One of the main lessons from happiness research is that the impacts of many life changes fade quite quickly. There is lots of adaptation – lots of getting used to change. Adaptation is explained by the withdrawal of attention to inputs as their impact on happiness diminishes. The novelty of a new stimulus attracts your attention, but when you get used to it you stop focusing so much attention on it. When this happens, your attention is freed up to find something new to attract it. A new king of attention soon replaces an old one. The King is dead. Long live the King.
Together with David Bradford, I have looked at the existing life satisfaction data to see what happens to people as they gain weight. They get less happy, right? Well, no, not really. Life satisfaction is hardly affected by weight gain. The theoretical model we developed posits that you can do one of two things to stay happy when you gain weight: the first is to expend effort in losing weight, and the second is to expend effort in playing down the importance of weight gain in your life. Our data analyses support the second explanation. As people put on weight, they shift the focus of their attention away from parts of their lives that are associated with weight, like health, toward aspects where their weight is less important, like work.
This shift in attention explains some of the behaviours we observe; many of us gain weight but do not lose it. The effort needed to lose weight may be greater than the effort required to shift the attention you give to your health and weight when compared to other elements of your life, such as work or leisure.
There’s some evidence that obesity can have a small but significant effect on life satisfaction but it does not have anywhere near as much of an effect as other problems in life. Notwithstanding some issues in how best to analyse the data, based on ratings of life satisfaction in the UK, we can tentatively suggest that your body mass index (BMI) would have to increase by at least 30 BMI points (which would be very extreme, since obesity is defined as a BMI of 30) to have about the same negative effect upon your satisfaction levels as a marital breakdown.
The longer-term consequences of obesity, such as diabetes, would have a big impact on happiness, of course, but the more immediate impact of a breakup explains why many people care more about their relationships with other people than the one they have with food. Of course, obesity does not occur overnight, and so there is a gradual adaptation to weighing more.
There is also now some genetic evidence to show that gaining weight may not necessarily make you any less happy. The same gene that is associated with a predisposition to obesity, the FTO gene, is actually associated with a reduced risk of major depressive disorders. So, genetically, at least, it seems that those of us who are predisposed to be overweight aren’t also predisposed to be less happy. The impact may also depend on cultural norms and socioeconomic factors. In some countries, such as Russia, getting fatter is actually good for life satisfaction because it acts as a signal of affluence. In the United States, those in high-status jobs are most adversely affected by being overweight, probably because of the stigma attached to it in those cohorts.
While we each may initially react quite differently to an event, we all have a built-in ability to detect and neutralize challenges to our happiness. This trait has been named the psychological immune system. Just as your body adjusts to getting into hot water, so your mind adjusts to change: the psychological reaction to changes in stimuli is analogous to the physiological reaction to changes in temperature. And your psychological immune system works a little like your physical immune system, which kicks in when faced with a threat, such as when someone nearby coughs or sneezes. This highlights the fact that many adaptation processes take place automatically and unconsciously; we simply get used to some changes without thinking about whether we really want to or not.
In one of the most interesting studies in this area, students were asked to predict how much worse their mood would be if they were rejected for a job: their average estimate was two points lower than their current mood on a ten-point scale. In sharp contrast, the actual effect of being rejected was only 0.4 points on the same ten-point scale. Even that effect was fleeting: ten minutes after the rejection, their happiness levels had returned to normal. By the way, there was no real job offer—such is the fun that psychologists often have at their students’ expense.
If your partner dumps you, give it a few months and you’ll generally look back on your partner as having been unsuitable. Chances are that you will then meet someone who makes you happier than that loser did. This is not to say that the pain of the breakup is any less real, just that you can take some comfort from it not lasting. You can also take comfort from the fact that you will make sense of the relationship and the breakup in ways that enable you to move on to bigger and better things. You are good at making sense of most life events in ways that enable you to move on. It is better to have loved and lost than to have spent your life with a psychopath, as one of my (single) colleagues says. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—and often happier, too, eventually.
On the flip side, your psychological immune system seems to neutralise the impact of many good things, too, and so the positive happiness effects of a pay rise, a marriage, or a new job won’t last for very long for most people, either. As we shall see more clearly in part 2, this is where the allocation and reallocation of your attention is crucial: we shall consider ways in which you can prolong pleasure and purpose and nip pain and pointlessness in the bud.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.