More on the How of Happiness: An Interview with Sonja Lyubomirsky

Photo BY taea Thale

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside, has been studying how and why people can become happier for over 30 years. Her research includes cognitive, motivational, and behavioral processes in subjective happiness. Dr. Lyubomirsky examines how generosity, gratitude, humility, and curiosity, as well as culture and age influence the pursuit of happiness. Most recently, her research explores how connections are the key to happiness. 

Those who attended the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA) World Congress on Positive Psychology in July may have heard Dr. Lyubomirsky speak about how to communicate about positive psychology to massive audiences. We will have another opportunity to hear her speak at the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Summit next month. MAPP Magazine had the privilege of speaking with Dr. Lyubomirsky to learn more about the how of happiness. 

Kimberly Dickman for MAPP Magazine (KD): Thank you for giving your time to talk today. We’d like to start by asking how you got started or interested in positive psychology. 

Sonja Lyubomirsky (SL): I started doing this before positive psychology was a thing. In 1989 on the very first day of graduate school at Stanford, I met my new advisor, Lee Ross, one of the world’s experts on conflict and negotiation. His focus had nothing to do with happiness—maybe even the opposite of happiness—but as we walked around campus and started talking, we discussed the secret of happiness. Why are some people happier than others? 

This was when Ed Diener was the only person doing research on happiness but he didn’t call it happiness because he didn’t think he could get tenure studying something as fuzzy and unscientific as happiness. He called it subjective well-being and it stuck. He was doing lots of correlational work on important variables like income, age, gender, and education level. 

So, we started interviewing people who were happy and unhappy. We started comparing their thinking and how they behave in their daily lives. About 10 years later through media interviews, I kept getting asked what I could tell readers from my research to do to be happier. I never really had an answer to that question because the research was correlational. I couldn’t really tell people how to be happier. My dissertation at Stanford was on happiness and social comparison. Basically, happier people don’t compare themselves to others and use their internal standards, not social comparison. I remember thinking the question of how to increase happiness was not very interesting, and it was an applied research question, not basic research. Then it hit me that this was an interesting basic science question- that is, can happiness change over time? Can we intervene? Can we actually do experiments where we get people to be happier? That’s how my intervention work started. My first book was called The How of Happiness. It focused on the mechanisms underlying changes in happiness and how to be happier. 

KD: It’s wonderful that your advisor was open to you exploring an area that he was not focused on. Your work shows that we can increase happiness to some degree through intentional behaviors. In a 2019 article with Kennon Sheldon, you wrote that how people live makes a difference in their happiness. Can you share some of the key differences for those who live happy lives compared to those who don’t? 

SL: Yes. This comes from both correlational work and from experimental work, a lot of the former I did in the first ten years of my research when I met Ken Sheldon and David Schkade. Happy people tend to be more grateful, more social, kinder. They meditate more and exercise more. They have significant goals they’re pursuing and cope better with adversity. They are more spiritual and religious. 

But we have to ask whether these kinds of behaviors or ways of thinking and acting cause those individuals to be happier or is there a third variable involved? Maybe it’s genetics. This is where the experimental work is really important. You can randomly assign some people to act more grateful or meditate more and then compare them to a control group. If people engage in habits that happy people already have, will less happy people become happier? That’s where we began to observe the impact of social connections.

“Almost everything that we have done that works to make people happier works because it’s making them feel more connected to others.”

KD: Can you say more about social connections?

SL: For about 20 years now, I’ve been doing randomized controlled interventions (similar to  clinical trials) on the efficacy of strategies or behaviors. However, what struck me about all this research is that almost everything that we have done that works to make people happier works because it’s making them feel more connected to others. When we ask people to write gratitude letters, they almost always write them to a person in their lives, and it makes them feel more connected. When we ask them to be kind to others, most are kind to someone they know, which makes them feel more connected to that person. We have also asked people to act more like an extroverted person, and this increased their happiness. It hit me. The key to happiness really is social connection. Of course, we all know this, and now there’s a lot of attention to the subject of connection and happiness. 

The longest running study from Harvard shows that social relationships are the key to happiness. Of course, some interventions (like exercise or meditation) don’t necessarily involve others so not 100 percent of what makes people happy is about connections but I’ll go out on a limb to say about 95 percent does.

More recently, I’ve been engaged in research on connection. For example, we are asking people to have conversations with others. After all, we usually connect with others by talking. We can connect with touch and eye contact but talking is really important. So how do we talk in a way that fosters connection? How do we listen? One key to conversations is good listening. In addition, working with collaborators, we are studying a psychoactive substance called MDMA, (3,4-Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine), which makes people feel super connected and empathetic, grateful, understood, cared for, and loved. What is it about such substances that make people feel connected, and can we borrow what we learn to make them feel such connection without the substances? A lot of my research now is about connection and happiness.

“One key to conversations is good listening.”

KD: That is wonderful. Would you say that these interventions are impacting states or traits? In other words, are these interventions becoming a part of a new set point and how people operate and function in the world or are they temporary states of happiness?

SL: The interventions that we do are usually around a month long, maybe six to eight weeks. More recently, we’ve been doing interventions that are one or two weeks long. They are not longitudinal; I call them shortitudinal. These interventions improve people’s sense of well-being and sense of connection. The idea is, if we maintain these behaviors over time, it could change their trait happiness. Basically, trait happiness is made up of state happiness. The more you can inject positive emotions in your life, the more you can be a happy person in general. The positive emotional states add up; these states aggregate and accumulate to create a happier person. I hope we are doing both and truly, longitudinal studies are needed to see if people can become happier over long periods of time. 

“There is now really persuasive evidence that strategies like gratitude and kindness and being more social, event to strangers, can make us happier in the moment and add up in the long run.”

KD: Yes, that would be good to know. Thank you. With all of your research and insights into happiness, how can our community of positive psychology scholars, practitioners, and researchers promote connection and help to create meaningful connections? 

SL: I always worry about applying the research too early into the real world, but I do think that there's now really persuasive evidence that strategies like gratitude and kindness and being more social, even to strangers, can make us happier in the moment and add up in the long run.

The research may be ready but I also caution that some of these strategies might backfire. For example, you work with severely depressed people and ask them to write gratitude letters, it could actually backfire. One of the big risk factors for suicidality is feeling like a burden to your friends and family. You can imagine if you ask a really depressed person to consider and write about all the great things that their family and friends have done for them, they may feel like more of a burden than they did before, and that could be really dangerous. 

So, when we apply these findings in the field or in the real world, we do have to consider specific situations or certain populations or circumstances. For example, we ask people to be kind to others, yet certain people are very nurturing; they care too much about others, and neglect themselves. So doing more kindness could backfire. We also have to be careful to advise people to use the right dosage. Other than those considerations, I think social behavior or kind behavior is almost always positive. 

I also think role modeling these behaviors is important. If you are a leader, teacher, or doctor, role model gratitude, kindness, sociality. It could have a spillover effect. 

KD: Can you speak to the use of the word happiness?

SL: There is some controversy about that, but I personally don’t like jargon. Of course, we need to have precise language to describe certain constructs that we are studying as scientists. To me, however, the word happiness is really just the real term for subjective well-being. I do understand that certain words can have certain connotations, and we may not want to use them anymore. But, I don’t think that has happened with happiness. I’m on the side of using a term that everyone understands. 

KD: Thank you. Where might we find more information and more of your work?

SL: I have a web page that has all my papers that can be downloaded, and every chapter I’ve ever published is on there. 

KD: Thank you. Is there anything else we should have asked or anything else you’d like to share?

SL: Fit is really important. We have to remind ourselves that the research, the interventions on happiness, are about averages. When research shows that interventions work after a month, that effect is on average, for the average person. It doesn’t mean that when you specifically do it, that it’s going to make you happier because it might depend on your personality, situation, lifestyle, goals, stress level etc. We have to remember that fit is important. Not everything is going to work in the same way for different people. Luckily the cost of these interventions is small or zero, so people can try it to see if it works for them.  

KD: Thank you for being so generous with your time and sharing all your work on your website. We’ll see you at IPPA and then at Penn. 

SL: Thank you. 

About the Expert | Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Riverside and author of The How of Happiness and The Myths of Happiness (published in 39 countries). She received her B.A. summa cum laude from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in social psychology from Stanford University. Lyubomirsky’s research—on the possibility of lastingly increasing happiness via gratitude, kindness, and connection interventions—have been the recipients of many grants and honors, including an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Basel, the Diener Award for Outstanding Midcareer Contributions in Personality Psychology, the Christopher J. Peterson Gold Medal, the Distinguished Research Lecturer Award, and a Positive Psychology Prize. She lives in Santa Monica, California (USA), with her family.