Every situation has a silver lining – discover a mindset that heals and enlightens.
August 18, 2021 · 7 min read
The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. - Albert Einstein
Intelligence and happiness are two directly correlated possesions of humans. To most of your amazement, the truth who is happier, that is either people with lower intelligence or higher intelligence, is surprising.
Happiness can be brought by a lot of things: friends, gifts, loved ones, pets, hobbies, conversations and much more.
The natural question arises: if there is an abundance of aspects to be happy from, then why so many people are unhappy? Even though the happiness is so abstract and it could seem that the answer should be simple enough – it‘s not that easy.
We often don‘t know how to enjoy life, it seems as it almost we forget how do it, but we can‘t remember exactly how. Take children for an instance: they are so curious, they are thrilled to experience new things, smell and taste new food, beverages, new activities and a lot more.
As we grow up, life becomes not that simple and we start overthinking about things. People have more responsibilities, chores to do and things just don‘t stop piling up.
One of the potential answers to your majority of happiness questions is emotional intelligence importance on happiness and how the intellect correlates with happiness.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence is described as a type of social intelligence, which aids for a person to control his and others‘ emotions, differentiate between them and to use this emotional information to execute actions.
Emotional intelligence is a state of mind that could help to improve happiness. The main two models of such emotional intelligence are ‘‘Mixed Model“ and ‘‘Ability Model“.
What Is The Purpose of Emotional Intelligence?
Scientific readings propose that emotional intelligence is a huge part of a person‘s development of happiness. Emotional intelligence helps to increase satisfaction of life, lower the amount of negative thoughts and negative emotional states.
Also, emotional intelligence increases positive thoughts and positive emotional states, improves one‘s social capabilities and relations with other people, reduces stress and depression and increases overall well-being of a person.
Therefore, it is crucial to promote the emotional intelligence impact on happiness and how to control and leverage it to your advantage, so you can be happier and enjoy life more.
Emotional Power – Mixed Model
Mixed Model of emotional intelligence refers to a collection of steady personality traits, sociological emotional characteristics, a variety of cognitive powers and motivational features.
In short, it describes a sum of variety feelings that are within one‘s mind that add up emotional intelligence. The list is long and complex, but to give an example, some could be such as motivational will power – a state where a person is dedicated to achieve a certain goal almost no matter what current circumstances are.
Other example could be from personality traits group: a certain person could be hard-working, which results in an increasement of emotional intelligence.
It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
On the other side, the same person could be very stubborn, which means it is hard for him or her to accept other opinion and change his or her outlook of the world.
This is a downside, because it is a barrier for improvements in every aspect in life: social, emotional, financial, physical health and much more. This is seen as a downside of the person, which decreases the emotional intelligence.
Emotional Information Processing – The Ability Model
The ability model refers to a person‘s ability of emotional information processing. It can be whatever – sadness, stress, depression, joyfulness, euphoria and others.
For an instance: a person has just experienced a car crash. Luckily, he is not injured, but he just crashed his 100,000$ worth Mercedes-Benz that is beyond repairable. Now, there can be a lot of different outcomes of emotional information processing.
A lot of people would go through different emotional phases if they were in this person‘s place. Some people would be grateful that they are still alive and didn‘t experience any life-threatening injuries, but some people would be devastated by the financial loss.
As a result, a lot of emotional feelings would be processed in a period of time: gratefulness, sadness, stress, uncertainty, acceptance, even depression.
If one makes a decision to pivot their emotion into happiness or at least suppresing the negative feelings – that is a positive ability model.
Emotional intelligence and happiness correlation
A study that aimed to 646 adolescents aged 12-17 was executed. The goal of this study was to find correlation of emotional intelligence and happiness levels. Emotional intelligence consist of 3 objects: attention, clarity and attention.
Adolescence is perceived as the best time for emotional intelligence growth. Such person is learning the most about himself. Thus, incorporating additional emotional learning about oneself is very beneficial as it can increase the happiness levels in person.
Happiness, however is an abstract emotion if not described correctly. A recent study aims to present adolescents as an object to describe happiness in two ways.
The first approach is that happiness is related to positive emotions without any negative emotions.
The second is that happiness refers to psychological actions which result in full potentional of that person.
Both models are joined by the trinity of happiness.
This study found that adolescents are likely to change their emotions quicker than adults. That is the reason why it is important to inform them about the happiness and emotional intelligence.
Happiness is perceived as a tool to prevent depression, make people be satisfied with their lives and bring the creativity out of them. Of course, adults can also change and must change for their better being.
The more emotional intelligent person is, the better he can control his emotional or happiness state.
All in all, life is too short to be trapped in a negative state of mind and bragging about life unfairness. Every person has a power to start taking actions in order to take the control of happiness into their hands.
Hapiness Trinity #1 - Pleasant Life
The first element of the trinity is having a pleasant life, which means that a person has positive feelings for his future, present and past.
Having no positive expectations for life will rarely lead to a good direction. A good direction is regarded as a psychological state, when a person is very often cheerful and joyful about what he does and has optimistic, but at the same time realistic expectations.
A pleasant state can be found in everyday life: walking a dog, tasting delicious food, having a conversation with loved ones or playing a video game.
You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace. - Frank McCourt
Hapiness Trinity #2 - commited Life
The second aspect refers to a commited life, which means that a person uses all of his talents and strengths.
It can be nearly anything: dedication to cook delicious food to building planes or rockets. A person uses his talents for something that he is passionate for.
It can be anything, because people are different and have different hobbies or passions that drive them to be commited.
Hapiness Trinity #3 - Meaningful Life
The last dimension is correlated to a meaningful life – a person spends his time for positive results around his or her environment.
If one is skilled in public speaking and utilizes this tool to empower the audience in a positive way, then it can be assumed as meaningful life. A person uses his leverage to help other people to reach their social, financial, psychological goals.
Hundreds, thousands, in some cases even millions of lives can be changed by one person. As a result, that person has a meaningful life by helping other people fullfilling their goals.
Are intelligent people more depressed?
Happiness and intelligence are closely linked to each other. A study where participants over 16 participated was analyzed. There were 6870 participants in this study.
The lowest level of happiness were reported in the group of IQ range from 70-99 and higher happiness levels occurred in highest IQ group which ranged from 120-129.
Variables in income, relationships, daily activities and mental health were the key factors in happiness levels. These factors reduced happiness levels by 50%.
A very important factor which is social media impacts heavily on happiness. The more time people spend communicating with each other face to face, the happier they are.
The more people spend time on social media, the unhappier they are. This occurs more in younger individuals because they tend to use social media more than older people. Older people usually have more face-to-face interaction.
Social media depresses people because they start feeling the fear of missing out. People see a lot of nice places, beautiful relationships, rich lifestyle.
Nowadays we are trying to make sure that we don’t miss any posts from friends. This results in never-ending catchup game. However, this scrolling through social media is not as emotionally rewarding as having face to face interaction.
All of this adds up to a one feeling which is called isolation. We start missing out on friends’ meetups and sometimes even on family related events. This leads to depression and constant bad mood.
Therefore, happiness and intelligence are dependent on each other, but in some cases like this both intelligent and less intelligent people suffer.
Do Intelligent people have mental disorders?
Another study was analyzed, where 3700 people were surveyed. These people have top IQ of 2% total population, which equals to 132 IQ or higher.
For a comparison, 10% of population have anxiety disorders and another 10% have some sort of mood disorders. It turns out that 27% of surveyed intelligent people had mood disorder and 20% had anxiety disorder.
Happiness and intelligence correlation problem occurs due to intelligent people’s tendency to worry more than lower intelligent people. They are more likely to think about other people’s opinions about themselves, whether it would be physical or psychological related opinion.
I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. - Antonio Gramsci
Another proposal which relates to IQ and happiness correlation is that intelligent people have a smaller social circle. They are likely not to make too many small talks and this results in isolation. As it is known, humans are meant to be social creatures. That’s why intelligent people fall to depression.
However, there is another alternative to having lower happiness levels. Lower happiness levels could occur due to genes.
On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that intelligence increases your mental illness probability. People could be born with these genes, which result in lower happiness, regardless whether a person is intelligent or not.
In either case, intelligence and happiness have a close relationship due to the happiness dependency on IQ.
Personal experience of IQ and happiness correlation
I know a lot of people that are academically intelligent and have little friends.
I also know a lot of people that are academically intelligent and have a lot of good friends.
From my experience, academically intelligent people tend to spend more time learning and thus having less time to interact with people, which results to being less happy.
They are more driven to achieve more in life, which makes them to worry a lot about upcoming future. However, one thing that sets them apart is emotional intelligence, which helps them to cope with the stress and depression.
They are also well aware of specialists that can help to combat stress and depression. A lot of acquittances and friends have attended specialists for psychological help which provided appropriate medical consultation to improve their mental health.
Final Words From Delightful Mindset
Research proposed surprising truth that people with lower intelligence are more likely to stay depressed and unhappy. This is due to the difference between intelligent and less intelligent people emotional intelligence awareness and knowing how to cope with state of unhappiness.
Although higher intelligent people could potentially have more stress worrying over their future and public opinions about them, but they know the tools that can help them. Because of this, they are fully aware that this state of unhappiness is temporary and can be fixed with the right help.
Depression and other negative feelings are huge psychological problems among people in our modern times. Due to the fact that our society is getting smarter, the mental health problems are more and more discussed and people seek for more help than ever before.