In positive psychology, the psychology of happiness, there’s a principle called The Happiness Baseline. The Happiness Baseline means that, while our level of happiness varies with events that happen in our lives, we ultimately adapt to these events and return to a baseline level. This baseline is also referred to as the Hedonic treadmill. The key takeaway is that your life satisfaction is likely to hover around the same point for your life, unless you address and take action on the areas that fundamentally cause stress or concern.
You may have goals that you think achieving will make you happier; that’s often why we set goals in the first place. But rather than exclusively attaching happiness to external or future events, it’s also important to ask, “Am I happy now?”
Activity A: Draw your Baseline
You can map your baseline using a graph, such as the one below:
As an example, mine looks a bit like this:
In my personal experience, I have found that dips are marked by dramatic changes— from transitioning to a different period of life (ie. early childhood to adolescence), to a deep shift in perspective that changed my thoughts and actions. You may find it helpful to add labels that discern changes in baseline and mark the different periods of your life.
If your baseline isn’t trending towards where you want it to be, or you’d like it to be higher, you can look at what areas of your life are causing the most problems through the lens of hotspots.
Optional: Before moving on, you can look at your graph and think about some of the reasons of what made the “highs” so high, and the “lows” so low. It can also be helpful to share your graph and discuss it with a trusted friend.
Activity B1: Examine your Hotspots
Hot spots are a way to see your life from a birds-eye view. According to J.D. Meier, who coined the term, our lives can generally be broken into 7 hotspots:
- Emotions
- Mind
- Body
- Career
- Finances
- Relationships
- Fun
Some people like to add or substitute in categories such as “home” or “spirituality”, which you may do as you feel appropriate.
To figure out the areas of your life that are contributing to unhappiness, we can examine how we feel in each category at a high level. You can write down the answers to the following:
- [Emotion] How do I feel overall?
- [Mind] How do I feel about my purpose?
- [Body] How do I feel about my body?
- [Career] How do I feel about my career?
- [Finances] How do I feel about my finances?
- [Relationships] How do I feel about my relationships?
- [Fun] How do I feel about the amount of fun in my life?
- [Optional: Spirituality] How do I feel about my spirituality?
- [Optional: Home] How do I feel about my home?
Based on your responses, identify which areas are the biggest problem areas for you. For example, in my case, the categories of body, relationships, finances, and fun were more problematic than career, mind, or overall emotion.
Activity B2: The Deep Dive
For the problematic hot spot areas, it can be useful to break each category down further, to identify what aspect is problematic. Here are some questions you can use as a guideline for the categories, but if you feel some are not relevant or others are needed, modify as you see fit. You can focus specifically on the hot spots that came up as the biggest issues, or answer all of the questions if you feel inclined.
Mind
- What are my reasons for choosing what I do? What are the underlying feelings behind those reasons?
- How do I feel about my personal learning or growth? Am I learning about or improving in things I care about?
- How do I feel about my current level of stability?
- How do I feel about my support systems?
Body
- How do I feel about how I move?
- How do I feel about how I look?
- How do I feel about my overall health?
Career
- How do I feel about my purpose at work?
- How do I feel about my current level of stability?
- How do I feel about my learning/growth?
- How do I feel about my work relations?
- How do I feel about my work/life balance?
Finances
- How do I feel about my financial stability?
- How do I feel about my current income?
Relationships
- How do I feel about my relationship with my family?
- How do I feel about my relationship with my friends?
- How do I feel about my relationship with my significant other?
Fun
- How do I feel about the amount of fun in my daily life?
- How do I feel about the amount of fun in my week?
Optional: Spirituality
- What aspects of my spirituality feel successful?
- What aspects of my spirituality are not where I want them to be?
Optional: Home
- What aspects of my home or home life make me feel happy or comforted?
- What aspects of my home or home life cause me stress?
Summary: Emotion
- Which factors from the categories or sub-categories above are negatively affecting me the most?
Which subcategories need to change? Pick 1–3 where change feels achievable through small interventions.
Activity B3: Take Action
Now that you have a few items you can change, ask yourself:
“Would I be genuinely happier if I focused more on _____?”
If the answer is yes, then it’s time to take action. Think of a small, daily action you can take to improve this part of your life. Commit to doing it every day for 1 week, and see how you feel. Treat this as an experiment. You can use the following template:
- One of my areas of focus is _______.
- My daily action is to __________. I believe that doing so will ________.
Example:
One of my areas of focus is my relationship with my friends. My daily action is to reach out to one friend I haven’t talked to recently, as well as maintain any conversations I currently have. I believe doing so will make me feel more connected to my friends and encourage spending more time together.
Tracking Tools
You may wish to track your daily progress. There are apps, such as “Done” for iOS, where you can log your daily progress, or you may choose to do so manually on paper or a calendar.
Reflection
At the end of the week, ask yourself:
- How do I feel about the area I chose to focus on now, compared to last week?
- How successful was I? What worked, and what didn’t?
- Do I want to continue? Or to modify my approach?
Final Thoughts
When it comes to happiness, small, frequent wins inflate are baseline for longer, rather than a larger but very infrequent experience. Making a small daily change can make a surprisingly large impact on our happiness, and is also easier to maintain or bring back if we slip up.
Making small, frequent changes to the areas of life that we struggle with can lead to large shifts across time, and ultimately improve our baseline happiness.
