Latest news with #HappierLivesInstitute
CNBC
30-04-2025
- Health
- CNBC
36-year-old happiness researcher shares what it means—and what it takes—to be happy: 'Don't just worry about yourself'
At just 16, Michael Plant became interested in what people could do to maximize happiness, so he started studying philosophy. Two decades later, Plant, 36, is a global happiness researcher at the Happier Lives Institute, which publishes the annual World Happiness Report. As the founder and research director of HLI and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford's Wellbeing Research Centre, Plant knows a lot about what makes people happier. Happiness, Plant says, is "the experience of feeling good overall. I think it's that simple." Here's what he does every day to maximize his own happiness and overall wellbeing. Plus, his biggest takeaways from the research he's conducted about what it means to be happy — and what it Make It: What is the No. 1 lesson you've learned about happiness? That's a really hard question to answer because you want to say something that is novel, evidence-based and life-changing, and it's pretty hard to come up with something that is all three of those. I think I'd say two things. The first is about the importance of mental health. When you look at the data, mental health has so much of a bigger effect than we seem to believe it does. So, tip number one is don't get depressed. I say that as half a joke, because, of course, people don't choose that, but it really is one of the worst things for you. And if you are depressed, go talk to your friends, talk to a doctor. Therapy does work. The second thing is that a lot of our discussion about happiness is overly self-centered. I think if you want to live a happy life, then don't just worry about yourself. You want to worry about making a difference in other people's lives. We want to be connected and useful to other people. What are some of the practices that stand out as actually helping people feel true happiness? Think about the quality of your connections with other people. Do you have a partner that loves you? Do you have friends who care about you and who you can share things with? Then, branch out: Do you have weaker ties with people who you see every now and then, who make you feel like part of a community? You have to actively work to form social bonds. What are your daily habits for your overall well-being? I wake up and I try to be grateful for things, and I don't always succeed. I have my coffee and stare out of the window and see what's going on in the lives of people opposite me. And what do we spend most of our lives doing? Working. I feel extremely lucky that I have a job where I feel like what I'm doing is useful and that I have good colleagues. We have good relationships with each other, and that's really important and rejuvenating. I would hate to be, say, a corporate lawyer. I know that would be higher in status, and I would earn many times more, but I wouldn't enjoy my life day by day. That's the distinctive thing. On this odd entrepreneurial journey, I'm doing something that I think is important. I would recommend that to others. It's not always easy, but I think it's quite rewarding. And then I have a habit of exercising basically every day, so I will make sure I get out of the house and do things. Can you share the things you do to improve your mood and feel happier? I have this mental checklist I run through that I write down. So if I'm in a bad mood, I check it. Have I eaten something? Have I left the house? Have I spoken to someone? And have I exercised? Once I've run through those four, if I'm not feeling better, then it's quite serious. For the big things, I talk to my fiancé. And I actually just recently stopped seeing a therapist, but I quite regularly see a therapist. That helps shift the bigger things that you don't want to necessarily burden your partner or your friends with. How do you manage stress during tumultuous times? Something that's worth saying is that I may be a happiness researcher and sort of obsessive, but I get upset, stressed and angry. All of these things happen. These are the unavoidable bits of life. I use the serenity prayer. When I'm not sure what to do, that often comes to mind. So 'Can I do anything about what I'm worried about, or do I just need to accept it?' And often the challenge is knowing which one of the two it is. But often I'll realize that, 'Okay, I'm annoyed about this, but I can't actually do much about it.' I then try and get myself out of the house, get some exercise, eat something or talk to my partner as a way to try to manage stress. People talk about 'good vibes only.' And actually, I don't think that's reasonable. We should try for good vibes mostly.
Scoop
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Choosing Mass Murder?
The day after another mass shooting in the USA, the Guardian ran a puff piece entitled, 'Trump is creating a selfish, miserable world Here's what we can do.' The Donald would be glad to know that he's having such a worldwide effect. But it isn't true. Trump and his right hand man, Stephen Miller, who evokes the same fiendish creepiness as Himmler, are symptoms far more than they are causes of the disease that afflicts America. The Guardian's putative philosopher and founder of the 'Happier Lives Institute' has hitched his wagon to the wellness craze, adding a patina of respectability by citing 'scientific research.' He offers this bromide for personal happiness and societal renewal: 'Research shows when we share meals with others, volunteer or strike up friendly conversations with strangers, we're not just making ourselves and others happier. We're rebuilding the social fabric that authoritarian politics tears apart and reducing the distrust that fuels politicians like Trump.' That may fly in England, where Happier Lives is located, but its shallowness adds to the sinking feeling of the few thinking people left in the United States. As a true philosopher once said, 'It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society.' The collapse of western civilization makes a mockery of such chicken-soup-for-the-soul remedies. Is it really necessary to point out that the polycrisis is intensifying, and the idea of 'rebuilding the social fabric' by means like this amounts to a partial remedy for half a century ago? Volunteering and having friendly conversations are good things in themselves, but they don't come anywhere near meeting the multi-faceted crisis we face as individuals, societies and a species. A philosopher worth his or her salt is concerned with an adequate response at all levels, not with promoting more individualistic panaceas. 'A people die from too many lies,' Bill Moyers, President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary said during the Bush-Cheney prologue to Trump-Vance. When the history of this wretched period is written the consensus will be that despite America's triumphalism after the end of the Cold War, the social fabric in the US was ripped beyond repair at the same time the USSR collapsed. So it's grating when the progressive mainstream media features fake pearls of wisdom from a professional philosopher like: 'Trump and co want to make you feel helpless and furious. Keeping your composure and finding joy are acts of resistance.' For a philosopher to write banalities like this when evil rules is philosophical malpractice. The pretension of such 'think pieces' adds to a feeling of hopelessness in thinking people, whatever their educational level. Intellectual elites need to stop talking down to people, and start speaking to readers in the same way they speak to each other. The fetid social fabric in the USA is the background from which a college student at Florida State University, the son of a police officer no less, used his mother's weapon to randomly shoot people on campus, killing two and wounding five. It's inane to keep searching for individualistic motives when American society is sick from top to bottom. After decades of seeing enemies abroad and killing millions of people with impunity, from Vietnam to Yemen, Americans are now making war on each other. Stoicism is all the rage, but it's just another word for suppressing one's emotions and carrying on. A favorite quote from Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher born a Roman slave, is a wellness credo: 'We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.' Such a notion fits perfectly with the fad about 'agency' and the entire absurd notion of 'choosing' to act ethically and happily. The truth, as Socrates pointed out, is that when we see things clearly we don't choose; we act. In the parlance of today, a chooser is a loser. There isn't a duality and division between two things – the choice and the chooser. There is simply the choice as a challenge, and our clarity or confusion of action flowing from the depth or shallowness of our perception and insight. No matter how much planning and 'premeditation,' the plague of mass murderers in the USA is the ultimate expression of pathological individualism. People, mostly young men, 'choose' to kill random people because their mental, emotional and social life is so sick that they strike out in horrific reaction to the internalized evil of society. Fragments kill; in-dividuals (non-divided human beings) do not. We all face choices in life certainly, but choosing is an inherently false thing. We choose from the background of our conditioning and confusion, our unseen motivations, and from social and metaphysical compulsions of which we are unaware. In short, there is no freedom in choosing, quite the opposite. We're free when we perceive, understand and act as a single unbroken movement. Emphasizing individualistic happiness in a socio-political culture from which the boils of Trumpism have erupted is idiotic. And offering remedies like striking up friendly conversations with strangers as a remedy to repair a social fabric torn to shreds is ridiculous. What can one do? Stop thinking individualistically, and in terms of the polls and movements promoted by a complicit media. One inwardly alive human being counts more than a million inwardly dead humans. But even the walking dead can awaken and come back to life. With passion but without judgment, be self-knowing, and see society for what it is and people for who they are. Don't lose sight of things, but remain with things as they are, without becoming an activist.
Vox
31-03-2025
- Health
- Vox
How to buy a year of happiness, explained in one chart
is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect and co-host of the Future Perfect podcast. She writes primarily about the future of consciousness, tracking advances in artificial intelligence and neuroscience and their staggering ethical implications. Before joining Vox, Sigal was the religion editor at the Atlantic. You've probably heard the expression 'money can't buy happiness.' But take a look at the evidence, and you'll discover an encouraging fact: Your money can buy happiness — for other people. Not all efforts to improve people's well-being are equally effective, though. The best charities out there create hundreds of times more happiness per dollar than others, according to new findings published this month by research center Happier Lives Institute in the 2025 World Happiness Report, which ranks countries by happiness each year. That means that if you donate your money to the right charities, it can buy a lot of happiness for the world's neediest people at a stunningly low cost. For example, just $25 can meaningfully boost somebody's happiness for a year, if you give it to an effective organization like StrongMinds, which treats depression in African countries. The Happier Lives Institute figured this out by comparing the impact of different charities using a single standardized metric: the well-being year, or Wellby. It's pretty straightforward: Imagine that someone asked you, 'Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays, on a scale from 0 to 10?' Producing one Wellby for you would mean increasing your life satisfaction by one point for one year. The Happier Lives Institute is UK-based, so, for comparison's sake, it showed how some of the world's most cost-effective charities stack up against a few charities in the UK (the last six in the chart). As you can see, money donated to the top charities in poorer countries can improve lives much more per dollar than money donated within a rich country, because a dollar goes further abroad. To give you a sense of what a few of the 'best buy' charities do: The case for making people happier — not just wealthier or healthier It's only in the past few years that experts have started evaluating charities using WELLBYs as their metric. Since economists love things they can measure objectively, they've spent the past century focusing on measuring health and wealth. The best programs have long been considered to be the ones that saved the most lives or increased GDP by the widest margin. But as it's become clear that increasing wealth and health doesn't always go hand in hand with increasing happiness, a growing chorus of experts has argued that helping people is ultimately about making them happier — not just wealthier or healthier — and the best way to find out how happy people are is to just ask them directly. In other words, we should focus more on subjective well-being: how satisfied people are with their lives based on what they say matters most to them. That revolution in thinking has gathered steam to the point that it's now featured in well-known, mainstream publications like the World Happiness Report. Some experts remain a bit skeptical about focusing on subjective well-being because it is, well, subjective. 'I don't really know what it means for someone to say 'I'm a 6 out of 10' in the way that I know what it means for someone to not have a broken arm,' Elie Hassenfeld, the co-founder and CEO of the charity evaluator GiveWell, told me a couple years ago. He also questioned whether a measure of subjective well-being gets at the things we really care about, things that make life worthwhile, like meaning. It's a fair question. But, according to the Happier Lives Institute's Michael Plant, it shouldn't stop us from using Wellbys. 'Part of the virtue of the subjective approach is that people can bring whatever matters to them into their assessments' of how happy they are, he told me. 'So, how much meaning you have in your life could be an input into that.' Plant also notes that although he's trying to highlight the organizations that give you the most bang for your charitable buck, that doesn't necessarily mean that other charities aren't doing good work or aren't worth funding at all. We don't have to turn ourselves into mere optimizing machines — we can care about a diverse set of priorities and split our donations among a range of different charities. The point, then, is not that you should ignore needy people in your local community, but that you may also want to look beyond that once you realize that you can make a much bigger difference to those living abroad. 'If a friend told you they gave $200,000 to a charity, you'd probably be extremely impressed — that could be their life savings!' Plant and his colleagues write in the World Happiness Report. 'However, it's possible to have that sort of impact for a fraction of the cost: giving $1,000 to the best charities may do just as much good as $200,000 to a randomly selected one.'
Yahoo
23-03-2025
- Lifestyle
- Yahoo
What does ‘the world's happiest man' do when he's sad? What we can learn from him and 13 other experts on finding joy.
You've probably heard of 'hygge,' the Danish concept of coziness that became all the rage a few years ago. But you may not have heard of the man who made it internet-famous. Meik Wiking has been called 'probably the world's happiest man' — and for good reason. As chief executive officer of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, Wiking spends his life studying well-being and why some countries, like his native Denmark, consistently rank 'happier' than others in surveys like the annual World Happiness Report. He's also written a slew of books on the subject, including The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living and My Hygge Home: How to Make Home Your Happy Place. But even happiness experts are unhappy sometimes, and surprisingly, how they choose to deal with that sadness, anger or discomfort can offer some of the most revealing insights into how to be a happier person. Wiking tells Yahoo Life that when something bad happens, like forgetting his laptop on an airplane (which he has done twice), he applies what he calls 'the six-month rule.' '[I ask] myself the question, 'Six months from now, is my quality of life going to be affected by this?' Most often, the answer is no.' It's a perspective that the authors of the World Happiness Report, which every year does a wellness check on the state of happiness around the world, understand well: Real happiness isn't defined by being in a constant state of ecstasy, but rather by a general contentment and satisfaction with one's quality of life overall. Although grief over the death of a loved one or another traumatic experience can have longer-lasting effects on happiness, experts say little instances of unhappiness that creep up in day-to-day life can often be mitigated with simple things. Michael Plant, a co-author of the 2025 World Happiness Report and founder and research director of the Happier Lives Institute, tells Yahoo Life that he regularly sees a therapist 'to work through the tougher bits.' But to fix what he calls 'the smaller things,' he runs through a mental checklist: 'Eat something, leave the house, talk to someone, exercise.' Sounds simple? Yahoo Life asked 13 authors of this year's World Happiness Report to tell us what they personally do when they're feeling unhappy. Some of their takes are easy to implement, others maybe less so. Here's what they shared. Since we're constantly hearing about the benefits of exercise, it shouldn't come as a surprise that combatting unhappiness with physical activity is endorsed by many happiness experts. Sara Konrath, a social psychologist at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, says that when she's unhappy, she does something active like a hike with friends. Claudia Senik, a professor at the Paris-Sorbonne University and a research fellow at the Paris School of Economics, says she tries to put things in perspective or shift her attention to something else — but 'ultimately, I head to a yoga class.' Micah Kaats, a PhD candidate in public policy at Harvard University, and Kelsey O'Connor, a researcher in the economics of well-being at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, both say they go outside for walks when they're feeling down. 'And if [it] can be done with others and in a green or blue space" — such as parks or trails near the ocean — "then there are even greater benefits,' O'Connor tells Yahoo Life. Lina Martínez, a professor of public policy and director of POLIS, the Observatory of Public Policies at Universidad Icesi in Cali, Colombia, says spending time near nature is both soothing and helps put some distance between her and the source of her unhappiness. 'There are days when I don't feel my best emotionally, and they occur often,' Martínez tells Yahoo Life. 'On those days, I walk in a nearby park — or simply gaze at the green plants in my house if I can't go out. During these walks, I consciously try to distance myself from whatever situation is making me unhappy. I imagine my problem as if it belonged to someone else.' If you feel weighed down by the belief that happiness is fleeting, experts suggest flipping that around — namely, recognizing that instances of unhappiness are usually also temporary. Margarita Tarragona, director of the ITAM Center for Well-Being Studies at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico in Mexico City, says that when she's unhappy, she tries to remember that experiencing highs and lows is a part of life. 'In general, I just accept what I am feeling, live that experience and remind myself that life is constantly changing,' she tells Yahoo Life. Similar to Wiking's 'six-month rule,' Martínez understands that many of the little things that irk us and sour our mood — like sitting in traffic or getting a parking ticket — 'won't even matter in a week' . 'It's not the universe conspiring against you; it's just life,' Martínez says. Often when happiness experts talk about being 'happy,' it's not defined as being all smiles and in a constant state of jubilee. Although Finland is consistently ranked the world's happiest country (and is No. 1 yet again in 2025), the national trait is less 'happy' and more 'sisu' — a Finnish term that roughly translates to 'grit' or determination in the face of adversity. By their definition, happiness is more about contentment than perpetual joy. Lara Aknin, a psychology professor at Simon Fraser University, tells Yahoo Life that people often get stuck on chasing quick dopamine hits of happiness, like a trip to Tahiti or that coveted pair of shoes, instead of focusing on more sustainable happiness. A common refrain you'll often hear from happiness experts is that it's 'not about the pursuit of happiness, but the happiness of pursuit' — a maxim which Kaats reiterates. 'If we can enjoy the process of working towards our goals, instead of just hoping to be happy when we reach them, we may all be a bit better off,' Kaats says. Roberto Castellanos, a senior lecturer of political and social sciences at National Autonomous University of Mexico, says 'there are no quick fixes' for unhappiness or for acquiring more happiness. 'Happiness is not an easy endeavor,' he tells Yahoo Life. 'It is not so much — or only — a mental or emotional state as a skill — a skill that takes effort to master.' That said, Felix Cheung, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, says it can help people in some cases when they're unhappy to know they're not alone. 'In tough times, too much focus on self-help and wellness can make us forget that some struggles aren't just individual; they're societal,' Cheung tells Yahoo Life. 'If you're struggling, it's not a personal failure — sometimes, the world around you needs to change.' Most of the authors of the 2025 Happiness Report say the key to coping with unhappiness is helping others, which has a twofold effect: You'll make someone else happy, and you'll make yourself happier in the process. Aknin says that when she's feeling unhappy, she tries to concentrate on making someone else happy. 'Doing so gets my mind off what is troubling me and directs my attention to the people, places or causes I care about,' she says. Konrath adds that 'the happiest people are givers' who contribute to their communities. Leaning on others helps too. Francesco Sarracino, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, says he engages with people he trusts to help him 'put things in perspective.' Cheung says that when he's feeling down, he talks to his wife, hangs out with his son or asks mentors for help. 'People care more about us than we give them credit for,' he says. Rui Pei, a postdoctoral scholar at the Stanford University Department of Psychology, says that 'happiness is fundamentally social,' which can be difficult for those who are naturally introverted. Still, she says it's worth the effort to engage when you're going through a hard time. 'As an introvert, my natural tendency is to retreat: to turn inward and try to figure things out by myself,' Pei tells Yahoo Life. 'But I've learned that what's often more effective is the exact opposite: I reach out. I call up a friend, ask someone how they are doing or even something as simple as making eye contact with a stranger and [saying] hello.' Alberto Prati, an assistant professor of economic psychology at University College London, observes that while independence is a key aspect of modern culture, it's healthy to allow yourself to lean on others too. 'Contemporary societies, in particular in the industrialized West, tend to celebrate autonomy,' Prati says. 'But often too little attention is devoted to [helping] people develop and nurture healthy relationships with partners, family, friends and peers. 'I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends' is one of the most cited end-of-life regrets.' 'Ultimately,' Senik adds, 'the deepest source of happiness remains unchanged: love.'
