“Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are inalienable rights, according to the U.S. Declaration of Independence, but pursuing happiness isn’t the same thing as actually catching it, alas. However, new research is indicating ways we can increase our happiness quotient scientifically.
Until recently the only way to measure an emotion scientifically was to focus physiological changes such as an increased heart rate, a change in body temperature, or enhanced (or inhibited) activity on the part of certain glands. But new technology, such as positronic emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has enabled scientists to see which parts of the brain are most active when subjects are feeling various emotions.
Dr. Richard Davidson, director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin, has discovered that positive and negative emotions produce activity in very different parts of the brain.
His research reveals that people experiencing anxiety, anger or depression show the most brain activity in the right prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead), while those experiencing positive, outward-reaching emotions show more activity in the left prefrontal cortex. Not only that, people seem to be disposed, both genetically and by their formative experiences, toward being either more left-brained or right-brained–i.e., more cheerful or morose.
Hundreds of readings have shown that the general population forms a standard bell-curve distribution, with the relatively few who tilt farthest toward the right-brain end of the curve more likely to suffer clinical depression or an anxiety disorder, while those few on the far left end of the curve less likely to suffer from negative moods and more likely to recover from them rapidly.
One of the people Dr. Davidson scanned was a senior Tibetan lama, who turned out to have the most extreme value to the left–“happy”–side of the brain of the 175 people he had studied to that point. The question was, did the lama’s meditative training produce that value, or was it just an individual quirk?
In collaboration with Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass., Dr. Davidson conducted a small study on the effects of training in mindfulness meditation. Based on the Buddhist meditation practiced by Tibetan lamas, but stripped of its religious context, mindfulness meditation involves learning to monitor sensations and thoughts, both while sitting quietly and during activities like yoga exercises, and to drop those that might lead to a negative mood.
Workers in a high-pressure biotech business, who started out, on average on the right-brain side of the emotional distribution, and complained of feeling highly stressed, studied mindfulness meditation for three hours a week over two months.
The results were promising. After the training, on average the workers’ emotions ratio had shifted leftward, and their moods had improved: they reported feeling more engaged in their work, more energized and less anxious. (And as an added benefit, their immune systems seemed stronger: they had more flu antibodies in their blood after they received flu shots than a control group.)
Dr. Davidson and other scientists in this field met with the Dalai Lama in India in March 2000, and with his blessing, Dr. Davidson is now studying other Tibetan lamas who have completed at least three years of solitary meditative retreat.
Even if you’re not prepared to sit in the lotus position and chant “om,” you may be able to improve your mood. Three related studies conducted by Will Fleeson, associate professor of psychology at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, have shown that if you’re feeling unhappy, you can make yourself happier simply by acting as if you’re happy.
In each study, about 50 randomly selected university students carried handheld computers for up to 10 weeks, regularly recording their answers to a set of questions about their mood and activities.
The study showed the subjects invariably felt happier when they were acting extroverted: singing aloud with a song, walking over and talking to someone, asking a question in class. Further studies showed that subjects who were asked to be assertive and energetic during group discussions were then judged, both by themselves and by others, to be significantly happier afterward then those who were asked to be passive and reserved.
In other words, the mere act of pursuing happiness may make you happier–maybe even happier than catching the thing you began to pursue in the hope it would make you happy!
Good hunting!
