Bronze May Be Better in the Race for Happiness

Think your love life’s a failure? How about your job? And what about that 10-year-old bucket of lug bolts you call your car? Well, you probably don’t need a psychologist to tell you that what you think creates how you feel. But it’s true. It’s the bottom line of what’s called cognitive therapy.

Abe Lincoln said it best: “Most folks are as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

So what to do about it? Take a lesson from the Olympics. That’s what three research psychologists did in a now classic study published in 1995 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

They looked at silver and bronze medal winners as they stood on the podium receiving their medals, and they rated them according to how happy they appeared to be. Who do you think was happier: the silver or the bronze winners?

The answer may surprise you. It was the bronze winners, even though they had performed worse than the silvers.

Why? Because the silvers compared themselves up: “If only a second faster, I’d be the best in the world. Now here I am, a loser.”

The bronze compared themselves down, to the rest of the field. They were thrilled just to be up on the podium. After all, they could have been only one of the field.

The reactions of the winners Tuesday in the women’s gymnastics finals in Athens were a textbook illustration of the study results. As the results became clear, the U.S. team, which had expected gold but instead got silver, sat dejected and forlorn while the Russian team appeared happy and gracious in winning the bronze.

The take-home lesson here is that how you feel depends upon what you say to yourself, especially whom you compare yourself to. From a spiritual point of view, it’s why the Dalai Lama encourages folks to be grateful for electricity, plumbing and the other basics, things we didn’t have 100 years ago -- and things many people in the world still don’t.

So next time you’re working yourself into a lather about how little money you have, or how your sex life isn’t what sex life is on TV -- think bronze and be thankful for what you have. According to the research, it’s good psychology.