Secrets of living

I am not a lifestyle guru but, then again, neither are most of those persons who purport to advise other people on how to solve all their problems and make their lives perfect. For the most part, such gurus are conmen (and women) who offer superficial, feel-good mantras whose effects are the same as fad diets — the extra weight is shed for a time but soon returns. Nonetheless, there are genuine researchers who have discovered the factors that help create a good and long life. Some of these requirements are beyond our control, but many of them are things we can choose. This is because the things we imagine bring happiness — looks, wealth, fame — actually don’t. But there are specific social and personal factors which greatly increase your prospects for living the kind of life that, at its end, you can look back on with satisfaction.

Many of these initial factors, like I said, are beyond anyone’s control. For example, being the first child of a 30-year-old woman gives you some advantage in life. This is because women who have their first child at 30 or so tend to have children who are slightly more intelligent and who are more likely to be healthy. Researchers aren’t sure why children born to older parents tend to have slightly higher IQs, but it may simply be that women who have their first child at an older age take better care of themselves, are more likely to have a higher education, eat healthier while pregnant, and feed their baby more sensibly afterwards.

The other main factor that contributes to a good life has to do with where you live. The citizens of wealthy democracies are generally happier than citizens of poor dictatorships. Common sense says this is obvious, but the correlations are also quite subtle — the kind of parliament a country has, or its rate of inflation, actually influences the population’s happiness levels. According to economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stultz, authors of Happiness and Economics, “The finding that economic conditions systematically and strongly influence happiness stands in stark contrast to the view that happiness is a purely personal issue or depends solely on personal factors.” Frey and Stultz found that democratic participation rights has significant positive effects on happiness; they also found that it is possible to calculate a trade-off between unemployment and inflation so as to increase the overall level of the population’s satisfaction. “The evidence suggests that the level of cooperation and trust of a society improves health.” In other words, if you want to be as happy as possible, don’t be born in Trinidad and Tobago right now.

Then there are those factors which you can control, such as reading. In Aging with Grace, researcher David Snowdon and his team discovered that biographical essays written when nuns were in their late teens and early 20s were very strong predictors of who would remain mentally sharp and physically healthy in old age. The trait that predicted who would not get Alzheimer’s (to which women are more prone than men) was ‘idea density’ — which is the number of propositions per ten words. For both sexes, however, getting an education helps ensure that you live longer and will be healthier in old age.

This is especially the case if you have a PhD, although researchers have not yet figured out what the mechanism that makes this work is. Medical researcher Michael Marmot, author of Status Syndrome, suggests that “higher educational status gives people more control over their lives.” That control helps reduce stress, hence leading to greater health and longevity. Another factor that is under most people’s control is marriage. Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his book Authentic Happiness, notes that married people tend to be happier than single ones (although Seligman warns that the effect may not be causal — that is, it may be that happy people tend to get married, not that marriage makes people happier). But married people also tend to live longer. Seligman also suggests avoiding negative events and emotions (although this, interestingly, contributes only weakly to happiness); getting a rich social network (a strong effect, but not necessarily causal); and getting religion (which has moderate effects on happiness). Seligman makes a distinction between happiness and gratification.

“In contrast to getting in touch with feelings, the defining criterion of gratification is the absence of feeling, loss of self-consciousness, and total engagement,” he writes. “The pleasures come easily, and the gratifications (which result from the exercise of personal strengths) are hard-won.” The list of factors which doesn’t contribute to happiness is, in a way, even more interesting. Making more money doesn’t make you happier, once you have enough money to be secure. Also, more materialistic people tend to be less happy. Even staying healthy doesn’t necessarily make you feel happier, since your subjective perception of health is more important than your actual health in this regard. Obviously, though, being actually healthy is an essential part of a good life. In Aging Well, psychiatrist George E Valliant draws on data from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the most in-depth study of aging ever done, to list the protective factors that help a person maintain good health well into old age.

These are: not smoking or abusing alcohol; keeping your weight down; and regular exercise. However, there are also non-physical factors which contribute to good health. Having a future orientation is important — that is, anticipating, planning, and hoping. People who embrace attitudes such as gratitude and forgiveness, seeing the glass as half-full, also tend to age more healthily. Empathy is also an important trait, as is doing things with other people. And Marmot takes us back to choosing the kind of society you live in. “The evidence suggests that the level of cooperation and trust of a society improves health,” he writes — which again makes TT an unsalubrious place to be in right now. 

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