KEY POINTS

• Some drivers in our lives are destructive or keep us from reaching our potential.
• We can think of common drivers likes steps on a ladder from most negative to most positive.
• By acknowledging your drivers, you have the opportunity to focus on and change them.

When you step back and look at the landscape of your life, what’s drives you? What shapes what you do, not in terms of priorities—the things you focus on—but the engine that pushes your life along?

Seeing our lives as being driven is not new to psychology. Freud mapped out his 5 stages of development: oral, anal, phallic, genital, that not only propel a child’s development but can shape the adult’s.¹ And Maslow became famous for his Hierarchy of Needs, which moves up from the biological to self-actualizing.² As these authors point out, there are good and bad drivers, but each sets the pace, the tone of your life. You can choose what drives you, but the challenge is that you don’t choose. Instead, you accept what you get, or get used to, and call it life. You can change that, but first, you need to know where you stand.

Here are some of the most common drivers, ranked from those with the most significant positive impact (passions) to those providing the most negative impact (addictions). The line separates what we might consider adverse mental health from the positive.

Passions / Purpose

Goals

Routines

______________

Emotionally Driven / Shoulds / Self-Criticism

Anxiety / Depression

Addictions

Here’s how they break down:

Addictions

Here we think of alcoholism, drugs, sex, workaholism. What makes them addictive is that they kidnap your brain. Rational thinking goes offline, your midbrain pleasure center takes over and you just do what you do because you do it. You’re the passenger, and your addiction is running your life.

Anxiety / Depression

Unfortunately, this is the driver for too many of us. According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, anxiety is the number one mental health problem in the U.S. affecting 18 percent of the population.³ It can take many forms—panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, phobias. But regardless of the form, the impact is the same—your life is derailed. You worry, you avoid, you feel compelled to do things that you know are irrational, occupying too much of your time and mind.

Depression is the cousin of anxiety. Often, they go hand-in-hand. Worry leads to feeling overwhelmed, which can lead to feeling stuck or trapped, leading to feeling hopeless. When one or both of these take over, you are either always thinking about the what-ifs of the future or regretful and trapped by the past. The present dissolves into a blur.

Emotionally Driven / Shoulds / Self-criticism

While these are not formally diagnosable conditions, each has a negative impact on your life. Folks who are emotionally driven tend to run their lives based on how they feel. If they “feel” like cleaning up the house, they do; if they don’t, they don’t. While there’s an apparent spontaneity in their lives, they also struggle with the discipline needed to get things done that are difficult or necessary. They miss deadlines, problems get swept under the rug, they can seem to be unreliable to others.

Those driven by too many shoulds can go too far in the other direction. Rules run their lives. They can seem rigid with their black and white thinking and may feel guilty for breaking the rules. Because the rules are usually inherited from others, running your life this way often keeps you out of touch with your deeper needs and wants.

Finally, self-criticism is the bully who beats you up when you break the rules. Rather than enjoying your life, you spend much of your time trying to stay out of trouble with yourself.

Routines

Routines are useful. Without them, our anxiety goes up and we are essentially forced to invent each day from scratch. But if your days become too routinized, we’re running on autopilot; there’s too little spontaneity, few opportunities for joy. Life is safe but bland.

Goals

Setting goals and working towards them are good antidotes to routine’s downsides. You are proactive rather than reactive, creative rather than staid. But you can undermine your goals if you are emotionally driven. When the going gets tough and the goals are not your own, you lose enthusiasm, or your expectations are unrealistic. When that happens, it’s easy for anxiety, self-criticism, and depression to take over.

Passions/Purpose

Passion and purpose are at the top of our ladder because they arise from that core of who we are and want to be and carry none of the baggage of the others. When driven by passion and purpose, we are honest with ourselves and others. There is a natural integrity as our inner and outer lives reflect each other. We have the discipline to do what we want and need to do, yet can change our minds and be spontaneous without guilt or self-criticism.

So, when you step back and look at your life, what are your drivers? What keeps you from moving up that ladder? What do you need to do to reach greater fulfillment? How can you start today?

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We spend a large portion of our lives searching for things that make us happy.

What works? That depends, but psychologists and happiness researchers have identified a few common elements that tend to be found in happy people. Here are three recent findings from the field of happiness science that may help guide you to a brighter, happier future.

Pillar #1: Be autonomous.

Money can’t buy happiness. But research generally shows a positive association between income and happiness.

What might we learn from high wealth individuals about how to optimize our own happiness? One insight comes from research exploring the way wealthy people choose to work and spend their time.

Scientists at Maastricht University, Harvard Business School, and Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam surveyed 863 high net worth individuals and 1,232 non-high net worth individuals, looking for similarities and differences in the way the wealthy spent their time, and how this influenced their happiness.

They found fewer differences between the wealthy and non-wealthy than they expected. For instance, both groups spent approximately the same amount of time engaging in leisure activities, working and commuting, and using their phone and computer.

There was one key difference that emerged, however. The scientists found that millionaires were more likely to spend time on work activities that offered more personal autonomy—that is, work they decided to do themselves instead of following the guidance of others. This was shown to relate to higher life satisfaction.

Another interesting finding was that millionaires tended to spend more time engaging in “active” leisure pursuits (for example, praying, socializing, exercising, and volunteering) while non-millionaires engaged in more passive leisure activities (watching TV, napping and resting, and doing nothing).

Pillar #2: Tune into your “sense of mattering.”

Happiness comes in two forms. There is in-the-moment happiness, which is derived from things that give us immediate pleasure, like eating a chocolate bar or taking a hot shower on a cold day. There’s also the related idea of life meaning, fulfillment, or reflective happiness. We experience this type of happiness when we reach a milestone or create something we are proud of. It may not be as state-altering as in-the-moment happiness, but its effects can be just as potent, especially in the long run.

While both types of happiness are important, the science suggests that life meaning becomes more important to us over time. Fortunately, a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology offers guidance on how to improve it.

“Meaning is the web of connections, understandings, and interpretations that help us comprehend our experience and formulate plans directing our energies to the achievement of our desired future,” state the researchers, led by Vlad Costin of the University of Sussex. “Meaning provides us with the sense that our lives matter, that they make sense, and that they are more than the sum of our seconds, days, and years.”

From this definition, the researchers extracted three core themes: coherence, purpose, and mattering.

• Coherence refers to the process of making sense of the world and one’s experiences in it. Feeling a “sense of order” and “comprehensibility” are key facets of life coherence.
• Purpose describes the feeling of having a life goal, or multiple life goals, and working towards those goals. It is understood as a future-oriented motivational state and involves having a vision for how one’s future should be.
• Mattering refers to the belief that one’s actions are making a difference in the world and that one’s life is significant and worth living.

The scientists tested which of these three factors might be most predictive of life meaning. Using a sample of 126 British adults, they found that mattering was most strongly associated with life meaning. Purpose was also predictive of life meaning but to a lesser extent. Coherence, on the other hand, appeared to be more of a consequence of life meaning than a cause.

How should we go about improving our sense of mattering? While there’s no easy answer, a good place to start is by thinking about the questions that define the concept of mattering. They are: “my life is inherently valuable,” “even a thousand years from now, it would still matter whether I existed or not,” “whether my life ever existed matters even in the grand scheme of the universe,” and “I am certain that my life is of importance.”

Other research suggests that mattering is especially important in our professional lives. Employees who scored higher on the agree-disagree scale below, for instance, expressed higher job satisfaction and engagement.

1. My work contributes to my organization’s success.
2. The quality of my work makes a real impact on my organization.
3. My work influences my organization’s functioning.
4. My organization praises my work publicly.
5. My co-workers praise my work.
6. I am well known for the quality of my work in my organization.
7. My work has made me popular in my workplace.

“When employees feel like they matter to their organization, they are more satisfied with their jobs and life, more likely to occupy leadership positions, more likely to be rewarded and promoted, and less likely to quit,” state the authors of this research, led by Andrew Reece of the company, BetterUp, and David Yaden of the University of Pennsylvania. “These findings lend weight to the basic value of mattering in organizational contexts.”

Pillar #3: When it comes to happiness, age is on your side.

Youth, they say, is wasted on the young. Fortunately, the same cannot be said about happiness.

Most research suggests that happiness, well-being, and life satisfaction increase gradually from early adulthood to middle age. And, a recent study published in the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science echoes this finding with respect to optimism.

To arrive at this conclusion, researchers at the University of California, Davis, analyzed data from a large sample of U.S. adults between the ages of 26 and 71. At four time points across a seven-year period, participants were asked to complete the Life Orientation Test, a widely used and validated measure of optimism. A modified version of the Life Orientation Test is shown below.

1. In uncertain times, I usually expect the best.
2. If something can go wrong for me, it probably won’t.
3. I’m always optimistic about my future.
4. I mostly expect things to go my way.
5. I often count on good things happening to me.
6. Overall, I expect more good things to happen to me than bad.

The researchers used people’s responses from this scale to plot the trajectory of optimism across the lifespan. Consistent with prior work, they found optimism to be lowest in people’s 20s, then rise steadily into people’s 30s and 40s, peaking in people’s 50s, and gradually declining after that. Specifically, it was at age 55 that people experienced the highest levels of optimism.

“We found that the trajectory of optimism from ages 26 to 71 was characterized by normative age-graded increases, at a rate of about .15 standard deviations per decade, before plateauing around age 55,” state the researchers. “Together, these findings suggest that the development of optimism across the adult lifespan follows an inverted U shape, with a peak in late midlife, similar to other positive personality traits such as self-esteem and satisfaction with life.”

Conclusion: New psychological research suggests that autonomy, mattering, and age are three important components of happiness. While the age component will take care of itself, it’s up to you to guide your life in a direction that will enhance your sense of mattering and autonomy.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has cheated us out of all the good times we live for—the weddings, the vacations, the graduations and celebrations. Our work lives have been upended and our livelihoods threatened. There are people we love who we haven’t seen in months and some we’ll never see again; millions of us are mourning someone close who’s been taken by this awful disease. These overwhelming losses have had a devastating effect on our mental health, with rates of depression, anxiety and even suicidality surging around the world.

The good news is that there’s a lot to be hopeful for in the new year. With a vaccine on the way, there’s a real hope that we’ll soon be returning to the way of life we miss so much. But we can’t toss out our masks just yet. Even under the best public health scenarios, we’re in for several more months of cancelled plans, social distancing, and skyrocketing COVID cases, all during the coldest and darkest times of the year. For a while at least, 2021 is going to feel like 2020 2.0.

So how do we get it through it? Most of us realize that we need to take steps to manage our stress and emotions during tough times. The problem is we tend to go about managing those feelings in surprisingly ineffective ways. If you listen to my podcast, The Happiness Lab, you’ll know this is a common refrain. Our minds have really bad intuition about what we should do to become hap- pier and feel better. So even when we put in some work to improve our well-being, we often wind up doing it wrong.

But there is a better, scientific approach to improving our own happiness. Over the last two decades, psychologists have studied the kinds of behaviors and mindsets that really can boost well-being.

I started gathering these scientific findings together long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. It was back in 2018 when I had just come face-to-face with a different mental health crisis: the one facing my students at Yale. I had just taken on a new role as a Head of College, which meant living with students on campus and seeing their daily lives up close. I witnessed the high rates of stress and anxiety my students were facing first hand. Too many of the young people I cared about were lonely, stressed about the future and intensely worried about their grades. But it wasn’t just Yale students who were struggling. A 2018 survey of college students nationally reported that more than 40 percent were so depressed it was difficult to function, more than 60 percent had experienced overwhelming anxiety, and more than one in 10 had seriously considered suicide in the previous year.

Faced with these awful statistics, I wanted to do something to help. I decided to create a new class on the science of happiness—one that gave students practical, evidence-based tips for reducing their stress and improving their well-being. And the students showed up in droves. Over a thousand students attended class the first week. We had to move to a concert hall. In the end, it became the largest class in Yale’s history with just under a quarter of the entire student body registered. The popularity of the class prompted Yale to share the happiness class more broadly. We put a six week version of the course—called The Science of Well-Being—on Coursera.org so that anyone in the world could take it for free. Hundreds of thousands of people signed up.

But that was all before COVID hit. Starting in March of 2020, en- rollment in my online happiness class doubled, tripled—then octupled. In the middle of a pandemic, more than three million people signed up to take an Ivy League class about how to feel happier.

But did it work? Could taking a scientific approach to happiness help people feel better in the midst of a deadly pandemic?

My team and I are still compiling the results formally, which requires months of careful data analysis and review. But I had a chance to see for myself the powerful impact the class was having on my learners’ well-being. The evidence, it turns out, was there in my university mailbox.

“Your mailbox is overflowing.” So began the terse email I received from our psychology department administrative assistant. “And there is more mail on the counter, too. Please stop by some point.” With so many COVID restrictions on campus, I had neglected to pick up my office mail for a few months. I expected to be greeted by the normal stack of flyers and junk mail. Instead I found letter after letter from people writing to thank me. I saw just how powerful the lessons I was teaching could be.

Through happy tears, I read literally hundreds of stories of my students using what I taught them to make it through the anxiety and frustration of the pandemic dark times. But one story in particular struck me, from Susan, an 81-year old retired social studies teacher. Susan had spent most of 2019 nursing her beloved hus- band before he died that Christmas Eve. They’d been in love since seventh grade. “He was the kindest, sweetest and—I think—most handsome man,” she wrote. Susan was devastated by her loss, and thought things couldn’t possibly get worse. And then COVID hit.

“Your psychology of happiness was a godsend.” Susan decided to put the evidence-based tips I taught in class into practice in her daily life. Did these new practices fully eradicate the pain of her loss? Of course not. But when 2020 plunged Susan into the darkest time of her life, the five main takeaways of my class really helped. By incorporating these tips into her life, she said, she wound up significantly happier than she otherwise would have been. And that’s the message I heard over and over again from all those let- ters: scientific research gives us a set of small practices that we can use to make things a little better. And these days, a little bit of happiness counts for a lot.

So what are these five practices I share with my students? Here are the key ideas that worked for Susan and—as you’ll see from the evidence below—are backed up by science.

Get Social

One of the many cruelties of coViD-19 is that it has robbed us of one of the primary behaviors we can engage in to improve our happiness: being with other people.

When psychologists Ed Diener and Marty Seligman looked at people who scored in the highest 10th percentile on happiness surveys, they discovered that there was one activity that set happy people apart from the rest of us—happy people were more social. The results were so strong that these researchers deemed being around other people as a necessary condition for very high happiness.

We think that solitude feels good, especially when we’re having a tough time, but in truth being with other people will almost always make us feel better. Even if those people are strangers.

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Excessive worrying can hurt your well-being and lead to a state of chronic anxiety or stress. It can also stress your relationships, harm your self-confidence, and hurt your career. And stopping worrying is not always easy, either.

Worry involves negative thought patterns — patterns that we’ve used over and over again. This can make them deeply ingrained in our brains. So stopping worrying involves confronting our beliefs, values, and emotions. Here are five steps you can use to put an end to worrying.

1. Explore the origins of your worry. One way you can tell whether your worry is about the situation you’re in or the way you think is by exploring whether the worry is general or specific. If you worry about one specific thing (e.g., work, kids, money) but you don’t worry about everything, you should consider taking constructive action to change your situation.

But if you’re like me, and you worry about just about everything, then working on your “worrying thoughts” is a good first step. Either way, it’s good to investigate the origins of your worry so you can gain self-awareness.

2. Identify your unique worry patterns. Here are some thought patterns that lead to worry. Some people will find that they have all of these patterns; other people will just have a few. But by understanding what thoughts cause our worries, we can more easily resolve them.

• Catastrophizing is when we expect the worst possible outcomes.
• Minimization is when we downplay the good things.
• All-or-nothing thinking is when we interpret a situation as all good or all bad.
• Overgeneralization is when we believe that having one negative experience means we will always have this negative experience.
• Negative attention is when we focus on the negative things that went wrong rather than focusing on the positive things.
• Rumination is when we think about something distressing over and over again
• Mind reading is when we believe we know what others are thinking even though we haven’t actually asked them what they think.

Ask yourself: Which of these thought patterns do you have?

3. Stop worry by moving your body. When you worry, your sympathetic nervous system is activated (it’s the fight or flight system). Even if you completely stop worrying, it won’t get those neurochemicals out of your body right away. That’s why cardiovascular exercise can really help with worry.

Exercise activates the parasympathetic nervous system (in the longer term) which relieves stress and helps calm the body, returning it to its emotional baseline.

4. Try mindfulness to calm worries. The next step to stop worrying is by cultivating mindfulness. By sitting quietly, noticing your thoughts, and letting them go, mindfulness can help redirect worries. Over time, mindfulness can train the mind to calm the body so you don’t get so stuck in worries.

To practice mindfulness meditation all you need is a comfy spot. I find that a mediation video helps me stay focused while doing mindfulness.

Here’s a helpful mindfulness meditation video for a worried mind:

5. Talk to someone about your worries. Talking with a trusted counselor or friend can help you gain more perspective on your worry—Is it really worth worrying about? How can you think about this situation differently? Keeping your worries to yourself can lead them to build up and become overwhelming. By talking to someone, you can release some of the pressure.

But be cautious of who you talk to about your worries. Other worriers may make things worse. So just be thoughtful about who you share your worries with.

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