Well, it’s all happening. Amazon.co.uk have just chosen 59 Seconds as their book of the week, and so for the next few days it is available at just £5.84. Click here for details.
Also, as promised, today we announce the initial results of the happiness experiment. Over 26,000 people took part, which was amazing.
In one part of the project we asked people to carry out one of four happiness boosting exercises and compared the subsequent levels of reported happiness with those using a control technique (simply thinking about the day before). The result show that spending just a few moments thinking about one thing that went well yesterday is a surprisingly effectively way of boosting happiness. Compared to those in the control group, this procedure resulted in a 15% boost in reported happiness. Lots more details here.
Obviously, these are just initial findings and we will be submitting a full report to an academic journal soon.
In the meantime, here is a short video of my good self describing the technique. Take a few seconds to do it and then feel free to describe your memory, and/or whether you feel happier, in the comments section. Let’s see if we can make this the happiest blog on the web today!
Congratulations!
I didn’t stick to the expt all thru but I’ve been above avg happy thro last 2 weeks
If you skip a happiness expt and stay happy does anybody know?
I was so sad that I had been randomly selected to be in the control group
(I deduced I had been selected for the control group because I had already read 59 seconds and was familiar with what control groups for happiness/mood studies look like)
I just saw you on the morning tv! Good job!
would have been nice to know if *I* was happier at the end of the week or not – but it is interesting to see a “15%” increase (is that 15% more than the control, or 15% vs 7% for the control?)
I had one of the crappiest days yesterday… thinking about happy memories has lifted off the fatigue that I’d carried over today. This is nice. I find this more rewarding than gratitude in terms of the happiness levels.
Unfortunately, both follow-up questionnaire emails you sent got marked as Spam by Google Mail. I didn’t see them until this morning when I read this blog post.
I’m not happy about the findings…
Nice blog..I have not much understood what you what to convey……….
Nice blog! it is totally awesome! Were you on TV? Also check out this awesome site:
http://helpcooltheearth.wordpress.com
scikid
[...] running his ongoing happiness experiment. It makes for really interesting reading. There’s a short video on his site encouraging us to think about nice things that happened [...]
Cool! Now can we justify blaming all the complaints in the world on negative thinking, pessimism, and a glass-half-empty attitude?
Never mind the long-term practical consequences of people intentionally distracting themselves from problems at hand with nostalgia and pollyanna psychological self-manipulation.
And this is “science”? If only Pasteur had simply focused on pleasant memories and gratitude rather than stressing himself out about disease; imagine how much happier he might have been!
Nothing in the real world was ever fixed by retreating into our Happy Places, bury our heads in the sand, and smiling the world away. The Happiness Cult is a worse than bad science; it is a dangerous societal anti-pattern.
I did the memory task and there was nothing Pollyanna-like about it. There was no instruction to ignore real problems and in fact if you go check out the 59 Seconds website, it pretty much stands against that kind of technique. Do you really think Louis Pasteur would have given up on science if he spent a few seconds thinking “hey, I enjoyed the weather yesterday” every day?
God forbid we go to work happy and work 110% instead of 90% because we are happy and fruitful and energized to get stuff done! Happy Cult is for me!!!! What are you like, a uh.. Sad Cult dude?
Happiness cult, sir? Seriously?
I strongly disagree. In fact, I had never heard of this experiment or the book or any of this until I found a link to this blog via twitter.
I can say with certainty that a lot of our battles are fought in the mind…it’s our ego that affects our psyches.
I’m a very social person and I find that when I isolate myself of become busy with life, I sink into deep depression. And sometimes, all it takes to snap me out of my funk is for me to go out. Then reminiscing on the night before the day after always always
gives me a warm afterglow.
Food for thought.
myself
Please forgive the typos; I’m writing this from my BlackBerry
this is such a stupid survey. surely if something good happened or something went well on the previous day, then the individual will think about it of their own accord, because the memory gives them pleasure? it will “boost happiness” because it is intended to boost happiness. this is one for the No Shit Sherlock journal.
No, because the instructions were to find something happy even if it was really small, like a really nice cup of coffee you had or your dog greeting you when you came home. These are little things and if you had an extra rough day at work you mgiht not botehr to think about them the next day and focus on the fact you had a bad Monday or whatever.
Sorry, I had to drop out of the experiment after a couple of days. The events of my life took a sudden turn that totally derailed any attempts at providing fair/balanced experimental data.
Did the experiment, but was rather busy over the weekend, and the questionnaire expired on me. Boo. Oh well…
I enjoyed the blod, infact something unique. I also try to find happiness in life from tiny things in nature.
Tiny lives that inspire
http://www.boddunan.com/miscellaneous/51-General%20Reference/360-tiny-lives-that-inspire.html
happy happy happy!
The exercise was helpful – as what I might have considered a somewhat uneventful day, in retrospect, was full of little highlights, the most notable: a spontaneous and silly laugh with friends. Busy with other things now, I may not have thought or remembered to revisit this.
I wish I had a white room like yours!
I have to say that while I did take part in your experiment I tend to do the things you suggested everyday anyway. I don’t say this to score points just that it surprises me that people need to be told to pay others compliments or help other people out.
Those that didn’t but now do can hopefully only of benefitted from your experiment.
The memory exercise today was great, I am terrible at going over what happened yesterday good or bad! Thanks for the tip.
gonna buy the book now!
I was a member of the “do a good deed each day” group. I actually felt a bit of guilt/anxiety trying to remember to do a good deed and figuring out what to do, and it was worse when I realized I had forgotten one day. Not exactly a good way to improve my happiness.
Thank you for your great article. This technique really works and has helped me feel better during the stressful moments of my day.
I was in the memory group last week and when I was doing the task, I was nervous at first in case I couldn’t think of anything good. I actually found that once I started I had too many good things come to mind and the hard part was picking one to focus on. It totally rocked.
Think of something good that happened – like conducting a successful experiment on happiness.
I am very impressed with the results of this experiment. Some of it is common sense but we do forget things which make us happy and end up concentrating on the negative aspects of our life.
I would be honoured if I could ask Professor Wiseman some questions for my blog. Please be in touch.
The book is amazing, I did find that if something drastic has happened thinking about something the previous day only worked as a destraction
I was in the “do something nice for other people” group and had lots of fun.
Anyway, I wasn’t able to do something nice just like that. People always retaliated: For keeping safe a key I got cookies. For visiting someone I got treated to a nice meal. In the course of the experiment I’ve got fed, petted and called “darling”.
So I never got to see the effects of just being nice for no apparent reason — isn’t that frustrating?
Very cool idea! I’m going to try this out.
[...] psychologische Experimente, Richard Wiseman, Science of Happiness 12.08.09: Hier geht es zu den ersten [...]
It’s harder than it looks
Joyceland likes this a lot. http://llutze.wordpress.com/
Serious question: how did you select who was included in the post condition. Never got a call back.
I was in the smile group. I was slightly confused over whether I was actually supposed to be happy while smiling of just going through the motions. the fact that i was analyzing it to that degree usually made me smile anyways, so it was pretty easy.
I don’t know if it made me happier or not, but relating to todays question, I had a super boring day yesterday, but today was full of good stuff, lots of getting lost and finding my way and walking through a full on forest that i didn’t know existed, getting a temporary work assignment and sending cards and postcards to people at home that i miss. I will for sure be saving those memories up to reflect on tomorrow!
I was in the gratitude group and ended up less happy than I started. The problem lay with the examples given (friends, family, relationship, job, health, roof over your head, enough food on the table), which all (except for the one about the food) reminded me of problems with my life as it is and made me feel less happy. I did best on the day I was simply grateful for not being tortured…
The memory one sounds like it might work better.
[...] best way to boost your mood is to think about something good that happened to you the day before. As Wiseman writes on his blog: The result show that spending just a few moments thinking about one thing that went well yesterday [...]
[...] more information about the results of the experiment and how to help cheer up the world visit Richard Wiseman and Science of [...]
Are we better thinking about things that went well, or are we better coming to terms with things that went badly for us. In the long term I mean.
I think happiness comes from a combination of things: wealth, love, social status etc.
There is no hard recipe since everybody values these things differently.
However, it is possible to find out how much one specific individual values these different aspects through conjoint analysis, a statistical approach to extract one’s real preferences.
I tried to implement this in a very simple (but rigorous) way online. Please let me know if you find it useful:
http://dingsme.com/
It is fun, but still scientifically accurate (as long as people do take the time to think about the answers).
[...] interesting are the comments below the post announcing the experiment results, which are very telling about people’s attitudes [...]
[...] And for some scientific evidence, have a look at Professor Richard Wiseman’s blog post on the science of happiness [...]
Some of the comments make we want to suggest that happiness neither follows logic, nor comes naturally, even when good things happen. Perhaps the biggest challenge is that our time and attention is attacked from many angles and the plain logic of “remember the good thing from yesterday” can get lost among deadlines, commercials, news, tweets, and facebook updates.