Ep. 110: Why Is Finland So Happy? (And What Can We Learn From It?)
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The World Happiness Report has for the fifth year in a row ranked Finland as the planet’s happiest country. Yet the nation is darker and colder than Canada. So what are the Finns doing right? Could it have anything to do with sisu, saunas and plunges into ice-cold water? Medcan’s Clinical Director of Psychology, Dr. Jack Muskat, investigates with Eat Move Think senior producer Russell Gragg, who recently returned from five weeks of living in Helsinki. Featuring interviews with Finnish culture experts Frank Martela, Katja Pantzar (pictured above) and others.
LINKS
The World Happiness Report 2022 ranked Finland as the happiest place on Earth for the fifth consecutive year.
Frank Martela’s book is A Wonderful Life: Insights on Finding A Meaningful Existence. His website is frankmartela.com and he’s on Twitter @frankmartela.
Katja Pantzar’s book is Everyday Sisu: Tapping Into Finnish Fortitude for a Happier, More Resilient Life. Her website. She’s on Twitter @katjapantzar.
Earlier this year, Dr. Jack Muskat wrote an article at the Medcan blog about Finland and happiness.
One study we mentioned showed people gain more happiness if they spend money on others rather than themselves, by Elizabeth W. Dunn and Lara B. Aknin, of UBC, and Michael I. Norton of Harvard Business School. Link to Science article. Link to another article about similar research. Another version of same article. NPR's Hidden Brain mentions the research.
Not everyone in Finland is running through tulips, grinning: Here’s a report about depression in the Nordic country.
If ice bathing appeals to you, check out the Toronto Polar Bear Club. Plenty of spas exist to cater to people seeking to conduct combinations of ice baths and saunas. Here’s one in downtown Toronto, and another north of the city.
INSIGHTS
Helsinki is both darker and colder than Toronto, with 200 fewer sun hours per year and an average mean temperature of just 6.1 degrees compared to Toronto’s 8.7 degrees Celsius. Yet the World Happiness Report has ranked the company as the happiest place on Earth for the fifth consecutive year. Part of the country’s high ranking, according to Prof. Frank Martela of Helsinki’s Aalto University, is the fact that comparatively few people in Finland are very unhappy. “I've been saying that Finland is the land of quiet satisfaction,” he says. “So people might not… outwardly express their joy all the time. But then when they contemplate on their life, and that, well, things are actually quite okay, in my life… if you think about the scale from like, zero to 10, Finland's high ranking is not because there will be like more people who rate their life as 10, but… that there's less people who score one, two, three or four on the scale. So that's kind of the secret to Finland being the happiest country — that we’re quietly satisfied, and we have less people who are highly unsatisfied with their lives.” [7:06]
“Sisu” is a Finnish term that refers to something like fortitude, resilience or perseverance—and that likely has something to do with the country’s high ranking as well. “My impression of sisu is this independence of spirit that gets you through trying periods,” says one Finn. Others credit sisu with helping get the nation through the world wars. And, “I'm sure it required some sisu just to live in Finland, back in the day,” says another Finn, “because it's not so evident why people decided to settle here—because it is dark, and it is cold, and it is not so pleasant.” Martela also ties sisu to the Finns’ comfort with sharing negative emotions. Dr. Jack Muskat has his own succinct summary of what sisu is: “Suck it up, buttercup.” Finally, Katja Pantzar, an author of a book on sisu, describes it thusly: “I would say that it is a unique form of Finnish fortitude, in the face of challenges big or small.” [9:28, 14:25]
Russell and Dr. Muskat discuss the way the Finns incorporate sisu into their everyday lives—including the near-national pastime of “winter swimming,” a.k.a., plunging into freezing cold water in the middle of winter. Pantzar acknowledges the absurdity of the activity: “Oh, it's minus 10, and it's snowing out, I think I'll go for a dip in the Baltic Sea.” But, she says, “It's a good example of gathering yourself up and tapping into courage to do something that seems difficult… then you feel so good, partly because, of course, when you have a dip of just 30 seconds to a minute, all of the endorphins, you know, the happy hormones kick in.” Not that it’s all bad. As Pantzar observes, “for most people living in Finland, a winter swim really means a winter dip, a maximum of a few minutes, and you go to a place that's very well equipped… where there's changing rooms and a sauna, and hot showers nearby so that after… they can go inside and warm up.” Dr. Muskat does see the way the practice could be liberating. “We're so controlled in life by so many things, and what would be the most daring, outrageous, stupid thing to do?” he asks, rhetorically. Then he supplies the answer: “Jump into freezing ice cold water in the winter.” [15:36]
More on the sauna component to sisu and winter swimming: The sauna does have this purifying element to it, where strangers sit alongside one another, mostly naked, without elements of social status or technology. It’s also a bit of a digital detox. “If I have time and the sauna is on,” says Pantzar, “I will go back and forth. So it becomes a bit of a meditation. Walk, go and have a dip and then go and have a sauna. And then get all warm and then go back into the water and do that many, many times… Some people get that [same] sense of high [as] when they exercise, that you just leave everything behind and it's very pure and basic.” Dr. Muskat reacts: “There's a sense of, I think, purification, but more importantly, an attachment to, that we're just part of the world. We're not just a speck, but we're also part of the world and part of our own humanity and community.” [20:24]
At the deepest level, Russell and Dr. Muskat decide that the Finns’ perennial high ranking on the World Happiness Index has to do with their conception of the meaning of life. “I would say there is something wonderful about the Finnish way of life,” observes Russell, “in terms of their lack of attention to materialism, their lack of attention to consumerism. If you ask the average Finn [to name] something that would make them happy, it would be a glass of wine, a meal with a friend, a great record, a music experience… Very rarely is it a new car, a new set of clothes. And they incorporate this into almost every aspect of their life. They eat well, they have incorporated exercise as just a natural part of their day. They value friendships highly, they probably drink too much. But overall, they seem to have a much more balanced approach to life than I think we have here in North America. And I think this overall life philosophy is what contributes to their sense of happiness and what keeps them atop the World Happiness Index.” [37:35]
“Happiness is not found by searching,” says Frank Martela, quoting a characteristically Finnish sentiment, “but by living… by chasing [happiness]… you miss out on sources of happiness that already are present in your life.” According to Dr. Muskat: “Happiness is an outcome. It's not a goal—it's an outcome of what you do.” It’s like the UBC/Harvard Business School study (linked above) that established that people experience more satisfaction when they invest resources in other people, rather than themselves. Frank Martela sums it up as follows: “Meaning in life is about making yourself meaningful to other people.” And Dr. Muskat puts it slightly differently: “If you put out positive energy, [then] positive energy will come back to you.” [39:14]