The Grant Study

Most happiness/social psychology research is bollocks, because everyone is different and people are happy or unhappy for so many different rhymes and reasons. Sells a lot of books though.

My friend Sulove gave me a copy of this study and because of the approach I think it's worth passing around.

It's a study that's been running for 72 years on a group of 268 men, with the intention of identifying the common threads running through happy lives. It was originally slated as a research in what makes people successful, but the researchers quickly realized that since successful people are often unhappy that didn't make for a very interesting payoff.

www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness -- it's well interesting.


My biggest takeaways:

1. Our happiness depends on how we adapt to change, disappointment and tragedy.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else.

One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.”

The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).


2. I like this for a somewhat mathematical conclusion.

[Valliant] identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight.

It goes on to say that if five or six of these factors are in your favor, your chances of being happy are quite high. If three or fewer are in you favor, there's almost no possibility that you're happy.

In my view, education, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, exercising and staying a healthy weight are all check boxes. You do them or you do not.

Having a stable marriage is more complicated and obviously many external factors contribute to this which makes it more difficult to control or predict.

In my opinion, adaptation is the wildcard. Bad things happen, we are frustrated by our failures and inadequacies and we are shaken by things that happen to us and to those around us. To some degree I'm sure the way we adapt is innate, but there's also some choice involved. And knowing the different ways we adapt seems like an important step in reacting to things in a healthy way.


3. Other interesting bits and bobs.

The line about how someone will cross the street to avoid talking to someone who gave them a complement the previous day. Some of us find stress in being praised.

Forgiveness is an absolutely necessary part of being happy (and is a vital element of adaptation), but telling someone they should forgive someone causes stress. It needs to happen naturally.

Through all the adaptation and reinvention, it's really about relationships -- keeping in touch, being good to friends and family. It's a virtuous cycle.


4. It's funny how we can sometimes fool ourselves into thinking we're happy.

The entire study seems paradoxical in that each reader will have a different opinion of whether the main researcher is happy himself.