But why? Why is it that spending our money on others—prosocial spending—makes us happier?

It’s partly because giving to others makes us feel good about ourselves. It helps promote a view of ourselves as responsible and giving people, which in turn makes us feel happy. It’s also partly because spending money on others helps cement our social relationships. And people with stronger social ties are generally happier.

The consequences of this notion can work in a circle. Not only do you want to buy gifts that bring happiness to others, it will make them even more happy to know that they gifts they give you are treasured. Link

Want to be more productive? Don't.

That's the advice from Leo Babauta, which is striking because his blog Zen Habits has been one of the top self-improvement blogs who used to dispense tips on how to be more productive!

Leo explains:

For at least a couple of years, Zen Habits was one of the top productivity blogs, dispensing productivity crack for a nominal fee (your reading time).

I’d like to think I helped people move closer to their dreams, but today I have different advice:

Toss productivity advice out the window.

Most of it is well-meaning, but the advice is wrong for a simple reason: it’s meant to squeeze the most productivity out of every day, instead of making your days better.

Imagine instead of cranking out a lot of widgets, you made space for what’s important. Imagine that you worked slower instead of faster, and enjoyed your work. Imagine a world where people matter more than profits.

Leo lists 7 productivity booster tips that you should toss out: Link (Photo: Shutterstock)

Sure your life might not be that bad, but if you keep feeling like you just need this or that to be happy, you’re never going to actually be happy. Why? Because science says your entire idea of happiness is wrong. Learn why over at Cracked.

Link

This might make a massive traffic jam a little more tolerable. As part of their “Spread Happiness” mantra, Coke put up a big screen in Bogotá, Colombia, so stranded people could at least be entertained by a movie while they waited for the jam to clear up. Cars not in seeing or hearing distance of the screen could tune in to a local radio station to listen, similar to the way drive-in movies work now. But that’s not all – Coke also hired models to act as carhops, delivering free mini-Cokes (a new product – see, there’s the marketing tie-in) and movie theater fare such as hot dogs, nachos, candy and popcorn.

Link via Mashable

A new study revealed that the Golden age is when people achieve the peak of happiness:

A study published by the American National Academy of Sciences, based on a survey of 341,000 people, found that enjoyment of life dwindled throughout early adulthood but began an upward trend in the late forties, and continued to increase until reaching a peak at 85.

Andrew Steptoe, professor of psychology at University College London, said elderly people today benefit from better health and opportunities now than 30 years ago, adding that good health and a secure income were "very important" in old age. [...]

In addition, psychologists believe that in old age we become more selective with how we use our time, focusing more on doing things we enjoy and cutting out parts of life that make us unhappy.

Link

It is proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder and be included in future editions of the major diagnostic manuals under the new name: major affective disorder, pleasant type. In a review of the relevant literature it is shown that happiness is statistically abnormal, consists of a discrete cluster of symptoms, is associated with a range of cognitive abnormalities, and probably reflects the abnormal functioning of the central nervous system. One possible objection to this proposal remains–that happiness is not negatively valued. However, this objection is dismissed as scientifically irrelevant.

Link via J-Walk Blog | Photo by Flickr user thephotographymuse used under Creative Commons license

In the study, researchers tried to evaluate the effect of money in two ways: One was on how people think about their lives and the other was on the feelings they have as they experience life. Responses from more than 450,000 Americans, gathered in 2008 and 2009, were evaluated.

The study found that people’s evaluations of their lives improved steadily with annual income. But the quality of their everyday experiences — their feelings — did not improve above an income of $75,000 a year. As income decreased from $75,000, people reported decreasing happiness and increasing sadness, as well as stress. The study found that being divorced, being sick and other painful experiences have worse effects on a poor person than on a wealthier one.

"More money does not necessarily buy more happiness, but less money is associated with emotional pain," the authors wrote. "Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve individuals’ ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being, such as spending time with people they like, avoiding pain and disease, and enjoying leisure."

Link

Once we escape the trap of poverty, levels of wealth have an extremely modest impact on levels of happiness, especially in developed countries. Even worse, it appears that the richest nation in history – 21st century America – is slowly getting less pleased with life. (Or as the economists behind this recent analysis concluded: “In the United States, the [psychological] well-being of successive birth-cohorts has gradually fallen through time.”)

Needless to say, this data contradicts one of the central assumptions of modern society, which is that more money equals more pleasure. That’s why we work hard, fret about the stock market and save up for that expensive dinner/watch/phone/car/condo. We’ve been led to believe that dollars are delight in a fungible form.

But the statistical disconnect between money and happiness raises a fascinating question: Why doesn’t money make us happy? One intriguing answer comes from a new study by psychologists at the University of Liege, published in Psychological Science. [...]

The Liege psychologists propose that, because money allows us to enjoy the best things in life – we can stay at expensive hotels and eat exquisite sushi and buy the nicest gadgets – we actually decrease our ability to enjoy the mundane joys of everyday life. (Their list of such pleasures includes ”sunny days, cold beers, and chocolate bars”.) And since most of our joys are mundane – we can’t sleep at the Ritz every night – our ability to splurge actually backfires. We try to treat ourselves, but we end up spoiling ourselves.

Link – via Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish

The solution, of course, is simple: get rid of your money by shopping in the NeatoShop

If you're unhappy where you are, you can pick up and move. Thanks to a new study, we now know where all those happy people live.

Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index asked more than 353,000 Americans to find out the happiest ... and the unhappiest cities in the United States:

"Most of our highest-scoring cities are found out West and most of our lowest-scoring cities are in the South," says research director Dan Witters. Wealthier communities typically score higher.

Residents of large cities — those with a population of 1 million or more — generally report higher levels of well-being and more optimism about the future than those in small or medium-sized cities. In small cities, at 250,000 or less, people are more likely to feel safe walking alone at night and have enough money for housing. [...]

Nine of the 10 cities that fare best on "life evaluation," assessments of life now and expectations in five years, boast a major university, a big military installation or a state Capitol — institutions that presumably provide some insulation from recession.

Overall, the top 10 cities include four in California, two in Utah and one each in Colorado and Hawaii. Of them, only the Holland, Mich., and Washington, D.C., metro areas are located in the Eastern or Central time zones.

Many of the bottom 10 are in economically embattled regions. Three are in the Alleghenies and three in the Rust Belt. Only Shreveport, La., and Modesto, Calif., are west of the Mississippi.

The 10 happiest cities are:

1. Boulder, CO
2. Holland-Grand Haven, MI
3. Honolulu, HI
4. Provo-Orem, UT
5. Santa Rosa-Petaluma, CA
6. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA
7. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
8. Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV
9. Ogden-Clearfield, UT
10. Oxnard-Thousand Oaks-Ventura, CA

... and the 10 unhappiest cities are:

153. Pensacola-Ferry Pass-Brent, FL
154. Hickory-Lenoir-Morganton, NC
155. Shreveport-Bossier City, LA
156. Evansville, IN-KY
157. Kingsport-Bristol, TN-VA
158. Youngstown-Warren-Boardman, OH-PA
159. Flint, MI
160. Charleston, WV
161. Modesto, CA
162. Huntington-Ashland, WV-KY-OH

Link

"My idea is to have nothing left. Absolutely nothing," he told The Daily Telegraph. "Money is counterproductive – it prevents happiness to come."

Instead, he will move out of his luxury Alpine retreat into a small wooden hut in the mountains or a simple bedsit in Innsbruck.

His entire proceeds are going to charities he set up in Central and Latin America, but he will not even take a salary from these.

"For a long time I believed that more wealth and luxury automatically meant more happiness," he said. "I come from a very poor family where the rules were to work more to achieve more material things, and I applied this for many years," said Mr Rabeder.

But over time, he had another, conflicting feeling.

"More and more I heard the words: ‘Stop what you are doing now – all this luxury and consumerism – and start your real life’," he said. "I had the feeling I was working as a slave for things that I did not wish for or need. I have the feeling that there are lot of people doing the same thing."

Link

Here’s what researchers at Princeton and Harvard universities found:

Results suggested that thinking fast made participants feel more elated, creative and, to a lesser degree, energetic and powerful. Activities that promote fast thinking, then, such as whip­ping through an easy crossword puzzle or brain-storming quickly about an idea, can boost energy and mood, says psychologist Emily Pronin, the study’s lead author.

Pronin notes that rapid-fire thinking can sometimes have negative consequences. For people with bipolar disorder, thoughts can race so quickly that the manic feeling becomes aversive. And based on their own and others’ research, Pronin and a colleague propose in another recent article that although fast and varied thinking causes elation, fast but repetitive thoughts can instead trigger anxiety.

Why? The researchers think that "thinking quickly may unleash the brain’s novelty-loving dopamine system, which is involved in sensations of pleasure and reward."

Come to think of it, reading Neatorama should trigger the same novelty-loving dopamine system and thus make you all feel happier!

Link

Lauren McCarthy created the Happiness Hat – a gadget that detects whether or not you’re smiling. If you’re not, it drives a small metal spike into the back of your head to encourage to you resolve that problem quickly:

An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile. Through repeated use of this conditioning device you can train your brain to smile all the time. The device runs on Arduino.

Link via Geekologie

UPDATE 10/29: The YouTube video’s status was switched to private, so I swapped it out for a Vimeo version.

Image: Facebook

Jason Kinkaid writes at Tech Crunch that Facebook has developed a new application that aggregates the published emotional states of users over time. The relative contentment that users express constitutes “Gross National Happiness”:

Data is collected from “public and semi-public forums” on Facebook, which is all anonymized before its analyzed. To determine if a particular status message is happy or sad (or neither), the app searches for popular phrases and words that the engineers have associated with each sentiment.

You can adjust the graph by sliding the bar at the bottom of the screen. You can also adjust the zoom by dragging the handlebars on the slider, and can actually watch happiness jump hour-to-hour, though it’s a bit difficult to navigate when you’re zoomed in that far. It’s fun to play around with, but you aren’t going to find many surprises: happiness generally hits a low on Mondays, then gradually grows up through the weekend when it drops again as the work-week begins. Peaks are all found around holidays, with Thanksgiving drawing the most happiness. Also worth nothing: this year there was an abrupt drop in happiness in late June, which is likely associated with the tragic death of Michael Jackson.

Link via Fast Company

In 2003, Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and internist at Harvard, and James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego, began searching through the Framingham data. But they didn’t care about LDL cholesterol or enlarged left ventricles. Rather, they were drawn to a clerical quirk: The original Framingham researchers noted each participant’s close friends, colleagues, and family members.

“They asked for follow-up purposes,” Christakis says. “If someone moved away, the researchers would call their friends and try to track them down.”

Christakis and Fowler used the social data to study changes in the population over time. They constructed networks of the volunteers social connections to see how these connections affected any changes. The findings? Some behaviors are contagious. Social connections with up to three degrees of separation influence whether we quit smoking or become fat. And even happiness is contagious, both online and offline. The social connections of the Framingham volunteers are graphically illustrated at Wired. Link

Still, the University of Vermont study presents what could be a complementary measure, and it provides a few decent cocktail-party nuggets along the way. Dr. Dodds and Dr. Danforth downloaded the lyrics to 232,574 songs by 20,025 artists released between 1960 and 2007, from the Web site hotlyrics.net. From another site, wefeelfine.org, they pulled more than nine million sentences that used some form of the verb feel — as in “I feel relieved” — from 2.3 million blogs from 2005 to 2009. They also analyzed State of the Union speeches going back to George Washington’s. They then rated the psychological charge, or “valence,” of a significant subset of the words on a 10-point scale: from triumphant (8.82) and love (8.72) down to disgusted (2.45) and suicide (1.25).

Some of the findings were expected. Sept. 11, 2001, was rock bottom, for instance. Others were less so: the day that Michael Jackson died also lowered people’s mood significantly. The high-water mark was the day President Obama was elected, when the word “proud” was predominant.

Christmas and Valentine’s Day regularly popped as positive times, although words like “guilty” were associated with Christmas and “waste” and “lonely” with Valentine’s Day.

Link via Hit & Run

Dodds and Danforth’s Peer-Reviewed Article

A spokesman for home hair colour brand Clairol Perfect 10, which carried out the study of 4,000 women, said: "Everything in life hits its peak at some point, and nearly reaching your thirties isn’t so bad now.

"The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.

"The security of your job, having a steady income, being in a relationship and having strong friendships all help create the perfect point in our lives when everything comes together. Reaching and surpassing your twenties no longer triggers the downward spiral of your looks and self-confidence.

Link

1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. The Netherlands
4. Sweden
5. Ireland
6. Canada
7. Switzerland
8. New Zealand
9. Norway
10. Belgium

The US ranked above average. Link to article. Link to slideshow. -via the Presurfer

(image credit: Eddie Gerald/Alamy)

We do a lot of bitching(maybe I’ll start a thread for that too) but lets have a little space dedicated to what’s made us happy lately. At least if nothing that great happens in my day I can read about everyone else’s little joys.

What makes you happy? Join the thread there (or if you don’t want to register a username, you can comment below): Link

And with that, let me congratulate Johnny Cat on the good news and wish seefish3 a Happy Birthday!

Lead researcher Professor Tony Cassidy said: "Sisters appear to encourage more open communication and cohesion in families.

"However, brothers seemed to have the alternative effect. Emotional expression is fundamental to good psychological health and having sisters promotes this in families."

He said many of the participants had been brought up in families where parents had split and the impact of sisters was even more marked in these circumstances.

"I think these findings could be used by people offering support to families and children during distressing times. We may have to think carefully about the way we deal with families with lots of boys."

Link

Comedian Louis CK was on Late Night with Conan O’Brien explaining how amazing everything is, and yet nobody is happy. You’d think with all this technology and instant gratification, we would at least realize how lucky we are.

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by JKirchartz.