Happiness is learned and maintained through practice, says first-ever study.
Happiness means different things to different people. It could be playing an instrument or doing a sport. Almost all would agree it’s the feeling of truly enjoying our lives, and wanting to make the very best of them. Happiness is key to helping us be and do our best. But how many of us really work at being happy, just like we would to develop and maintain a skill? A research team at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom revealed that happiness can indeed be learned, but it can be short-lived if we don’t work hard at it. That’s because the initial boost in well-being needs constant effort and ongoing practice of habits, such as gratitude and meditation, to sustain long-term benefits. The findings were published in the journal ‘Higher Education’.
The key to happiness
Senior author Bruce Hood, professor of developmental psychology in society at the University of Bristol, is director of the ‘Science of Happiness’ course. Launched in 2018, this pioneering course teaches first-year undergraduate students about the latest scientific studies involving happiness. He led a team of researchers that carried out a first-of-its-kind study to monitor the long-term well-being of participants in a happiness course. They asked nearly 230 students who had taken ‘Science of Happiness’ during the academic years 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 to complete a repeated self-assessment of well-being measures. The objective was to find out if they had experienced any long-term change. Results showed that students greatly improved their well-being, provided they consistently applied the positive psychology interventions learned during the course.
The happiness hack
“It’s like going to the gym – we can’t expect to do one class and be fit forever. Just as with physical health, we have to continuously work on our mental health, otherwise the improvements are temporary,” Prof. Hood commented in a news item. “This study shows that just doing a course – be that at the gym, a meditation retreat or on an evidence-based happiness course like ours – is just the start: you must commit to using what you learn on a regular basis.” He added: “Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating. This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets [sic] us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”
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