13 Mar For long term happiness don’t get divorced or fired!
When it comes to your long-term happiness, it’s worse to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, at least according to a review article by Michigan State University psychologist Richard Lucas.
Lucas set out to investigate a commonly held view in his field – that people are born to be happy or sad, the slings and arrows of fortune altering that ‘set point” only temporarily.
But nobody had specifically looked at the impact of big life changes, such as marriage, divorce or unemployment, he said. He found that marriage buoyed the spirits for only about two years, after which the spouses were no happier than they had been as singles.
But divorce, he found, could plunge you permanently into the emotional dumps. So could losing your job.
His findings, based on several different studies, were published in the April issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science.
To read more of this happiness research (including the upside to divorce!) – click here.