The How of Happiness | Sonja Lyubomirsky | Talks at Google

Thank you so much for coming. I was actually pointing to the pronunciation key of my name that I have there, Lubomirsky. It means love and peace in Russian, which I think is very appropriate for a positive psychologist, someone who studies happiness. So I'm delighted to be here. I live in Santa Monica. I just. It took me about four minutes to get here. And I think Santa Monica and Google are great places for a talk about happiness. And so what I'm going to do today is give you a brief overview of the work that I do on happiness, the work that is described in my book, and on how people can become happier, how people can increase their happiness past or over and above their baseline, or what's called a set point. We'll talk about that, and I'll try not to give everything away so you can actually read the book. I usually try to communicate in a way that non scientists can understand, and I show graphs and things like that. But I'm sure that this audience will have no problem with any of the research that I describe. The book is very accessible to general audiences. I just realized today we haven't gotten books for this. Hello. Hello. Great. All right, we muted them. Great. So let's get started. Raise your hand if you don't mind being a little happier than you are right now. Okay. How about a lot happier? Who wants to be a lot happier? Okay, good. Well, I believe that all of us want to be happy, even if we don't use the same language to describe that wish, and even if we define happiness differently or we pursue happiness differently. In every culture that researchers have surveyed, they ask people, what are their top goals in life. They found that most people put happiness at the top of their list. And even in cultures that don't value happiness as much. I was born in Russia, where suffering is valued. And even in those cultures, when people are asked, what do you want most for your children? Most people say, I want my children to be happy. So I think it's really a universal goal. And indeed, throughout history, actually, I just realized that I need a remote or some way to advance my slides because my mic is keeping me fixed onto. Or I can have a human remote, I guess. So throughout history, human beings from all over the world have. Next slide. Oh, these are. Just actually. Click it again. Okay. Throughout history, people from all over the world have been infatuated with the idea of happiness, especially in the Western world. This is a famous quote from Aristotle that some of you may know about. And a couple of surveys have actually found that Americans think about Happiness at least once a day, which is kind of amazing. You can sort of see if it's true for yourself. Next slide, you have to kind of click again. You know, I wonder. It'd be easier if we just move my computer. The Airpoint just crashed. Uh oh, that's never happened before. So I'll just continue then. I also have a quote from William James, who is considered to be the father of psychology. And he talks about how to be happy is one of the sort of the goals that most people seek to have in their life. Okay, so here's William James and actually I love this picture of him because he looks really unhappy. So I don't know, maybe that's why he was interested in talking about how happiness is a secret motive of all that people do. Next slide. And the pursuit of happiness clearly also holds an honored position in American society where it's described as one of the inalienable rights that people have. U.S. declaration of Independence. And the pursuit of happiness, I should say, is a worthwhile goal too. I mean, we don't just strive to be happy just because it feels good. It turns out that happy people enjoy a lot of benefits. Two of my colleagues and I actually published a paper where we reviewed 225 studies on happiness. And we concluded this was a meta analysis, which is a analysis of study of studies. We concluded that happy people accrue a lot of good things. And if you can kind of. So happy people just kind of click, make more money than unhappy people, are more productive at work, they're more creative, they're better leaders and negotiators, they have more fulfilling relationships, they're more likely to get married and, and less likely to get divorced, they have more social support, they're more generous and philanthropic and they cope better. And really interesting work on health that shows that happier people have stronger immune function, they are physically healthier, and they even live longer. So this research suggests that we should strive to be happy not just because it feels good, but because it benefits us in many different ways and doesn't just benefit the individual, it benefits our families, our communities, perhaps our whole society. But is it even possible to become happier? And if it's possible to become happier, is it possible to sustain that new level of happiness? Well, it turns out that there's relatively little support in the scientific literature for the idea that we can sort of change our happiness for the better. So there are happiness boosting techniques that are described in the self help literature. I'm sure you've all seen lots of self Help books and bookstores. I'm going to show you some examples. So happiness is free and it's easier than you think. You can be happy no matter what. Happy for no reason. There's one more, my favorite one is you can be the wife of a happy husband. That's actually a really terrible book. It sort of argues that women should be completely submissive to their husbands to make their husbands happy. So the recommendations that are described in the self help books are rarely rooted in any kind of scientific research or theory. And so there's just really not much support for sort of the notion that you can become happier. And by the way, some of these book titles are essentially the opposite of what I'm arguing today. So I'm actually going to argue that happiness is harder to attain than you think, not easier than you think. So what I'm going to do now is give you three arguments. I'm going to be kind of a devil's advocate for why raising happiness is actually not possible or practical. All right, so here's reasons why we don't think that it's possible to become a happier person. The first one is that we're all born with a. This is just a. This is one of my kids who happened to be born with a genetically determined set point with a high set point for happiness. So it's now quite clear that a large portion of our happiness is genetically determined. Now, this finding comes from research in a field called behavioral genetics. And what they do is they compare researchers in this field, they compare the happiness levels of identical twins and the happiness levels of fraternal twins. And they find that identical twins are much more similar in their happiness than our fraternal twins. And this suggests that happiness is heritable, that it's passed down through our families. And I should add that. And so that we're all sort of born with a characteristic kind of what's called a set point or a baseline of happiness. I should add that my book has a test that you can take that will help you determine your own set point for happiness. Although you probably all know already what it is. Everyone sort of intuitively seems to know whether their natural happiness baseline is high or low or medium. And so this research leads some people to conclude that it's futile or worthless to, to try to make people happier because, you know, it's genetic. Okay? And the second reason is that happiness appears to be a trait. It's an intrinsic part of our personality. And we know that personality doesn't change much over time. And indeed Studies have shown that happiness is very stable over people's lives. And so this fact also leaves some people feeling pessimistic. You know, if happiness is so stable, it's like one of your intrinsic traits. How can we ever change it? And the third one is hedonic adaptation. And this is actually something I'm really interested in. I'm doing some new research right now on adaptation. And this phenomenon means that we tend to adapt or get accustomed to new changes in our lives. So we get a new job, we get a job at Google, and it's really great. And you have this boost in happiness. But I have to tell you that that boost is not going to last, because after all, we adapt. We get accustomed to any kind of positive change, we start taking it for granted. There's a very nice study that was done in Germany that followed 25,000 Germans over the course of 15 years. A lot of those Germans got married during that time. And they found that getting married gave people a boost in happiness, a significant, substantial boost in happiness. But that boost lasted on average, for two years. Okay, after two years, people reverted back to their baseline that they were before they got married. And there's lots of research like that. So basically, this work shows that any kind of positive change, having cosmetic surgery, becoming more beautiful, moving to a beautiful house, getting a new job, getting married, even, we tend to getting a new car. We tend to adapt to those things. And so ultimately, that means that our life circumstances don't really impact our happiness very much. So. So I've thought hard about these three reasons for why people can be made any happier. And I argue in the how of happiness that the pessimism is totally unwarranted. And the reason is that despite the fact that a large portion of our happiness is genetically determined, and despite the fact that our life circumstances don't have a huge deal to do with our happiness, still a very large portion of our happiness, and I argue that's up to 40% is under our power to control. And that's the 40% of the pie that you see on the COVID of the book. So up to 40% of happiness is in our power to change, to control by how we behave and how we think, how we act and how we think. Let me show you a pie chart that I've developed with my colleagues Ken Sheldon and David Scotty. So basically, this is what it looks like. The set point accounts for about 50% of individual differences in happiness. Life circumstances account for about 10%. And I should say these numbers are estimates and average from previous studies. They're not set in stone, they're approximations. And so that leaves about 40% for what I call intentional activity, which is sort of the things that we can do in our daily lives to make ourselves happier. Next slide. I should also say that also just say a couple words about how happiness is defined. Researchers following the work of Ed Diener define happiness usually as having two components. And the first component is the experience of positive emotions. So people are happy, tend to experience frequent positive emotions. They also experience negative emotions, of course, but they experience more frequent positive emotions. So joy, pride, curiosity, interest, and enthusiasm. And then the second component of happiness is what's called life satisfaction. It's a sense that your life is pretty good, that you're progressing towards your life goals at a rate that's sort of satisfying to you. And what we do when we define happiness, we basically let people define it for themselves. There's no happiness thermometer we can use to sort of figure out how happy you are. It's a subjective phenomenon. No one else can tell you how happy you are. Only you really know how happy you are. And so we ask people, we use self report scales. We ask people, how happy are you in general? So there are scores of how to Be Happy books in bookstores, as I mentioned. But I think that I'm the first author of a How to Be Happy book who actually does research with my students and with my colleague Ken Sheldon on how people can be made happier. And I think that's very important. Some people really care that happiness recommendations are based on the scientific research or they don't care to know the details. And I would argue that you may not care about the details, but you should care that it is based on research. And I have to say, it's amazing how many people out there who just don't seem to think that it's important that what you do has any kind of validity or effectiveness. There was a blog, I keep track of some of the bloggers that write about my book. And there was one that was written, I believe it was, about a week ago, that sort of made fun of the book and said, I can't believe that she thinks that happiness strategies that are based on research are going to be any more effective ones that are not based on research, they're based on intuition. Which is just incredible to me that there are people who think that, would you ever take a drug that's just not based on anything? So one reason it's important that any kind of recommendations that you take are based on scientific evidence is that I argue that we really need to put the same kind of effort and commitment into becoming happier, if that's what you want to do, as you do into any other area of your life, into perfecting your body or raising your children or advancing in your career. All of those things take effort and commitment. And if you're going to put a lot of effort into becoming a happier person, you want to make sure that that effort is worthwhile, that it's based on sound scientific data. And then you choose the strategies. And we'll talk about that in a moment. How you sort of choose the happiness strategies that you do. And also really like the title of the book, the how of Happiness, because it was like maybe the 90th title that we thought of, but it was a good one because it incorporates two different meanings of the word how. It's both a how to be happy book, but it's also about the scientific how about sort of why and how do these strategies work? Okay, so what are these strategies that I've been mentioning? There are probably hundreds of happiness strategies that you can use that exist out there. I've chosen about a dozen, about 12 to focus on the book because those are the ones that have the most scientific evidence. But there are probably hundreds. And I'll give you sort of a sampling of some of them. Basically, they come from. A lot of them come from research on the happiest people. And the idea here, the thesis is, if you want to be a happier person, you should observe really happy people and see what they do. Kind of like if you want to be thinner, observe a skinny person and sort of watch what they do and follow what they do. See what happy people do. And I've been doing this research for about 18 years now, and I'll show you some of the results of that. So research shows that happy people invest a great deal in their relationships. They enjoy their relationships. They express gratitude for what they have. They are kind and helpful to others. They practice optimism when envisioning their futures. They savor life's pleasures and tend to live in the present moment. They make physical activity a habit. Many happy people are religious or spiritual, and they're deeply committed to lifelong intrinsic goals, whether it's fighting crime or advancing in their careers or raising children and teaching their children their most important values. So, okay, I bet none of you are sort of bowled over by looking at this list, right? I mean, unless you've been living under a rock, you've heard that being grateful and being Forgiving and sort of being good at relationships makes people happy. Right. So this is nothing new. The unique contribution of my book is that I talk about these strategies. I talk about the research that supports the strategies which are supported, which are less supported, and then different ways of accomplishing them and sort of what the interventions say. Just kind of some side notes. I want to mention some personal notes about what it was like for me to write this book. It was a little bit uncomfortable for me at times because I found it unnatural to give advice. As a basic scientist, I'm taught to draw very cautious conclusions on the basis of my research. And so it's kind of weird and unnatural to sort of make recommendations. We're not trained to do that. But I think the caution of scientists can sometimes be misplaced in that we're never really ready to share the results of our research. There's always sort of I's to dot and T's to cross. But in the real world, people are living their lives and they want to know how to live a happier and healthier life, how to live a more flourishing life, how to be more fulfilled. And if we don't share our research with the general public, then other people who are not sort of as well versed in it are going to interpret our findings for us and often misinterpret the findings, which happens all the time. Another source of discomfort that I had while writing the book had to do with how kind of hokey, if I may use that word, or corny some of the strategies seem to be. I mean, I'm not the kind of person who reads self help books. So when I see things like, oh, you should try to be forgiving, you should count your blessings more often, that just sounds kind of trivial to me. Kind of hokey, like a cliche. And why is that? I'm not really sure. I mean, it could be that these are really complex recommendations and when you condense them down and sort of trying to get at their essence, it's very hard to condense them. Basically, it sounds like a cliche. It sounds trite. It also could be that we're sort of turning into universal maxims, things that are really personal and close to the bone to us and make them sound watered down, kind of like cliche. But the fact that some strategies sound corny to some people, and by the way, they don't sound corny to others. I actually had some of my chapters were read by some of my friends and some of them were kind of insulted and said, I don't think this is corny at all. I think this is really wonderful. And so there are individual differences in people's reactions. But what's important is that the strategies have been shown to be effective. I mean, that's what's important, not whether they sound correct. So I'm a scientist who does what are called happiness interventions. And by intervention, I don't mean, you know, like there's a show right now called Intervention. I don't mean like the kind of meeting that family and friends, you know, confront a drug addict and, you know, tell them that they should stop using drugs. It's a different meaning. Researchers use the word intervention to mean, basically an experiment where people try to change something about themselves, to have a positive change. And so what I do is I have human research participants and I instruct my participants to practice a happiness strategy over a certain amount of time. Maybe it's six weeks or 10 weeks or eight weeks, and I follow there and I measure their happiness at different points in time and I see what happens. And I also have other groups of participants who might practice a different strategy or they might practice the same strategy in a different way. And I also often have a, or usually always, I should say, have a control group to compare to. And I'm not only interested in which strategies work, I'm interested in sort of how and why the strategies are working. So I'm going to give you a list of some of the interventions that I've conducted with my colleague Ken Sheldon and my students. So over the course of a few months, volunteers are asked to do various strategies like committing acts of kindness, counting their blessings, practicing optimistic thinking. And my research, the conclusion of my research is that happiness takes work. And I've given this sort of a version of this talk to different groups. I've done book signings at bookstores, and people don't like to hear this, that happiness takes work. Maybe it's sort of this American desire for quick fix solutions, magical solutions. But if becoming happier were easy, then we'd all be happy, right? If becoming skinny and fit were easy, we'd all be skinny and fit and it'd be easy for us to keep our New Year's resolutions. But it's not easy to keep New Year's resolutions. So it takes a lot of energy and effort and commitment. Now, the good news is that some of those initial efforts that you will make in becoming a happier person will become more habitual over time. They'll turn into habits and then there'll be less and less sort of work that's necessary. So I'm just going to give you a couple of examples of studies that I've done. The first one is a study that we did where we asked people to count their blessings. Okay. So what we did, we tried to induce gratitude in our participants. Gratitude is defined as a felt sense of wonder, thankfulness, and appreciation for life. And there are many reasons why being grateful makes people happier. I'm not going to go through them, but I'll just. I just note some of them in the slide. You know, being grateful prevents us from taking things for granted, makes us feel good about our lives, helps us cope with stress and trauma. It neutralizes negative emotions. You know, it's hard to feel jealousy or bitterness or greed when we're grateful. Right. So it's sort of a good antidote to negative emotions. Okay. So in this particular study, we had participants count their blessings, that is, keep a gratitude journal for six weeks. And we had three groups. They either did it once a week, which is about every Sunday night. You know, you write down what you're grateful for, or three times a week, Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday. And we had a control group that actually didn't do anything. We just measured their happiness. In other studies, we have more appropriate control groups. Okay. So these are the instructions that people got. There are many things in our lives, both large and small, that we might be grateful about. Think back over the events of the past week and write down up to five things for which you're grateful or thankful. Okay. And then you wrote, this week, I'm grateful for. Okay. And these are college students, I should say, in this study. And these are some things they mentioned. Actually, Mom was the most popular, which I liked. And, you know, actually, AOL Instant messenger is a funny one, because if you're a professor, you know that sometimes students in their classes, they're just sort of eyeing each other the whole class. It's really annoying. There's one woman who was really into lotion, and I think she had some kind of skin problem. And so she just was saying how grateful she is about this lotion that she has that really helps her problem. So anyway, so some of them are bigger, some of them are small. Okay. We measured happiness in different ways by using validated scales of well being. And we used different scales of positive emotion, life satisfaction, and happiness and combined them in a single index. I'm just going to give you a couple of examples. This is a scale that actually I developed with a student. Basically, people are asked very directly, do you consider yourself a happy person? Okay. And then another example is this is a life satisfaction scale. How do you feel about your life right now? On a scale from sort of terrible to delighted? So we kind of combine these measures. Okay. So. Okay. Not yet. Oh, ok, you can show. Ok, Good, good, good. All right. So we first wanted to see if we successfully induce gratitude in our participants. Right. Did we actually make them grateful by keeping these gratitude diaries? And we did, but interestingly, only in the once a week condition. So these bars represent changes in gratitude from before the study to immediately after the study. So if it's above zero, that means there's an increase in gratitude. And you can see that it's only in the once a week group, the ones who counted their blessings once a week, that we showed an increase in gratitude. Okay, we'll talk about why that is. No, it's a scale. It's actually. I'm just totally blanking on the word, but it's normalized. So it's because we had all these different scales, we had to combine them in one. So. Yeah, that's why the numbers are so small. Ok, so do we actually succeed in making people happier? So next graph. Okay. And we did, but again, only in the once a week condition. So first of all, look at the green bar, the control group. These are subjects who aren't doing anything and they're actually getting less happy. So why is that? Now you can call that adaptation, that we sort of naturally get less happy. But this is a college student sample, and I've replicated this many times. Basically, if you take college students at the beginning of a semester or a quarter, they're all kind of happy, excited, right? You all remember being in college, new classes, new friends, but then they start having midterms and assignments and they get sort of less happy over time. I should say the next quarter they'll go back up to their previous level of happiness. So the control condition is not doing so well. And by the way, when the study ends, we're now like, midterms are happening, finals are coming up. So it's not a really. It's kind of a difficult time in the quarter, but in the once a week condition, people got happier. Okay, Those who counted their blessings once a week, even during this sort of stressful time in the quarter, the three times a week condition, people did not get happier. Now why is that? We have lots of sort of explanations for it. I think the people who counted their blessings three times a week did it too often. Perhaps it became kind of a monotonous chore for Them it sort of lost its freshness and meaning to kind of three times a week, try to think of what you're grateful for. There's also something in psychology called the effort as information heuristic. And basically what that means is that when it takes you a lot of effort to think of something, it might backfire, right? So if you can't think of things to be grateful for three times a week, then you actually might conclude, oh, I must not have much to be grateful for. There's actually a nice study of professors where students are asked something like, can you name 12 things, 12 reasons that you liked your professor this semester? Or give me four reasons why you liked your professor. And people who name 12 actually evaluate the professor lower. And the idea is that when it's hard to kind of think of 12 things that you like, then you like them less. So it looks like the gratitude only worked once a week. So raise your hand if you think that you should try this strategy. Go home and start counting your blessings once a week. What do you think? Okay, you're all wrong. And the reason you're wrong is that counting your blessings is not for everyone. I mean, it could work for some people. It may not work. It works for people on average in my study, but it doesn't. All these strategies work differently for different people. And actually, this is an important theme that runs through my book, and I call it, it's called Person Activity Fit. You need to find the strategy that fits your particular personality, your resources, your lifestyle, your goals and interests. And I hate to confess this because I think that gratitude exercises are very powerful, but it doesn't work for me personally. I just find counting blessings kind of hokey and unnatural. But a lot of people say it's changed their lives by trying to be more grateful. So I actually have developed a diagnostic test that's included in the book based on some work by Ken Sheldon that helps people determine when you take the test, it'll help you determine which strategies are right for you, that you are more likely to benefit from you personally. And then you also can just read the parts of the book that are just about those strategies. You don't have to read about all 12 of them. Okay, so again, the point is that if you're going to put a lot of effort and energy into making yourself a happier person, you want to you better sort of be sure that you're choosing the right strategy for yourself, that that strategy is supported by evidence, and that you're doing it in an optimal way, that you're not doing it too often, not doing it too infrequently. You're not doing it too repetitively. You're not doing it. You're doing it sort of. You're spicing it up a little bit with variety, because variety is important. So speaking of variety, I want to tell you quickly about another study that I did. This one, we made people do what I call a behavioral strategy, not a cognitive one. Cognitive is something in your head, behavioral. Obviously, you do something that makes you act where we had people commit acts of kindness. Okay, so in this intervention. Oh, I should. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Go. Okay, so just to say a couple words about why being kind to others makes people happy, maybe. It seems an obvious question. A lot of cultures sort of have this idea, this notion that kindness makes people happy. The Dalai Lama talks a lot about that. Happiness is compassion. So there's a famous Chinese proverb that says if you want happiness, just one click at a time for an hour, take a nap for a day, go fishing for a month, get married. And by the way, that should really be for two years. Right? Because remember that study that showed that the marital boost lasts for two years? For a year, Inherit a fortune for a lifetime, help somebody else. Now, note the wisdom of the Chinese here. The first two are just momentary pleasures. You know, taking a nap, going fishing. Obviously, that's not going to make you happy for a long time. The third and the fourth, marriage and money are circumstantial. They're basically changes in your life circumstances that do make you happy, but sort of not for as long as you think that doesn't last for that long. And then the fifth one is an activity that you can do that actually can last. Yeah. You're saying the get married, it lasts two years. How long does inherit a fortune actually last? Are you interested for your personal. He's got this uncle. Yeah, I don't know, because there aren't really studies of that, but there are studies, for example, of people who've won the lottery. And actually there's some mixed findings because sometimes they get less happy because they feel like their friends now treat them differently. And actually there's a high rate of divorce among lottery winners. So I don't know the answer to that question, but it's a very good question at least a few people are interested in. Okay. So I should say our president, who is very wise, agrees with the Chinese about the benefits of helping. Okay, now we can go on. All right, so kind acts make people happy for a lot of reasons. I'm not going to go through all of them. Basically, when you're generous, it makes you feel good, like you're a good person. Person. I think maybe the key is it has a lot of social consequences. So when you're kind to others, they tend to like you more, they appreciate you, they might reciprocate later when you need help. And so there's sort of a lot of sort of positive outcomes of kindness. So we tried to test this in an intervention. And so we did a study where we had people do a three or nine acts of kindness per week for a period of 10 weeks. And we had actually a number of conditions. I'm just going to sort of simplify this a little bit. We had a high variety condition where people, what they did is they were. And imagine if you were in the study, I would ask you to write down a list of 15 things that you'd like to do more in the future, kind of kind acts that you'd like to do more in the future that can be repeatable. In the high variety condition, you can do any of those 15 acts every week. And then we also had a low variety condition where you had to choose three and repeat them over and over again. I don't mean doing the exact same thing, but maybe it's doing a chore in your household that you don't normally do. So every week you might sort of do that. It doesn't have to be the exact same chore, but sort of the general category. And then we had a control group that simply listed three or nine events that happened to them each week. So they also kept track of things, but it was, it was not kindness, not kind acts. Okay, so these are the instructions that we gave our subjects. We'd like you to list. I'm just going to read the green. We would like you to list 15 acts of kindness that you would like to do more in the future. Only write down acts of kindness that are easily repeatable. And I have some examples. You know, if you drive every day, let a car enter your lane or go ahead of you. Okay, so something we could all think about. After you make your list. We ask you to choose three or nine of these acts and do them during the upcoming week. Next. Ok, so again, this is a complicated study. I'm just going to show you one graph. So this represents the happiness level of our subject on a scale of one to seven. And it's at four different time points before the study, right in the middle of the intervention. This was 10 weeks right after the Intervention and then a month follow up. And if you see the red line is the high variety condition subjects. So these subjects who are kind of doing different acts every week, they got happier during the study. And actually importantly, they were able to maintain their happiness a month later. So this is a month after they finished the study. They're no longer doing these acts of kindness. Interestingly, the low variety condition, which is the green line, actually got really unhappy. And I think again, you know, it probably was this huge chore for them, especially the ones in the nine acts condition, to sort of do all these acts of kindness. Okay, you know what, I think I might actually, I wonder if I should leave a lot of time for questions. Let me skip, just skip. I'm going to skip the next study. We also did a study where we had people write gratitude letters or practice optimistic thinking. We found that they got happier. Just keep, keep going. Sorry about that. I have these really nice slides you can look at. So in this study. So just keep going. We basically were testing also. You know what, why don't you stop here? We were testing maybe one more, the question of whether if you're motivated to be happier, if you're going to benefit more. Now interestingly, in all of these studies that we do, we take participants, we pay them or they do it for some kind of credit, and then we randomly assign them to some condition that makes them happier. Now they may not be remotely interested in wanting to be happier or putting the effort into it. They may not be taking it seriously. In the real world, people who want to be happier actually really care about it. And they go to the bookstore, they buy a book, they actually do something in their daily lives. And so in this study we actually manipulated motivation. So we had half of our subjects. I should say this was not an experimental factor because we couldn't figure out how to do that. So we had half of our subjects self select themselves into a study about happiness. Like do you want to be happier? Come be in our study. And then half just were doing a study on cognitive exercises and we found that basically the motivated, which are the red bars, the motivated subjects benefited more from happiness than the non motivated ones who practice optimism or gratitude and actually keep that. We also looked at effort. So the more effort that people put into the activity, the more they benefited. So the red line is people who put a lot of effort into the activity. So whether they're practicing optimism or gratitude, effort was important. And then we also looked at fit. Remember I talked about the importance of fit. You have to, you have to choose the activity that works for you personally. People who felt that the optimism or gratitude strategy sort of fit them as a person, the control condition, they were just writing down what happened to them every week. And I guess some people like to do that. Maybe they're kind of organization freaks and like to write down everything they do. Actually, I kind of do that sometimes. So the higher the fit, the more they benefited from the strategy. Okay, all right. I'm just going to sort of conclude now. These are just sort of some examples of studies we've done, and a lot of them are described in the book, and then a lot more. And all of these findings are basically testimony to the importance of motivation, effort, fit, and commitment when you try to remake yourself as a happier person. And I discuss all of these in the last chapter that's called the Five Hows of Happiness, which is actually a really important chapter. Sort of, how are these things implied working? We've done about a half dozen other interventions. We've looked at other strategies like savoring. We are looking right now at cultural differences again, sort of the hypothesis being that the pursuit of happiness is a universal goal. But people in different cultures pursue happiness differently, might benefit differently from different things. So I guess I kind of want to conclude by saying that I want you to consider how much effort that you put into other domains in your life. Maybe it's physical exercise. Some of you might put a lot of time into going to the gym or running or Pilates or yoga or whatever it is that you do. And I think you need to think about happiness in a very similar way. People don't tend to apply the notion of effort to their emotional lives the way they apply to other areas of their life. But if you want to be a happier person, you kind of need to put in the same kind of effort and commitment as you do to going to the gym. But I think even though this effort takes work, it's a really rewarding and fine kind of work. I mean, trying to be grateful for what you have, trying to be optimistic, being kind to others, is very fulfilling and can be fun. So I started with a quote from Aristotle, if you remember, back then. And I end with a quote that nicely kind of describes the gist of my work, which is that happiness depends upon ourselves. So thank you.