By Jeff Mullin, Commentary
Here we are a full seven days into 2009 and I continue to stick to all of my New Year’s resolutions.
Well, all except for that one about losing weight. Oh, and there’s also the one about picking up after myself, the thing about not being grouchy in the morning and the bit about not hogging the covers.
I have stuck to the one about giving up playing the accordion. Of course I couldn’t play an accordion if my life depended on it, but there’s no reason to get technical about it.
According to the Web site usa.gov, the most popular New Year’s resolutions are to lose weight, manage debt, save money, get a better job, get fit, eat right, get a better education, drink less alcohol, quit smoking, reduce stress overall, reduce stress at work, take a trip and volunteer to help others.
One that is glaringly absent from that list is a simple one, to be happy.
That, of course, begs the question, what makes you happy?
There were, as of Tuesday morning, 6,752,062,211 people on this planet, give or take three or four. Ask each one their definition of happiness and you would likely get 6.7 billion different answers.
Some people say being rich would make them happy, or being thin. But what about all those skinny millionaires on anti-depressants?
One thing happy people don’t do, according to researchers, is watch television.
John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, has authored a study that says unhappy people watch more television than happy folks do.
Which begs the question: What if watching TV makes you happy?
2008 was not a happy year for many Americans, it seems. A group called Precision Opinion polled 1,385 Americans just before the end of the year and found 32 percent of respondents said their personal level of happiness dropped during the year.
That might relate back to watching television. The average American, according to Nielsen Media Research, watches 142 hours of television a month. That’s eight hours and 18 minutes per day, up an hour a day from a decade ago.
In the Precision Opinion poll, men were found to be less happy than women, Democrats (despite the results of November’s election) were unhappier than Republicans and those older than 51 were unhappier than younger people.
Of course, this was a telephone survey, so perhaps these people were simply unhappy about being called away from doing something that makes them happy, like watching TV.
On a side note, it is not really correct to say you are feeling blue if you are especially unhappy, since the color blue, according to a study by English scientists, makes us happy.
Happiness, no matter the color, is apparently contagious. Another recent study has found we can catch happiness from others. On average, according to the study co-authored by researchers from the University of California, San Diego, and Harvard, every happy person in your social network increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent. And the happiness bug is hard to kill, it seems. The researchers say the effects of catching happiness from someone else can last up to one year.
Even being around a happy stranger can do more to lift one’s spirits, according to this study, than receiving a $5,000 raise. I am perfectly willing to accept a $5,000 raise simply to test this theory, in case my bosses are reading this.
Unhappiness, on the other hand, is not really contagious. Whew, that’s a relief. I wouldn’t want to be thought of as the Typhoid Mary of grumpiness.
How do you define happiness? The author of “Human Happiness — Its Nature and its Attainment,” Michael Fordyce, lists these traits of happy people.
Happy people, he says, are social and productive. Happy people have a healthy self-image and have flexible goals. Happy people are optimistic, but also realistic. Happy people are motivated, focused and socially adept. Happy people are content with their successes. Happy people were raised in positive, nurturing and safe environments.
I am happy, most of the time. I think expecting to be happy 100 percent of the time is unrealistic.
Circumstances occur in everyone’s life that make them unhappy. Truly happy people have a foundation that helps them bounce back from life’s troubling circumstances.
For many people that foundation is their faith.
Everyone seeks happiness, in every country of the world. But, as we al-ready have established, happiness means different things to different people.
In a poll of British women, those who said they were happiest were those who wore a size 14. A poll of Russians found happiness one of the prime wishes for the new year, along with finding a new job and staying healthy.
Americans used to be urged to “Be Like Mike,” while in India people want to be like Sachin Tendulkar. Tendulkar, a cricket star, was voted India’s No. 1 role model of health and happiness in a nationwide survey.
In the aforementioned Precision Opinion survey, 64 percent of Americans surveyed were happy to see 2009 come, convinced the new year would be a happy one for them. I hope they are right.
As for myself, I am happy just to have the opportunity to write this little tome three times a week, and happy to have you read it.
And I am especially happy when I finish one, which I now have.
Mullin is senior writer of the News & Eagle.
