Why doesn’t money make you happier?

We’ve all been told a million times that having a lot of money won’t make you happy - or no happier, that is, than having just enough money. After enough (to keep the wolves from the door, the rent paid, and some honey in the cupboard), money seems not to make much difference to levels of happiness at all. Moreover, research has shown that, in many cases, rich people seem to be less happy.

"Although gold dust is precious, when it gets in your eyes it obscure your vision.!

His-Tang Chih Tsang, Zen Master (735-814)

So why doesn't having more money make us happier? New research by Jordi Quoidbach and colleagues* suggests that the answer lies, at least in part, in how rich people lose touch with their ability to truly appreciate or savour life's pleasures.

Savouring is a way of increasing and prolonging our positive experiences: taking time to experience the wonderful taste of a fresh apple, for example, or the beauty of the sky at night, or the way a good joke can make you crack up so your whole body ripples. Being aware of the effect of these good things and taking the time to appreciate them, however minor they might be, is what will turn an ordinary day into a day in which a number of wonderful things happened to you. Being aware of, and appreciating, the small delights of life is what makes people happier, not money. And is also why the habit of recalling Three Good Things (Happiness Habit No. 6) in our Habits of Happiness Experiment works.

So why, then, don't rich people savour these things, if it feels so good?
It's obviously not for a lack of delightful things because rich people probably have easier access to the finer things in life, as well as more time to savour them (I’m obviously thinking of gourmet restaurants and African sunsets here). The basic idea is that when you have the money to eat at fancy restaurants every night and buy designer clothes whenever you want, those experiences diminish the enjoyment you get out of the simpler, more everyday pleasures, like the smell of a sausage in the pan cooked by a friend or the bargain you got on Ebay.

"He who is richest is content with least, for content is the wealth of nature."

Socrates (469 - 399 BC)

When you have more than enough money to buy whatever it is you think you want, that want has lost all its flavour - it’s just another thing you can have. Wanting something implies the possibility of not getting it, surely. But if you know you can have whatever you want, then the desire, as well as the pleasure of getting it, has been diminished.  

So that’s why having more than ‘enough’ money won't make you happier, and can also be bad for you.

One way rich people can offset this disadvantage is using their money for the good of others. Philanthropy has its rewards - as you can find out from reading about Happiness Habit No 4, Spreading Happiness.


Quoidbach, J., et al.,(2010) Money giveth, money taketh away: The dual effect of wealth on happiness. Psychological Science, 21, 759-763

Posted by Annabel

Three Good Things - Happiness Habit No.6

Research has shown that about 50% of our happiness is a result of genetics and about 10% can be accounted for by circumstances.That leaves 40% which is a direct result of our behaviour and ways of thinking that can be influenced*

That’s a significant amount of our happiness that we can do something about. The question, of course, is how to go about improving our happiness levels, and more importantly, improving them so that they last, and become a part of our overall outlook and experience of life.

Dr Martin Seligman, leading light of Positive Psychology, and his research team have scientifically tested some hundred “interventions” claiming to improve happiness. They found that recalling Three Good Things that happened that day increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for six months after the single week of testing. If participants actively continued the exercise on their own and beyond the prescribed one-week period, it appeared to keep raising happiness month by month after the first week.

Habit 6 in our Happiness Habits Experiment asks you to write down each evening, three things that went well that day; and reasons – preferably to do with you – why they went well. As you write them down, recall and relive the positive feelings you had as they were happening. If it works for you, keep doing it every day beyond the initial seven – or as often as you remember. If you get into the habit of writing Three Good Things twice a week for the rest of the year, you’ll have clocked up nearly Three Hundred Good Things that have happened to you.

Initial responses from participants in our experiment who adopted this habit have reported positively although many also commented that they found it a chore to have to write the three good things down. Whilst research has shown that writing increases the effectiveness of this habit, if you find it a chore then simply think of three good things that have happened during the day. I do this as I get ready to go to bed and find it also helps with getting to sleep.

So why does the habit of Three Good Things work?

There is a lot more research now on the way in which even fleeting thoughts and feelings can leave their mark on your brain and affect how you experience life. The more positive the thoughts and feelings you have, the happier you will become. Unfortunately, it appears that our brains preferentially register, store and recall unpleasant experiences over positive experiences; even when positive experiences outnumber the negative. And this in turn can, and does, lead to unhappiness. One way to override this is to foster positive experiences by paying special attention to the good things that happen to us, or that we see happen around us.

You need to actively search out for and notice the good things, particularly the little things that we often take for granted: the way children seem to laugh and play whenever they have the chance, the way the postman always says hello when you bump into him, the warmth of the sun - to name a few that I just noticed. It’s the little things that matter - we aren’t talking about big events. 

And when you alight upon a pleasant experience then it’s important to savour it. The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the stronger the trace in memory. So if something good happens, however small, let the positive feeling it brings wash over you and then store it for later use.

Paying special attention to the good in your life is not about denying the hard things or putting a superficial gloss on things. It’s about recognising the need for balance. Given our brains preference for paying attention to negative experiences, positive experiences need all the help they can get.

'Happiness is round, sadness is square'  

 from the spanish 'Tristeza nao tem fim, felicidade sim', suggesting that

Happiness rolls away, but sadness stays

*Lyubomirsky,Sonya. The How of Happiness (New York: Penguin Press, 2007)

Posted by Annabel

How to be happy - tips from recent research

It appears that people suffering with mild to moderate depression focus too much on the bad and the sad*, and that socially anxious people tend to remember negative rather than positive experiences*. When trained to shift their attention, both groups experienced a major improvement.

In the case of the research on depression, sad faces seemed particularly attractive to people with mild to moderate depression, whereas non-depressed people found neutral or happy faces more attractive. The question is whether the increased attention paid by depressed people to unhappy or sad themes is simply a byproduct of depression or might it be a cause?

Researchers looked at the question of whether biased attention towards sadness plays a maintaining role in depression and, more specifically, they looked at the question of  whether modifying the attention for sadness, by training participants to shift their attention toward neutral stimuli, could reduce depressive symptoms.

The study provided evidence for the first time that training attention away from unhappy or sad stimuli to neutral stimuli reduces depressive symptoms. In addition, these effects lasted beyond the duration of training. Perhaps most notably, these results provide additional evidence that, rather than being by-products or symptoms of depression, attentional biases towards sad themes play a causal role in the maintenance of depressive symptoms.

These findings worked with people with mild to moderate cases of depression, and those are also the people for whom anti-depressants often don’t work. Since we are all prone to episodes of mild depression, it may well be worth remembering to keep a tab on the amount of attention you pay to sad or unhappy events - and try to stop yourself.

In the study that looked at people who suffer from social anxiety, results showed that socially anxious individuals more easily forget socially positive words and experiences than do non-anxious individuals. It’s not that socially anxious individuals have fewer positive experiences than non-anxious individuals, it’s just that they appear not to recall them as readily.

Martin Seligman’s research is worth noting here. He found that the habit of writing down Three Good Things that went well each day increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms for six months after the single week of testing.

So if you can get into the habit of writing Three Good Things that went well, and reasons - preferably to do with you - why they went well, even if you only manage it twice a week, you’ll have clocked up over Three Hundred Good Things that have happened to you in a year.

The first and last Steps of The Real Secret "Choose to be Happy" and "Smell the Roses" give you Habits that promote focusing on the positive and have been shown to raise happiness levels. Get your copy from Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk in paperback or Kindle



* Tony T. Wells and Christopher G. Beevers (2010) Biased Attention and Dysphoria : Manipulating selective attention reduces subsequent depressive symptoms Cognition and Emotion, Vol. 24 (4)
* Chi-wen Liang et al., (2011) Absence of a positive bias in social anxiety: The application of a directed forgetting paradigm" Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, Vol. 42 (2)

Post by Annabel