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

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After we attempted to define mindful complaining in the second entry of our no-whining project, Hanna and I vowed to get to the root causes of our kvetching. 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, and Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at the University of California-Riverside and the author of The How of Happiness. 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 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.