Apologies -- I've gotten temporarily distracted from my agenda of posts on creating self-change by more posts from Rick Cockrum's Shards of Consciousness.

This week he's writing a series of articles on Happiness and I wanted to do a quick article about his first in the series: Happiness, Emotion, and Fulfillment - Part 1.

One of Rick's conclusions was that happiness can't be found outside ourselves, an insightful interpretation he made of the studies he reviewed.

This is absolutely one of the take-home messages of the positive psychology approach -- the way your world (and you) appear is highly dependent on how you're looking at it. Look at your world as half-empty and you'll see half-emptiness (or worse) all around you. Look at it as half-full and likely to get filled up and you'll be experiencing that fullness. Research has shown that optimism is good -- from the perspectives of your physical health, your emotional resilience, your personal growth, your relationships, your work....and on it goes.

And here's an interesting addition to his point:

It's snowing outside right now like you wouldn't believe. You start thinking about taking a winter-getaway somewhere sunny and warm. How happy would it make you to be able to take that trip?

One of your personal goals is to finish that degree. How great will it feel to finally have it done and over with?

Predicting how you will feel as the result of some future event is called "affective forecasting". It's an incredibly imporant component of our daily decision-making and perhaps even more so for the Big Things in life. And what is particularly fascinating is that...

We aren't very good affective forecasters for ourselves.

Research by Nobel Laureate Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert, and others has shown we consistently make systematic errors in predicting how happy or unhappy events in the future will make us.

Some examples:

Career Advancement - One of their studies looked at university professors up for tenure (that means a job for life and the freedom to study whatever they want, yes?). Of course, each one predicted that they would be SO much happier and satisfied with their career if they got tenure. Outcome? Professors who were passed up for tenure were no less happy than those who got it.

Location, Location, Location - Contrary to all predictions, Californians living in nice sunny areas are no happier than MidWesterners tolerating deep-freeze winters; college students overestimate the importance of having a dorm that is more conveniently located and more physically attractive to their quality of life (it made no, zero, zip, nada difference).

Money - After the first $40,000 (which does matter), the amount of money a person makes has virtually no effect on their happiness. Winning the lottery doesn't change lives for the better. And this is true for nations as well. Economist Richard Easterlin surveyed a large number of people across different nations -- and found that as people get richer, they do not grow happier. (Unless they were moving up over the poverty line -- having the basics without worry does make a difference).

So where do we go wrong?

We tend to predict that future events will have a bigger and a longer-lasting impact on our emotions than they really do.

And we do this because of the way we are wired:

We have what Dr. Gilbert calls a "psychological immune system". It acts to protect us as much as possible from feeling miserable on a long-term basis. After something unpleasant happens, we start to look at the upside of it -- "ah well, if I'd gotten that promotion, I would have worked too many hours anyway...." Doing this is actually an adaptive response that helps us balance emotionally - it's part of resiliency. But we don't pay attention to the potential upsides of the disappointment until it happens, so we predict it will be devastating.

We have "tunnel vision" about our emotions. When we zero in and attend to some possible future event, we block out all the other things in our life that influence its impact. "My life would be totally different if I... [win the lottery, get that job, live in that city, lose thirty pounds, etc. etc.]"  Yet no matter what else happens, most of the things in our lives carry on. And that consistency tends to smooth out both the ups and downs of new events.

So what does make a difference?

The biggest one thing that makes a difference to happiness levels (other than optimism, but that's a story for another day) is relationships. Nurturing our social relationships may be one of the most powerful things we can  do to increase our happiness.

And even having positive relationships is not about finding the "right people", it's about being the "right person" -- taking us back to  heart coherence and  half-full and filling cups. And to one more comment on Rick's articles -- In Part 2 of his series, he recommends meditation s a way to increase our happiness. While I agree, I would certainly recommend learning to produce heart coherence as a "best option" for many people.

This is because while heart coherence can be practiced in a time block as a meditation, heart coherence is also readily used on the spot during our daily lives to move us to a more positive, appreciative place in terms of what we are doing, who we are with, how we feel, anything that moves us out of kilter. I can't say enough good things about heart coherence. It gives us a way to feel happier.

For more on it see:

Using Our Hearts to Create Heaven on Earth

Can Other People Have an Effect on Your Brain?

The Heart of Neurofeedback