The kind of change you want doesn’t just happen to you.

Our instincts would tell us that major world and life events, like the changes thrust upon us through the Covid-19 pandemic, must have an impact on who we are as people. These major changes to our lives and lifestyles must surely alter some aspects of our character, attitudes, or happiness on a permanent basis, right? 

To test this theory, the widely respected institution Hogan Assessment Systems (Hogan) have gone deep into their data on personality to evaluate how we've changed as people since the Covid-19 pandemic and (spoiler alert) their verdict is: we haven't. Their data indicates that since the pandemic took hold there is no discernible difference in our personalities, defining traits or characteristics compared to how we looked as a people before it. Listen here if you’re interested in the full story. 

It’s long been understood that the traits and characteristics that make each of us, us (aka. our personalities), generally remain consistent over time. Hogan’s data now demonstrates that even with the magnitude of what we've just faced and the new ways of living and working we’ve had to adopt within such a short space of time, we still are who we are. 

In short, while most of our lives may look slightly or even entirely different, who we are as people within the lives we live holds true. You’re the same person, just walking against a different backdrop. As an example, if you were confident, outspoken and sociable by nature before the pandemic, it's highly likely you are still these things now.

The intriguing thing is this concept and Hogan’s recent finding meshes so beautifully into much of the literature about happiness and wellbeing it's as though someone has rigged the data (but we’re not suggesting they have!).

What we know from Sonia Lyubomirsky et. al’s 2005 research about happiness and emotional adaptation is that our attitudes and experienced happiness are roughly defined in the following ways:

Our Genetic Setpoint refers to predetermined characteristics defining our character and individual wiring for happiness. This is the happiness quotient we’re born with, our ‘nature’, and is quite separate from any ‘nurture’ component or environmental influences at play.

Our Context & Circumstances are the things happening to and around us, and across a lifetime that ‘bump’ our happiness up or down some notches in reaction to events and circumstances.

Intentional Activities are deliberate actions, decisions and past-times we can consciously engage in to alter gradually over time our pre-set happiness and wellbeing. It may not feel like it to you, but this is a remarkable level of influence we have to become the people we want to be.

Tying all this together, if you were thrust around by Covid and forced to establish a ‘new normal’, but didn’t engage in any intentional activities to alter your mindset, attitude and ability to cope, nor take the opportunity to leverage the changes thrown at you to embed new practises and habits alongside those, then your happiness, or unhappiness will likely have settled back to your existing baseline, true of the pre-covid you, right about now.

If you’re a naturally happy person whose life has been severely disrupted by covid-driven change and all of a sudden you’re without all the things you once had and did that you assumed were making you happy, you may have experienced a reduction in happiness, stress and despair for some time after things crumbled, but you may also find yourself surprised by how happy you’re feeling with your new lot, quite soon after the change.

The same is true for people who win the lottery - while we all think we’ll be infinitely happier, healthier and better people for a sudden and enormous windfall, the effects of this on our affect (emotions) wears off by about six to twelve months and we find ourselves stuck in just the same general mood state as we were prior to the big event. In other words, you can’t buy happiness and wellbeing. Just like getting the things you think you want in life, whether that’s a bigger paycheck, being married to the person of your dreams, or achieving olympic gold won’t have the lasting impact on your general mood state and wellbeing that you think it will. You’ll see an immediate increase in happiness and then a drop back to operating within your normal range of emotions very quickly.

How do we creating tangible, lasting and meaningful change?

Without diminishing real life problems and negative events, neuroscience research from the University of Miami reveals that cognitive spillover - how the emotional colouring of an event spills over to other things that happen - has a lasting impact on our perception of the world around us and long-term wellbeing outcomes over time. Their research indicates that “the longer your brain holds on to a negative event or stimuli, the unhappier you report being.” Like you’re wearing a pair of dark glasses all the time.

Similarly, research about wellbeing and learned optimism suggests we are able to influence our overall happiness by up to 40%. Regardless of our circumstances or genetic ‘set point’ we all have the capacity to put on a brighter pair of glasses to see the world through. And if we wear these glasses for long enough, and practise the right things regularly enough we can manipulate our neural pathways to the point where we establish a new ‘happiness setpoint’ for ourselves, leaving us in a better place than where we began. This is called happiness adaptation.

Many evidence-based practices that influence our happiness and subjective experience of different life events are in fact the same things that build resilience over time. For those of us seeking to increase our average happiness and resilience, we can learn how to:

• Heighten the highs - through savouring, appreciation & gratitude, recalling and reminiscing positive events later to reignite the emotions you experienced during them.  

• Shallow the lows - by not holding on to negativity, putting into practise the resilience strategies you’ve established, strengthening and leveraging support networks, establishing and maintaining daily health habits, exercise routines and good sleep.

However, as easy as these may sound to you reading them, the challenge is often crossing the threshold from knowing what you need to do, to actually doing it.

If you need support crossing over into the ‘doing’ space, or advice as to how best to achieve this in light of everything else going on in your life, please get in touch.

We help people, teams and businesses build greater wellbeing, happiness and resilience.