Do happiness exercises last?
· Source: Seligman, Steen, Park & Peterson, American Psychologist, 2005
A friend sends you a link: one simple exercise, a week of doing it, and you’ll be happier for months. You’ve seen this kind of promise before. Write down good things, thank someone, find your strengths. It sounds pleasant, and also a bit too neat.
So you’re left in the middle. You don’t want to dismiss something that might help, and you don’t want to spend your evenings on a trick that only works in headlines. The honest answer turns out to be more interesting than either a yes or a no.
The study behind the promise
In 2005, Martin Seligman, Tracy Steen, Nansook Park and Christopher Peterson published one of the best-known tests of happiness exercises. It ran on the internet. Adults who came to a website about happiness signed up, and each was given one exercise at random.
There were six groups. Five got exercises the researchers thought might raise happiness. The sixth got a placebo, an exercise meant to look just as plausible while not being expected to do much: writing about early memories every night for a week. Everyone filled in questionnaires about happiness and about depressive symptoms before starting, and then again at several points over the following six months.
The five exercises
Here is what people were asked to do, each for one week, as the full paper describes them.
Three good things: every night, write down three things that went well that day and what caused them. Using a strength in a new way: take an online survey of character strengths, then each day use one of your top five strengths in a way you hadn’t before. A gratitude visit: write a letter of thanks to someone who had been especially kind to you and had never been properly thanked, then deliver it in person. You at your best: write about a time you were at your best, then reread it daily and think about the strengths it showed. Identifying strengths: take the survey and try to use your top strengths more often, without the “new way” part.
What happened over six months
Of the 577 adults who completed the first questionnaires, 411 (71%) completed every follow-up, and the analysis used those. In the first week, people in every group felt happier and less depressed, including the placebo group. A week later, the placebo group had drifted back to where it started.
Three good things and using a strength in a new way did something different. Their effect showed up at the one-month check and was still there at three months and at six months: happier, and fewer depressive symptoms, than at the start. The gratitude visit gave the biggest boost of all at first, and it lasted about a month. By three months it was gone. The remaining two exercises helped only in the first week, much like the placebo.
There was one more finding the authors called unsurprising. People were only asked to do their exercise for a week, but some kept going on their own. Those who continued did best over the long run.
Then other researchers tried it again
A single study, however neat, is a starting point. In 2012, Mongrain and Anselmo-Matthews repeated the test of three good things and using strengths in a new way, with a better control condition and an extra “positive placebo”: an exercise that brought up pleasant things about yourself without being one of the famous ones. The two exercises did bring lasting rises in happiness. So did the positive placebo. On depressive symptoms, the exercises did no better than the control.
In 2017, Woodworth, O’Brien-Malone, Diamond and Schüz repeated the three exercises that had worked best in 2005, with the original placebo, again online. Every group improved, the placebo included. The effects of the exercises couldn’t be told apart from the placebo’s.
That doesn’t make the 2005 study wrong or the exercises useless. It changes what we can say about them. People who choose to try a happiness exercise often do feel better. What later studies question is whether the specific exercise is the reason, or whether something they share does the work. The 2012 authors suggest that bringing positive things about yourself to mind may be that shared ingredient. In the 2017 paper, the authors point to effects common to most kinds of treatment, or to cultural and other differences in the setting.
So what does this mean for you?
Here’s our reading of all three studies together, and it is a reading, not a result. The exercise you pick may matter less than the claims suggest. Trying one, and keeping it up, seems to matter more. In the 2005 study, the lasting effects were strongest in people who carried on after the first week.
Choose the exercise you’ll actually keep doing.
That’s freeing. You don’t need the one perfect method. If writing down three good things feels natural, do that. If a letter to an old teacher feels right, write it. If both feel forced, a few minutes of noticing good things about your day or yourself may serve you just as well.
There is also a detail in the three good things exercise that is easy to miss: people noted what caused each good thing. Our suggestion is to keep that to one short line. “The bus waited because I ran.” That’s a cause. It’s different from sitting down to analyse why a happy day made you happy. When Lyubomirsky, Sousa and Dickerhoof had people do that, they came out feeling worse than people who simply replayed the day in their minds.
Mira’s week of good things
This one is invented. Mira tries three good things for a week. Monday’s list is easy: a warm lunch, a funny message from her brother, the train arriving on time. She adds a cause to each, in a few words. “Brother: he remembered the joke from our holiday.”
By Thursday it takes longer, and she nearly skips it. She writes one thing instead of three and goes to bed. On Sunday she reads the week back and notices something she hadn’t expected: most of her good things involved other people.
The next week nobody asks her to continue. She keeps it up on most evenings anyway, sometimes with three things, sometimes with one. A month later she can’t say whether it was the exercise or the habit of stopping for five minutes each night. Going by the later studies, it may not matter.
When an exercise isn’t enough
These exercises are small, pleasant habits, tested on adults who signed up because they wanted to feel happier. They aren’t a treatment. If your mood has been low for more than a couple of weeks, if you’ve lost interest in things you used to enjoy, or if a list of good things keeps coming up empty, see a doctor or a therapist. You deserve more help than a nightly list can give, and the list can wait until later.
Try it tonight
- Tonight, name three things that went well today, small ones included.
- Next to each, add one short line about what made it happen.
- Keep it up for a week, then decide for yourself whether to continue.
Say your three good things out loud in Halflight each evening. It keeps them by date, so after a week you can look back and see what kept coming up.