Happy morning

A study has found that most people are happier in the morning.

Using survey data from 49,218 adults between March 2020 and March 2022, the researchers found people generally woke up "feeling best" but were "feeling worst" by midnight. Dr Feifei Bu, from UCL's department of behavioural science and health, said: "Our findings suggest that on average, people's mental health and wellbeing are better in the morning and worst at midnight."

There could be a simple reason for this. In the morning, most people see a day filled with opportunities. The same survey revealed the obvious fact that people are happier in summer than in winter. This is unsurprising. It is because summer offers more chances for people to do things, whereas winter is shut in and confined. The hope of better things is why Socialists celebrate workers’ day on May 1st, the time of planting and promise. America, more cautious and pragmatic, celebrates its Labor Day in the autumn when the harvest is in.

William Wordsworth wrote of the French Revolution, ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, and to be young was very heaven.’ When maturity turned him conservative, Robert Browning bitterly denounced him and wrote ‘Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a riband to stick in his coat.’ Another line speaks of ‘Never glad confident morning again!’

Surveys on happiness reveal that people are happier in societies that offer opportunities for advancement, even when compared with richer but static societies. Thomas Jefferson might have had it right when he wrote, ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ Not happiness, but the pursuit of it. The chase, not the goal.

Many politicians leaning to the left seek greater equality, but people report that opportunity ranks higher. Rather than seeking to curb the achievement and advancement of some, they prefer the opportunity to seek it themselves. The old story has the British man watching a Rolls Royce go by and thinking, ‘One day we’ll have them out of cars like that.’ Meanwhile the American watching a Cadillac go by thinks, ‘One day I’m going to be in a car like that.’

It is by no means true that all the British want to level down, but it does express the ambition to succeed that has characterized the American attitude. If the UK is to achieve its announced goal of growth, it perhaps needs more of that attitude and more of the opportunities that allow it to succeed.