8. Resilience
To remain happy, we must be able to cope with a certain amount of upset and stress. Even the most fortunate individuals experience some setbacks, disappointments and problems, no matter how comfortable their circumstances. And of course stress is not something that affects only adults: children and young people also encounter potential sources of stress in their lives, including relationship problems with friends or family, high-stakes exams, and anxieties about their own attractiveness. Like adults, they need to have effective methods for coping.
The capacity to maintain or restore well-being in the face of adversity is referred to by psychologists as resilience, or hardiness. The evidence confirms, unsurprisingly, that resilient individuals are usually happier than those who are more easily cast down by life’s inevitable upsets. Individuals who display high levels of resilience are typically found to have supportive personal relationships, persistence, motivation, an ability to plan ahead, and practical knowledge. Resilience is actually a common characteristic of children, prompting one developmental psychologist to call it ‘ordinary magic’. Even for children growing up in deprived or difficult circumstances, there is nothing inevitable about future problems. Many of them will cope.
9. Self-esteem
If you are a happy person, the chances are you will feel reasonably good about yourself as well as your life. You will have good self-esteem, to use the jargon. Self-esteem, which has become a somewhat overused term in recent years, is usually defined as how you judge your own worth or value as a person, both rationally and emotionally. The media and self-help books abound with glowing references to its magical powers.
Individuals with high self-esteem are generally found to be happier, healthier and better adjusted than those with low self-esteem. On average, they have better social relationships, cope better with illness and other problems, and are less likely to suffer from anxiety or depression. Studies have found that children who have high self-esteem are statistically less likely to be unemployed when they become adults; they also earn more on average and are less likely to commit crimes. Low self-esteem, on the other hand, can impair social relationships. If you are not happy about yourself, you will probably find it harder to be happy about your relationships with other people as well. Low self-esteem is also associated with a range of other problems including drug and alcohol abuse. Children with low self-esteem are at greater risk of becoming problem drinkers later in life.
Self-esteem is about liking yourself. This makes self-esteem different from satisfaction – which is about how you evaluate your life – and different from overall happiness. In principle, you could have reasonably high self-esteem yet still be dissatisfied with your life and generally unhappy, perhaps because of how you have been treated by other people. Having loads of self-esteem will not prevent you from being a miserable curmudgeon or a vicious swine.2 That said, self-esteem and satisfaction tend to be quite closely correlated. By and large, people who have high self-esteem are also likely to be satisfied with their lives.
The strength of the association between self-esteem and overall happiness varies according to the kind of society in which people grow up and live. In highly individualistic societies like the USA and UK, self-esteem has a fairly strong influence on overall happiness. However, the association is found to be weaker in more collectivist societies such as Japan, China, India, Bangladesh and Korea, where there is less emphasis on the self and more on harmonising with the group. For example, a study which compared students in the USA and Hong Kong found that maintaining harmony in personal relationship had a bigger influence on the happiness of the Asian students, whereas self-esteem loomed larger in the lives of their American counterparts.
High self-esteem can be a mixed blessing if it is built on self-delusion or vanity, as is sometimes the case. Moreover, trying to boost children’s self-esteem by praising them indiscriminately is not a quick way of making them happier or improving their academic performance, as some enthusiasts have claimed. Self-esteem is not all it is cracked up to be. We will return to its complexities and pitfalls in chapter 7.
10. Optimism
A common (though not universal) characteristic of happy people is optimism – that is, a general tendency to expect that life will go well and future events will have favourable outcomes. Like self-esteem, optimism has become a voguish and somewhat overused concept in the self-help literature, where it is presented by some pundits as a form of panacea. Nonetheless, numerous scientific studies have found that optimists tend to be significantly happier, healthier, better able to cope with stress, longer-lived and more successful than pessimists, other things being equal.
You can have too much of a good thing, however. A mindlessly optimistic Pollyanna attitude that flies in the face of reality will create unrealistic expectations. (I have sympathy with the cynic who remarked that a permanently cheerful, optimistic attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.) A certain amount of ‘defensive pessimism’ can be a good thing if it helps to avoid unnecessary disappointment. We will return to this topic in chapter 7.
11. Outward focus
By and large, happy people do not spend most of their time thinking about themselves and dwelling on their own feelings. Rather, their attention tends to be focused outwards on the world around them. In contrast, a tendency towards brooding introspection and a belief in looking out for number one are common characteristics of unhappy people. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote of how he started life as an unhappy child but became happier as he grew older, thanks mainly to a dwindling preoccupation with his own self. Russell argued that a person cannot be happy if they suffer from what he called the disease of self-absorption. ‘The man who can centre his thoughts and hopes upon something transcending self,’ he wrote, ‘can find a certain peace in the ordinary troubles of life which is impossible to the pure egoist.’
Self-absorption undermines happiness in many ways. Someone who dwells on their own feelings is unlikely to be brilliant at developing and maintaining close personal relationships. They run the risk of giving little affection and receiving little in return. Self-absorbed people can behave kindly towards others when the need is obvious, but the person to whom kindness comes naturally is more likely to sustain it. The self-absorbed and inwardly-focused can also fall prey to the crippling belief that they alone are responsible for all the bad things that happen to them. Someone who believes, for example, that they are lonely because of fundamental flaws in their personality or appearance may conclude that trying to form new relationships is a waste of time. Their inward focus thereby reinforces their isolation and adds to their unhappiness.
Happiness requires a certain transcendence of the self. Many people unconsciously try to achieve this by distracting themselves with TV, alcohol or recreational drugs, but usually with only limited and temporary success. These tactics might provide some distraction for a few hours, but little more. A better way to achieve outward focus is by regularly engaging with absorbing activities.
The findings from research generally confirm that outward focus is associated with happiness and mental health, including lower rates of depression. Among other things, individuals who are concerned about other people, and not just themselves, are less affected by stress. Outward focus remains important for happiness in old age as well. Studies have found that elderly people whose personal goals and aspirations revolve around an interest in the well-being of others are usually