of the New York Times every day and could converse about anything from Egon Schiele to Jon Stewart. When I called her yesterday to wish her a happy 96th birthday, she was totally incoherent. She just kept repeating in her Austrian-accented English, “Nothing new here, nothing new.”

Lyubomirsky says that the happiest people “construe benefit in trauma,” which means “seeing some value or gain (a silver lining, if you must) in your loss or negative life event—for example, a change in life perspective, a feeling that one’s life has greater value, or a sense of personal growth.”

It is precisely this advice that inspired Barbara Ehrenreich to write Bright-Sided [7], which Hanna reviewed in the New York Times this weekend. [8] When Ehrenreich had been diagnosed with breast cancer, she found that everyone was dismissive of her anger. They all encouraged her to think positive. But I am not ready to “construe the benefit” in my grandmother’s demise. Certainly I can acknowledge that she lived a good long life and that I am so lucky to have had her to talk to for so long. But to turn pure grief into sterile positivity feels demented.

Even so, perhaps Lyubomirsky and Seligman have helped me lately. I retook the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire again after reading their books and trying not to complain for the past two weeks, and my score went from a 4.42 to a 4.79. Hanna, what about you? Have Lyubomirsky and Seligman given you any insights into your whines?

Jess,

I can almost feel the calm practicality emanating from your letter. I look forward to our site running on the quiet hum of your new, smoother self (10 percent irony here). I, too, set myself to reading the new happiness gurus. And while happiness is a far more ambitious goal than our own noncomplaining, I did find some useful inspiration and tips in these books.

Before I begin, a few more thoughts on the gurus we’ve given ourselves over to. Seligman says he conceived of happiness studies out of frustration that psychology spent almost all of its efforts studying mental illness and depression. This struck him as some holdover from the Western notions of original sin—the idea that humans are, at their core, fallen and flawed. Why not spend some intellectual effort looking into states of contentment, and what creates them?

This is an intriguing insight and would have led to much deeper observations if Seligman (and Lyubomirsky) had not been seduced by the sticky-taffy Oprah world of guru-dom. Despite the abundance of surveys and questionnaires that you mentioned, these books are by no means scientific or rigorous. Seligman reports study results with a kind of breathless credulity that would get him denied tenure at any real university. Also, many of the insights have already been incorporated into cognitive behavioral therapy, so maybe the real credit should go to Albert Ellis [9], whose only flaw seems to be having failed to package himself effectively.

The books use the standard formulas of self-help—snappy personal vignettes about “Adele” or “Mark” with the occasional monk thrown in, embarrassing motivational speaker phrases—“Take happiness into your own hands!” from Lyubomirsky—and the required ONE DAY story from Seligman, about how he was gardening when his 5-year-old daughter told him he has to stop being such a grouch.

The concept of a set point of happiness that you describe is quite useful, if somewhat obvious. It’s comforting, I suppose, to know that your entire temperament is not your fault but that there is some slice of it you can work on. I scored pretty low on the initial happiness tests, but I think that may be because I am one of those “depressive realists” Seligman describes, which means I have a really hard time deluding myself that things are much better than they actually are. I found it pretty depressing, by the way, that a key component of happiness seems to be self-delusion.

But instead of fighting the realist tendency, I decided to run with it. Seligman has a section in which he distinguishes optimistic and pessimistic tendencies. I was very excited about this one, as it pretty much mimics the explaint strategy [10] I outlined in our second entry, which is still working beautifully for me. Optimists, he writes, seek temporary specific explanations for problems, while pessimists seek permanent universal ones. Here are some of his examples.

Pessimist: You never talk to me.

Optimist: You haven’t talked to me lately.

Pessimist: Men are tyrants.

Optimist: My husband was in a bad mood.

You will no doubt note that the pessimist’s statements have a much higher probability of being incorporated into a comedy routine or a piece of good writing than the optimist’s flat, dull statement of facts. But the absence of constant catastrophic thinking has been making my husband very happy, so I will keep it up and be funny in other ways.

Other than this, I found Seligman to be kind of a bummer. Despite what he says, he is quite obviously still sunk in original sin, guilt-ridden-type thinking. He is insistent that the only kind of worthwhile happiness is the moral kind, and anything fleeting is classified as “hedonic.” Again, there is a germ of a good idea here. Studies do show that the things you think will make you happy—better job, more money, face-lift—only make you happy for about three months, and then your level adjusts. A very useful and sobering bit of information.

But Seligman takes it too far. “The pleasure of the second taste of Basset’s French vanilla ice cream is less than half of the first, and by the fourth taste it’s just calories.” Give me a break. Can you imagine going on a beach vacation with this guy? His advice on child-rearing is particularly annoying and moralistic. Every infant game, toy, bedtime routine needs a higher purpose. This is the mirthless thinking that brought us Baby Einstein and private-school admissions tests. There’s nothing like a pointless afternoon spent eating too much ice cream with your kids, and there's nothing to spoil it faster than a lesson on empty calories.

Which bring us to bubbly Lyubomirsky. She convinced me that noncomplaining is perhaps not enough, and that I need to try to put that positive energy back out there. This means making a conscious effort to express gratitude and thankfulness for the things I appreciate. She also has about a million more specific suggestions, but I’ll stick to the basics.

My good friend Margaret once told me that I was kind of unfriendly when we first met; many people have told me that since. I don’t mean to be; I think I’m just neutral, but maybe that translates as unfriendly. Margaret and I have also discussed how D.C. is really a place where you can feel lonely in public places. Unlike in California, where she grew up, or New York, where I grew up, contact between strangers just doesn’t naturally happen.

So I am going to make an effort to be more visibly cheerful and appreciative. This might mean thanking friends, my children, or strangers. It might mean an active phone call to, say, Margaret, or a genuine smile at the register. It might also mean I follow the dictates of Lyubomirsky’s happiness app for a day or two. I tried out being more visibly cheerful in Austin, where I was visiting this weekend. But it was pretty easy down there since Texans are a smile a minute. This week I’ll try D.C. and tell you how it goes. I’m hoping I don’t seem too weird, or that my friends don’t call for an intervention.

Hanna