People who donated more of their bonuses to pro-social spending and how they spent it was a more important predictor of happiness Thant the size of the bonus itself.
Happiness is not about gaining things and being satisfied with them. We can use the powerful abilities of synthetic happiness. You can create happiness with prosocial behavior, gratitude, making brief eye contact in short social interactions with a stranger, or synthesizing an environment of things you like.
Avoiding chronic nicotine smokers and alcoholic is counterproductive to one’s happiness. This is also for people with close ones who are smokers and alcoholics.
What is happiness?
When someone asks how we feel, we usually answer it in languages. However, the funniest things are we do not know how we think naturally and do not see what people are feeling most of the time. Depending on the culture and different languages, the vocabularies of emotions can have very different meanings depending on how one person interprets or conceptualize them.
In terms of happiness, the word can mean pleasure, joy, delight, or ease.
In addition, there’s also no single neurochemical that is directly linked to happiness. Happiness is a state of mind felt when our brain is in a cocktail of chemicals.
Scientists use standardized definitions called operational definitions. Scientists use the operational definition to measure psychological states.
Dan Gilbert defines happiness as a state of mind where we experience more positive emotions than negative emotions.
Happiness does not have an operational definition, but scientists can use language and neurochemicals. And we can still have an inversion of data-driven communication about happiness.
Sleep and Happiness
Dr.Huberman suggests that viewing bright light within one hour of waking improves happiness and increases cortisol throughout the day.
In the afternoon, viewing the sunset can offset some of the detrimental effects of viewing overhead ceiling lights at home during nighttime.
Getting light ceiling light exposure from 10 pm to 4 am has been shown to hurt life, including depression tendencies.
Happiness in a Lifespan and The Harvard Happiness Project
The Harvard Happiness Project is a 75-year-long longitudinal study started in 1938. The study is insanely impressive and beautiful because it is one of the rare studies that tracked human development for a long time. The project monitored and contacted how human well-being by contacting them through phone calls and surveys.
The study concluded that quality social connection is very important to happiness. However, this does not mean that we need deep conversations
Avoiding chronic nicotine smokers and alcoholic is counterproductive to one’s happiness. This is also for people with close ones who are smokers and alcoholics.
However, as human society evolves, what makes someone happy at one age can be different from another era.
For example, does having children make a person’s overall life satisfaction higher or lower? While people who have children say that having a child is the proudest achievement, people who do not report higher happiness because they have better quality sleep and care for themselves better.
Dr.Huberman also explains the U-shape of life satisfaction.
One side of the U-shape represents the energetic happiness felt in our twenties.
Nevertheless, as life continues, we acquire more responsibilities, such as having children, maintaining a functional marriage, and increasing work demands in the trough to the U, around 40s years old, the happiness level drops.
Then, happiness level increase as children leave the house and have more time to enjoy things. People’s health will not be as vigorous as those in their 20, which can also impact their happiness.
Humans are good at describing our feelings in the present and past but very horrible for the future. This is called the End of History Illusion, where humans are poor at predicting how the experience will change us in the future.
Dr.Huberman defines synthetic happiness as our ability to attend and focus on what is happiness to us. This includes gratitude, controlling attention in social connecting, maintaining eye contact, and prosocial spending.
In contrast, natural happiness is the traditional definition where we feel happy when we gain something we want.
Dr.Huberman provides the example of setting up a workspace that makes you happy. He likes to listen to whale sounds, white noise, and fish tanks by his side when he works.
Gratitude plays a significant role in our happiness. Simply writing down a list of things you are grateful for will not activate gratitude.
Receiving gratitude, watching someone else receive gratitude, imagining a story in movies or the past from your life of receiving gratitude has more powerful benefits than giving gratitude or writing gratitude lists.
The underlying conditions for gratitude to increase happiness are that you need to understand that the person genuinely gives in the environment interaction.
The pro-social spending needs to be something the donator cares about.
People who donated more of their bonuses to pro-social spending and how they spent it was a more important predictor of happiness Thant the size of the bonus itself.
Quality social connection and happiness
As old-age primates, humans have a brain region called fusiform face gyrus that recognizes faces. UC Berkeley has shown that it is related to anxiety and fear. When we see someone and do not have eye contact with them, we see them as mean.
Brief social interaction with eye contact will create a sense of bonding even when no words are exchanged.
Dr.Huberman gave an example of him. As a young scientist, he used to work late at night. The following day, he would see the cleaning lady coming in for the early shift. Seeing familiar faces made me feel a sense of bonding when he was not socializing much outside his laboratory.
We are constantly told to look at someone’s eyes when conversing. However, research has shown that this is not the case.
The paper found that “rather than maximizing shared attention, good conversation may require shifts in and out of shared States accompanying eye contact”.
Throughout the conversation, our attention resets continually. We are not paying attention to the person all the time. We feel a sense of bonding by looking people in the eyes and nodding. Those small doses of brief social interactions with eye contact can increase our happiness too.
This is also true when someone is listening very attentively. The listener’s eyes might close because 40% of the human brain processes vision, and by closing the eyes, the attention can diverge to the sense of hearing.
Priscilla Xu 
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