16) Notes on 'Happy' documentary on Netflix - 23/10/17

In order to give me some wider research on the idea of happiness, I decided to watch a documentary about happiness that I found on Netflix. My notes from the documentary can be seen below.

I really liked the documentary because it had a lot of recent research studies into happiness as well as some scientific and psychological explanations.

The first point I took down which was interesting was the pie chart on what makes up people's happiness. Interestingly, only 10% is allocated to your circumstances - for instance where you live, income, social status, age. It's sad how advertising leads us to believe these are the things that matter and will make us happy. 40% is allocated to intentional activity, what you choose to do that makes you happy. Then the remaining 50% is a genetic set-point/range for each person, which we adjust back to in good and bad situations. I never knew people had different set-points of happiness so I thought this was intriguing, but also I think its quite sad to think that one person may be genetically happier than another person.

A science-y point I thought were interesting was the fact that as we grow older we lose dopamine receptors, so this means that adults can be less happier than children. This relates back to what I was talking about in an early blog post, and how children have unfiltered joy in comparison to adults, not affected by the responsibilities you have as an adult - for instance simple things like climbing a tree or playing outside.

Going back to the idea of everyone having a happiness set-point, another thought provoking point I found was that the key ingredient to happiness is to be able to recover from adversity quickly. Paired with this, is the ability to have 'flow' (when a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energised focus, full involvement, and enjoyment). I found this point quite insightful and I want to try and actively do these things more. I hope this will reflect in my own photography in the coming shoot I'm going to do with a 35mm point and shoot camera, to capture what makes me happy in everyday life.

Other facts I'd seen which were similarly in the BBC Lifestyle manifesto too include:

- more exercise

- random acts of kindness

- counting your blessings

and meditation

The last interesting and more psychological point I took from the documentary was the information on intrinsic and extrinsic goals. Within the documentary they talk about a study where they focused on three extrinsic goals (money, image and status) and three intrinsic goals (personal growth, relationships and desire to help) and compared the effects of them on different people. They found the extrinsically motivated people were more depressed, anxious and had less satisfaction with life, whereas the intrinsically motivated people were more happy, had more vitality and less depression. It made me happy that these were the outcomes of the study, because it shows you do not have to focus on material things and money for happiness. This is an ideal I would also like to show within my work and my upcoming shoot on film.

To conclude I found the documentary really illuminating in terms of psychological and scientific information, and it was great to see some examples of this in real life around the world. I hope my points of interest from the documentary will show through in my own work.

#research #obsessions