The Abridged version:
- A new UC Davis study challenges previous research on how people find the path to happiness.
- Roughly one quarter of the population fits the “top-down” theory of finding joy, while another quarter fits the “bottom-up” theory.
- Dr. Emorie Beck of UC Davis suggests people do their own experiments to determine which theory they best fit.
You’ve decided to work on your mental health and wellbeing, so you dove face first into the wellness-sphere.
You’re following all of the thought leaders and Instagram gurus. Your algorithm is almost entirely composed of smoothie recipes, customized gratitude journals and workout routines. You watch endless videos and reels of Jay Shetty and Brené Brown and you fall asleep every night to YouTube affirmations.
After a month you don’t feel any more joyful. So you give up on it faster than a gym membership in February. Why does it work for everyone else and what is wrong with you!?
According to a new study from Dr. Emorie Beck, an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at UC Davis, and her colleagues, there is nothing wrong with you. You’re just trying to follow other people’s recipes for your happiness. As simple as it sounds, there is a trillion dollar industry working to convince you that joy is one size fits all when the science clearly shows that it is not.
Does happiness come from the top down or the bottom up?
There have been a few schools of thought in the science community on where the wellspring of our personal happiness is. You probably already know which camp you lean toward. Think about how you tried to solve your last big life stress. Did you change the situation or change your mindset?
Think about it in terms of a job that’s bringing you stress. Bottom-up theory says that if the circumstance contributing most to your personal unhappiness is your job then you should consider looking for another job to increase your level of personal happiness.
There is a school that believes happiness is a direct result of the conditions in our lives, things like economic stability, healthy life expectancy, social support, autonomy, generosity and the lack of corruption. This is what Dr. Beck’s study refers to as “bottom-up.”
The flip side of this theory is the “top-down” theory which proposes that our mindset has more to do with our levels of personal happiness than our physical circumstances and conditions. In the case of a stressful job that makes you unhappy, top-down theory says that you can increase your personal happiness by shifting your mindset about the job. This could look like finding gratitude for gainful employment, coworkers you enjoy, or a positive impact you are having rather than the stressful elements of the job. It’s that whole thing Mary Poppins taught us about a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down.
At a glance, both of these theories seem to make sense, so why wouldn’t they make sense together? That is how the bi-directional theory gained traction and became a pretty universally accepted theory of personal happiness.
For decades, the wellness-sphere operated under the assumption that most people were bi-directional and could increase their personal happiness by both bottom-up, changing circumstances and conditions, and top-down, by shifting their mindsets. That was until Dr. Beck and company challenged this theory in their study.
Dr. Beck’s study analyzed 40,074 participants using five huge long-term studies from around the world that tracked people for up to 33 years across domains including job, health, income, home, relationship and leisure and what they found cracked open the foundation of the wellness-sphere.
There is no single recipe for happiness. Not even close
When the researchers crunched the data, top-down, bottom-up, and bi-directional showed up in anywhere from 20% to 26% of the population. This shattered the theory that everyone could boost their personal happiness by shifting both their circumstances and their mindsets and proved that percentages as large as a quarter of the population were bound to either the top-down or bottom-up philosophies for personal happiness.
This means that a bottom-up person will most likely have a hard time shifting their personal happiness by simply changing their mindset about the job they hate and should start sending their applications in for new employment. This also means that a top-down person could quit and get a new job and still not be any more happy because they haven’t shifted their mindset.
Those numbers only add up to three-quarters of the population. What about the last quarter? The last quarter of the population is what is referred to as non-directional. This means that how they increase their personal happiness is unpredictable. Non-directional doesn’t mean broken. It means your joy circuitry is complex, adaptive and highly specific.
There are many guesses at why this is, including traumatic experiences, neurodivergence (like ADHD, autism, CPTSD, BPD) and other mental health conditions. This does not mean they are incapable of increasing their personal happiness; it’s more that the methods of finding more happiness are more situation specific. For example, these people may need to change their conditions and leave their unsatisfying job to increase their happiness at work, but may also need to shift their mindset if they’re unhappy in their romantic relationship for instance.
Designing your own personal joy plan
So how do we find out whether we are top-down, bottom-up, bi-directional, or non-directional? Dr. Beck says that we should do our own experiments and track our own personal data. “I think as a starting point, for most of us, we can just sort of retrospect on our own experiences,” Dr. Beck explained. “It’s sort of understanding where our well being comes from for us, and by us.”
Even once we’ve found what works for us, Dr. Beck explained it can be subject to change.
“The thing that works now may not work forever. I think a lot of us have the thing that used to work for us, and when it stops working, we think that we should just keep trying, like, maybe we’re not doing it right,” Dr. Beck said. “That also just might mean your life has changed. You’ve changed, and you might need to adjust your strategy. I think it kind of, again, comes back to that self knowledge.”
The great joy hunt
The wellness world has been selling us a universal model that never actually existed.
Joy is not a generic hack, it is a personal system. While the influencers can offer suggestions, there is no guarantee that those suggestions will work for you and that doesn’t mean anything is wrong with you or that you should stop trying.
If you give gratitude journaling an honest try and don’t notice a difference, chances are that you’re not doing it wrong, but you may want to try making some more conditional changes. If you quit that job or get out of that relationship but you’re still finding happiness hard to come by, maybe it’s time to work on more mindset-based approaches.
Take stock. Write down the things that seem to work for you and whether they are more top-down or bottom-up approaches. This will help you figure out and map your own pattern and joy hunting style. Joy isn’t something you mimic from someone else’s feed. It’s something you engineer, test, refine and personalize until it becomes undeniable.
Your joy is your laboratory. Your life is your data. And while you’re experimenting, remember that we call it a “practice” and not a “perfect” for a reason.
Andru Defeye is the former poet laureate of Sacramento and a regular contributor, writing The Great Joy Hunt for Abridged.