Why don’t better circumstances make us happier?

Hi, I’m Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, and in this video I’ll discuss research explaining why improving our circumstances usually doesn’t make us significantly happier. Most of us think that making our lives materially better is the key to happiness, but research shows that assumption is mistaken. As someone who’s always relied on this approach to happiness, Maya wants to better understand why it doesn't work so well. Why haven’t Maya’s job promotions, her romantic relationships, or any of her other successes ever brought her real happiness? Reflecting on her experiences more carefully gives Maya a clue. She remembers how great it felt when she moved from her grungy studio into her first one-bedroom apartment. She loved setting it up; she loved curling up with a good book on her plush couch; she loved having friends over for small dinner parties. It did make her happy for a little while. Before long, though, Maya stopped feeling dazzled every time she looked at the tall ceilings or fancy stove. The apartment just started to feel like where she lived. Maya’s guess, then, is that the reason circumstantial improvements don’t really boost our happiness is because we eventually just get used to them. Decades of studies on happiness confirm Maya’s hypothesis. For example, one pair of studies tracked subjects over 15 years to see how their happiness fluctuated with certain significant life changes. One of the studies looked at how happiness changed after people got at least a 50% raise in income. The study found that while people do initially experience a boost in happiness after this nice income bump, this happiness fades almost entirely within four years. And according to the second study, the initial happiness boost people enjoy from getting married is mostly lost after just two years. Just the way our sense of smell adapts to fragrances and odors so that they lose intensity after we’ve been smelling them for a while, our minds also adapt to improvements and setbacks in life. Our initial happiness or unhappiness from life changes loses intensity after we’ve been living with those changes for a while. This is what psychologists call “hedonic adaptation". Hedonic adaptation is a major reason we have such a hard time making sustained gains in happiness just by improving our circumstances. Whatever gains we make simply fade as we get used to the improvements. Another thing that happens as we reach our material goals is that we start feeling like our happiness depends on getting even more. When researchers asked subjects what income they would need to be happy, people earning $30,000 a year said they’d need to make $50,000. And what about people earning $100,000 a year? Were they already satisfied with their high income? Nope. They also said they needed more. In fact, they said they’d need $250,000 to be happy. So why do circumstantial improvements paradoxically make our happiness seem even further out of reach? Well, consider what happened when Maya got her first big promotion. Yes, she could now afford designer clothes and a nice one-bedroom apartment. But with greater respect at work came more invitations to socialize with colleagues higher, sometimes much higher, up on the corporate ladder. Soon Maya's great new apartment seemed really modest compared to the fancy lofts of her colleagues. She started realizing that her presumably big step up just raised her into the bottom of her new social group, and that she’d need more, a lot more, to really fit in. Many studies show that the happiness we get from the things we have largely depends on how those things compare to other people’s things. Other people are the “reference points” we use to assess ourselves, so when we see what others have, we think we need it too. Of course, wanting what others can have makes us productive and can lead to important progress. But whether it makes us happy depends on who we’re using as our reference points. And it turns out that our minds are very unreasonable in setting those reference points: we seem to fixate on whoever happens to show up in our view, without calculating how realistic it is to imagine ourselves in their shoes. That’s why the more we watch TV, which often shows the lives of wealthy, successful people, the more unhappy we are with our own income. And it’s why looking at pictures of beautiful models in fashion magazines for even a few minutes can lead to notable drops in our happiness. One of the worst ways our reference points get messed up in today's culture is our constant use of social media, things like Facebook and Snapchat. As we check out people’s feeds, we see all the fun places they’re going, all the cool people they’re hanging out with, and all the awesome things they’re buying and we start feeling a lot worse about our own lives. Of course, checking out the posts of people who don’t seem as cool can have the opposite effect, making us feel somewhat better about ourselves. But research shows that this self-esteem boost is smaller than the drop in self-esteem that comes from looking at the posts of people who seem cooler than us. And because of this imbalance, it turns out that the more time we spend on Facebook, the lower our self-esteem is overall. All this research convinces Maya that she won’t find happiness by just trying to improve her situation she also needs to make the most of what she already has. But how can she do that? How do you try to make the most of what you have?