The Road to Happiness

The researchers who developed the equation pictured on the right call it a “computational model of momentary subjective well-being.” And while it may look and sound complicated to most non-mathematicians (that would be me), its developers say that the gist is pretty simple: How happy you are depends in large part on your expectations.  If you do better than you think you will, then you are happier.

In some ways this sounds like what I call "duh" research--research that comes to conclusions that most of us arrived at long ago, like women are more complicated than men.  How much did they spend to come to that conclusion?  Better yet, what did we gain with that knowledge?

So, in order to be contented, lower your expectations to something achievable and when you exceed that goal, you will be happy.  It sounds so easy, but in fact, it can be very hard to achieve.  Like telling people to stop smoking or lose weight.  Habits are hard to break and changing your world view can require months if not years of work.  But it is worth it.  Because you control what you control, and not much else.  Better to feel good about life.  Today is the birthday of my eldest son, and one of the things that he excels at is reworking his expectations and remaining happy.