Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  You should certainly not lose sight of the salience of pleasure and of how making pleasure even more salient might be good for you. So find ways to laugh more and remind yourself how happy it makes you feel. And you don’t have to do too much to get results. Studies show that smiling can cause happiness as well as be a consequence of it because the conscious decision to smile unconsciously makes you happier as a result.11 And so you will quickly, and quite automatically, feel better. Even a false smile, such as one contrived by holding a pen sideways between your teeth, can make you feel happier.12 Others might know you are faking it, but you still feel happier.13

  It’s also important to find ways to make purpose more salient. Children’s behavior and performance in school can be improved with challenging tasks.14 So find ways to challenge yourself in some of what you do. It has also been found that applying a variety of different skills at work is linked to higher experiences of meaningfulness on the job.15 Find ways to vary the skills you use. Our attention is attracted to what’s new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.

  It is vital that pleasure and purpose are kept salient whenever you use feedback to decide whether an activity or a goal is, in fact, contributing toward your happiness. In general, you should not give up too much happiness for too long (clinging to the mistaken belief that you will be able to recoup the loss at some point later on in life). Don’t put off until tomorrow happiness that can be experienced today. If you are planning to lose weight, or whatever, to be happier, take the steps to start doing it now. Quite apart from any future happiness from being thinner or fitter, you can feel purpose now alongside the pain of the interval training on the treadmill. Remind yourself of this whenever you can; for example, by putting gym visits in your diary as “purpose trips.” Making salient the current impact on your happiness of any behavior is important, especially when you are trying to change what you do (rather than simply how you think). Desires, projections, and beliefs are often about the expected impact on future happiness of future events, but to kick-start a behavior change now, you need to make salient the benefits of doing so now as well, because you care less about future benefits.

  You might think of saving more money for the future as a trade-off between a beautiful pair of boots now and an expensive custom-made walking frame later on. Well, this could work to some degree but I bet the boots would win. The benefits of saving for your retirement come not only from being secure in your old age but also from feeling secure about your old age now. So in place of the new shoes now you get a cool walking frame later on and the comfort of knowing the walking frame will be on its way. The boots are no longer such a clear winner.

  Your happiness bears the consequences of your behavior, and so continuing with any behavior requires positive feedback—and it needs it now. If an activity makes you feel happy and you are aware of that, you are more likely to carry on doing it. On the flip side, if another activity, such as overeating, does not make you feel miserable now, you have less incentive to do anything about it. This is especially true for pleasure and often for purpose, too, although purposeful activities do require more attentional effort and it’s easier to get sidetracked when engaged in them.

  Attend to your current experiences of exercising rather than what you think the future benefits will be, because health only weakly motivates behavior now, if at all.16 It is generally a mistake for any encouragement of “healthy” behaviors to be based on what might happen in the uncertain and distant future. Instead, focus on how exercising makes you feel now. I am certain that my own exercise has very little to do with concerns for being healthy. I may experience some health benefits in a couple of decades’ time, but I may also have some joint problems from heavy training. Either way, it is all very uncertain and twenty years is a long way off. My ability to keep weight training—my “stickability”—is simply sticking with an activity that brings happiness in the current moment, rather than in the future. It’s the pleasure-purpose feedback you get while you are engaged in an activity that matters most.

  In much the same way that happiness data can be used to guide policy decisions by showing the relative impact of different allocation decisions, such as treating physical health or mental health, your own happiness data can be used to guide your own allocation decisions. You might think that putting in all those hours at the office to get promoted is worth the sacrifice of your home life but the feedback for your happiness might tell another story. Keeping your eye on the ultimate prize of sentiments of pleasure and purpose might rein in some of your more excessive desires, in and out of work.

  Reconstructing time

  “But how can I do all this?” you might sensibly ask. To aid salience, you could consider writing a diary for your happiness by completing a day reconstruction method (DRM) exercise, along the lines of what we discussed in chapter 2. You can find a DRM to complete in the box below. I appreciate that this looks a little onerous, but I think it will be helpful to do it at least once to bring your time use to your attention. You shouldn’t be overly concerned if you can’t remember every detail of your activities or precisely when each one started and finished. It is not intended to be a test with right and wrong answers but a way for you to place a happiness lens over how you use your time. Simply having this information to shape your perspective could affect your behavior in ways you might not be able to predict or indeed even be aware of.

  Fill out this day reconstruction method diary for yesterday to help you get feedback on your happiness. Include activities that have a natural start and stop time, such as when you changed tasks or locations.

  Episode

  Time it began

  Time it ended

  What were you doing?

  Who were you with?

  Pleasure (0–10)

  Purpose (0–10)

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  The DRM can help to draw your attention to whether you might have developed mistaken desires that are reflected in how you use your time. Perhaps you have a desire to know more than anyone else about what started out as your favorite TV show but, upon reaching season 17, you discover it isn’t that good anymore. Your evaluative self continues to think it’s a good show, because it still ought to be good given the cast and writers, but your experiencing self is giving you direct feedback that is quite different. So you can use the DRM to contrast your evaluations with direct evidence on whether and how you might have adapted to the pleasure or purpose of an activity you have been engaged in for a while.

  Or you might have a mistaken desire, for achievement say, which may not be consistent with the maximization of your happiness. Maybe you spend too long at work, or looking for another job on the Internet. A DRM will also enable you to see more clearly how much time you fritter away unnecessarily. Some companies offer software that makes tracking your productivity easier by logging how much time you spend on various websites, documents, and programs, producing a chart that draws your attention to important facts like your Facebook-spreadsheet ratio.

  Information of this kind can also be helpful in overcoming mistaken projections. To illustrate, imagine the following choice that many Londoners face: you can take the tube to work or hop on a bus. The tube ride takes thirty minutes and it involves changing trains and rid
ing with your head wedged against the doors because it is so busy. The single bus ride takes forty minutes, but it’s a calmer and quieter trip. The time taken is likely to matter most in a joint evaluation of these options and so you will probably take the tube. But you could use the DRM to tell whether the ten-minute time difference between taking the tube and the bus to work will really matter to you in a happiness sense. If the bus ride is more pleasant and you tend to spend the first hour or so at work a little less stressed, then you might take the bus to lift your mood, at least from time to time. Indeed, you might find that it’s the variety itself from switching back and forth between the tube and the bus that makes you feel happier.

  A DRM can also prevent your feelings now from guiding your decisions about the future. Just as a grocery list can prevent you from buying too much on an empty stomach, a DRM can keep you from making plans for a Sunday morning that would be better spent in bed (avoided when you notice a lot of low happiness ratings on weekend days with early plans).

  DRM-type data on your own experiences of pleasure and purpose can also help you avoid mistaken beliefs about how you use your time and what brings you happiness. You obviously have to devote time to the necessities—earning money, household duties, personal care, sleep, and so on—but you have a great deal of choice over how you use your discretionary time: what you have left over each week once the necessities of life have been dealt with.17

  How much time do you spend doing things that are decided upon for you? And how much time do you spend doing things that are decided upon by you?

  You probably have more control of your time than you think you do. Each of us in our way thinks that we are really busy and just don’t have the time for various activities. I consider myself to be pretty busy but I somehow find time to go to the gym four times a week. It’s a question of priorities. When we say we don’t have time to exercise, we really mean that we don’t prioritize using our time in that way. The barriers to using our discretionary time differently emanate much more from failing to accept that we are not making the time and less from genuinely not having the time, except among people who work long hours just to make ends meet of course. I sent the final draft of this book to a dozen very busy colleagues and, with one exception (you know who you are), they all found the time to provide detailed comments.

  You also need to have sensible expectations about your time use, and the DRM can help here, too. If your commute is two hours long perhaps it isn’t sensible to expect that you will have time in the evening to go to the gym, meet up with a friend, cook dinner, watch your favorite TV show, and also get enough sleep to show up rested for work the next day. The DRM will bring the consequences for your happiness from these activities to your attention. It might also force you to consider whether that two-hour commute, every day, is really worth it or, in the very least, whether you might be able to work from home once in a while.

  You might well find that how you use your discretionary time could matter more than how much of it you have.18 If you recorded a DRM for a few days while on holiday, you would be able to see which aspects of the holiday really made you happy and which did not, rather than being unduly influenced by what you think should make you happy about the trip. This will allow you to plan future holidays more effectively. You can also find out how you are trading off pleasure and purpose within and between activities by looking at the relative balance throughout your days.

  Reconstructing the context of events will help you better remember them and give you more accurate feedback about their impact on your happiness as you decide how to spend your time. When the police conduct interviews with key witnesses, they attempt to reinstate the context of the crime by asking about mundane details such as the weather or what they ate for lunch on the day, which improves memory. To reinstate context in your mind, you could think about what the surrounding environment looked like there, such as rooms, the weather, any nearby people or objects. You might also consider changing perspectives by trying to place yourself in the shoes of someone else who was there.19

  At other times, though, you might wish to take advantage of your natural inclination to remember the peak and end of an experience and to forget about how long it lasted. If you’re scheduling meetings at work, plan the meeting with your favorite coworker at the end of the day. And if you want to remember sex in the most positive way, focus on making the last moments memorable without worrying too much about duration (within reason, of course). Just like everything else that you do in life, whether a longer sex session is a good use of time or not then depends not only on the happiness within the experience itself but also on the experiences of happiness after the event, which is the memory of it.

  The critical issue is to monitor the feedback for your happiness of whatever it is you start doing. When the feedback is clear, you can then stop monitoring. Constantly monitoring the entire production process would be effortful and eventually hinder happiness. Once you know what brings you the best mix of pleasure and purpose, your production process of happiness will just need some adjustment from time to time. Let’s say you’ve switched from the tube to the bus. Now you can check in once every so often to see if this is still making you happy. Perhaps the weather has changed, so you’re no longer happy when waiting for the bus when it’s raining. Feedback is the fuel for this fine-tuning.

  Pay attention to the feedback of others

  Look at others

  We can get our own feedback, but we can also look to the experiences of others. Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, says that one of the lessons happiness research teaches us is that the experiences of other people like you are a useful guide to the impact of an event on you, and often a much more useful guide than your own predictions about the impact of that event.20 I agree with him.

  Imagine you are about to go on a date. What would you rather know about your date ahead of time to help you project how you might feel—physical features, age, height, hometown, and favorite sport, or how a stranger felt when they met your date on a previous occasion? I’m guessing you would want the personal information, and most other people do, too. But women who were given personal information made worse forecasts about how they would feel when they met a man than when they were given reports of how another woman felt when she met him—even though they did not personally know the other woman who was providing the report.21

  The key challenge is to know when your experiences will mirror those of other people and when yours will be different because you have a different set of preferences. You may have agreed with how many of the participants in the German DRM and the American Time Use Survey rated their happiness during different activities, but there were likely some differences, too. I know that you think you are special—and you are, of course—but, at least in how you react to events, just not as special as you think. Many of the experiences you have will be quite similar to the experiences of others, and probably more similar, more often, than you would imagine.

  Ask others

  You could also solicit the advice of other people about your beliefs about your own happiness, particularly since the evidence suggests that your reports of your own happiness tend to correlate quite well with other people’s reports of your happiness. In Estonia, a selection of visitors to GPs and hospitals nominated someone who knew them well (mostly spouses but also friends and other family members) to predict their overall happiness on a 0 to 10 scale. The correlation between the self-reported scores and the predictions made by others was a very high 0.75.22 Similar results have been found in other studies using different measures of happiness.23 If you believe you are happy but behave like you are not, then those close to you are well placed to point this out.

  When your own mistaken desires for outcomes other than happiness conflict with your experiences of pleasure and purpose, other people can help you to refocus on what really matters. They might quite like the idea of you being the next Lady Gaga b
ut also see, more clearly than you can, just how miserable the process of getting there is making you on a day-to-day basis.

  Other people may also be well placed to help you overcome mistaken projections. Partly, this is because they will generally be less committed to your present self than you are; they will instead pay more attention to the consequences for you in the longer term. You will focus mostly on what becoming married, rich, or disabled will be like when you will be a newlywed, newly rich, or newly disabled for only a short time. Those close to you will be more inclined to consider what being married, rich, or disabled will be like, which lasts much longer and therefore more greatly affects your sentiments of pleasure and purpose.

  When making a decision, you can use your friends to help you avoid focusing effects and the pitfalls of distinction bias, by asking them to imagine the consequences of your decision and not to pay attention to the decision itself. Say you have just been offered an attractive new job with the only anticipated downside being a longer commute. What will you think about as you decide whether or not to take the new job? Most likely you’ll mistakenly consider the first couple of days or so when you are as excited as you ever will be about going into work, and when you are still making a direct comparison between your new job and the old one. So you could get those close to you to consider the next couple of months, when the pain of changing trains or being stuck in a traffic jam kicks in.

  We have shown in our own research that longer commutes are associated with lower psychological health, especially among married women.24 This is almost certainly because married women still pick up most of the household duties when they get home, while the commute does not eat into men’s time in quite the same way. This is salient information but it’s more likely to occur to your family or friends, who are not caught up in thinking about all the positive aspects of the opportunity. You may still take the job, but at least you are doing so armed with a better sense of the longer-term costs and benefits of being in that job.