The Timescales of Your Happiness
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🌊 Your happiness is made of many overlapping waves. Like ocean waves, the forces shaping your happiness unfold on different timescales, from split-second reactions to decades of aging, and together they determine how you feel at any moment. This article discusses 10 waves that affect your happiness.
🍽️ Check in with your body. Hunger, thirst, pain, and overheating can lower how you feel. In wave 3, we see that mental health resources often start with basic bodily needs to help you find simple things you can do right away.
🎯 Where your attention goes matters. In wave 2, we see that one study found the activity people were doing explained about 4.6% of the variation in their happiness, but whether or not their attention was focused on that activity explained a largely independent 10.8%.
😴 Sleep and anxiety affect each other. In wave 5, we see that a meta-analysis found that all studied forms of sleep loss reduced positive affect and increased anxiety symptoms. Clearer Thinking’s own study found the opposite direction holds too: reducing anxiety made people feel less tired right afterward.
🔄 The hedonic treadmill is strong but not uniform. In wave 7, we discuss longitudinal research that shows the speed of adaptation to major gains and losses varies widely by event and person, and people don’t always return fully to their previous baseline of happiness.
Your happiness, like the surface of the ocean, is the result of the interactions between lots of different kinds of waves, with different causes, unfolding on different timescales. The ocean’s waves range from small ripples (capillary waves) that unfold over fractions of a second, to planetary waves (Rossby waves) that are hundreds of kilometers long (or even longer) and can unfold over a decade.
There are different kinds of waves to your happiness too. Like the ocean’s waves, each kind of happiness wave ebbs and flows on its own timescale, but their interactions do a lot to determine your level of happiness at any given point in life. And at any given moment you may be experiencing the impacts of many such waves operating at many different time scales, from a second to a lifetime – much like the state of the ocean is the composite of the shortest to the longest waves all overlapping each other.
Each wave tends to oscillate around its mean (except for the slowest waves, which take your whole life to unfold). One useful way to think about becoming happier is to take care of your life at the level of each of these waves.
Your Waves From Fastest to Slowest
For each of the wave types below, we’ve given a rough timeframe that is typical of lots of experiences, but is not universal and is not a precise boundary. The point is to illustrate the fact that your happiness is affected by things working at different scales. Here’s a chart that shows them all at a glance:
The fastest, highest frequency waves are your emotional shifts based on what just happened a moment ago. They’re the initial jolts of emotion you feel in response to events around you. If you just had a sip of a delicious beverage, you’ll feel better than if you just knocked your beverage over. A sudden loud noise can cause you to startle within a couple of hundred milliseconds, with a feeling of fear rising shortly after.
These reactions can fade in a few seconds, but if the events that caused them are significant to you, these waves might interact with other waves. For example, your reactions might affect your mood (wave 4) or stay in your body (wave 3) as physical experiences, like a racing heart or blushing.
The next fastest waves are based on what’s around you right now and what activity you’re engaged in. Are you walking outside enjoying nature, shopping in a grocery store, talking to a friend, or reviewing your taxes? Your emotional state depends on what you’re doing, how you think about what you're doing, and where you’re doing it.
A now-famous study of 909 employed women found that the participants reported being happiest when having intimate relations or socializing, and the least happy when commuting or working. Similar results are reported by other studies. We’ve put the results for all the activities reported in that famous study into a chart below:
Of course, these studies are not immune to the effects of multiple waves at different time scales. If people tend to go shopping on the weekends, when they've gotten more sleep and aren't working, that can impact their mood ratings while shopping.
An important aspect of this roughly 1-minute time-scale wave appears to be whether your attention is on the activity, instead of wandering. Another study found that, on average, the activity a participant was engaged in explained about 4.6% of the variation in that participant’s happiness, but whether the participant’s attention was focused on the activity explained a largely independent 10.8% of their variation in happiness. This is evidence that people are typically happier when their attention is on what they’re doing, rather than wandering to other things.
How do you feel in your body? Are you hungry? Do you have to go to the bathroom? Does your back hurt? Are you overheated? These states tend to persist for a while until something changes, and they more often make us feel bad than good – though you can, of course, have positive body states too (e.g., the feeling of taking a warm bath, getting a massage, or experiencing a post-workout high).
The importance of this kind of wave is emphasized by mental health resources like:
“You Feel Like Shit”, and
The “HALT acronym” used in relapse prevention
All of these start by asking about basic bodily needs. They help you figure out what (usually simple) things you can do now to bring yourself into a state of greater well-being.
Some days, you may wake up in a funk. Sometimes, after a few hours, your mood might change due to something good or bad happening, or perhaps due to nothing at all that you can put your finger on. Your mood may well shift a few times throughout the day.
Academics distinguish mood from emotion partly in terms of duration. Emotional reactions can last seconds (as discussed in wave 1), but moods are waves that take longer to pass.
You likely have a time of day when you tend to feel your best. Perhaps you’re a morning person or a night owl. A large study of public data from twitter.com (drawing on ~509 million public messages from ~2.4 million Twitter accounts) found that (when averaged across people) positive affect has a peak in the morning, dips a bit throughout the day, and then rises again from 6pm until it peaks around midnight. The same pattern was observed for every day of the week:
Additionally, once enough hours go by without sleeping (especially after it gets dark), you’ll start to feel sleepy. If you slept badly the previous night or your circadian rhythm is disrupted, it is likely to impact how you feel the next day. A recent meta-analysis found that all forms of sleep loss that were studied resulted in reduced positive affect and increased anxiety symptoms. In our own study we also found that anxiety cuts the other way: reducing it makes people feel less tired right afterward.
Do you have an acute viral or bacterial infection or bodily injury? Typically, these reduce our functioning and make us feel bad for a few days to a few weeks. Of course, some illnesses and injuries are much worse than this, and some end up as a chronic health problem operating on a longer scale.
If you lose something you care a lot about (e.g., you break up with the person you love, or your house burns down), or if you win the lottery, how long will it take you to feel mostly normal again?
Early research on this topic popularized the notion of the “hedonic treadmill” according to which people adapt to major life events quickly and return to their baseline levels of happiness.
More recent research, using more robust methods (longitudinal studies, which follow people over many years), indicates that the rate at which people adapt and return (or get closer) to their baseline varies a lot depending on the event and from person to person. A loss that takes one person a few weeks to recover from might take someone else years. A new job you love, getting your dream home, a baby, a sudden windfall of cash, etc., may cause you months or years of elevated happiness before the hedonic treadmill starts to kick in to bring you closer to baseline.
While the hedonic treadmill is strong, it doesn’t always mean completely returning to your previous baseline: sometimes people end up at a higher or lower level than they started. But many big life changes lead to a period of higher or lower well-being that eventually fades away returning us close to our baseline.
Are you making progress towards your goals? Are you happy with your city, the people you hang out with, and your job? Do you have a romantic relationship, and if so, does it make you happy? Is your body fit or out of shape? Do you have chronic health issues? This yearly scale is often about our overall satisfaction with life, which is a form of happiness that differs from the moment-to-moment experience of things like joy. Instead, it involves an evaluation of how things are going overall compared to how we want them to be going and our expectations.
Of course, your overall health also affects your moment-to-moment happiness (not just your overall satisfaction), as seen in wave 3 (your body) and wave 6 (an acute illness).
Are you the person you want to be? Do you love (or like or hate) yourself? Do you have lifelong friends? Is your life path one you feel good about? Do you feel positive about your past? This time scale is often about how you feel about yourself as a person, which usually shifts over multiple years (though it can sometimes undergo a rapid shift in the face of big life changes).
As we age, our bodies and minds obviously change. Our aging bodies can feel worse and become less reliable. Yet there is at least some evidence of U-shaped happiness curves, with more happiness on average for the young and old (until very old age) – though this is debated. Aging is the longest wave of them all. Good habits such as exercise and healthy eating can slow the negative impacts that come with age.
Questions for reflecting on your waves of happiness
Your well-being is the sum of many waves operating at many scales. All of these overlap to determine how you feel right now. It’s easy to get lost in this ocean of complexity and focus on just a few waves at the expense of the others. Here are questions for you to help you evaluate how each wave is going:
Did your emotion just shift?
a. If some event that just happened is affecting you a lot, it might also help to ask yourself, “Will this matter to me tomorrow?”
b. Consider asking whether a short break to do something else (e.g., taking a walk, focusing on your breathing) would help.
How do you feel about the activity you’re doing right now and about the setting you’re doing it in?
a. Is your attention on what you’re doing or somewhere else?
b. Is there a small change that would make the setting better, such as putting on some music or moving to a different room?
How does your body feel right now? Are you hungry, thirsty, in pain, etc.?
a. Is there something you can do to address any needs identified by that question?
How has your mood been for the past few hours?
a. Is it possible that your mood is being affected by some other wave? If so, would addressing that help? Is this just a mood that is likely to pass in a few hours?
How sleepy or tired are you, and did you sleep well last night?
a. Should you give yourself permission to rest?
Are you sick right now?
a. Again, should you give yourself permission to rest?
Are you processing some form of loss right now?
a. If the negative impact on your happiness has lasted for many months without easing, consider talking to a mental health care professional.
How satisfied are you with your life?
a. Are you making progress on your important goals? For help with that, you could check out these free tools of ours.
How satisfied are you with who you are?
a. Are you acting in line with your values? If you want help identifying your values, you could try this free quiz of ours.
b. How do you talk to yourself when you make mistakes? If you want help cultivating self-compassion, you could try our free mini-course.
Are you taking care of your body for the very long term?
a. If you could take one action to improve your long-term health, what would it be?
