Joy to the world?
The World Happiness Report is out, with a surprising picture of global resilience
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one — everyone could use a little bit more happiness these days. Surprisingly, the most recent World Happiness Report found that 95countries reported overall satisfaction with life in 2020on average with the previous year’s findings, despite the life-altering Covid-19pandemic.
In a conclusion that even surprised its editors, the 2021 World Happiness Report found that, amid global hardship, self-reported life satisfaction across 95 countries on average remained steady in 2020 from the previous year.
The United States saw the same trend - despite societal tumult that yielded a national drop in positive emotions and a rise in negative ones. The country fell one spot, to 19th, in the annual rankings of the report, released Saturday.
The report is good news regarding global resilience, experts say.
“I don’t want to leave an impression that all was well, because it’s not,” said one of the report’s editors, Jeffrey Sachs, an economics professor at Columbia University. But while the use of national averages masks individual well-being disparities, Sachs said, the data suggests that “people have not thrown up their hands about their lives.”
The happiness report relies on the Gallup World Poll, which asks respondents to rate their current life satisfaction on a zero-to-10 “ladder” scale, with a 10 representing “the best possible life for you.” It’s a “longer view” of happiness, as Sachs put it, and its steadiness aligns with what other U.S. Gallup polling and some European polling has found during the pandemic.
In late March to early April of 2020, at the beginning of pandemic restrictions, 58.2% of U.S. respondents rated their current life satisfaction as a 7 or above, Gallup found.
While the number of Americans reporting anxiety and depressive symptoms rose sharply over the course of 2020, that satisfaction number stayed fairly even through December, according to the report, even after further COVID-19 restrictions, pandemic surges, protests over racial injustices and politics, and a divisive presidential election.
All the while, Americans’ expected future happiness remained high: In five surveys since the pandemic began, between 65.8% and 69.2% of respondents said they expected their life satisfaction to be an 8 or above five years into the future, higher than before the pandemic. That suggests an optimism for the future that Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychology professor at the University of California at Riverside, says is “really, really adaptive.”
“We have the most massive changes in social behavior we’ve ever seen in our lifetimes happen during this pandemic,” said Lyubomirsky, author of books such as “The Myths of Happiness” and “The How of Happiness.” “And so I would have expected much, much bigger declines in well-being. And we do not see that.”
It’s not so much that people are doing precisely as well as they were before, experts explain, as that many have adapted to their new situations in ways that might have roughly evened out their well-being. “One of the quotes we use is ‘You aren’t traveling the world, but you’re more likely to have met your neighbors this year,’ “said John Helliwell, another editor of the report and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of British Columbia.
Stressors such as those we’ve experienced this year can encourage people to craft a different, big-picture concept of happiness. And this, psychologists say, can improve resilience. You’ve already likely taken the opportunity to examine your own big picture this past year, but, if you’ve been having difficulty, and because we’re not done with this pandemic, here are some strategies to help.
Look for awe-inducing experiences
When the rover Perseverance touched down on Mars on Feb. 18, Ethan Kross, a professor and director of the Emotion and Self-control Lab at the University of Michigan, felt something powerful: awe.
“When you experience awe, that’s an emotion we have when you’re in the presence of something that’s vast and hard to explain,” said Kross, the recent author of “Chatter.” “Like, I don’t know how the hell we figured out how to land on another planet, right? But it fills me with awe.”
The landing, he recalled, reminded him of life’s bigger (in this case, interplanetarily massive) picture. “What science has shown is that when you experience awe, that leads to a ‘shrinking of the self,’ “Kross explained. “So our own problems feel smaller by comparison.” Perseverance, it seems, helped him summon the same.
You can also find awe stopping at a scenic overlook, watching a sunset or seeing a 1-year-old figure out how to take their first, hesitant steps. A 2018 study, published in the journal Emotion, sent students and military veterans on a whitewater-rafting trip and asked them to record their experiences of six different positive emotions after each day on the river. The extent to which the rafters felt awe, researchers found, most predicted changes in their well-being and stress symptoms a week later.
Seek social support, and give it
It’s no surprise that, according to this year’s happiness report, “the ability to count on others” was a “major” support to life evaluations in 2020.
“Social support is by far one of the best ways to help people cope with any kind of adversity or stress or tragedy,” Lyubomirsky said, and it’s been crucial during the pandemic: drive-by birthdays, neighbors helping the elderly, regular Zoom or Facetime checkins with friends.
But communing with others also expands our perspective. And if we’re facing a problem, or getting down on ourselves, those who know us well often see things we don’t.