What Happy People Don’t Do

Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes just like anger, disgust, or sadness. So I always had a difficult time when people asked about my life in general with “Are you happy?” I would think to myself, I’m happy sometimes, other times I’m sad or annoyed. However, after thinking about it I understand what it means. A happy person is someone who is content with the trajectory of their life. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect or they don’t wish for some parts of their life to be different. It means, in general, they wake up liking who they are and what their life produces.

Happy people spend a lot of time socializing, going to church and reading newspapers — but a study found that they don’t do a lot of this:

They don’t spend a lot of time watching television. That’s what unhappy people do.

Although people who describe themselves as happy enjoy watching television, it turns out to be the single activity they engage in less often than unhappy people, said John Robinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and the author of the study, which appeared in the journal Social Indicators Research.

While most large studies on happiness have focused on the demographic characteristics of happy people — factors like age and marital status — Dr. Robinson and his colleagues tried to identify what activities happy people engage in. The study relied primarily on the responses of 45,000 Americans collected over 35 years by the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, and on published “time diary” studies recording the daily activities of participants.

“We looked at 8 to 10 activities that happy people engage in, and for each one, the people who did the activities more — visiting others, going to church, all those things — were happier,” Dr. Robinson said. “TV was the one activity that showed a negative relationship. Unhappy people did it more, and happy people did it less.”

Perhaps it is time to turn off the TV so we can live more of our own story.

But the researchers could not tell whether unhappy people watch more television or whether being glued to the set is what makes people unhappy. “I don’t know that turning off the TV will make you happier,” Dr. Robinson said.

Still, he said, the data show that people who spend the most time watching television are least happy in the long run. Perhaps it is time to turn off the TV so we can live more of our own story.