10 Keys to True Happiness (page 3 of 3)

Aging Happily

8. Faith
Karl Marx was fairly close to the mark when he described religion as an opiate for the masses. Of the dozens of studies that have looked at religion and happiness, the vast majority have found a positive link.

Believing in an afterlife can give people meaning and purpose and reduce the feeling of being alone in the world, says Harold G. Koenig at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C., especially as people get older. "You really see the effect in times of stress. Religious belief can be a very powerful way of coping with adversity."

Religion also brings social interaction and support. But Koenig believes it is not just about receiving. "Studies have shown that people who provide support to others are better off themselves. They even live longer." This, researchers agree, makes religious involvement a source of greater satisfaction than other socially inclusive activities such as book groups.

9. Charity
Several studies have found a link between happiness and altruistic behavior. But as with many behavioral traits, it is not always clear whether doing good makes you feel good, or whether happy people are more likely to be altruistic.

James Konow, an economist at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, tried to tease apart cause and effect in a lab experiment.

He recruited subjects to answer questionnaires, and toward the end of the session gave half of them $10 and half, nothing. He then told the subjects who had been paid that they could share their money with those who hadn't been compensated. Konow found that the happier students were overall, the more likely they were to share the money. However, being in a happy mood on the day of the test did not make them any more generous, and students who gave did not report any immediate increase in happiness. In fact, they were slightly less happy.

But those who shared their money were more likely to show the personality traits of a "self-actualizer" -- they were concerned with their own personal growth and improvement. Konow thinks that while a single act of generosity did not make his subjects happier, the cumulative effects of being a generous person did.

10. Age
Old age may not be so bad. "Given all the problems of aging, how could the elderly be more satisfied?" asks Laura Carstensen, a psychology professor at Stanford University in California.

In one study, Carstensen gave pagers to 184 people between the ages of 18 and 94, and paged them five times a day for a week, asking them to fill out an emotions questionnaire each time. Old people reported positive emotions just as often as young people, but they reported negative emotions much less frequently.

Why are old people happier? Some scientists suggest older people may expect life to be harder and learn to live with it, or they're more realistic about their goals, only setting ones that they know they can achieve. But Carstensen thinks that with time running out, older people have learned to focus on things that make them happy and let go of those that don't.

"People realize not only what they have, but also that what they have cannot last forever," he says. "A goodbye kiss to a spouse at the age of 85, for example, may elicit far more complex emotional responses than a similar kiss to a spouse at the age of 20."

From Reader's Digest - March 2004

 

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