Most people will go to great lengths to feel more happiness.
78% of participants in a 2022 survey said they’d even pay a premium for true happiness if it were possible, according to an Oracle Fusion Cloud Customer Experience survey of 12,000 consumers and business leaders.
Stephanie Harrison, a researcher who has studied the science of happiness for the past 10 years, says money and success are not the keys to happiness. What she actually believes can lead to more of the feel-good emotion may surprise you.
“I think the secret to happiness is using who you are to help other people,” Harrison tells CNBC Make It.
“To do that, you have to discover who you are, who you really are, away from the conditioning that we’ve been given by our society. And then you have to figure out the best ways to share that self with other people. It’s really something that you can start to do right now.”
Here’s why Harrison says helping others can lead to more happiness for you and the people you aid in her book, “New Happy.”
Help others and walk away happier
The belief that gaining material things, being better than others and getting tasks done on your own are what will make you happy is rooted in “old happy” values, Harrison says.
New happy, as she calls it, prioritizes working together, asking for help and helping others — which she believes leads to true happiness.
And research supports Harrison’s conclusion.
Psychologists tested this theory in a 2022 study of 122 individuals with symptoms of anxiety and depression by randomly assigning them to either perform acts of kindness, engage in social activities or journal their thoughts for five weeks. By the end of the experiment, the group tasked with doing acts of kindness saw the greatest benefits to their well-being.
“Helping other people is one of our needs. It’s just like a need for connection or for love or for self esteem, we need to go beyond ourselves and feel like we matter and we’re making a difference,” Harrison says.
“The easiest way to do that is through these actions of helping, and at the same time, we also need other people to help us to have our needs satisfied.”
You can start helping others now, she adds, and she provides a list of starting points in her book.
Here are a few ways you can aid others and walk away happier:
- Send a note to a loved one letting them know how much you appreciate them
- Write a nice email to someone praising their work
- Call a friend you haven’t heard from in a while
- Give a call to a store or business that you enjoy and thank them
- Smile at a stranger
- Speak up about a cause that holds value to you
“Helping makes us happy,” Harrison says in her book. “We are here to help each other.”
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