39 MB - University of Toronto Magazine

20-26 3/2/05 4:54 AM Page 24How I Learned to StopWorrying and Love HGTVA lifelong pessimist meets his matchBY JOEL YANOFSKYMy wife and I had known each otheronly three months when we decided toget married.We’d fallen in love and gottenourselves pregnant, more or less in thatorder.Were we ready for a new life? Whoknows? Both of us were pushing 40 so if weweren’t, we probably never would be.There’s bound to be a learning curve in anyrelationship – she’s teaching me yoga, I’mteaching her poker – but ours has beenparticularly steep.What my wife didn’t knowabout me, for example, is that I complainabout everything.What I didn’t knowabout her is that she’d prefer I didn’t.Which is why the other day, to seewhere we stood, we took a “life-orientationtest” I saw in a book called Learn to Bean Optimist.The test measures attitude andoutlook.Thequestions weresurprisingly easy,at least for me. (1. Inuncertain times, I usually expect the best.Ha! 7. I hardly ever expect things to go my way.You can say that again!) I finished the testlong before my wife. My score – three outof a possible 24 points;“extreme pessimism”on the test scale – was also easy to tally.My wife, who rated a 16, looked worried.“But I’m happy,” I said.“Really. Extremely.”To which she replied,“Compared to what?”Good question.Woody Allen oncesaid that life is either miserable or horrible,and you should consider yourself lucky if,most of the time, you are merely miserable.By that standard, I explained, who’s luckierthan us? I alsopointed out thatsince studiesroutinely demonstratethat there’s nohappier creature onthe face of the Earth thana married man – happierthan married women, anyway –it’s safe to assume my score, lowas it was, was probably higher than it hadbeen before we met.Somehow, none of this reassured her.As she double-checked the test results, Icould guess what she was thinking – perhapsbecause it was what she was thinking moreand more often: there’s room here forimprovement.Another thing I recently learned aboutmy wife is that she’s addicted to HGTV.Home & Garden Television provides viewerswith a wealth of home-decorating solutionsand do-it-yourself good intentions. Noamount of clutter is untameable, and noslob (i.e. husband) too irredeemable.Theborn in Minnesota between 1936 and 1955, compared theresults from identical and fraternal twins, and came to theconclusion that about half of one’s happiness is determinedgenetically. The other half depends on life circumstances andwhat Lykken calls “life’s slings and arrows.”Our inborn temperament explains the general stability ofour well-being over time. A famous 1978 study by researchersfrom Northwestern University in Chicago found that lotterywinners reported feelings of intense joy following their win,while paraplegic and quadriplegic accident victims experienceddespair. Within a few months, though, people in eachgroup reported feeling about the same as they had prior to thelife-changing event, leading experts to conclude that we allhave a happiness set point. Our mood rises and falls, and seriousmental illness can shift us lower, but over the long termour average happiness hovers around the same spot. “Someonewho has a cheerful disposition today is probably going tobe cheerful 10 years from now,” says Professor Ulrich Schimmack,who spent two years working in the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign lab of Edward Diener – a pioneerin the study of happiness and the editor-in-chief of the Journalof Happiness Studies – before joining the psychologydepartment at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.In almost any situation, Schimmack says, our personalitystrongly influences our happiness. We all know someone whois wealthy, good-looking and successful yet also downrightglum. “If we feel bummed out or that our life is meaningless,it’s hard for us to ignore those feelings and say, ‘Hey, my lifeis great,’ even if in most ways it is.”Schimmack’s research has refined scientists’ understandingof the link between specific personality traits and well-being.A study published last year illustrated that, of all the traits, apredisposition to sadness – the tendency to have a lot of bluedays – has the strongest negative impact on life satisfaction.Cheerfulness has the greatest positive effect. Shocking? No,but it’s the first time these intuitive truths have been proven24 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO MAGAZINE