By Mark Leary, PhD, Duke University
What Makes People Happy? Life circumstances have less of an impact on how happy you are than most people imagine. Only about 10% of your happiness is due to your life circumstances. But if only 10% of happiness is due to people’s circumstances, what’s the other 90% due to?
Happiness and Your Genetic Makeup
Research shows that people’s genetic makeup is responsible for about 50 percent of their happiness.
Genes play a very important role in people’s personalities, including how they tend to respond to what happens to them. Our genes determine the structure and activity of our brains. Some lucky people’s brains are structured in ways that promote positive emotions, and some of us have brains that respond more easily to negative emotions.
This is a transcript from the video series Understanding the Mysteries of Human Behavior. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Many studies have conclusively shown that about 50% of the variability that we see in the degree to which people experience positive and negative emotions is due to genetic factors.
For example, research shows that identical twins are more similar in their level of happiness—or unhappiness—than regular brothers and sisters. That’s true even if the twins have been separated at birth and raised by different families. Their identical genes create identical brains that make them similar in how happy—or unhappy—they are.
…identical twins are more similar in their level of happiness—or unhappiness—than regular brothers and sisters.
They won’t be identical in happiness, of course, because genetic influences account for only 50% of happiness. But identical twins are certainly more similar emotionally than other siblings.
You can see inborn differences in happiness in very young infants, long before their circumstances have affected them very much. Some babies are naturally more bubbly and happy, and other babies are more unhappy and fussy.
Learn more about the fundamental characteristics of the human species
A Baseline of Happiness
The best way to think about these genetic influences is to think of yourself as having some typical baseline of happiness. Good events will temporarily increase your happiness, and bad events will make you unhappy. But after those events have passed and nothing particularly good or bad is going on in your life, how happy are you? You will return again and again to your typical baseline, almost as if it’s some kind of a set point.
In all likelihood, you can’t change this baseline or resting level of happiness. But that doesn’t mean that those of us whose brains lead us more toward unhappiness can’t be happy; we just have to work harder at it.
Learn more about why we have such a wide variety of emotions
How Our Behavior Factors In
But even after we account for the 50% of happiness that’s due to genetic factors and 10% due to our life circumstances, there’s still 40% remaining. That 40% is due to our behavior—what we do, how we think, and our intentional activities. People who are happier do things differently than people who are less happy.
The good news is that research suggests that if we all do things the way that happy people do, we’ll be happier too. There are many different ways to be unhappy, but happy people are alike in many ways.
…research suggests that if we all do things the way that happy people do, we’ll be happier too.
Happy people differ from unhappy people both in what they do and how they do what they do. For example, in general, research shows that happy people spend more time with their friends and family than unhappy people do, and happy people also nurture and enjoy those relationships more.
There’s something about having social connections and close relationships that usually promotes happiness. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that simply forcing yourself to spend more time with your family is necessarily going to make you happy, unless you approach it in the right way.
Learn more about why we forget
Subjective Well-Being
To understand this point, consider a different word than happiness for the positive emotional state we all seek. Happiness doesn’t quite capture what most of us probably want. When people imagine a happy person, they often think of someone smiling or laughing who is experiencing a surge of pleasure because something good has happened to them.
But, what most people want more than occasional episodes of happiness is an overriding sense of contentment and pleasure—a sense of well-being that goes a little bit deeper than happiness per se. Of course, people want moments of happiness, and that’s fine, but no one can sustain happy feelings all the time. But people can have a long-lasting sense of contentment, satisfaction with themselves and with life, peace of mind, and general positive feelings.
Let’s call this sort of positive emotion subjective well-being to distinguish it from momentary happiness that’s caused by something happening in particular, such as getting a raise or winning an award.
People who generally live with a sense of high subjective well-being differ from people who report lower subjective well-being in the degree to which their lives are characterized by eudaimonia. Most people may not be familiar with the concept of eudaimonia, but it is very useful in understanding happiness and subjective well-being. Eudaimonia can be defined as living one’s life in a way that focuses on things that are intrinsically important for human well-being.
Eudaimonia can be defined as living one’s life in a way that focuses on things that are intrinsically important for human well-being.
Intrinsic Importance
If you were asked to make a list of all of your goals—things that you wanted to get in the next year or two—you might list many different things. You might want to get a raise, to lose weight, to achieve some goal at work, to spend more time with your children or your friends, to get a bigger house, to retire, or whatever. All of these goals are fine, but some of them are more intrinsically important to your well-being.
By intrinsically important, some of these goals are pursued for their own sake rather than to get something else. Spending more time with your children or friends is probably an intrinsic goal. If you want to spend more time with somebody, it’s probably because you want to spend more time with them, not so that you can obtain some other goal.
By intrinsically important, some of these goals are pursued for their own sake rather than to get something else.
On the other hand, making money is not an intrinsic goal. You don’t want to make money just to have piles of money; you want money because it will allow you to obtain or to do other things. Money isn’t intrinsically rewarding in the same way that you may find it intrinsically rewarding to spend time with people you love, to play golf, or to paint.
Henry David Thoreau once wrote that “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Life situations and bad experiences contribute to their desperation and unhappiness, of course, but not nearly as much as most people assume.
Learn more about popular myths about self-esteem and its role in affecting our behavior
We need to understand that our day-to-day happiness and subjective well-being depend far more—at least four times as much—on how we approach life than on what life brings our way. It’s this understanding that may open the door to greater happiness and life satisfaction for all of us.
Common Questions About What Makes People Happy
According to Ed Diener, PsyD, there are five factors to what makes people happy: positive thinking first and foremost, useful and pleasant social relationships, a relaxed temperament and predisposition for adaptation, income level, and the society and culture you live in.
What makes people happy is subjective but can be defined as a sense of satisfaction, purpose, and contentment when life fulfills the majority of your most pressing needs and wants.
Of the many theories, most agree that happiness is somewhat of a survival mechanism. Happiness makes people more attractive and interesting which helps attract others who can offer their skills for survival and thriving.
According to studies, intelligence can bring happiness. Low levels of happiness tend to correlate positively with low income, stress, and poor physical or mental health which all correlate with lower intelligence based on IQ.
