The scientific formulas of happiness

The scientific formulas of happiness. If we work so hard to calculate our shopping basket, isn't managing our happiness worth a few minutes? 

The song said: “There are three things in life: health, money and love”, but today we know, thanks to two British researchers, that these three terms are nothing more than one of the components of happiness.

The scientific formulas of happiness 

The formula for such a long-awaited feeling responds to the title seen here: F=P+5E+3H. If you believe the statistics, of course. And if you trust the reading of them by British researchers Carol Rothwell and Pete Cohen, a psychologist and a “lifestyle advisor,” who announced last January the “finding” of the happiness equation. 

To obtain it, they surveyed 1,000 volunteers, and from their answers they inferred that a person's level of happiness has the following ingredients, and in the following proportions (almost culinary): happiness is equal to P (what they call “personal characteristics” , which encompass optimism, flexibility, extraversion), to which is added, multiplied by 5, E (basic needs: “health, money and love”, personal security...), plus 3 times H, which is refers to “high-ranking” needs (self-esteem, expectations, deep relationships, and ambitions).

The guy and the soccer team 

That easy. For Rothwell, his “discovery” has the merit of “being the first equation that allows people to put numbers on their emotional state.” Not everyone agrees. The director of the Center for Neurobiological Studies of Madrid, and author of the book Happiness, José Manuel Rodríguez Delgado, is blunt: “It is stupid: no mathematical equation can define happiness.” Perhaps the merit of Rothwell and Cohen is to provide some statistical data. 

Thanks to them, we know that men and women obtain their happiness differently – they, from sex and sporting success (of their team, of course); and they, about the family and about... losing weight!–. Other studies point out that the best way to be happy is to be a woman and over 30, that inflation makes us sad and democracy makes us happy, and there is even a global base of happiness, in which Spain, with a 6.5 ( on a scale of 1 to 10), is in the middle of the list, led by Switzerland (8.1). The red lantern is Moldova, with 3.

“What am I going to do to him, I'm happy,” Pablo Neruda confessed embarrassed. Happiness has often had a bad press, as if the unfortunate were more lucid, more worthy of study. Psychology has long been a science of illness that has ignored an aspect of the human being that is more common than previously thought (74% of Spaniards consider themselves quite or very happy, according to data from 2002). The proof? Since 1887, Psychological Abstracts (one of the most important guides) has included 140,000 articles on anger, anxiety, and depression, and only 3,000 on positive emotions. 

As psychologists María Dolores Avia and Carmelo Vázquez point out in their work Intelligent Optimism, “research has an outstanding debt with very important emotions.” A debt that is being settled thanks to the so-called “positive psychology”, which analyzes rewarding emotions in line with the WHO, which defines health not as the absence of disease, but as a state of well-being. A survey by the company Onhealth showed that 86% of Americans identified health with “general state of happiness.”

earthly pleasures

But what is happiness from a psychological point of view? Experts have vacillated between happiness conceived in the Aristotelian style, as orientation toward goals that one values ​​(not their full satisfaction, because the lack of desired things is an indispensable element of happiness, as Bertrand Russell pointed out), and the simpler one: happiness as hedonism. 

And they have related it to three behavioral systems that nourish and give meaning to each other, as explained by psychologists JR Averill and T. More in their work Handbook of emotions: the biological (the most earthly needs), the social and the psychological ( self realisation). What does it mean? Well, when faced with a delicacy, and with good company, we feel happiness because both sensory pleasures (eating, laughing) and other higher ones (good social relationships) are satisfied. Some without others do not give happiness.

Less happy, sicker

Is there a “recipe”? Be optimistic, they tell us. We can start by measuring our optimism with a test (the Life Orientation Test –LOT–, developed by Charles Carver, from the University of Miami) and convince ourselves that by being optimistic we will obtain benefits for our health. A study by Christopher Peterson of the University of Michigan states that pessimists in a group of students spent 8.6 sick days per month on average; the optimists, only 3.7. Most of them were infections, illnesses linked to the immune system.

But psychologists point out more clues. Achievable goals, not becoming obsessed with oneself, opening up to the world... And they remind us that forgetting is a characteristic of memory, not a defect. Selective forgetting affects positively – normally – or negatively – in cases of depression. Happy people do not experience fewer tragedies, but their memory does not “revel” in them. In the mundane words of Rita Hayworth: “The two attributes that marked my happiness are: good health and a bad memory.”