Analysis: One of the key things that impacts our happiness is connection and the number of friends in our network
Research has lots to say about when we're at our happiest (or saddest) in life. "For many years we had this U-shaped happiness curve," says psychologist Prof Jolanta Burke. Happiness peaked first in our early 20s, hit rock bottom in middle age and then started going up again in our 50s before peaking again at 70. Hence, the U-shape.
For many of us, this probably rings true. Youth is marked by a tumultuous but more carefree time full of learning and new people. This is followed by an often startling shift to careers, responsibilities, mortgages, finances and children, where we easily drift away from friends and community, until we settle into life. Then, we retire, slow down and have time to rediscover the world around us.
This general trend in happiness has been confirmed over and over again in different studies across the world, though not all research has agreed on where the peaks and troughs fall in life. A recent study made headlines for pinpointing 47.2 exactly as the unhappiest age. Earlier this year, the same researcher who initially documented the happiness curve, published another paper challenging it.
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In fact, the new research found this U-shaped happiness doesn’t exist anymore, says Burke, who is Associate Professor and researcher at the Centre for Positive Health Sciences, RCSI. "The researcher said now, younger people are not as happy as they used to be. There is more anxiety among the younger generation."
Instead of a peak of happiness in young adulthood, there’s a peak of unhappiness. The paper identified a 'deterioration in young people’s mental health both absolutely and relative to older people’ and found the increase in despair predated the covid pandemic. "Everything is delayed in this world now - something is really shifting in the world and that could definitely impact younger people’s happiness," says Burke.
In a 2023 study of over 460,000 participants, research teams in Germany and Switzerland set out to answer the ‘seemingly simple’ question of when we’re at our happiest, by looking at the three components of subjective wellbeing: life satisfaction, positive emotional states and negative emotional states. The answer, at least according to that piece of research, was 70.
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But even if there is no definite happiest or unhappiest age because we’re all different, one of they key things that impact our happiness is connection. "Connection is absolutely crucial," says Burke. Even though we’re so connected digitally, "we are much more lonely than we used to be. If you were to look at any research about youth and what happened in the last few years with connection between people, that impacts youth especially. Because we have turned to our phones. We communicate a lot, possibly more than we have ever done, but the communication is not as meaningful as it used to be."
We have our largest network of friends in life around the age of 30, explains Burke, as this is when many meet people through work, meet a partner and their friends and family and so on. But as we get older and some people have children, there's less time to spend with others and our network is reduced.
That lack of connection can contribute to unhappiness in mid-life, says Burke. She recalls a former client who had a "beautiful network of friends" that he hadn’t seen for years after having children. "One of the things that we were working on, is can you connect meaningfully with one person a day? Be it a colleague at work, go for lunch with them, have a coffee with someone, or have a conversation, even on the phone, that would help you connect. He did it over six weeks and he said that this was transformational."
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Research on later life also shows the importance of connection. "Very often, around the age of 55-60, we have a smaller number of people in our life. However we connect with them more meaningfully because we know them, often, for many years and they are the ones that hang around us when everybody else fell off the the edge."
A huge amount of research also shows that when we get older we tend to notice more positive things, says Burke. "When older people and younger people were going through the same activity, younger people tended to notice the danger and the problems, whereas the older people were focusing on the positive more so than the negative. Now, not every older person would be like this, but on average.
"I think that there is something that changes within us. Maybe because we've gone through more, we are comprehending our lives much more. Maybe we become a little bit wiser about the decisions we're making and we spend our emotional [energy] on something nice. I think there are changes within us that help us become happier as we age."
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Can you practice happiness or positivity?
Burke's latest research turned the question of happiness inward by asking experts in positive psychology if they practiced what they preached. The initial sample of 150 was aged between 50 and 60, while the group of 22 who were interviewed were in their 50s and 60s.
"When I asked them, do you practice positive psychology preventions, the majority of them said no, oddly enough. So I asked them 'what do you do?' Because these people, when we measured them, are the only sample I have ever measured that don't have languishing. Not one person languished. Everybody was moderately happy or really, really happy."
Five themes emerged from the data, which highlighted the participant’s mindsets: (1) intentional living, (2) wellbeing hygiene, (3) self-acceptance, (4) embodiment, and (5) environmental awareness. "We called it meliotropic wellbeing mindset (from the Greek melio ('better’) and tropism (‘movement toward’)".
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"Interestingly, they were accepting of self. It’s not that they were like toxically positive, they were far from it. It's all to do with trying to embrace the best part of life regardless of what situation you find yourself in," says Burke. "Another thing they had is this amazing ability to search for opportunities in your daily life, to experience meaning in life. Remind themselves what their meaning was, or remind themselves what joy was, remind themselves of the optimism. They would watch the the news, for example, and the news would make them feel unhappy and they'd be aware of that, so they'd say 'OK I better do something that balances it out' so they were consciously engaging.
"The last thing that they had that I found absolutely fascinating is that they were choosy about what they engaged with in life. They were conscious of the impact of, for example, the team with whom they worked, the people they met every day, their family, who they were friends with, the job that they did, the physical and social environment around them. If that caused them distress they found a way to reduce it or change it. They didn't reject people, they were choosing how much energy they would devote to certain relationships."
"I found this fascinating. I see this positivity through their eyes now slightly differently. I don't see it as ‘let's just have lots of positive emotions’, instead it's about this balance of of protecting yourself but also giving yourself out to the world."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
