I’ll post some further info on the SWOT over the next few days.

Regrets, I’ve had a few: How finding the silver lining contributes to happiness and maturity

This article on yesterday’s Positive Psychology News Daily looks at research into regret which suggests that it’s about more than learning from experience, it’s beneficial for the process of psychological maturity itself, and that the accommodation of regret has profound implications for human development, and ultimate happiness.

Image: Orbitcast

This Radio 4 programme today is a great introduction to the pros and cons of measuring happiness, and whether it’s possible, desirable or indeed useful to do so, with Professor of Economics, Paul Omerod, one of the principals of Volterra Consulting, Lord Richard Layard, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, and Professor Paul Dolan, Chair in Economics at the Tanaka Business School, Imperial College London.

I think this is a great starting point if you’re unfamiliar with the finer points of happiness research and measurement.

Whose perspective do you agree with?

Source: D.G. Myers, Happiness, 2004

You’ll be interested to know that in July, the independent think-tank the New Economics Foundation (NEF) published the European Happy Planet Index of carbon efficiency and well-being in the EU.

It reveals that Europe is less carbon-efficient at delivering well-being (measured in terms of the happy, long lives of its citizens) than it was over 40 years ago. This might come as a surprise to some people – after all, as a whole we are wealthier than ever.

The good news is that some European countries are doing pretty well in terms of high levels of well-being (a combination of how satisfied people feel with their lives overall, and their life expectancy at birth). Those in the North such as Denmark, Sweden, Iceland and Finland, as well as Switzerland, report the highest levels of subjective life satisfaction. Interestingly, Iceland and Sweden also have some of the lowest per capita carbon footprints, despite being amongst the richest nations. As a result, Iceland tops the European Happy Planet Index, followed by Sweden, Norway and Switzerland.

And the bad news? Some economically-advanced countries feature pretty poorly in the Index. Take the UK for example – it comes 15th out of 30 in rank order for both life satisfaction and life expectancy. It also has the 4th largest per capita carbon footprint in Europe, behind Luxembourg, Estonia and Finland. As a result the UK ranks 21st out of 30 overall in the European HPI, only slightly ahead of ‘transition’ countries such as Bulgaria and Lithuania.

Countries like Germany, Finland and France don’t fare much better either, coming 15th, 16th and 18th in the Index respectively.

So what can we conclude from this? Quite simply, as I’m sure you already know deep-down, consumption is not the main route to well-being. If this were true, the poorer countries would always feature at the bottom of NEF’s league tables, but they don’t.

What the report also shows us, however, is that it is not impossible to be prosperous, happy and green. Perhaps we should be looking towards countries like Iceland and Sweden for some answers?

A simple 2×2 model for understanding Happiness

In his recent book ‘Happier‘, Harvard University lecturer Tal Ben-Shahar presents a wonderful model of happiness which he has christened The Hamburger Model. What I really like (apart from the 2×2 format which all MBAs love…) is the simplicity of it. It goes something like this:

Junk Food Burger: tasty but unhealthy. When people are asked to describe what a happy life means to them they quite often think of a life filled only with pleasure and devoid of any pain. This is the life of the hedonist, someone who lives only for the moment, giving little thought to future consequences. Young children are like this, until they learn to forego immediate gratification for some longer-term reward. But what would happen if your life were only ever about indulgence? In a continuous succession of pleasurable experiences, how would you distinguish one from another? Put simply, if you ate your favourite food every day, how long would it take before you got thoroughly sick of it?

Vegetarian Burger: healthy but not tasty – the kind you eat because you know it’s good for you, not because you really want to. In this quadrant of the Hamburger Model, you forgo current pleasure entirely in order to derive some future benefit, living your life according to the ‘No Pain, No Gain’ principle. The problem with this is that you can start to believe that happiness is something you can only achieve in the future. And when you reach that future, what then? Often, you’re still searching…Life has become a rat race.

Worst Burger: both tasteless and unhealthy. Before you ask, “well why would you eat it then?”, some people become resigned to the belief that their life is pretty pointless – they give up on the present and the future and spend their time ruminating on what went wrong or what could have been. Seligman’s research on a phenomenon called ‘Learned Helplessness‘ shows how easy it is for us to learn that we have no control over our own lives and that whatever we do is futile. Ben-Shahar describes this desperate place as ‘Nihilism’. Fortunately what has been learned can be unlearned.

Ideal Burger: both tasty and healthy. The Happiness quadrant is where you enjoy a good balance of pleasure, fulfillment and purpose in your life. Sounds simple doesn’t it? There are two crucial points here. Firstly – take a moment to consider your own personal definition of happiness. If you’re thinking you’d like to experience pure unremitting bliss for the rest of your days, beware. Leading psychiatrist Dr Raj Persaud has suggested that we really should be aiming for no more than “mild contentment”. Anything more and you’re likely to set yourself up to fail. So you might have to revisit your expectations. Secondly, does your definition of happiness incorporate activity as well as feeling? If not, think about it again – only you can make you happy, so in order to be happy, to create meaning and purpose in your life, you have to do something.

So what are you going to do differently?