Every spring the United Nations releases the World Happiness Report and each year, since 2012, the United States has fallen in the rankings with both adults and adolescents reporting significantly less happiness than they did in the early 2000’s. While the economy has improved dramatically since the recessions of 2008, and with unemployment the lowest in decades, Americans get less and less happy as a whole each year.

This is not a worldwide trend.

Global poverty rates are falling. Now 87% of people in the world have access to electricity. Global literacy rates have been increasing for decades with 90% of people over the age of 15 able to read. Infant mortality rates are falling, as are teen pregnancy rates. TB and malaria rates have also fallen dramatically. It is unarguable that the quality of life in the world has increased in a measurable fashion over the last two decades, yet in the west we get more and more depressed. According to a Harris poll only a third of Americans report being happy.

This decline in happiness is indicative of the Easterlin Paradox, named after Richard Easterlin, the first economist to study happiness data. Easterlin disovered that at a point in time happiness varies directly with income both among and within nations, but over time happiness does not trend upward as income continues to grow. Essentially as the broader measure of the standard of living improves, we are not getting happier as a nation.

Millions of Americans are literally living what Thoreau quoted decades ago:

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

I realize that there are millions of Americans that are dealing with mental illness and significant personal issues that impact their happiness and I’m not making an attempt to lump everyone together in one big category. Outside of the category of people dealing with mental health and difficult personal situations, there are millions of Americans who are simply not happy or fulfilled.

Why are so many seemingly successful and well-adjusted people unhappy? Why are so many older men in the United States (7 out of 10 suicides are men between the ages of 45 and 65) killing themselves? What goes into each individuals happiness equation?

According to Marci Shimoff in her book Happy For No Reason, most people have a fixed rate of happiness.

“Researchers have found that no matter what happens to you in life, you tend to return to a fixed range of happiness. Like your weight set-point, which keeps the scale hovering around the same number, your happiness set-point will remain the same unless you make a concerted effort to change it.”

The key component is that your “happiness set-point will remain the same unless you make a concerted effort to change it.”

Further from Shimoff:

“Researchers posit that 50% of our set-point comes from genetics while 10% is determined by our circumstances (like our job, marital status, wealth). “The other 40 percent is determined by our habitual thoughts, feelings, words and actions. This is why it’s possible to raise your happiness set-point. In the same way you’d crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly day, you actually have the power to re-program your happiness set-point to a higher level of peace and well-being.”

According to Shimoff, you have to bring happiness to your outer experiences instead of trying to “extract” happiness from your outer experiences. They key is to stop trying to manipulate the world around you to try to make yourself happy.

Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology wrote that, “habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.”

In his book, Learned Optimism, Seligman stressed that learning to be optimistic is all about disputing negative beliefs:

“Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.”

Both Seligman and Shimoff agree that optimism is learned by better managing our self-talk. When you reach that point where you mind is creating negative self-talk that is starting to invade your headspace it’s key to be mindful of what you’re saying to yourself. Teach yourself to build awareness of when your mind turns to negativity and work on building tactics to better examine what you’re dealing with.

According to Shimoff, our mind is “always on”.

“Our minds—made up of our thoughts, beliefs, and self-talk—are always ‘on.’ According to scientists, we have about 60,000 thoughts a day. That’s one thought per second during every waking hour. No wonder we’re so tired at the end of the day! And what’s even more startling is that of those 60,000 thoughts, 95 percent are the same thoughts you had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Your mind is like a record player playing the same record over and over again… Talk about being stuck in a rut…Still, that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the next statistic: for the average person, 80 percent of those habitual thoughts are negative. That means that every day most people have more than 45,000 negative thoughts.”

To explain the phenomenon of negative self talk creating the feeling we can’t succeed, Seligman came up with the term “learned helplessness”, which occurs when the subject endures repeatedly painful or otherwise aversive stimuli which it is unable to escape from or avoid. After such experiences, the organism often fails to learn or accept "escape" or "avoidance" in new situations where such behavior is likely to be effective. In other words, the organism learned that it is helpless. In situations where there is a presence of aversive stimuli, it has accepted that it has lost control and thus gives up trying, even as changing circumstances offer a method of relief from said stimuli.

The more we tell ourselves we are doomed to fail we accept failure, which in itself becomes inevitable.

So what tactics can we employ?

According to Shimoff:

“Back in Thomas Jefferson’s day, he explained, the common usage of the word ‘pursue’ was not ‘to chase after.’ In 1776, to pursue something meant to practice that activity, to do it regularly, to make a habit of it. What a difference a definition makes! Thomas Jefferson, our wise Founding Father, meant that we all had the right to practice happiness, not chase after it—which isn’t very productive anyway. So let’s stop pursuing happiness and start practicing it. We do that by practicing new habits.”

So how do we “practice” happiness? Here are a few thoughts.

Stop following the news: I’ve written about this before and I cannot stress this enough. Media is a business and that business is built on clicks and viewership. Negativity sells thus the news is inherently negative. The reality is that vast majority of stories you see on the news have no bearing on your own life and you have no control over them. Why pollute your mind day after day with subjects that are making you miserable? Rather then tuning into the news spend your time talking to friends, or getting exercise, or watching entertaining programs that you enjoy.

Get out and move: No matter what the situation or the climate, it’s critical to get up, get outside, and move every single day. I’ve written before on the simple benefits of walking.

Focus on In-Person Social Relations: Human beings are social animals, yet more and more of our interactions are becoming digital, and human beings act differently towards each other on digital platforms— take one look at Twitter during a particularly big political story and you’ll be reminded of how nasty humans can be towards complete strangers in the digital world. The era of social media has not been kind towards the development of real, interpersonal relationships. The key here is to prioritize relationships outside of the digital world. Sure, it’s great to keep up with friends and old classmates via social media, but real life conversations in-person are critical towards helping individuals maintain their feeling of connection to society.

Limit Digital Media: The rise of the digital age has led to a consistent year-over-year increase in screen time among adolescents, while other activities that don’t involve screen time have declined. Psychologist Jean Twenge’s research has indicated that adolescents are spending less time attending religious service, less time reading books and magazines and less time sleeping and these reductions in numbers are not due to more time spent on homework or extracurricular activities. While all of these other activities have decreased the amount of digital media consumed increases every year. There is a direct correlation between an increase in social/digital media usage and a decrease in-personal social interactions.

If You Are Really Struggling, Seek Help: I recognize that some people are really struggling. I myself see a psychologist on a semi-regular basis, typically two times per month and it’s helped me greatly in dealing with the pressures of parenthood, my job, marriage, etc. For a lot of men there is a stigma in seeing a therapist, but it can be extremely helpful to have a professional to talk to and work through things with. Of course, based on the male suicide rates, many men are having much bigger challenges, and it’s critical to absolutely seek help in those situations.

A little dose of perspective is needed: I’ve written recently how I was in a rut a few weeks back that I had to pull out of. In situations like this I find that a healthy dose of perspective is always good. In saying this I’m not discounting the fact that there are millions of people that deal with real mental illness and real substantial problems that impact their happiness. At the same time there are more people that need a healthy dose of perspective. No matter what the corporate media tells you things are drastically better off now than they were just fifty-years ago and in all of human history. In 1900 nearly 30% of children in many US cities died before reaching their first birthday. In most countries residents say they are better off than they were fifty years ago, which is not the case in the United States, even though by all statistical measures that is fundamentally untrue. Perhaps the best thing is a little dose of perspective and “tough love” to oneself with a reminder that although life can be a challenge, in the grand scheme of things the majority of us are very lucky to live in the time and place we do.

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