Recent news reports on the ten most and least happy professions in America, courtesy of the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, caught many people by surprise but really shouldn’t have. After all, each of the happiest jobs identified align well with established research findings on the key drivers of human happiness. As ably summarized by Richard Layard, these natural happiness drivers include things that are community, family, and health friendly; ensure adequate financial security; provide sufficient meaningfulness and work quality; promote social currency and personal freedom; and encourage compassionate, trusting, and thankful personal attitudes.

What should be equally unsurprising, but often is still a shock and strongly counter-intuitive for many of us, is that the least happy occupations identified emphasize income, technical focus, and/or positions of diffuse accountability within large organizations, and thus generally align poorly with the above happiness drivers. But since we live in a time where our natural sources of health and happiness are still poorly understood, and where incentives for wise status-seeking life are generally absent, we routinely pursue these unhappy occupations and make other objectively poor personal choices, in and out of work.

You can click  to learn more about the most and least happy jobs in America, but here is a quick listing of the top and bottom ranked occupations in the University of Chicago survey:

Ten Most Happy Jobs

1. Clergy
2. Firefighters
3. Physical therapists
4. Authors
5. Special Ed teachers
6. Teachers
7. Artists
8. Psychologists
9. Financial services sales
10. Operating engineers

Ten Least Happy Jobs

1. Information Technology Director
2. Sales and Marketing Director
3. Product Manager
4. Senior Web Developer
5. Technical Specialist
6. Electronics Technician
7. Law Clerk
8. Technical Support Analyst
9. CNC Machinist
10. Marketing Manager

If you would like to begin to explore the science of achieving lasting and healthy happiness in your life and work, a great place to start is with Mark Lundegren’s popular article, Balancing Health & Happiness, which was published recently by HumanaNatura.

Photo courtesy of Happiness.

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A key aspect of achieving more attentive and higher quality life is regularly checking our perceptions. Much like optical illusions, perceptual biases exist in all our lives, often limiting the power of our choices and leading us astray. A good example of natural bias comes from research just published by Harvard University, this time involving the newly re-ignited topic of wealth distribution in the United States. In the study, researchers surveyed people to see what they thought would be an ideal wealth distribution and the country’s actual wealth distribution, and also asked questions about their background and behavior. As the summary chart shows, people’s perceptions of actual wealth levels were significantly at odds with reality. But there is more here related to perceptual bias than this simple misjudgment.

In addition to revealing popular perceptions of society that are significantly at odds with reality, the study surfaced at least four of many underlying natural biases or blind spots we all are subject to: 1) overuse of information that is at hand or easy to obtain to assess reality (judging the world by what we immediately see around us), 2) stated preferences at odds with actual behaviors (since many in the survey reported not voting for parties favoring redistribution), 3) a consistent and likely innate intuition of what social conditions “ought” to look like (spanning respondents from different backgrounds and countries), and 4) the more subtle belief that our intuitive sense of fairness is roughly optimal (with the research team cautioning eager readers that an objectively optimal wealth distribution is still being researched and not yet known).

If you would like to look for and check these and other perceptual biases in your life, especially in important areas that may affect your health and quality of life, there is a fairly reliable way to start. It involves examining specific outlooks and choices that have one or more of three critical qualities:

• Importance – actions and outlooks with important consequences, which often involve complex issues and promote oversimplification
• Frequency – choices and behaviors that recur regularly, potentially leading to the repeating of past interpretations and decisions without considering better alternatives
• Certainty – outlooks and choices where we feel we are acting ideally, which are often good places to look for bias since this is rarely true

In checking your perceptions, you can start anywhere, even with the next few choices you make or actions you take, and gradually develop a new intuition for and control over your natural biases. Importantly, this process can and should include the essential self-awareness strategy of looking for evidence that both supports and counters our views and plans.

Read about the new wealth perception study at What We Know About Wealth and consider practical ways to get around perpetual bias via the popular HumanaNatura article Understanding Personal Empowerment. You can also begin to move toward more deliberate and optimal life via the Natural Living section of HumanaNatura’s comprehensive Personal Health Program.

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Do you struggle sometimes to achieve healthy balance in your life? Most of us do and could use help to create new personal balance. If this is an area where you would like to be more effective, you may be interested in a new article by Mark Lundegren, Balancing Health & Happiness, that was just published by HumanaNatura.

In the new article, Mark examines a summary of happiness research by Richard Layard and discusses the role that health plays in ensuring our personal and general well-being. While many happiness researchers narrow their definition of health and place it among seven key contributors to modern happiness, Mark shows that once both happiness and health are better considered, the two converge into a nearly identical modern ideal – one that has important lessons we all can use to immediately have healthier and happier lives.

Click to Mark’s new article via HumanaNatura Featured Articles and learn more about his innovative health-based approach to personal and organizational strategy at Mark Lundegren.

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