Yes, you do have a happiness set point. It accounts for about 50% of your disposition towards happiness, and it’s genetic, so you are in fact born with it, and what you do from there, the choices you make, the impact of your environment, culminates in your overall life satisfaction aka your happiness.
And whilst you can positively (and negatively) impact your happiness by making decisions about being kind, inclusive, empathetic, expressing gratitude (or not if you do want to be miserable) there is one inescapable fact. Your circumstances, the economics of your environment matter.
Having cash on hand, liquid reserves, access to money above and beyond your basic core needs of daily life, is a better satisfaction with life measure than other measures of “wealth” such as income.
Correspondingly people with low levels of liquid cash, do as a result, feel more economically challenged, stressed by day to day life and demonstrate lower satisfaction with life levels.
So to have an influence, to make your happiness set point malleable in that we can enhance our happiness, money, to the extent that we can design our economic situation, needs to be at a level that it can provide that financial buffer to reduce stress in our daily life.
Our next blog will look at specifically what you can do about creating that buffer.
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