Intelligence and Happiness, are Smarter People Happier!?

Duh, does smart make you happy, because you know, those smart people get all the advantages, or would not so smart people actually do better because they have fewer worries and less concerns? And you know, they can just take life as it is. Do you know what’s the truth about intellect and happiness?

Well, stay tuned. I’ve got a few insights into that complex question and maybe a few suggestions about how to take advantage of the science of happiness and the connection to intellect. As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world.

So, stay tuned and I will give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. Does one’s intelligence determine one’s happiness? So, the premise might be that the smarter you are, maybe the more troubled you are by all life’s concerns or, conversely, maybe the smarter you are, the more tools you have, the cognitive processing power you have to capably navigate the world. Well, which is true? Scientists have looked at this, and I think there’s now an emerging consensus: a high IQ is positively correlated with a happier life, with greater well-being.

It might be easy to conclude that well, you know, happy people are going to have tools, emotional and other kinds of tools, to navigate life well, and therefore, happiness was going to come to smarter people more readily. But, it isn’t quite that simple. It turns out that the low IQ that we see associated with lower levels of happiness is also highly associated with poor financial attainment and less educational attainment. And those things are predictive of well-being and they’re productive of well-being because the standard of living is highly associated with greater well-being, up to a point.

So, I hope this is making sense so far. We’ve studied on this video channel before, the idea that you can buy happiness up to a point. That once we confidently meet our basic needs and have confidence that we can go beyond our basic needs of today, but tomorrow and the next year, we’re going to meet our basic needs, then people tend to get somewhere close to the maximum level of Happiness. The study is outdated now, but it’s around 75,000 US dollars per household, and beyond that, people don’t get any happier. But below that, and especially far below that, people are income insecure, they may be food insecure, medicine insecure, clothing, housing, all those things that cause a constant level of stress. And so, at low levels of income, we typically see low levels of happiness.

There are lots of cool exceptions, you know, think of monks or other people who’ve taken vows of poverty or just choose a really minimalist lifestyle and can be very happy indeed. So, this isn’t science that’s rock hard, but there’s a clear association with decent levels of income and greater levels of happiness. But, huge incomes don’t make us happier than that 75,000 and it adjusts for inflation, call it 85 – 90 thousand dollars, something like that, that tends to be the sweet spot.

So, when we see that lower intellect people cannot have this great educational attainment, and therefore don’t have the same levels of financial success as typically smarter people do, that’s the challenge. It’s not that the intellect is causation for low yes, it’s that the lack of finances and the tools to get greater finances are harder for people who are less smart to achieve.

But, this is a big ‘but’, even more predictive of IQ and happiness, is EQ and happiness. That is, emotional intelligence, and they’re measured quite differently. Emotional intelligence is about the ability to read other people’s emotions, to understand and manage our own emotions, maintain emotional regulation so that we can be disciplined and achieve the goals that are important to us, and not have outbursts of anger and, you know, get in trouble with the law and those kinds of extreme things too.

But, EQ is highly associated with well-being and a better predictor of happiness than IQ. Now, it gets a little bit more complex again. Relatively well Associated, because when a person has a high level of emotional intelligence, they’re using a lot of the same parts of the brain and cognitive capacity that people with high IQ also use. Cognitive processing, access to memory, those kinds of things are all important, and so, EQ and IQ often come together.

So, what’s the takeaway from this? One, the need to have our basic biological needs met confidently is important. Pursue your own career and occupational pursuits and lifestyle so that you can be content with your physical needs being met at an adequate level. And encourage your children, and even if they aren’t academically inclined, tell them to get into good trades and pursue entrepreneurial pursuits. It’s predictive of higher incomes and therefore those young people should get happier lives in the long run.

The second thing I would want to point out is that we can work on EQ. I produced a video on this topic not too long ago, and maybe able to put a link in the description below so that you can go and watch that video. Just a skill set of recognizing the emotion on someone else’s face is one EQ skill that can be taught, but there are others for sure. And it’s a little bit like the other neural pathways we’ve talked about in past videos. As we practice greater and greater emotional intelligence, we gain more skills in that regard.

Typically, women have greater EQ than men. They spend more time, right out of the womb, literally as little baby infants, paying attention to the faces on other humans, and therefore, they’re picking up more skills and awareness of what’s going on for other people. And therefore, they probably also become more aware of their own emotions.

First thing, get a decent income. Second thing, work on improving your EQ. And the third one is interesting, and it kind of actually relates to some videos I’ve done in recent weeks as well. IQ is highly associated with open-mindedness, the willingness to be challenged cognitively, to discover new things, to listen to different ideas. And what we often see is some people become rather close-minded at a young age, and if you look at some of the troubles in the American political system right now, people with very simplistic, hard, fast beliefs about sometimes stuff that’s crazy and based on conspiratorial theories and poor sources of information. But they stick to their guns no matter what, determined to not be open to more perspectives.

Highly intelligent people are just as likely to sometimes become close-minded with time. And so, there’s a clue for us. We need to keep being leaning into new sources of knowledge. If you’re stuck on Fox News, maybe check out CNN sometimes. If you think you’ve got too much information coming from North American sources, well, maybe go read Al Jazeera’s online news sources, or read poetry instead of nonfiction. Or if you’re being used to studying everything you possibly can about horticulture, maybe, take up cooking. This idea of sampling other different, interesting ways of bringing greater open-mindedness and experimentation with new information, and new ways of being, is going to improve your IQ or your capacity to exercise intelligence, and therefore probably make you happier. So there it is, the confusing soup, but some real, decent science coming out of the correlation between happiness and high intelligence. Hope that was helpful. Like the video if you do like it, share with your friends and family, maybe with your HR Director. Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.