If You Want to Improve Your Life Satisfaction

A large German prospective study, lasting 15 years, suggests that if we want to increase our life satisfaction then we need to:

1. Focus on becoming more extroverted and less neurotic  - more on that in another post
2. Pursue goals relating to
• Family life: building a happy marriage, developing good relationships with our children, and,
• Altruism: building friendships, helping others, social and political activism.

Whereas pursuing 'success' goals (career success and material gains) actually leads to decreasing life satisfaction.

It isn't rocket science is it?  But there is a lot of cultural pressure encouraging us to put energy into 'success goals' so it is good to keep being reminded that it really doesn't lead to more happiness. However, my instinct is that balance is the key here. I think that we can assume that most of the study participants were working, which actually means that the study found that adding goals around relationships and altruism increased well being.