A sense of agency leads to more happiness
Summary
- Contentment is linked to agency
- Agency is a sense that you can make a difference in your life
- Agency is the ability to make choices in life
Details
- You may face problems but if you have agency you feel you can improve your situation
- Small choices like what to wear as well as big choices like where to live give us agency
- If we experience powerlessness, or lack of agency then we may get depressed
References
- Me, But Better - The Science and Promise of Personality Change by Olga Khazan
- Resilient - How to grow an unshakable core of calm, strength and happiness - Rick Hanson
Quotes
Finding happiness, or at least contentment, often requires changing your daily thoughts and behaviors, and those happen to be the two elements of personality. Psychological research suggests that agency—the sense that you can create a positive difference in the world, or at least in your life—is linked to reduced levels of depression and helplessness. “Agency causes progress,” the positive-psychology pioneer Martin Seligman has said, while “lack of agency causes stagnation.” Agency imbues you with the sense that you can do something about your problems.
Agency is the sense of being a cause rather than an effect. Agency is present if you deliberately pick a blue sweater over a red one or listen to someone express an opinion and think, “Nah, I don’t agree with that.” With agency, you are active rather than passive, taking initiative and directing your life rather than being swept along
Research by Martin Seligman and others has shown that we are very susceptible to acquiring learned helplessness through experiences of powerlessness, immobilization, and defeat. Consider a child who can’t escape bullying or an adult who’s been assaulted. Or situations in which there is a mismatch between responsibility and resources, such as one person in a downsized corporation trying to do the jobs of three people. Even subtle forms of powerlessness wear people down over time, such as repeatedly trying to get the sustained empathic attention of a partner and finally giving up. A growing sense of pessimism, futility, and hopelessness drags down mood, coping, and ambition, and is a major risk factor for depression.
Then focus on and take into yourself the sense of being an active agent: a hammer rather than a nail.