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Happiness: Are Women in a Misery Epidemic?

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Plus the latest research on positive psychology

Marcus Buckingham is the bestselling author of five books, with more than 3.7 million copies in print, and the world's leading expert in personal strengths. Buckingham has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Larry King Live, the Today show, Good Morning America, and The View, and profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

His latest controversial observations, however, that women are in the middle of a “misery epidemic” and are more unhappy than men, have brought him much criticism and negative attention from women all over the world.

In truth, men and women are about as happy as each other. The large-scale studies of happiness that Buckingham and others use to promote their views of women being unhappy, when looked at carefully, actually demonstrate very small differences — less than one-half of 1 percent, which tell us nothing about men, women and happiness. And when the key researchers in this field, Wharton professors Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, looked at men and women in particular domains of life — employed, married, single, etc. — they found virtually no differences in overall happiness between men and women.

That “bad news” is “big news” is not new, and it seems especially true when it comes from male media types. Remember the 1985 Newsweek cover story that women over 35 have as much chance of getting married as they do of getting killed by a terrorist? This story really had legs, exploding in the media and even ending up as a line of dialogue in Sleepless in Seattle. It never was true. Twenty years later, in 2006, Newsweek apologized in another cover story.

It seems no matter how often the myth of the contemporary “miserable woman” is proven to be untrue, it always comes back again and again in the media with renewed vigor, only to be disproven again. It’s just way too sexy for media types to ignore. But sexy doesn’t mean truthful. Sexy can often be misleading and when it comes to thinking that modern women are an unhappier lot than men, well, there’s nothing sexy or truthful about that according to scientists.

Women and men may face pain in life equally. Unemployment, unsatisfying personal relationships, health concerns, not being happy in their bodies, feeling like they are surviving instead of thriving — who doesn’t face some degree of unhappiness in life? Men and women alike want a blueprint for building lasting, meaningful relationships, improving health, increasing creativity and boosting their productivity.

Positivity psychologists, a new breed of scientists whose works are based on the old glass-half-full approach to life, describe 10 forms of positivity that can help keep people in what many consider to be the optimal 3 to 1 ratio of positive to negative thoughts for healthy living. These 10 forms of positivity are: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe and love. Lots of “feel-good” talk, grounded in science. Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect. It means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections. Happiness is not based on the absence of problems. Rather, it’s based on the ability to deal with problems.

Developing meaningful relationships leads to happiness. Buying experiences, not things, leads to happiness. Being “mindful” — carefully observing the world and paying attention to, and savoring, the little details that are overlooked — leads to happiness. The ability to bounce back from bad experiences without dwelling on them or continuing to repeat the patterns that caused them, or “resilience,” leads to happiness. Optimism, or better, “realistic optimism” (the glass is not half filled, but the 8-ounce glass has 4 ounces in it), leads to happiness. Each of these can be developed over time.

Happiness has little to do with genes, luck or gender. It has to do with cultivating, identifying and nurturing traits we possess — kindness, originality, humor, realistic optimism and generosity. Calling on these traits provides us with a “natural buffer” against negative emotions.

Simply put, gender aside, it is all about the eye through which you look at the world. I heard a moving story recently that’s worthy of sharing. Seems a woman took her three children out to the park to play one day and they made toy bows and arrows out of twigs and string. The mother admonished them to be careful not to aim the toy bows and arrows at each other for fear that one of the children would get hurt. They played as carefully as three kids under the age of 8 could, yet as it would happen, when one of the boys was aiming his bow and arrow at the ground, another came along, bumped him and the arrow shot in the air and hit his sibling in the eye.

Frantic, the mother rushed the child to the hospital where surgeons could not save the eye hit by the arrow. The mother kept thinking to herself, “What am I going to tell my son when he comes out of the anesthesia?”

When the child woke, he was crying and asked his mother what was going to happen to him. With the brilliance of a positive psychologist, a wise sage and a loving mother, she said the following: “God gave us all two eyes — one eye through which we see the good in the world and the other through which we see the bad. You were lucky that the eye that you no longer have was the eye through which you saw the bad in the world, and are left with the eye through which you only see the the good.”

The youngster replied, “Then I guess I’m lucky because if I lost the eye through which I only see good, I’d spend the rest of my life seeing bad.”

Want to learn more about positive psychology? Go to my alma mater’s Web site, the central address for positive psychology, at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. The founder and director, Martin Seligmann, continues to demonstrate that regardless of gender, we all can feel more satisfied, be more engaged in life, have higher hopes and even laugh and smile more. Perhaps it all comes down to looking at life, regardless of circumstances and gender, through the right eye.

For more than 30 years, Dr. Mantell has successfully been bringing upbeat, friendly and helpful psychological insights to individuals, families and businesses in San Diego as a clinical and corporate psychologist in private practice. He's been a regular on Good Morning America, KFMB-TV News 8, has appeared on Oprah, Larry King Live, the Today show, authored two best-selling books and speaks regularly for audiences throughout the country. He can be found on Facebook and Twitter.

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