Decoding the science of happiness and the smiles that it brings

If you’ve ever seen something called the happiness U-curve, you’ll have every right to feel a bit despondent. This chart, which tracks human satisfaction by age, does not make for especially cheerful reading. From the mid-teens to the late forties or early fifties, the chart plots a steady descent. True, it does then begin to tick back upwards. But until then, on average, every year of your life will be a little less happy than the one before it. 

It isn’t hard to see why. Everything is a struggle. Maybe you’re battling with the pressures of work, or money, or kids, or health, or your elderly parents, or all of these at the same time. We might all want to be happier, but knowing how is the hard bit. 

Some happiness hacks are pretty much agreed upon, if not always easy. (More time outdoors; fewer hours zombified in front of a laptop.) Others are questionable: Should you get up at 5am to meditate? Start a gratitude journal? Wouldn’t an extra hour in bed make you more grateful? What you really need is someone to test them all, and report back.

Well, good news! As a father of two currently riding the downwards slope of the U-curve while working in a dying industry during a gruelling cost of living crisis, I’m ideally placed to be your guinea pig. What’s more, I really wanted to find a way to make my day-to-day a bit nicer. So, over the course of a month, I practised as many of these scientifically backed strategies as I could to see what would stick. Here’s my crash course in contentment.

Experiment 1—Satisfaction, Gamified

The overwhelming advice when it comes to feeling happier is to strengthen your interpersonal Joy Provision relationships. Both Yale’s Laurie Santos (who leads the university’s Science of Well-Being course and hosts The Happiness Lab podcast) and Harvard’s Robert Waldinger (who recently published a book on happiness, The Good Life) hammer home the importance of seeking out and maintaining a healthy social network.

Which is great…but it’s also a lot of effort. So, I thought I’d start with the apps, instead. After all, an app helped me lose weight last year, so maybe one could cheer me up a bit, too? More importantly, it sounded a lot more time-efficient to twat about on my phone for a few minutes a day than to actually go out and talk to people. And this brought me to Happify.

Launched seven years ago in New York, Happify claims to have helped millions of people by boiling down the tenets of cognitive behavioural therapy and gamifying it for on-the-go users. Its science is backed by 28 experts, who range from the professor of psychology at the University of California to yoga instructors and ‘compassion teachers’. The app asks you to choose a ‘track’–a pathway to happiness based on your own experiences–and every day it parcels out a few minutes of homework. 

I chose a track designed to help with the stress of caregiving, since that is currently my biggest obstacle to mental wellbeing. Some of the tasks involve listening to guided meditation (more on that later) or writing little gratitude lists (which some people might find helpful), that also included various games. And, god, these games are awful. One of them is essentially a shameless imitation of Angry Birds, except instead of killing pigs, you kill words with negative connotations. And, while I’m no doctor, I don’t think this is the fast track to a happier life.

While apps can help with things such as weight loss or nutrition–where progress can be measured in cold, hard numbers–something as subjective as happiness is harder to compute. Happify offers fortnightly check-in quizzes, where you answer questions about yourself along a spectrum that ranges from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’. The median score for users is 45.8 out of 100, and when I first took the quiz I scored a respectable 46. But by the end of the month, I had grown so disenchanted by all the pointless hoops that my score had plummeted to 40. When it told me, ‘You need a happiness boost,’ I took it as a sign to delete the app and get on with my life.

Experiment 2—Food For Thought

There exists a branch of science called nutritional psychiatry, which researches how food affects your mood. This goes beyond feeling regretful or lethargic after a three-day snack binge. In truth, the science is complicated. There are microbes in your gut, and these microbes produce neurotransmitters that send messages to your brain. The theory goes that, by eating certain foods, you can alter the message that your brain receives. 

The study that interested me the most came out of Deakin University in Australia. Researchers took a group of people with major depression who perpetually grazed on low-nutrient processed snacks and, over the course of 12 weeks, swapped these foods for fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and legumes. Porridge was eaten in place of sugary cereals. Processed meats were replaced with seafood and small amounts of lean red meat. And at the end of the trial, most people noted a significant improvement in mood.

This is something backed up by Gordon McCrorie, a Glasgow-based life coach who operates as The Happiness Guy. When we spoke, I asked him what set him on his path to seeking happiness. ‘Flippantly, I would say misery,’ he told me. ‘It was being overweight. It was not coping well with stressors in life.’ This manifested in compulsive overeating, and the thing that most helped him pull it together was a change in diet.

‘When people clean up their diet, their body invariably functions more smoothly–they’ll feel better, their head will be clearer,’ he says. ‘I’d encourage people to think of how they eat as a way of taking care of themselves. If you take care of yourself, then it means you matter. It’s an act of love.’ 

At the start of my month, I’d fallen into a bit of a dietary hole. I was snacking more than I’d like, often on whatever happened to be in the supermarket bakery aisle, and had slipped into cooking whatever meals made my kids complain the least. On day one, when I traded in macaroni cheese for a vegetable stir-fry, I was convinced that this particular experiment would prove a bad idea. My children reacted to the sight of vegetables like it was a violent personal insult. And, since my body had grown used to the quick carby hit of pasta, I didn’t have enough energy to cope.

But I persevered. One of the biggest proponents of this approach is Felice Jacka, founder of the International Society for Nutritional Psychiatry Research. Her book, Brain Changer, makes a strong argument for the connection between diet and mood. According to her, one diet has been shown to have far more empirical benefits than others. ‘The Mediterranean diet is certainly the most studied, and the dietary pattern that has by far the largest and strongest evidence base for health benefits,’ she has written. Psychologist Kimberley Wilson, author of Unprocessed, concurs, describing it as ‘the gold standard diet for promoting heart–and by extension brain–health’.

I tried sticking to this–lots of omelettes, tuna salads and grilled chicken–while experimenting to see what would go down best with my family. For the most part, I managed to keep it up all month, except for a couple of days when I was strong-armed into ordering burgers. The results were encouraging. The problem is, I don’t know why.

I ended the month feeling better about myself. But was this because I’d successfully hacked the microbial neurotransmitters in my gut, or was it–as I suspect–because I lost a bit of weight and felt happier because I looked better? Outside of a stringent scientific study, I can’t say for sure.

Experiment 3—Who’s In Control?

I had plans to study stoicism–an ancient Greek philosophy pegged as one of the foundational texts of virtue ethics–for years. So, in 2020, when lockdown hit, I decided to insulate myself from the swirling uncertainty by buying John Sellars’ book Lessons In Stoicism. But guess what? As the drudgery of lockdown continued, and I was left holding down a full-time job while raising two children and tending to an unwell wife, I didn’t have much free time to brush up on 2,000-year-old thought experiments. Who could have known? 

I wasn’t the only one to get the idea, though: books on stoicism experienced a noticeable sales boost during the pandemic and (versions of) its ideas are increasingly popping up in podcasts and on Instagram. This article gave me the perfect opportunity to dive in, but that immediately raised a question. Stoicism involves self-control and self-awareness. Is that what happiness is?

‘When the stoics are talking about happiness, they’re not talking about a subjective, fluffy, warm feeling inside, they’re talking about something more substantial,’ says Sellars over Zoom. ‘It’ll reduce the amount of frustration that you feel, it’ll reduce the amount of disruptive negative emotions that you’ll feel. In that sense, it’ll lead to a happier life. When people think about happiness, they’re often confusing it with pleasure. This isn’t that.’

Sellars helps to run Stoicon, an annual event where attendees spend seven days following stoic teachings. They’re asked to fill in questionnaires at the start and end of the week, and overwhelmingly report an improvement in their life satisfaction after participating. ‘We did a follow-up survey six months later,’ Sellars says. ‘Some people hadn’t kept strictly following stoicism, but the benefits were still there. It really stuck with them.’

Luckily, it really worked for me, too. A central part of stoicism involves learning to relinquish control of matters that are out of your hands, which is incredibly useful. During my month-long experiment, I was asked to go abroad on a work trip, but my visa got snarled up in processing. Before I started practising stoicism, the likelihood is that I would have exhausted myself railing against the embassy. But thanks to Sellars’ book, I quickly realised that being angry at an impossible wall of bureaucracy wouldn’t speed my passport along. It would have been a waste of energy. Instead, I let go. The trip wasn’t meant to happen. Oh, well. 

Learning to think rationally, minimising overreaction and relinquishing the things I can’t control took a stiff brush to my mental fog. It allowed me to think clearly, to see my place in the world without any complications. Maybe ‘happy’ isn’t the right word for how it made me feel, but there was certainly a lightening of my mood. I became calmer, resilient, more relaxed. I’m still not a perfect stoic by any means, but this is one habit I’m definitely keeping up

Experiment 4—Breathe Easy(ish)

While investigating practices for this article, I came across an astounding study. Published in 2020, it saw researchers from Yale submit students to randomised wellness techniques to see which worked. One of them, by a considerable distance, was found to offer the greatest benefits – not just to stress levels, but to mood, positivity and possibly even happiness. Better still, it was relatively simple: Sky breathing meditation.

I had long assumed that focused breathing was a shortcut to feeling better. There are countless mindfulness apps with little animations to help you focus on inhalation and exhalation, as well as books and classes to teach you how to do it properly, from Dan Harris’s Ten Percent Happier to Wim Hof’s tutorials. I actually tried transcendental meditation a few years ago, and the main appeal of that seemed to be getting 20 minutes to yourself. But something with empirical proof? Count me in.

Now, technically, Sky breathing meditation should be taught to you over a number of days by a qualified instructor. But on YouTube, you can find a lot of free exercises. Plus, there are several, and they range in intensity and length. One exercise asks you to try to only breathe two or three times a minute, another asks you to breathe in and out rapidly. It involves sitting through a lot of explanations–which is inconvenient when you’re already busy–but in my experience, it pays off.

The science behind Breathing Meditation Sky is that changing the rhythm of your breathing helps to signal relaxation, slow your heart rate and stimulate the vagus nerve, which is integral to the parasympathetic nervous system. And in practice, I felt a profound sense of relaxation wash over me whenever I tried the exercises, especially the ones that required slower breaths. My thoughts became clearer, and I felt like I was more capable of taking on whatever the world threw at me. 

This one lasted the whole month–although, in truth, there were a couple of days when I forgot about it and had to catch up on the toilet, which probably wasn’t the intended environment–and I’m going to try to keep it up, too.

Experiment 5—Lost Connections

And finally, the big one. Even though it sounded like the most work–and went against the most fundamental aspects of my core personality–I decided I should probably bite the bullet and become a more integrated member of society. The evidence for this speaks for itself. Dr Waldinger is the current head of a long-term Harvard study into happiness that for 85 years has tracked a number of people and their offspring to see what contributes to their levels of life satisfaction. And far and away the biggest factor is a person’s relationships–more so than social class or genetics.

In his book, The Good Life, Dr Waldinger suggests a range of ways to improve your relationships. But for my personal experiment, I wanted to concentrate on two: giving people your undivided attention and making small connections throughout the day. ‘Chatting to a stranger’ also happens to be one of the practical tasks recommended on Bristol University’s Science of Happiness course, so that seemed like a good place to start–not least because I have plenty of opportunities to make daily connections, and I always ignore them.

When I’m picking my kids up from school, I have a habit of standing grumpily in the playground, staring at my phone. But I spent the last couple of weeks of term leaving my phone in my pocket and talking to the other parents. Which was excruciating to begin with, obviously. But luckily, I was on nodding terms with a handful of other dads so, after taking a deep, meditative breath, I took the plunge: say hello, ask questions, see what happens. And you know what? I’m glad I did. All of them were interesting. One’s starting to get a new business off the ground. One of them, amazingly, runs a pub. One just really likes walking everywhere really fast, and we’re starting to bond over that. It sounds so nothingy, but making new friends as an adult is extremely difficult. Perhaps these are the seeds that need to be sown to make that happen. For the other approach, I chose to focus on my dad. This is largely because I think he needed this just as much as I did. Since my mum died six years ago, Dad has lived alone, and I worry about him getting lonely. But life is busy, things get in the way and I only really see him for an hour or so with the kids once every couple of weeks, and we spend quite a lot of that time checking our phones.

My approach was two-pronged. First, I just upped the number of times I visited him, popping over every few days rather than once a fortnight. This alone worked wonders. Mum was always the chatty parent growing up and when she was gone, I struggled to find things to talk to Dad about. But simply by being in his presence more often, I found that things fell into place more easily. True, some of our discussions are profoundly superficial–the number of conversations we’ve had about air fryers would stagger you–but we’re gradually starting to open up. And this has created a genuinely tangible happiness within me. There’s an honest to goodness warmth in my chest when I go to visit my dad now. 

This piece originally appeared in Men's Health