Freedom May Be the Key to Happiness and a Good Life

"It's great to have great sex and hot-fudge sundaes," says cognitive scientist Laurie Santos, who researches the science of well-being at Yale University.

"But ultimately, true happiness probably comes from what we do with others and building a broader good life."

For at least 2,300 years, philosophers have considered what creates a "good life". The Greek philosopher Epicurus explored the question and identified three central elements, including friendship.

During the past century, psychology, genetics and neurobiology have each examined the issue from their own perspectives.

Freedom and happiness

Fresh research now points to one crucial element of happiness: freedom. More precisely, it may depend on whether we believe we truly have control over our own lives.

Published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, the study was conducted by University of Toronto psychologists Jason W. Payne and Ulrich Schimmack. They set out to examine more closely the competing ideas about what constitutes a good life.

The hedonic perspective holds that well-being is essentially about pleasure and avoiding unpleasant experiences.

By contrast, the eudaemonic perspective proposes that a good life includes things that can be important even if they do not feel pleasant at the time.

Consider looking after an ill relative. It may be tiring, stressful and profoundly unpleasant, yet most people would not say the experience lacks value merely because it does not increase their happiness in the short term.

The researchers focused especially on three psychological needs outlined in self-determination theory: relatedness, meaning meaningful relationships; competence, meaning feeling able and effective; and autonomy, meaning our actions seem voluntarily chosen rather than imposed upon us.

They sought to establish whether these needs shaped how people viewed their lives independently of the emotional state of simply "feeling good right now".

Autonomy and life satisfaction

To investigate, the team surveyed more than 1,200 adults aged 18 to 80 in Canada and the UK in 2022.

Participants responded to questions about life satisfaction, positive and negative emotions, personality, and the extent to which their three psychological needs were met.

Each of the three needs had some association with life satisfaction. However, relatedness and competence appeared to matter chiefly because they helped people feel good.

Autonomy stood apart.

Those who experienced greater autonomy generally reported higher life satisfaction, even after the researchers accounted for how positively or negatively they felt about other areas of their lives.

"Even after accounting for how good or bad people felt, those who felt more autonomous were more satisfied with their lives," Payne says.

"Autonomy was the only psychological need that seems to contribute something that feelings alone did not explain."

It seems that people do not only ask themselves, "How do I feel?"

They also appear to ask: "Is this life mine?"

This difference may help explain why people occasionally choose options that do not maximise immediate pleasure.

Someone may accept a challenging job because it offers more independence than an easier role, or relocate somewhere unfamiliar to make their own decisions away from established relationships and personal history.

Such decisions may not generate an unbroken flow of positive emotions. Yet they may still strengthen the feeling that life is going well - simply because they were freely chosen.

The researchers do not suggest that pleasure is unimportant. Positive and negative affect, in fact, accounted for a substantial share of people’s judgements about life satisfaction.

Instead, their findings indicate that neither a wholly hedonic nor a wholly eudaemonic account captures the full picture. When assessing their lives, people seem to rely on both.

The team also noted a limitation: participants came from Western, English-speaking populations, so the findings must be tested among more culturally diverse groups.

Other research has also considered the role that age plays.

The risks of limiting choice

There may also be a wider lesson for anyone seeking to make others happier.

"Programs and interventions designed to improve well-being may succeed in improving feelings, but if they restrict people's choices, then they could ultimately backfire and lead people to judge their lives as worse overall," says Payne.

Sometimes, what makes life satisfying is not that somebody made the "right" decision for you. It is that you were able to make the decision yourself.

The study has been published in The Journal of Positive Psychology.

This article was fact-checked by Rachel Garner and edited by Clare Watson. While we take pride in our process, we are only human. If you notice an error, please let us know.