When have you been at your happiest?  Do our happiness levels change throughout our life? Does happiness depend on your age? This week we’re talking about the link between happiness and age and thinking about how happy we are at different stages of our live, does it change and what does it mean for us. When have you been at your happiest? When you look back are there times when you felt really happy? Was it your childhood, first love, student days, staring out with your career or family, or maybe getting a big promotion. We tend to look back at happier times, which might make us think we were happier when we were younger, and our carefree school days or at least the long summer school holidays were a time of happiness. We didn’t have to worry about paying the mortgage or bills but there were probably other insecurities, maybe a worry about what others thought and wanting to fit in, not to mention the pressure of homework and exams. Whilst for those who couldn’t wait to become an adult, the happy times began with leaving home and starting out on your own.  Age as a happiness factor Although individual circumstances vary, according to research our happiness levels change throughout our lives, so how happy you feel could also be influenced by your age. According to a study by Dr Hannes Schwandt of Princeton University for the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics, we’re happiest at 23 and 69, and unhappiest in our mid 50s. Our happiness levels are U shaped throughout our life. The optimism of youth and looking forward to future achievement accounts for a peak of happiness at 23. But the other happiest age of 69 is more surprising. Life is exciting in our twenties and thirties, getting on at work, maybe meeting a partner and starting a family. And then you get into your 40s and 50s and the pressures started building. You’re getting higher up in your career with more responsibility, or re-entering the workforce after having a family. Your children are getting older, bringing different pressures to bear on you from one end, whilst aging parents present another dimension of worry and potential stress. You’re caught somewhere in the middle. The LSE study was based on a study of a panel 132,609 life satisfaction expectations matched with subsequent realisations. And one of the striking things about their findings is that there was little variance between socio economic or culturally diverse groups or genders. And this U shaped pattern of happiness over the life span (high during youth and old age, low during midlife) has been observed in other studies also. It seems to hold around the world and has been documented in more than 70 countries, in surveys of more than 500,000 people in both developing and developed countries, according to a paper by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswold of Warwick University,Is Well-being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle? The researchers in the LSC paper measured people’s expected life satisfaction and actual life satisfaction, and it basically showed that we aren’t very good at estimating how happy we will be in the future. Why? Because we all tend to overestimate the likelihood of positive events and underestimate the likelihood of negative events. This is the optimism bias. So e.g. we tend to expect to be healthy in spite of an unhealthy lifestyle. According to neuroscientific research this ‘optimism bias’ is due to the selective processing of negative and positive information in the frontal brain and this is what which allows us to hang on to our biased expectations even when confronted with evidence to the contrary. Basically we’re not very good at estimating how happy we’ll be as a young or older person - but there’s a difference in the reason why. Young people tend to overestimate their future life satisfaction or future happi