What is determining our happiness?

We keep reading, study, work, exploration, competition, busy, and overcome all kinds of difficult and dangerous obstacles. The ultimate goal is nothing more than thinking about a happy life.

Happiness is the fundamental issue of life, but few people can point out the path to happiness. What is the determination of happiness? Family, money, power, achievement, or what?

Professor Zhu Rui of the Yangtze River Business School tried to answer these questions in his new "Logic of Decision -making: Behavior Psychology in Life", hoping to inspire you.

Author | Zhu Rui

Source | "Logic of Decision: Psychology in Life"

The following content is taken from "Logic of Decision -making: Behavior Psychology in Life", and the author authorizes the Yangtze Business School to reprint.

Secret of Happiness

The United Nations will release a "World Happiness Report" every year.

You must be curious, which country's happiness index is ranked ahead?

According to data from 2017-2019, the country with the highest happiness index in the world is Finland, with a score of 7.81 points (this measurement standard is 0-10 points, and 10 points represent the happiest life).

Following Finland's two to ten countries are Denmark, Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand, Austria and Luxembourg.

The top countries are in Europe, and they are mainly Northern European countries.

What's more interesting is that the six important factors listed by the United Nations' studies, these six factors add up to explain the difference between the happiness between 75%of the country.

These six factors are:

Per capita GDP: The role of money.

Health life life: Are you healthy and longevity.

Social support: If you encounter difficulties, do you have relatives or friends to rely on; you can get help at any time.

Freedom of making decisions: Can you make decisions in life freely?

Generological and generous: For example, people's public welfare behavior.

Corruption and the overall trust of the society: For example, people feel that there is a widespread corruption in the government and business fields.

It is worth mentioning that the latter four of these six factors are related to the social environment. The influence of their combination and the influence of the first two factors -that is, the influence of money and health life - same size.

In other words, except for money, whether you are happy depends on whether you live in a good social environment, especially whether you have a better intimate relationship and whether you have love.

If you know these countries in Nordic, you will find that their per capita GDP is not the highest globally, and they are behind the United States. However, their national happiness is the highest. The main reason is that in these countries, people have a better social environment.

People will spend a lot of time with their families and friends. The community is very important in daily life. The intimacy is an important reason for the happiness of the Nordic people.

In fact, intimacy can not only explain the happiness of the Nordic people, but also apply it elsewhere in the world.

Harvard University has a well -known long -term experiment. From 1938, 724 men have been followed in 1938. They have been followed up for 75 years, and then they are happy through a large amount of data research.

Interestingly, the original 724 people were recruited from two very different people. There are 268 people who are studying in Harvard in that year. This group of people can be described as an elite generation. The other 456 people, from the poorest areas in Boston, did not even have hot water.

If you let you predict, whoever is happier after decades, you must have a probability that you will bet in Harvard's undergraduate group.

In the next 75 years, the researchers will follow up every two years, send questions to these people, conduct home visits, do physical examinations, scan their brain, and visit their family and friends.

75 years is a long process. After graduating from university, these people have experienced World War II, work, family, children, divorce, remarry, illness, death.

From these rich and valuable data, researchers have found that those factors that really affect happiness have nothing to do with wealth, status, and reputation. It has nothing to do with you reading Harvard or slums 75 years ago. But good social relationships can not only make you happier, but also make you healthier.

In other words, intimate relationships, or simply, is love, is the best indicator for predicting your happiness! This discovery coincides with the report of the United Nations.

Regarding intimate relationships, the existing psychological research brings me three points of inspiration, and I will share with you here:

First, intimacy not only helps improve happiness, but also helps your health.

In contrast, loneliness is harmful to you. Those who have close relationships with their family, colleagues, and friends are happier and healthier than lonely people. Lonely people not only have a low sense of happiness, but also the brain function also declines earlier, and it is more prone to aging.

Second, intimate relationships refer to the number of friends, but the quality of friends.

There may be thousands of people in your circle of friends, and you have to attend the party every weekend, but you are in a low mood. When you encounter difficulties, you can't find a person who can communicate with confidence. This shows that you do not have social support, there is no high -quality intimate relationship.

Some people may not seem to be popular and introverted, but as long as he has a friend who can truly trust and rely on, as long as he needs, friends will come forward, and we think he has high -quality intimate intimacy The relationship is also likely to be happier. Third, I think it is very important, that is, the intimate relationship contains two basic elements:

One is to cultivate love;

The other is to find a lifestyle, even in adversity, it will not destroy love and hurt intimate relationships.

People often ignore the second element. The love that has been cultivated is sometimes fragile. When we encounter discomfort, when we walk into the trough, we often show the worst side of those who care about us and love us the most.

A good relationship cannot guarantee that your life is smooth, but if you maintain a positive attitude in the trough and stand with the people you love to overcome difficulties, instead of accusing each other and hurting each other. The intimate relationship and the love deepen one layer, they will also become the foundation of your happiness.

Creativity

It took a lot of space to explain the intimate relationship. It is an important factor that makes people happy. Of course, in addition, there is a series of other controlled factors that make you happier.

Below I want to share with you the other two factors that make me deeply experience: one is creative significance, and the other is to learn to be grateful.

Speaking of meaning, you will find that those who feel that they do what they do and have ideals in their lives are often people with a high heart and a high sense of happiness -although they are not necessarily materially materialized.

For example, my parents' generation has experienced adversity such as natural disasters and material scarcity in three years, but their happiness seems not lower than us. This is because they have the spirit of pursuing and ideal, and can surpass the suffering of life.

Great ideals are undoubtedly a way of creating the meaning of life, but in fact there are many ways to allow us to create and pursue meaningful life in daily life.

For example, if I do research, the biggest fun is to constantly break the existing cognition and discover the truth of the world -how people think and decide.

Exploring the unknown itself is a very meaningful thing. The biggest happiness in this process is to obtain the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment of new knowledge through learning and research.

At the same time, many studies have shown that things that can bring you greater significance and a greater sense of accomplishment are often transcending self and altruism.

I have seen an exclusive interview with a character before, talking about an ophthalmologist who spends half a year a year and a public welfare organization to Africa to help ordinary people there to treat eye diseases.

When asked why he spent 6 months of volunteers every year, the doctor's answer made me remember so far. He paused for a moment, and said frankly:

"Actually, it is a very selfish reason, because this is the happiest thing to make me happiest."

Helping others can bring happiness to themselves, which is already a phenomenon that has been repeatedly confirmed in psychology. Whether it is an individual or an enterprise, altruism may be the ultimate source of creative meaning.

learn to be grateful

In the end, I also want to share with you the importance of gratitude to happiness.

Speaking of this topic, I want to introduce a classmate when I was a PhD. Her name is Lan, a Vietnamese American girl who likes children very much. Later research is also related to young psychology.

In research, she found that now children are more material, such as like to compare who is richer, who has the latest generation of mobile phones. However, a large number of studies have shown that excessive material pursuits will bring a series of problems, such as depression, drug use, and other behavior problems.

So how can children less material?

Lan's research found that children know how to be grateful, and developing gratitude can reduce their pursuit of material and make them more willing to help others.

She recruited some young people aged 11-17 to do an experiment: asking some of them for two consecutive weeks, writing a gratitude diary every day to record people and things worthy of gratitude every day; Essence

After two weeks end, children have the opportunity to give themselves from the paid to the experiment to donate to the charity organization. The results showed that those children who had written the diary for two weeks donated more money.

My friend explained that when you practice gratitude every day, you are actually recognizing your family and friends, and you are also strengthening your social network. This will make you easier to have a close relationship, and the intimacy is to increase happiness. An important factor in feeling.

A psychologist once drawn a scientific happy map to explain what to determine whether a person is happy and happy. According to this happy map, what do you find?

First, genes are important, and it accounts for 50%of the interpretation ratio. This is also the reason why some people are born with Lotte, and some people are naturally easy to be depressed. We cannot control this part.

Secondly, you usually feel that you will have a great impact on the living environmental factors, such as wealth, work, marriage, and children. In fact, only 10%of the factors affecting happiness.

In addition, 40%of the decisive factor is our thinking, attitude, and behavior.

40%is a large proportion, which shows that we can largely control our happiness and create happiness for ourselves.Happiness is like a healthy body. In fact, there are no secrets, and there are no shortcuts.

All you need to do is to do those correct things every day. Taking time and energy to create the meaning of life in the process of continuous learning and helping others in the process of constantly learning and helping others, and practice gratitude every day.

It sounds very simple, but how easy it is to persist in doing it?Intersection

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