Pursuing Happiness with Flow: At Work – Part II

Please read Part 1 here.

For many, when developing their work-related ambitions and climbing through the corporate ranks to clinch their inner potential, the common motivation is the pursuit of personal life satisfaction along with a state of active fulfillment. Yet, Americans are experiencing disdain toward working long hours for the next promotion or the expected bonus. Tensions with family dynamics arise and working longer hours becomes less gratifying. Lack of variation, routine, uniformity and a complete resignation to their version of the monotony of captivity to workplace obligations contribute to these tensions. With total autonomy to influence and shape their careers, Americans in the current professional landscape find themselves more detached, unfulfilled, and downcast altogether within the day-to-day repetition of their work-related responsibilities and assignments.

Many are not alone in their fight through workplace disenchantment. Numerous studies are now confirming that close to two-thirds of employees in the United States are bored, disconnected, or tired and ready to obstruct plans, assigned projects, and even other people. There are underlying mindsets with emerging thought patterns and emotions that maintain this contemporary restlessness within the workplace. Just recently, the American Psychological Association reported that Americans at work are experiencing more stress than before related to ever-evolving politics, constancy in change and revolution of their workplace culture, and worrisome uncertainty related to world events. Despite these circumstances, professionals accept unsatisfying emotions related to their work, experience more pronounced burnout, and are faced with a chronic state of unhappiness. These mindsets secure patterns of “stuckness” along with non-productivity and diminished experiences of success.

Does Working Hard Lead to Happiness?

According to the French philosopher, Pascal Bruckner, “Unhappiness is unhappiness; it is, worse yet, a failure to be happy.” Often in the workplace and any other intersection of life’s domains, happiness has been preached as a moral obligation and a necessary pursuit through hard work. That is, if you work hard, then you will become successful. If you just get that preliminary raise, stand on that mountain of good grades, lose the initial five pounds, then happiness will ensue. Success is sought after first, and happiness second.

Recent research from the University of Warwick indicates that happiness and satisfaction in workers will lead to dynamic productivity. Managerial leaders that make their workplace happy for their staff within their organizational structure highlight the threaded association of an increase of emotional health in the work environment. In contrast, the yearly Gallup reporting indicates that employees find that they do not have high levels of engagement, passion, motivation, and meaning attached to their work. This typically costs the United States an annual $350 billion due to the weight of unhappy and disengaged workers in the marketplace. Within the contemporary workforce, companies and executives are using various perks as cash incentives, juice bars, vacation packages, and anonymous surveys to establish a sense of employee satisfaction and better navigate their employees’ doldrums.

Positive Psychology Fuels Job Progress

Clearly, happiness and optimism continually fuel the trajectory of individuals’ success platforms and give them the competitive edge to embrace a greater performance standard and higher achievement in the workplace. The current ground-breaking research from positive psychology is evident that cultivating a positive brain ensures a more motivated, creative, resilient, efficient, and productive lifestyle outcome that drives workplace productivity upward. This particular discovery has been confirmed with thousands of other studies.

Barbara Fredrickson introduced this novel concept in 1998, the same time frame that Martin Seligman, the former president of the American Psychological Association, became responsible for pioneering efforts for steering attention and funding into the field of positive psychology. Using Fredrickson’s Broaden-and-Build Theory, she cites that the point of positive emotions is that, “… these positive emotions broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire: joy sparks the urge to play, interest sparks the urge to explore, contentment sparks the urge to savour and integrate, and love sparks a recurring cycle of each of these urges within safe, close relationships.” Positive emotions open our minds while facilitating and building our inner resources as abilities, skills, knowledge, and relationships.

Researcher Courtney Ackerman highlights this list of positive emotions as an invitation to better describe constructive mood states and create a foundation for how to narrate our common experience in the workplace and beyond:

• Joy – a sense of elation, happiness, and perhaps even exhilaration, often experienced as a sudden spike due to something good happening.
• Gratitude – a feeling of thankfulness, for something specific or simply all-encompassing, often accompanied by humility and even reverence.
• Serenity – a calm and peaceful feeling of acceptance of oneself.
• Interest – a feeling of curiosity or fascination that demands and captures your attention.
• Hope – a feeling of optimism and anticipation about a positive future.
• Pride – a sense of approval of oneself and pleasure in an achievement, skill, or personal attribute.
• Amusement – a feeling of lighthearted pleasure and enjoyment, often accompanied by smiles and easy laughter.
• Inspiration – feeling engaged, uplifted, and motivated by something you witnessed.
• Awe – an emotion that is evoked when you witness something grand, spectacular, or breathtaking, sparking a sense of overwhelming appreciation.
• Elevation – the feeling you get when you see someone engaging in an act of kindness, generosity, or inner goodness, spurring you to aspire to similar action.
• Altruism – usually referred to as an act of selflessness and generosity towards others, but can also describe the feeling you get from helping others.
• Satisfaction – a sense of pleasure and contentment you get from accomplishing something or fulfilling a need.
• Relief – the feeling of happiness you experience when an uncertain situation turns out for the best, or a negative outcome is avoided.
• Affection – an emotional attachment to someone or something, accompanied by a liking for them and a sense of pleasure in their company.
• Cheerfulness – a feeling of brightness, being upbeat and noticeably happy or chipper; feeling like everything is going your way.
• Surprise (the good kind!) – a sense of delight when someone brings you unexpected happiness or a situation goes even better than you had hoped.
• Confidence – emotion involving a strong sense of self-esteem and belief in yourself; can be specific to a situation or activity, or more universal.
• Admiration – a feeling of warm approval, respect, and appreciation for someone or something.
• Enthusiasm – a sense of excitement, accompanied by motivation and engagement.
• Eagerness – like a less intense form of enthusiasm; a feeling of readiness and excitement for something.
• Euphoria – intense and the all-encompassing sense of joy or happiness, often experienced when something extremely positive and exciting happens.
• Contentment – peaceful, comforting, and low-key sense of happiness and well-being.
• Enjoyment – a feeling of taking pleasure in what is going on around you, especially in situations like a leisure activity or social gathering.
• Optimism – positive and hopeful emotion that encourages you to look forward to a bright future, one in which you believe that things will mostly work out.
• Happiness – a feeling of pleasure and contentment in the way things are going; a general sense of enjoyment of and enthusiasm for life.
• Love – perhaps the strongest of all positive emotions, love is a feeling of deep and enduring affection for someone, along with a willingness to put their needs ahead of your own; it can be directed towards an individual, a group of people, or even all humanity.

Redefining Happiness

For the past three decades, happiness has become a very hot topic since now science can merge with one of the oldest philosophical questions of “What is the very nature of happiness?” Not just in the realm of inquiry for philosophers and poets to describe, the study of happiness has exploded with bright intensity. Psychologists, economists, and neuroscientists have all joined in a collaborative effort to better explore their intersecting interest in these disciplines. Psychologists desire to know and understand what people feel, economists desire to grasp what people value, and neuroscientists want to better explain how people’s brains maintain a response mechanism to different rewards. These three disciplines that have been interested in the same topic have placed happiness on the global map as Nobel Prizes are awarded, Science research papers and journal articles are written, and federal governments all throughout the world are keenly interested in cultivating happiness in people. In light of this, people use real-time experiences to subjectively respond to the question of, “How are you?” to describe their emotions every day. According to the latest findings in both the field and lab studies, very few experiences linger and make an impact longer than three months for most people. Typically when good things happen, people will celebrate the events and eventually become sober after a while. When bad things occur, they might whine, moan, and complain for a while before picking themselves back up and moving on.

Many psychologists now agree that people are starting to make the best of what they have been given and realize their own sense of resilience when their emotions are not working for them altogether whether in their workplace, family, or communal life. History has many examples of how people are redefining their sense of happiness in their various life spheres. Many continue to synthesize their experiences of happiness and identify their own silver linings in the midst of aversively negative, traumatic, or tragedy-like circumstances. Moreese Bickham, who spent over 37 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary stated, “I don’t have one minute’s regret. It was a glorious experience.” Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Jim Wright resigned after a blacklisted book deal. A few years afterward, he reflected to the New York Times that he was, “so much better off, physically, financially, emotionally, mentally, and in almost every other way.” Pete Best, the original drummer for the Beatles, had been replaced by Ringo Starr in 1962 prior to the band’s global success platform and later reflected, “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles” as a session drummer. In many ways, the psychological community is noting how people are happiest when appropriately challenged but wither when they are threatened, and people work better when rewarded rather than punished.

Experiencing happiness at work will not just remain an outlier in the daily vernacular if Americans position themselves to pursue emotional intelligence. This will require vision to establish meaning in our work, satisfying relationships, and a sense of enduring hope. Achieving happiness is similar to the concept of losing weight: going on a diet and exercising more regularly with consistency are the key cornerstones of weight loss. Over time, the results will come. Dr. Ed Diener from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign cites in his research that the frequency of happy experiences can be a much better predictor for sustaining happiness rather than the intensity of positive experiences. Going on an outing with a celebrity, winning the Nobel Prize, or buying a mansion are positive life events that have much emotional intensity. Yet, having a dozen mildly nice things occur each day, such as receiving a kiss from your spouse, wearing your favorite shoes, and meeting friends for dinner accumulate the same positive feelings. In this sense, happiness is the sum total of all the small things that occur in each day. Proactive behaviors as meditating, exercising, getting enough sleep, practicing altruism, and maintaining social connections are all important elements in developing lifestyle habits of happiness that can tremendously impact the workplace.