Want to feel better? Try doing something nice for someone else. Here's why.
“Americans are guaranteed the right to ‘pursue happiness’ for themselves,” say the researchers, led by Liudmila Titova and Kennon Sheldon. “But might they be better off if they pursued happiness for others? We compared the two strategies, showing that, ironically, the second pursuit brings more personal happiness than the first.
In another experiment, the researchers asked participants to either recall a time they tried to make someone else happy or themselves. Participants were asked to write a few sentences describing the event and rate how happy it made them feel. Again, participants who were prompted to recall a time they tried to improve the happiness of someone else reported higher levels of remembered happiness than those who wrote about a time when they tried to improve their own happiness.
“The results of these studies extend findings from previous research by showing that people derive boosted personal happiness from attempts to make other people happy — an approach that might seem counterintuitive for a lot of people at first,” state the researchers.The research squares with other studies showing how spending money on others increases one’s happiness more than spending money on oneself.
The researchers offer a good explanation for why they saw the results they did. They suggest that it has to do with our basic psychological need for “relatedness,” or feeling close to others. According to the researchers, an attempt to make another person happy inspires feelings of closeness which, in turn, explains why people end up feeling happy themselves. The same chain of reasoning does not work when attempts at happiness or mood enhancement are self-directed.
Furthermore, this research adds another bullet point to a growing list of scientifically vetted techniques aimed at improving happiness. For instance, other emerging research has found that increasing our sense of