Did you get your happiness gene?

We have all been warned that wealth, power, good looks, social status and all other markers of earthly success are not associated with a greater degree of personal happiness. We all know of course, often from personal experience, that the opposite of these conditions is no recipe for a happy life either. So what makes one happy or grumpy, going about the business of life with a smile or a scowl?

It is now becoming more and more clear that an essential ingredient is having the right genes, or as Bernard Shaw once put it, choosing your parents right. Happiness, we are told, is all in the mind, which is wired quite differently in optimists and extroverts who in general are happier than their opposite numbers. Functional activity of the brain can be demonstrated with modern techniques to vary significantly in persons with such disparate personalities.

These structural and functional changes in the brain are associated with various levels of chemicals, including serotonin (the so-called feel-good chemical), which like all proteins is under genetic control. Depending on how much of the right chemicals are produced by your brain cells you live more or less contentedly.

A number of books have been written recently about the subject of personal happiness. Unfortunately, reading books on happiness, like reading the business columns in the papers, is no sure way of achieving one's goal.

The US Declaration of Independence guarantees "the pursuit of happiness" but not the achieving of this laudable goal. Significantly, the Universal Declaration of Independence is completely silent on this point.

Investigators have shown that all those things which one would have thought are associated with a high level of happiness referred to above seem to work only in the striving rather than in the fulfilment. The promise of an award is a greater stimulus to happiness than the getting it. Once we obtain what we hanker for, we promptly return to the previous level of happiness characteristic of our personality.

It thus appears that we are all supplied with a "happiness thermostat" - or shall it be called the "happystat" - which ensures that our level of happiness oscillates about a certain level, determined largely by our genetic constitution, and which varies as a response to environmental factors, but which tends to return to the pre-set level.

So what are we going to do about it? Are we to give up and blame our stars for being underlings?

While there is no doubt that genes are responsible for at least 50 per cent of our happiness score, environmental factors come into play to modify these characteristics. As in the case of intelligence quotient and personal weight control, environmental factors help to modify our genetic tendencies and improve the outcome to fit better with our expectations. Family background adds another five per cent to the score, but this still leaves up to 45 per cent unaccounted for.

Among the things that have been postulated as increasing our happiness score one finds the following:

• living a productive life,

• mastering challenges,

• enjoying things that are less than perfect.

It is curious to reflect on the significance of this last item. It has often been said that perfection is not for this world. Hankering for perfection is no recipe for happiness. Indeed one notices that the ecstatic pleasure associated with the highest productive activity of artists or scientists, for instance, is often preceded and followed by depths of despair. The gourmet who enjoys the delicate flavours of food and wine is more often the one who is miserable about the poor quality of food and drink offered as a routine.

In the final analysis, life is what one makes it, but it seems that it can be much more difficult for some than for others to achieve equivalent aims in life. While this seems to be unfair, it might have its compensations, otherwise it would not have lasted through the millennia of years and the several thousands of generations over which time the supreme hand of evolution might have had a chance to rewind our brain mechanisms. Those of us with a lower happiness score may find themselves to be higher on an achievers score - although this is by no means established.

Maybe one of these days the work of genes would be undone, and happiness would come in small vials of concentrated concoctions, like perfume or poisons. Then we shall have proved ourselves to be the masters of nature and not dependent on our human frailties and our inheritances.