Some people are born with a ‘talent for happiness’ – so what’s their secret?

Chloe Madley says her dad Richard has it: an irrepressible sense of joy no matter how grim the news or the weather. Intrigued, Polly Dunbar meets the experts who say any one of us can develop a ‘happiness advantage’

Happy hour: as many as 972 genes could be involved in making us feel good (iStock)

We all know someone. That person in the office or local cafe who always seems upbeat, no matter how grim the weather or horrifying the news. Are they just good at pretending – putting on a happy face to mask how they really feel? Or could happiness be something they genuinely possess more of than the rest of us?

In a recent interview, Chloe Madeley described her father, the irrepressible television presenter Richard, as having a “talent for happiness”; an innate propensity to see the world in a positive light. And, according to experts, there are those who really do have a biological advantage when it comes to contentment.

“Some people are just born happier than others,” says Meik Wiking, CEO of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen. “We know from studies that identical twins have similar happiness levels, suggesting a genetic component.”

It’s a complex business: one 2019 study identified 972 different genes potentially involved in making us happy. One of the genes thought to play a part is 5-HTTLPR, important in the control of mood-affecting serotonin. Volunteers with a particular variant of it were found to be predisposed to avoiding negative images, gravitating towards happier and uplifting ones.

The data also shows a close association between happiness and two of the five personality traits known as the Big Five: openness, agreeableness, neuroticism, conscientiousness and extroversion. In 2018, psychologists confirmed that the two which seem to be key to happiness are high extroversion (being outgoing and expressive) and low neuroticism (being anxious and self-doubting). More specifically, one aspect of each: enthusiasm and withdrawal, respectively. Those who are highly enthusiastic, defined as friendly and sociable, and withdraw less, leaning out of social situations because they’re easily discouraged and overwhelmed, are happier.

But it’s not as simple as assuming our happiness is all driven by genetics. Extensive research by Norwegian scientists suggests that wellbeing and life satisfaction – the scientific measurements of happiness – are around 40 per cent hereditary. This sounds huge, until you consider that the heritability of IQ is as high as 80 per cent – much more significant. So for those with a talent for happiness, there’s more to the story. It is something that has been honed over years.

Happiness needs to be worked at (Getty)

Happiness expert Andy Cope, author of The Art of Being Brilliant, says that only 10 per cent of our happiness comes down to circumstances, “which always surprises people, because it doesn’t seem much at all.”

Other forces which influence an ability to be happy include the natural rhythms of life experience in which happiness follows a U-shape over a lifetime. It peaks when we’re young and old and nosedives in our forties, dipping to its lowest at 47.2, when energy-giving hormones such as testosterone and oestrogen are plummeting at a time our caring responsibilities for children or elderly relatives may be increasing, as well peak pressure at work and on our finances too. Research tells us we only start climbing out the other side 10 years later and by our mid-sixties, we can expect to feel as happy as we did at 18. Where we live is also important (unsurprisingly, the least happy people live in war-torn countries), but, for the rest of us, the remaining half of the pie is influenced largely by how we behave. Happiness needs to be worked at.

This is borne out by the longest-running study into happiness, by Harvard University. It began in 1938 with 724 participants and has continued with their children and grandchildren, including 1,300 direct descendants. The scientists broke down happiness into two types: hedonic happiness (temporary and fluctuating) and eudaimonic happiness (living a meaningful life).

Throughout their lives, they had regular brain scans, measures of stress hormones, blood tests and psychological interviews, aiming to understand what truly makes a happy life.

By changing our habits, we can train our brains to behave differently (Getty)

One finding leapt out as by far the most significant – the people in their study who kept prioritising (social) connections, and kept making those small decisions to connect day after day, were the people who stayed happier and healthier.

These were active, regular choices made by individuals, rather than anything pre-ordained. Admittedly, it might be easier to make these kinds of choices if we’ve grown up around people doing the same. Vanessa King, lead psychology expert for the non-profit organisation Action for Happiness, says: “Just because you have the genes which make you more likely to look for the silver lining in difficult times, or the opportunities, that doesn’t mean those genes will always express themselves. The conditioning in our early lives can help us to cultivate those abilities.”

But if you didn’t have role models for an optimistic outlook, all is not lost. While it was once believed our personalities were fixed by adulthood and remained largely immutable throughout the rest of our lives, it’s now believed that by changing our habits, we can train our brains to behave differently. And people with a talent for happiness can teach us a lot about how to do this.

“People we perceive as happy don’t always feel good,” says King. “But usually, they’re choosing to do things which make today or tomorrow just slightly better.”

Our brains can only process 40 bits of information per second, despite being deluged with 11 million pieces of information coming from all our nerve endings. Unfortunately, most of our brains are wired to pay more attention to negative things than positive ones – and what our brains attend to becomes our reality.

King says that we can combat this by choosing not to ignore the negative, but to intentionally notice some of the positive things that are going on, too.

“If we do small things like this daily, it can help us to build a kind of realistic – not blind – optimism”. Studies show that this kind of deliberate optimism has all kinds of positive benefits, because it helps us feel better, but also means we’re more likely to try harder to fix problems too.

Those who maintain social connections are more likely to be happier, studies suggest (Getty)

Studies suggest that even two minutes of a positive habit every day, such as thinking of three things we’re grateful for, or writing an email to a friend, can help prime our brains to be happier. Other small things virtually all experts agree make people happier include getting outdoors, listening to music, helping others and laughing. The powerful cocktail of oxytocin, dopamine and serotonin – all the feel-good hormones – released during these activities not only elevate our mood in the moment, but also have a lasting impact on our response to stress, including our heart rate.

Wiking says that it’s helpful to see happiness as a talent that we can develop. “We need to look at happiness the same way we look at health,” he says. “While we are all more or less genetically predisposed to certain diseases, the choices we make – whether to smoke, drink alcohol and eat healthily – have a major impact. We need to look at happiness through the same lens.”

Wiking’s advice? If you feel your happiness is stuck on a five out of 10, ask what would lift you to a six. Just the act of consciously tuning our mind to what could make us happier is a start.

“All these habits and practices are things that people who have that talent for happiness might do naturally,” says King. “But we can all learn to do them and practise them regularly and in that way, we can create that gift of happiness for ourselves.”