Happiness or Well-Being? Set Points and Subjective Well-Being in the Quest for a Positive Life Journey

Hello, I am Julie Donaldson and I am a clinical nutritionist with functional medicine training. I specialize in restoring balance in complex, chronic and acute health conditions. I welcome you to peruse other articles that may be of interest to you in your health investigation!

“You won’t get “positive affirmations” here! What you will get is an understanding of who you are, where you came from, how it affected your life and your health, and what to do to have your best shot! Julie is that kind of practitioner. She didn’t save me, she helped me save myself.”

— Ryan, CA

If ever there was a perplexing question in this life, it could easily be “What is happiness and is it what I should strive for?”. While many spiritual practices advise achieving both happiness and acceptance, peace may really be the experience that truly allows us to grow. Peace may bring a positive experience without attachments to success, status and purely “acceptable” emotions. Given that we are working in the world of healing here, we need to remain open and entertain a variety of possibilities that can support holistic health and the healing journey without triggering a stress-inducing requirement for happiness.

The Happiness Set Point

For many decades, psychology defined personal happiness as a set point. The “Set Point” theory of happiness assumes we each have a fixed average level of happiness around which our day-to-day and moment-to-moment happiness varies. This is expressed through temperament, mood and emotion that combine to create a constitution that is stable and returns to itself after an impact of either positive or negative nature.

Set Point theory is supported by the research of Brickman et al, where it was shown that people who win the lottery are no happier than people with spinal cord injuries after the initial euphoria of the win has subsided. The research indicates that everyone has such a set point and returns to it after an experience that either raises it or lowers it temporarily. If your baseline level of happiness is 5/10 and then you win the lottery, you’re at 9/10 for a while, but you tend to return to 5/10. If you have an accident and your body is permanently damaged, you may go to 2/10 for a while, but then you adapt to the difference in what activities you can do/how you feel, and then you likely return to 5/10. A set point is a baseline to which you tend to return, and it is often established quite early in life based upon positive and negative experiences.

The basic mechanism is pretty easy to understand. We’ve all had the experience of wanting something to be different than it is. We can stay in the phase of complaining/wishing it was otherwise, lobbying for a reversal to the previous mode, or we can accept the reality of our situation and figure out how to work with it. The latter will, of course, pull us out of the experience of a lower set point, but may also help to provide a shift in the set point (upward) more permanently. Of course, when one has had an accumulation of difficult life experiences, the latter choice is also harder to make. A question that this theory brings up is whether it is possible to become any happier, or whether we are just stuck with the happiness we have been dealt and the belief that some people will always be more naturally cheerful than others. It seems a rather fatalistic position to take but also may encourage a perspective that isn’t helpful when it comes to “striving” for happiness.

Satisfaction with Life Scale and Subjective Well-Being

Alternate theories to the happiness set point theory have been posited, for example with Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale and Bradburn’s Affect-Balance Scale. These are referred to as Subjective Well-Being (SWB) measures. Subjective means that it is what a person feels and reports. It is not scientifically possible to stick probes into the brain to measure happiness - all we can do is listen to what people say. As with any subjective assessment, these are based only on perception but nevertheless, SWBs have received a lot of attention and proven to be useful.

“Well-being” seems something of a medical interpretation for what we usually call “happiness”. For psychologists, however, it is a wider subject. SWB includes both cognitive and emotional aspects. Cognitive processing of well-being includes overall satisfaction with life and specific external factors. Emotionally, happiness is an internal feeling and has a more pleasure-filled reality.

SWB is not just about the positives. Absence of negative situations and emotions are also important for well-being. Feeling angry or fearful can reduce SWB, as can dwelling on the problems of life.

Here is a list of factors that correlate with the subjective well-being measures of people:

Finding meaning and purpose in life
Having sufficient supportive friends and family
Supporting others, sustaining their social capital
Having interesting and challenging work
Feeling competent and able to handle life
Being easily amused and smile or laugh often
Living by one’s values
Getting what one thinks they deserve
Having a positive self-image
Feeling able to cope with life's emergencies
Feeling a sense of belonging
Having fewer and less intense negative emotions
Feeling optimistic, using significant positive language
Having basic needs sufficiently satisfied
Expecting a long, healthy life
Not expecting traumatic experiences to occur

For me, as I peruse this list, I see substantial opportunity for a more “round” sense of well-being. While I believe that the set point theory is probably quite real, I also believe that this type of subjective scoring can provide more insight on resilience and therefore, more peace. Life may not always be easy or simple, but adaptation to what is can allow room for peace to enter and prevail.

ACES and Resilience

With many decades of research and public health focus, the evaluation of ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) is possibly one of the most critical and direct correlations with a low happiness set point. Research shows that those with high ACEs have more physical disease over the course of their lifetimes. This can be altered, however, by the learning and practicing of resilience behaviors. Resilience is one of the best ways to alter a set point or poor sense of well-being. This begins with practices of reframing experiences and also of understanding/respecting how much life skill has actually developed in the face of trauma and challenge.

On the other hand, one of the primary ways that people remain connected to the immediacy of the disappointment/hurt/associated negative emotions is through a process of revisiting. Trauma results in an experience of loss that is easy to return to in visual and visceral memories. Through this, the immediacy of the experience is maintained, as is a low expectation of happiness.

Often, when a person with high ACEs and/or a generally low set point needs to begin healing, there is a lot of “waffling” that goes on. This entails rebellion against changes that must be made, restrictions on foods and diet, and simply settling in with “what is”. The stated desire to heal is fought, tooth and nail, as a person must face what is needed to go forward and release the constant re-experiencing of negative situations. In these cases, work with core beliefs is something that can change their course for the better.

Other Factors that Influence Well-Being

The notion of “gross national happiness” considers influential factors such as economics, environment, health, institutions, politics and demographics. Worldwide, we have witnessed/experienced this very directly in the last 2 years, with many new statistics arriving that describe the negative impacts particularly in mental health.
Two factors that have a negative effect on well-being that can be easily measured are unemployment and inflation. These have been combined in a “misery index” which also includes wealth disparity - whether poor or wealthy, those on the outer edges of the spectrum often feel isolated and unhappy.
Irrevocable injury and disease as well as the death of a loved one can also have lasting effects. These both involve significant loss, which can have strong depressive effects.
Old age is not where lack of happiness is most prominent, contrary to popular belief. There is a U-shaped happiness curve through life, with the lowest ebb often in the 40s.
The “Big Five” personality traits provide other important consideration. I have written about them in this article. The good news on these traits is that research shows they change for the better over most life courses, especially as they interact with one another.
In studies of twins reared together as well as separately, a discovery was made that 40% of the variance in positive emotion and 55% of the variance in negative emotion is genetic. In other words, familial environment did not change the similarities in their patterns of happiness or lack thereof. While specific information on the exact environment controls needs to be added to this data, it is intriguing.

Summations and Solutions

I share here what I have learned over the course of a life and a career. I am a person with high ACEs, but also with a very high resilience score. I have wrangled with my traumas, done the revisiting and maintaining of the experiences, and for many years held a low set point for my happiness. I also suffered with poor health during those years. I’ve had to face all the “waffling” demons that arrive with a healing program!

Here are some of my favorite resources for developing a better level of well-being:

Smile, just because, and stay present to peace that arises
Spend time in nature, daily if possible
Eat with care and cleanliness, worshipping the power of your food
Play, often and spontaneously
Utilize stream-of-consciousness journaling to unload negative emotions and thoughts
Avoid comparison thinking of all kinds - to the past, to other people and their lives, etc.
Practice dream awareness and interpretation
Practice with an experienced body/mind therapist
Practice breath work, meditation, prayer, any form of “presence” that keeps you in the here and now vs. in an old experience
Identify safety as connection rather than the absence of threat
Agree to accept and care for yourself, unconditionally, including all strengths and weaknesses
Practice gratitude, but also know that what you are grateful for is grateful for you as well
Try peace “on for size” vs. striving for happiness
Skeptical? Read up! Molecules of Emotion and The Biology of Belief will provide you with some scientific information on what your well-being scores mean in cellular terms

This is peace. All forms of peace are rooted in presence in the moment. I wish you peace and I invite you to write to me if it is missing in your life, Julie@truenaturehealthconsulting.com. Sometimes the addition of a present and supportive coach and functional health practitioner can be one of the greatest investments of a lifetime - it was for me. We provide holistic telehealth services.