The end of one year and the beginning of another often leads us to contemplate how well our lives are stacking up to our hopes, dreams, and expectations. It’s interesting that this sometimes anticipated, sometimes dutiful reflection occurs during both the darkest time of the year (in the northern hemisphere) and arguably the most stressful holiday of the year. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem like the best possible time to evaluate our lives and then make or renew commitments to ourselves based on those assessments.
But that might depend on the nature of our hopes, dreams, and expectations.
Sunshine dulls the mind to risk and thoughtfulness. —Adam Alter,
Drunk Tank Pink
The shorter, cloudier days of winter could be just the right time for this type of contemplation since research indicates that while our cognitive abilities are diminished on sunny days, they are invigorated when it’s cloudy.
Of course, invigorated cognitive abilities don’t appear to be related to our sense of wellbeing. So it’s entirely possible for your mood to be down while your mental sharpness is up. And your mood has an effect on both what you direct your attention to and how you perceive it.
In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman says:
A good mood is a signal [to the brain] that things are generally going well, the environment is safe, and it is all right to let one’s guard down. A bad mood indicates that things are not going very well, there may be a threat, and vigilance is required.
Good mood, intuition, creativity, gullibility, and increased reliance on System 1 form a cluster. At the other pole, sadness, vigilance, suspicion, an analytic approach, and increased effort also go together. A happy mood loosens the control of System 2 over performance: when in a good mood, people become more intuitive and more creative but also less vigilant and more prone to logical errors.
And according to Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne:
[N]egative moods induce careful and systematic cognition. Grey weather may similarly induce sober, grey-flannelled thinking.
Both your mental model and your current mood affect your outlook and your perception of what in your life, if anything, you want to change. If your mood is somber and your mental model includes the belief that you’re not measuring up but you could, you’ll be more inclined to think of ways to whip yourself into shape in one area of your life or another. You’ll probably be inclined to harsher judgments of yourself. That might lead you to come up with, if not formal resolutions or even goals or intentions, some ideas of what you should be doing and what you should be able to accomplish. You know what I mean: buckle down to this or finally take care of that or really, really do that thing you’ve been trying to get done for the past five years.
Would your experience be different if your new year began on the first of July instead of on the first of January?
It’s been proven that exposing your skin to sunlight produces vitamin D which increases your brain’s production of serotonin and lifts your mood. And whether or not you’re affected by SAD (seasonal affective disorder), exposure to bright lights—which is a treatment for SAD—would likely enhance your mood.
You might be more relaxed at the beginning of July—possibly happier—and therefore less inclined to set as many “sober, grey-flannelled thinking” types of resolutions.
We’re more different from ourselves in different states than we are from another person. —George Loewenstein, educator and economist
You’d probably also be much less inclined to follow those sober, grey-flannelled types of resolutions (generated by System 2) when you’re enjoying yourself (gratifying System 1), even if your life isn’t everything you want it to be. The you who makes resolutions or creates goals in January isn’t necessarily the you who will be expected to take action on their behalf down the road.
Why Change?
No matter how you conceptualize them—resolutions, goals, self-improvement lists—the intention is to change your status quo in some way. And often the underlying but unspoken change people want to make is to become happier. There are two problems with that. One is that happiness is an ephemeral and transient emotional state, which means you can’t be happy all the time no matter what you do. The second problem is that we humans are very poor at affective forecasting—being able to predict how we will feel and what will make us happy in the future.
We want to be happy because it feels better than being sad or angry or unhappy. Happiness is great! But happiness is currently being touted not only as a pleasant feeling, but also as something that is good for us. Consider the irony. We should strive to be happy, for example, because that will lead to better health and a longer life. That pretty much puts it in the same category as eating more fruits and vegetables, stopping smoking, and getting regular exercise. Are we to feel guilty about not being happy?
If you’re not happy all the time, don’t worry. There’s no indication that being happy will increase your lifespan and some indication the opposite is true. Recent investigation of the link between happiness and health revealed the surprising result that the bodies of happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats by activating the pro-inflammatory response. That’s not good. And there’s this from an August article in BBC Future:
The truth is, pondering the worst has some clear advantages. Cranks may be superior negotiators, more discerning decision-makers and cut their risk of having a heart attack. Cynics can expect more stable marriages, higher earnings and longer lives—though, of course, they’ll anticipate the opposite.
Good moods on the other hand come with substantial risks—sapping your drive, dimming attention to detail and making you simultaneously gullible and selfish. Positivity is also known to encourage binge drinking, overeating and unsafe sex.
Our obsession with happiness may reflect a sense that our lives lack meaning, but pursuing happiness is absolutely not the solution to that problem.
At the next MONTHLY MEETING OF THE MIND (& BRAIN), we’ll talk about the difference between happiness and satisfaction (and why satisfaction is a better target to aim at), dispense with some of the many myths about the benefits of happiness, and take a few moments to contemplate the coming year.