Christmas Hampers Happiness

Christmas! Hampers! Happiness!
3 great words - how much fun they are!

Let’s play with the punctuation…
“Christmas hampers!* Happiness!” Sensational! We love gifts of food and wine.
What if we take all the punctuation away?
Christmas hampers happiness. Now I’m being a real killjoy.

The Psychology of Happiness has a lot to do with Christmas.
Read on…
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The study of Psychology has developed over the last 100 years in a medical mindset, trying to fix the people who are sick, trying to understand the people that no one else can understand. Consequently, the target audience has been small, and the culture of psychology academic, and tainted by its associations with ‘crazy people’ – “if I’m seeing a psychologist, I must be crazy”.

Psychology has tried to understand challenges such as sadness, depression, hysteria, and has neglected the more positive emotions, such as one we all treasure – happiness – until now. Positive Psychology has some very interesting things to say about happiness and where we find it. And Christmas seems to be a time when spending money and giving gifts is designed to create happiness. Wealth buys happiness, right? Rich people are happy, right?

Fifty years ago**, the average American family lived in a 1200 square foot house, there was one car per family, and one out of five family members went to college/university. Today the average American family lives in a 2500 square foot house, there is more than one car per licensed driver, and one out of two people go to college. If you had told those parents this (living in their 1200 square foot house), they would have said, “that will be paradise!”

But modern America is not paradise. In spite of the tripling of real purchasing power in the last fifty years, life satisfaction has not budged and depression is ten times more common now. Ten times! This is the only tenfold change in mental illness of the twentieth century. This is called the “Easterbrook paradox,” after Gregg Easterbrook’s revealing book, The Progress Paradox.

When we have buying power, we have choices about where to spend it, and why we spend it. Sales people often say, “Decisions are emotional”. Products may be cheaper, more useful, or higher quality, but in the end, its how they make us feel that is the final criteria. We can use money to buy positive emotion. And at Christmas, this is heightened by the desire to create positive emotion in ourselves and also in others.

Unfortunately, this ‘buzz’ of happiness is constructed the same way as addictions are. They feel great in the beginning, but the pleasure evaporates and requires more and more maintenance. When the buzz is gone, I don’t just feel neutral, I feel bad, and need another buzz to ‘stay normal’. The expression ‘retail therapy’ may serve this purpose for many people – shopping to avoid feeling sad or bored – and to purchase positive feelings. We sometimes talk about buying things we never use, “why did I buy that”? Or we may buy gifts that nobody wants. As a lifestyle, it is ‘bad consumerism’; good for shops, unhelpful for our emotions and life satisfaction.

Positive Psychology talks about 3 types of happiness:
The Pleasant Life: enjoying the moment, measured by the 5 senses, but repeat experiences lose their value, requiring more and more to sustain them. Typically used as shortcuts to happiness.
The Engaged Life: a life spent drawing personal satisfaction from using your strengths, measured by your achievements. (This is a worthy lifestyle, but in spite of it, depression is still high amongst even the highest of achievers.)
The Meaningful Life: a life spent using your strengths to achieve goals, to find personal balance, and to satisfy others – people or causes outside yourself / larger than you.

Can the Engaged Life and the Meaningful Life be bought? Can we spend our funds on getting more ‘flow’ and more ‘meaning’? The answer is a definite ‘Yes’, and you might consider this for Christmas this year.

Give gifts to people that will add to the amount of flow or to the amount of meaning in their lives. Doing this will add meaning and engagement to your own life.
In general, the key to this is giving activities not things. Follow the effects of your gifts and write them down to use next Christmas. A few examples:

• Pay the travel costs for a friend to visit someone they love, but has not seen in years.
• Adopt a student – in China, you can sponsor / purchase a student’s school or university education, build a friendship with them, and follow their progress. Check out these websites that offer Hope: China Youth Development Foundation (english) ; (chinese)
• Donate bees, goats, llamas to friends through World Relief Agencies. Examples include: Heifer Project; TEAR Fund
• Make a “treasure chest” for your child, with coupons redeemable for one reading hour with you, one trip to the movies, one meal at a restaurant of their choice, one walking/cycling expedition.
• Give pots of herbs and berries or hundreds of flower bulbs (e.g. daffodils) to brighten someone’s home or office.
• Give your child a complex Lego set or computer game that requires building/playing over weeks - with you!
• Give dance lessons / musical instrument lessons, or yoga lessons, to people you love, who do not dance, play music or meditate.
• Make the gifts yourself (e.g. cakes, clothing) and make the cards yourself. It is time consuming, personal, and it gives the people you care about the most precious gift of all - your time.

If you try some of these, I would love to hear the results. Send me an email, or add a comment…

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* The word ‘hampers’ in English has two meanings. As a noun, it means a basket of fruit, wine, and other yummy foods. As a verb, it means to hinder, obstruct, or restrict.
**This article is drawn from the work of Martin Seligman of the International Positive Psychology Association (IPPA), which has been adapted to suit this newsletter structure.