The secret to satisfaction? UTM research offers insight on quest for fulfillment

What does it take to be truly satisfied with life? Philosophers and psychologists have debated the question for centuries and it remains a preoccupation today – just look at the life hacks and wellbeing tips populating social media. 

A recent study from the University of Toronto Mississauga sheds new light on the subject, suggesting that feeling good isn’t enough – people also need to feel free to be satisfied. 

“We found that autonomy, the sense that you’re self-directed, predicted life satisfaction above and beyond what emotions explained,” says co-author Jason Payne. 

“This research shows that people are not merely hedonists. They care a lot about whether they’re free in a way that pleasant emotions don’t replace, when they think about life satisfaction.”

The study was part of Payne’s doctoral dissertation, which he completed under the supervision of UTM psychology professor and co-author Ulrich Schimmack.

Life satisfaction is a central component of what scientists call “subjective wellbeing” and most people call happiness. It’s how individuals evaluate their own lives based on whatever factors they think are important. 

There are two main views on how people derive life satisfaction. Payne and Schimmack’s study, published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, puts these opposing theories to the test. 

The first perspective says that life satisfaction is all about having more pleasant feelings and fewer unpleasant feelings. 

The other perspective says that pleasure isn’t enough and people need to meet certain psychological needs to be happy. 

In their study, Payne and Schimmack explored three psychological needs that other researchers have put forward as crucial to wellbeing: relatedness, or feeling close to others; competence, or feeling effective and capable; and autonomy.  

“In a lot of happiness or wellbeing studies, researchers ask questions that are aligned with one or the other theory,” says Payne, who is now a post-doctoral fellow at Simon Fraser University.

“There was a gap where no one was looking at the impacts of both feeling good and meeting psychological needs on life satisfaction judgments.” 

The researchers surveyed more than 1,200 adults from Canada and the United Kingdom about their overall life satisfaction. They then measured respondents’ positive and negative emotions and sense of relatedness, competence and autonomy. In all cases, respondents considered their past four weeks when selecting their answers. 

Finally, the researchers used advanced statistical modelling to disentangle each of these influences and see how much each of them affected life satisfaction. 

“As expected, people who felt good more often and bad less often tended to rate their lives more highly,” says Payne. “The surprising finding was that autonomy contributed something to life satisfaction that feelings alone could not explain.” 

Relatedness and competence, on the other hand, didn’t predict life satisfaction on their own. “They only seemed to matter for life satisfaction because they made people feel good, suggesting that those factors are interchangeable with other pleasant experiences,” says Payne. 

As for the practical value of this new knowledge, the researchers say there are lessons at the individual and societal level. 

“There is not one happiness,” says Schimmack. “Everybody has to define for themselves what their personal conception of happiness is.”

While the findings confirm that feelings are an important guide to know whether our lives are good, they show that feelings shouldn’t be followed blindly. 

“This is where autonomy come in,” says Schimmack. “Freedom adds to happiness over pleasure and displeasure. Making a choice to suffer can add to happiness if it’s freely chosen.” He points to the example of going to the gym.

For public policy, Schimmack says the research supports the creation of liberal societies where everybody is free to pursue their own version of happiness. 

When it comes to designing programs to improve wellbeing, Payne says they shouldn’t involve any form of coercion. 

“Policymakers need to be mindful not only of potential outcomes, but of whether people feel they’re free to choose the path to those outcomes,” he says.

Ultimately, says Payne, the study highlights that no one theory on satisfaction entirely fits everyone. 

“It speaks to the complexity of human wellbeing,” he says. “And it’s important to have some humility about that.”