Each year, around four in 10 Americans pick New Year’s resolutions. For 2016, the most common resolution was weight loss – followed by getting a better job, exercising more and quitting smoking.
By February, there’s little need to ask if people feel as though they’re failing –grocery receipts can do the talking. When Cornell University researchers tracked per-household purchases from three stores somewhere in the west of New York state, they inferred that Americans typically consume even more daily calories in the post-holiday period – 2 January to 12 March – than they do over Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year.
The problem partly appears to be New Year’s resolutions themselves: healthy foods fly off the shelves early in the year, but these purchases are additional to spending on unhealthy items. At this time of year, Americans not only buy many more calories per person per week than they did before the annual ‘fresh start’ got underway, but they also have bigger grocery bills.
If this sounds like you, there’s plenty of good advice available to help you achieve your goals. But how about pressing reset, and aiming to make 2016 the year in which you started to make changes that, statistically speaking, should improve your odds of becoming happier for the rest of your days?
Like most resolutions, this is easier said than done. One prominent theory in happiness research is the idea that people’s sense of wellbeing is sticky – that, for each of us, genes and early life experiences fix a certain level of happiness as our normal. The choices we make in adulthood can do little to change this ‘set point’. The concept often (but not always) appears to hold for various changes in circumstance – a lottery win, a sudden physical disability. In these cases, after a short period of elation or depression, people tend to become accustomed to their new lot in life, and return to their old selves.
So how could you resolve to shift your normal? To hack how goal-setting alters long term happiness requires something exceptional: standardized measurements of thousands of peoples’ happiness levels over decades, alongside everything that might reasonably account for how good someone feels about life, plus information about how every individual has valued different kinds of medium term goal along the way.
Perhaps surprisingly, this exists. Every year since 1984, the German government has paid for a survey in which a huge crowd of people answer questions about how satisfied they are with their lives. This crowd constitutes a representative sample of the entire country’s households – today the participants number more than 25,000. In the 1980s, the survey extended over West Germany alone; then, just before reunification in 1990, it expanded east of the Berlin Wall. Germans’ personality traits along five dimensions – income, work hours, church attendance, time spent on leisure activities and volunteering – have all been meticulously recorded, year on year. It’s all, well, rather German.
Crunching the numbers reveals happiness levels often remain stubbornly steady for decades. Over 25 years, more than 60% of the participants’ happiness levels wiggled within quite narrow boundaries. A minority of Germans have become gradually less happy. A smaller minority still have become happier over time. Specifically, for about 6% of the population, gains in life satisfaction scores have showed a substantial improvement over 15 to 20 years (for the nerds: that’s an improvement of 1.5 standard deviations).
This 6% is set apart by how they prioritize different life goals.
In some years, the survey participants have provided a score from one to four for the importance they attach to each item on a list of fairly typical medium-term ambitions. These encompass diverse fodder for New Year’s resolutions: career success and gains in material wealth, personal developments, aims for their relationships, and involvement in politics and society.
Germans who have emphasized goals like moving up the career ladder, and earning and owning more, are those who have become progressively less happy over time. Unlike the rest, the 6% have consistently placed a lot of value on spending time with family and getting involved in their communities. In fact, the data suggest that valuing these kind of positive-sum goals (as opposed to the zero-sum goals that the ever-sadder Germans prioritize) matters so much that it’s at least as good for your long-term happiness as getting married.
Depressingly, as far as goal-setting goes, Americans aren’t on track to become happier in the decades to come. Quite the opposite. Researchers from San Diego State University and the University of Georgia report that each recent generation of Americans has valued the kinds of life goals that promote long-term happiness less than generation before it: at about the age of 18, millennials valued them less than generation-Xers did; at the same age, generation-Xers valued them less than baby boomers did.
So when you’re revisiting your New Year’s resolutions this month, focus on what might actually make you content. How about recalibrating the American dream from striving to join the thinnest, most productive or wealthiest 1%, to instead aiming for the happiest 6%?
