Notes on: How Our Environment Impacts Our Happiness

'How Our Environment Impacts Our Happiness' is taken from the course 'Managing Happiness' by Arthur Brooks on edX.org.

Importance of Community

One researcher studying a group of soldiers at war found that they suffered both physically and psychologically living away from their family, friends, and communities. Some became addicted to drugs in search of comfort, or to escape the reality of their situation.

When these same soldiers returned from war, they discovered something amazing: most of the ones who started using drugs, stopped without intervention, and their wellbeing surged as a result of being reunited with their homes.

This suggests that love and relationships are extremely strong forces for countering isolation and trauma.

Outsourcing Our Control

David Neal, a psychologist who studied how our environments might affect our behaviour, explains that when people perform a behaviour repeatedly, especially in the same physical environment, they will end up outsourcing control to that environment.

For someone who has never driven a car, the steps they need to take to get it going are plentiful and complicated: they would first need to find the lock and open the door, they would need to manoeuvre themselves into the seat, then coordinate the key going into the ignition, and this is all before we even put the car in drive. But, for people who have driven the same car for a long time, there is no need to think of these individual steps, once we are in the environment of our car, everything just happens without thinking.

Environment's Key Role In Behaviour

Our environments unconsciously direct our behaviour, even some behaviours we may not want. Take smoking for example, if a smoker regularly smokes outside of the entrance to their office, they will come to associate it with smoking and it will become a cue for a cigarette even if they do not want one. Over time cues can become so deeply ingrained that they are very hard to resist.

One way to counter bad behaviours is to disrupt the environment that supports them in some way. Even small changes can help. For example, if a smoker switched the hands they used to smoke, this would alter the body's automatic action sequence and the conscious mind would kick back in, and perhaps reassert control.

Larger disruptions are obviously very impactful as well. For some of the soldiers returning from the Vietnam War, after they were treated for their physical addiction to heroin, and they were no longer in the same environment where the addiction occurred, it was easier for them to fight it and not relapse.

Your environment can control your emotions, so make sure you control your environment and make changes to foster behaviour that will lead to happier feelings in the short and long-term.