In other posts on this site, I’ve talked about ways to stop having a bad day, for instance through music, idea repair, and emotional antidotes. In their recent book Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, Tom Rath and Jim Harter of the Gallup Group (the organization whose research on strength psychology I talk about in my recent post “Should We Maximize Our Strengths or Minimize Our Weaknesses?“) offer a way to greatly increase our chances of having a good day: increasing social time.

According to Gallup’s research, socializing matters. Six hours a day of social time, according to Rath and Harter, greatly increases our chances of having a good day–that is, feeling happy and thriving. “When we get at least six hours of daily social time, it increases our wellbeing and minimizes stress and worry … each hour of social time quickly decreases the odds of having a bad day. Even three hours of social time reduces the chances of having a bad day to 10%.” (Emphasis is theirs.) Social time seems to have a powerful effect on stress levels, even for introverted people.

Six hours seems like a lot, but apparently what helps us in terms of social time is to simply interact with other people in some direct way. Among kinds of social time available to reduce stress, Rath and Harter include talking on the phone and exchanging e-mail. Time spent communicating with other people at work seems to count just as much as time at home or elsewhere.

This may not necessarily be good news for those of us whose work tends to be solitary. For instance, full-time writers or computer programmers may find it difficult to find six hours a work day in which to communicate and be social, since only a small amount of the time in either of those jobs (especially non-book research for writers and meetings for programmers) can be social. Most of the work in those and many other jobs gets done alone, and communicating with other people while doing it makes it next to impossible to be productive.

This suggests that it’s especially important for people whose work is solitary to go out of their way to find social time if they want to be happy and reduce stress. Living with someone you like rather than living alone seems an especially important step. Other possibilities include dinners with friends, exercising in a social setting, having lunch with others instead of alone, and increasing communication with family and friends.

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One of the books I’m reading at the moment is  Tom Rath and Jim Harter’s Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements, which summarizes the findings of ongoing research by Gallup over a number of years on the subject of wellbeing and happiness. In the section on social wellbeing, Rath and Harter point out an important influence on our lives that’s often ignored: our friends’ habits.

Habits of friends have a profound effect on us, often even more than habits of parents or spouses. For example, when I was much younger (and more foolish), I smoked, though not heavily. When I moved to a new town where I’d be spending time constantly with friends who didn’t smoke–and who didn’t like smoking–I stopped. I literally smoked right up until the day I moved, then quit cold turkey and never picked up the habit again.

There are some useful ideas that emerge from understanding the power of friends’ habits, ones that impact our own self-motivation and give us more tools to help people who are close to us.

1. Buddying up makes habit change easier
Working together with a friend who wants to make some of the same improvements you do helps encourage habit change in at least three ways: first, any kind of social support makes us more likely to follow through with the changes we want to make in our lives. Second, any gains our friends makes help encourage and influence our own improvements. And third, changing habits together with someone whose company is enjoyable makes the change and the new habits more attractive, which makes it easier for the new behavior to become permanent.

2. Improvements in your life can help improve your friends’ lives
If you want to help make your friends’ lives happier, more successful, healthier, or more fulfilling, one of the best possible things you can do is acquire a good habit yourself. The change in you has a good chance of being noticed and admired by your friends, and it’s possible some of them will make improvements in their own lives inspired by your example. Additionally, making a positive change in part for the benefit of friends offers you an additional, very meaningful kind of inspiration to succeed.

3. Pick your friends carefully
If you spend time with people who are stuck and unhappy with their lives or who have bad habits you don’t want to pick up, your own quality of life is more likely to worsen unless you have so much support from other parts of your life that you’re a much stronger influence on your friends than they are on you.

Simply being aware of the impact friends can have on our habits and wellbeing can help bring out problems that were hidden and offer new possibilities for making things better.

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As far as I can tell, most Americans consider it normal to be unhappy with their jobs. The idea seems to be that you have to put in your time during the week, suffer through having to do tasks you don’t feel like doing, then get in some fun over the weekend if you can.

This is not a recipe for happiness. After all, most of us spend a huge proportion of our waking time working. If we don’t like our work, than that’s a lot of time spent unhappy and stressed.

For some people, certainly, the solution is getting a different job, even if expenses need to be scaled back to make that possible. But the key to happiness in a job isn’t always what we’re doing: sometimes it’s just how engaged we are.

The new Gallup book (from the people who do the polls), Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements by Tom Rath and Jim Harter, makes the argument based on extensive research that a fulfilling life is one where a person is doing well in five areas: career, social, physical, financial, and community. “Career” in this case can mean employment, self-employment, full-time parenting–even a hobby. Regardless, happiness in a career turns out to have a lot to do with engagement.

Rath and Harter distinguish between people who are generally engaged in their jobs (interested in what they’re doing, focused, involved) and people who generally aren’t (distracted, waiting for the day to end, dissatisfied, bored). They employed a series of pretty clever tracking techniques, including a device that would beep at certain times during the day and prompt subjects to record what they were doing and how they were feeling about it; heart rate monitors; and monitoring cortisol levels in saliva. (Cortisol is a chemical in the body that is closely linked with stress.) From these and other data, they offer a chart measuring happiness over the working day for an average engaged person versus an average not-engaged person.

Of course the people who were engaged were happier, but the specific comparison is striking. Unengaged people come in unhappy, get unhappier after the first hour or so, become more interested and less unhappy during the middle of the day, and then experience a slide in happiness throughout the afternoon that only stops with a sudden burst of comparative happiness at the very end. The least unhappy point in the day for these folks? Quitting time.

By contrast, the engaged people are as happy when they walk in the door in the morning as unengaged people were at the end of the day–and the engaged people keep getting happier from there. The most tedious and unpleasant time in an engaged person’s average day as happy as the most thrilling time in an unengaged person’s day! Weirdly, people who are trying to entertain and distract themselves at work by stretching coffee breaks out and reading e-mailed jokes are having much, much less fun than people who are getting excited about their work.

Admittedly, it’s not always easy to get excited about one’s work. It’s especially hard if you have a manager you don’t like, if you’re doing something you don’t believe in, if you have serious concerns about how the organization operates, if you don’t like your coworkers, or if you don’t have what you need to do your job effectively. In these situations, it might make sense to look for a new job.

In other situations, it can be interesting to ask yourself “What could I do to feel more involved and interested in my work?” There are some suggestions in my article 6 Ways to Be Happy at a Job You Don’t Like.

Photo by oso