Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

       A．For at least the last decade, the happiness craze has been building. In the last three months alone, over1000 books on happiness were released on Amazon, including Happy Money, Happy-People-Pills ForAll, and, for those just starting out, Happiness for Beginners.
　　B．One of the consistent claims of books like these is that happiness is associated with all sorts of good lifeoutcomes, including--most promisingly--good health.  Many studies have noted the connectionbetween a happy mind and a healthy body--the happier we are, the better health outcomes we seem tohave. In an overview of 150 studies on this topic, researchers put it like this: "Inductions of well-beinglead to healthy functioning, and inductions of ill-being lead to compromised health."
　　C．But a new study, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS)challenges the rosy picture. Happiness may not be as good for the body as researchers thought. Itmight even be bad.
　　D．Of course, it's important to first define happiness. A few months ago, I wrote a piece called "There'sMore to Life Than Being Happy" about a psychology study that dug into what happiness really meansto people. It specifically explored the difference between a meaningful life and a happy life.
　　E．It seems strange that there would be a difference at all. But the researchers, who looked at a largesample of people over a month-long period, found that happiness is associated with selfish "taking"behavior and that having a sense of meaning in life is associated with selfless "giving" behavior.
　　F．"Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in
which things go well, needs and desires are easily satisfied, and complicated relationships areavoided," the authors of the study wrote. "If anything, pure happiness is linked to not helping othersin need." While being happy is about feeling good, meaning is derived from contributing to others orto society in a bigger way. As Roy Baumeister, one of the researchers, told me, "Partly what we do ashuman beings is to take care of others and contribute to others. This makes life meaningful but it doesnot necessarily make us happy. 
　　G．The new PNAS study also sheds light on the difference between meaning and happiness, but on thebiological level. Barbara Fredrickson, a psychological researcher at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatry (精神病学) researcher at UCLA, examined theself-reported levels of happiness and meaning in 80 research subjects.
　　H．Happiness was defined, as in the earlier study, by feeling good. The researchers measured happiness byasking subjects questions like "How often did you feel happy?", "How often did you feel interested inlife?" and "How often did you feel satisfied?" The more strongly people endorsed these measures of"hedonic (享乐主义的) well-being," or pleasure, the higher they scored on happiness.
　　I．Meaning was defined as an orientation to something bigger than the self. They measured meaning byasking questions like "How often did you feel that your life has a sense of direction or meaning to it?"and "How often did you feel that you had something to contribute to society?" The more peopleendorsed these measures of "eudaimonic (幸福论的) well-being"--or, simply put, virtue--the moremeaning they felt in life.
　　J．After noting the sense of meaning and happiness that each subject had, Fredrickson and Cole, withtheir research colleagues, looked at the ways certain genes expressed themselves in each of theparticipants. Like neuroscientists who use fMRI (功能磁共振成像) scanning to determine how regionsin the brain respond to different stimuli, Cole and Fredrickson are interested in how the body, at thegenetic level, responds to feelings of happiness and meaning.
　　K．Cole's past work has linked various kinds of chronic adversity to a particular gene expression pattern.When people feel lonely, are grieving the loss of a loved one, or are struggling to make ends meet,their bodies go into threat mode. This triggers the activation of a stress-related gene pattern that hastwo features: an increase in the activity of pro-inflammatory (促炎症的) genes and a decrease in theactivity of genes involved in anti-viral responses.
　　L．Cole and Fredrickson found that people who are happy but have little to no sense of meaning in theirlives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are responding to and enduring chronicadversity. That is, the bodies of these happy people are preparing them for bacterial threats byactivating the pro-inflammatory response. Chronic inflammation is, of course, associated with majorillnesses like heart disease and various cancers.
　　M．"Empty positive emotions"--like the kind people experience during manic (狂喜的) episodes orartificially induced euphoria (欣快) from alcohol and drugs--"are about as good for you as adversity,"says 　　Fredrickson.
　　N．It's important to understand that for many people, a sense of meaning and happiness in life overlap;many people score jointly high (or jointly low) on the happiness and meaning measures in the study.But for many others, there is a dissonance (不一致)--they feel that they are low on happiness andhigh on meaning or that their lives are very high in happiness, but low in meaning. This last group,which has the gene expression pattern associated with adversity, formed 75 percent of studyparticipants. Only one quarter of the study participants had what the researchers call "eudaimonicpredominance"--that is, their sense of meaning outpaced their feelings of happiness.
　　O．This is too bad given the more beneficial gene expression pattern associated with meaningfulness.People whose levels of happiness and meaning line up, and people who have a strongsense of meaningbut are not necessarily happy, showed a de-activation of the adversity stress response. Their bodieswere not preparing them for the bacterial infections that we get when we are alone or in trouble, butfor the viral infections we get when surrounded by a lot of other people.
　　P．Fredrickson's past research, described in her two books, Positivity and Love 2.0, has mapped thebenefits of positive emotions in individuals. She has found that positive emotions broaden a person's
perspective and help protect people against adversity. So it was surprising to her that hedonic well-being, which is associated with positive emotions and pleasure, did so badly in this study comparedwith eudaimonic well-being.
　　Q．"It's not the amount of hedonic happiness that's a problem." Fredrickson tells me, "It's that it's notmatched by eudaimonic well-being. It's great when both are in step. But if you have more hedonicwell-being than would be expected, that's when this [gene] pattern that's similar to adversityemerged."
　　R．The terms hedonism and eudaimonism bring to mind the great philosophical debate, which has shapedWestern civilization for over 2000 years, about the nature of the good life. Does happiness lie infeeling good, as hedonists think, or in doing and being good, as Aristotle and his intellectualdescendants, the virtue ethicists (伦理学家), think? From the evidence of this study, it seems thatfeeling good is not enough. People need meaning to thrive. In the words of Carl Jung, "The least ofthings with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it." Jung's wisdomcertainly seems to apply to our bodies, if not also to our hearts and our minds.