by Paul Dolan
If you do decide to stay put, try to see your decision as a new commitment rather than as simply staying put at the same thing. See your attempt to accept your partner for who he or she is as a positive commitment. Turning down new job offers in the past has made me feel more committed to my existing job, for a while at least.
Difficult decisions of these kinds are not made easier by the sometimes complex relationship between pleasure and purpose. The pursuit of pleasure might push you into a new relationship but the continuation of purpose might pull you back to the old one. The balance between pleasure and purpose ebbs and flows in life as it does in relationships. So a key challenge will be to try, so far as it is possible, to separate out the experience of the current context from the general experience. Framing your commitments in terms of pleasure and purpose does, however, allow you to commit to more purpose if you are a pleasure machine (publicly promise to mow your elderly neighbor’s lawn) and to more pleasure if you are a purpose engine (publicly commit to a night out with friends).
Social norms
Our modern age of information, technology, and social media means that we learn from the experiences of many other people. You might take into account the ratings of others when booking a holiday, hotel, or restaurant. We trust the judgments of others, to some extent at least, because they have information about an experience that we do not. If lots of people have had a specific experience, you can look at the average response, as well as the range of responses if you consider yourself to be more of an outlier. It has been shown that the wisdom of crowds can actually provide a great deal of insight.27 Social norms affect your behavior through your unconscious attention and your automatic inclination to put people into groups.28
Surround yourself
People around you influence you much more than you think. We are all social animals. You want to be like people like you and you will do what others like you are doing. You unconsciously want to fit in (even if, consciously, you say that you want to stand out). We are wired, automatically and unconsciously, to mimic and absorb the emotions of others around us. If you were to see pictures of happy and angry faces flash across a screen, you would react by moving the muscles on your face that create smiles and frowns, even if the flash of the faces was so quick that you would not be consciously aware of having seen them.29 And if you kept a diary about your moods and your perceptions of the moods of those around you, there would be a close correspondence between your moods and their moods.30
It is not surprising, then, that having a friend who lives within a mile of you become happier increases the probability that you feel happy, too, by 25 percent.31 Now, this could also be due to shared experiences: friends may all experience the same loss of a friend, which makes them all feel sad, and it is not always possible to properly account for this. But studies show that cricket players are affected by their teammates’ emotions completely independently of how well their team is doing, suggesting that at least some of this contagion effect may not be attributable to shared experiences.32
You are especially likely to be affected by how someone else feels if you like them.33 Nowhere is the contagion effect of happiness stronger than in families. When a sample of fifty-five teenagers, their mothers, and their fathers were asked about their emotions at random times of day over a week, the moods of the family members were highly correlated. The results also suggested that the similarity in moods was partly attributable to the transmission of emotions, particularly from daughters to their parents. Why is this, you might ask? We can’t be sure but we can speculate that girls may communicate with their parents more about personal issues than do boys.34 Regardless, it is clear that happiness is contagious and a social phenomenon.
Since other people matter so much to your behavior and happiness, the proximity of your family and friends is something to take into account when thinking about a new job or a new place to live. A basic starting question for any locational decision should be, “Where do the people who contribute most to my happiness live?” The distance between our friends and ourselves has grown over time as more people leave their hometowns and as we commute farther to work, which leaves us less time to spend with the people we care about.35 You can draw your own “map of mates,” similar to the one shown below. The map will help you flush out who matters to you and how far away they are. You can reappraise your portfolio of friends by drawing attention to who you see most often and whether this accords with whose company you enjoy the most. You might well realize that you are surrounded by a whole load of miserable gits. There are now sophisticated apps that allow you to map your friends online, too.
Thanks to social media, the term “friend” has taken on a whole new meaning. Your friends on Facebook can influence what you do and how you feel just like friends in the real world can. So it is worth taking stock of these “friends,” too. Doing a bit of “Facebook culling” once in a while to reorient and reboot your social network can have huge payoffs as you prioritize those people you genuinely care about. You probably look at your financial portfolio from time to time, and you should do similarly with your friends.
There can be little doubt that my weight training has been made considerably more pleasurable and purposeful by training with a seasoned bodybuilder, who has also become a close friend. Dixie is fifty-four and has been bodybuilding for thirty years. During this time, he has been in the top three in many national and international bodybuilding competitions. He is a training inspiration. Insofar as you would be happier from going to the gym (and you may well not be, of course), find yourself a gym buddy, so that you can encourage each other through the door and spur each other on once inside.
In general, you could try to spend more time with pleasure machines if your life is light on pleasure and more time with purpose engines if your life is light on purpose. You might want to think about the most important people in your life. Using the pendulum from chapter 1, do you live nearer to, or spend more time with, pleasure machines, purpose engines, or “balanced folk”? I do a lot of purposeful things these days, even going to the gym, so I make the most of the few times each year I get to see the pleasure machine that is Mig. I appreciate that I have a much greater choice of who I work with than most people, but where there is a choice, many people, perhaps motivated out of a mistaken desire for achievement, will work with those who are most likely to further their career. I try to work with people whose company I enjoy.
Finding the sweet spot
We want to be like people we consider to be similar to us—but we can also be adversely affected by their successes. Studies have found that life satisfaction and reports of pleasure fall when the income of those living in your local area rises.36 The income of those around you doesn’t have to increase for it to adversely affect you—you just need to find out that others are earning more than you. Researchers recently made employees at the University of California feel worse off by providing them with a Web link to the salaries of their colleagues (made possible by the state’s “right-to-know law”). Those who were earning less than the median wage were less satisfied with their jobs after they viewed that link.37 Perhaps there is something to be said for the coyness we have, especially in the UK, about talking about money.
This “relative income effect” does not appear everywhere, however: in transition economies, the higher income of similar others actually increases life satisfaction because financial success acts as a signal of opportunity for others to achieve the same.38 In a very different study but with similar conclusions, African American participants took a bogus IQ test in which they were told that they either did better or worse than the person sitting near to them. They reported lower self-esteem when they were told they did worse than a white person but higher self-esteem when the person who did better than them was black.39
There might be a sweet spot with social comparisons, then, where we can benefit from looking down on some and upward at those we aspire to be
. When people ask me how they can get happier, have more sex, lose weight, and so on, I reply that they should get happy friends and ditch the miserable ones, get friends who have lots of sex and ditch those who don’t, get thin friends and ditch the overweight ones, and so on.
Although I say that half-jokingly, you do need to think carefully about this. Imagine a friend who insists on bragging about her zesty sex life while you are going through a dry spell. Having more sex might make you happier but you will be made less happy if your friends are having more than you (or at least say that they are).40 The same logic applies if your friend brags about how easy it is to stick to her diet after you’ve just ordered more takeout. You might “win” by becoming more like your friend or you might “lose” by the negative impact of her doing well relative to you. If you want to be dragged up by others, then make sure you are not dragged down by envying their success. Select social norms that allocate your unconscious attention to sensible expectations for yourself. This will keep your attention away from unattainable upward comparisons that only serve to make you feel worse.
Expectations matter, and so you could focus more time on those people you want to be—and can be—more like. For a start, recall that happiness and misery are contagious and you should do all you can to catch the former and avoid the latter. Choosing the right reference groups will be central to this. Social media allow you more flexibility in your choice of peer group. Think about all those friends you have on Facebook and start prioritizing those whose behavior you want to copy. But be realistic—if they are all marathon runners or bodybuilding champions, you might make yourself a whole lot less happy from unattainable upward comparisons.
With a little effort, and a bit of trial and error, you should be able to tweak your reference groups so as to reallocate your attention in ways that will make you happier. Much of what you assume about the causes of happiness will be governed by the assumptions of those around you. Once you are aware of this, you can reconfigure your social norms.
Designing habits
Recall that your brain is constantly looking to conserve attentional energy—seeking ways to go with the grain. Consequently, much of what you do will be habitual. As I’m sure you are only too well aware, habits are easy to create but they are a lot harder to break. A “habit loop” gets formed in three steps: (1) the cue—a trigger to send your brain into automatic mode; (2) the routine—the physical or mental act itself; and (3) the reward, which determines whether any loop is worth remembering.41 Once a habit loop is established, it becomes difficult to inhibit even when it conflicts with changes in motivation and conscious intentions.42
The best way to change a habit is to change the routine, leaving the cue and reward alone. As a smoker who wants to quit, you may sometimes experience stress at work, which is the cue, and relieving it, which is the reward. Your routine might be to relieve the stress with a cigarette. It is much harder to remove the stress or the need to relieve it than it is to look for routines other than lighting up. Again, the simple principle of making good things easier to do and bad things harder applies here. Don’t take cigarettes into work; and get a commitment from your work colleagues that they will not share theirs with you. Then reach for the kettle when the urge to smoke takes hold. I know that a cup of tea might not feel like much of a substitute for nicotine but it will become so within a few weeks.
Addictions of various kinds are some of the most difficult habits to break. Beyond any physical or psychological dependency, though, environment also matters greatly. There is also often a wider range of external cues for feeding the addiction, which explains why it’s more likely that a smoker will become a regular user of nicotine than it is that a cocaine user will become a regular user of cocaine.43 This does not mean that nicotine is more physically addictive than cocaine; simply that drug use is based on people and their contexts, not just on the physical properties of drugs. Recall that much of what we do is driven by the opportunity to do so. We have already seen that making a commitment to stop smoking can be quite effective but you need to additionally remove as much of the temptation as possible. Hanging out with nonsmokers will help.44
Other habits are somewhat looser than nicotine addiction. Have you ever noticed how easy it is to let your gym attendance fall away? Unless you have a gym partner who calls you when you miss a session, it is up to you to set the cues that get you to a workout. The hardest part might be getting through the gym door in the first place but that’s only half of the story: it’s also quite easy to stop going again. This would seem to be one behavior where an apparent habit is quite easily broken. For “loose habits” like this, you need constant “top-up” nudges. Finding a gym on the way to or from work is a good start but you need to get into a routine of going at the same time each day. So long as the context of your gym visits does not change, once you have been going for a couple of months (around the time it takes for a habit to be set), you should be able to keep it up.45
A big change in your environment, such as a house move or a new job, is the perfect time to change some of your most ingrained habits because you have an entirely new environment to design.46 Many of the usual cues for your habits are gone. This helps explain why soldiers who were heroin users returning to the United States after the Vietnam War in 1971 were much less likely to be using heroin a year later than civilian heroin users: the soldiers’ usage patterns changed when their context changed.47
A study of the newspaper reading, TV watching, and exercising habits of students transferring from one university to the next found they were better able to act on their intentions for changing these habits when the environments in which these habits occurred also changed after the move. If reading the newspaper went from being a solitary to a social activity and they wanted to change the frequency with which they read newspapers, then they did so. Their habits changed when the contextual cues for the habits also changed.48 So, before a big change, decide what behaviors will make you happiest and look to create contexts that will make it easy for you to do those things.
Imagine deciding where all your old stuff should go in your new house. Want to watch less TV? Then set up the TV in a spare room and not in the kitchen where it was previously. Want to work from home without the distraction of the Internet? Then set up a workspace out of the range of your wireless router. Or say you’re starting a new job. Want to walk a bit more? Then reserve a parking space farther from your desk. Want to eat at McDonald’s less often? Then pick up a load of coupons for a local restaurant. Start doing something once in a new environment that you have designed during your transition and you are more likely to continue doing it because you have a fresh array of contextual cues to reinforce the behavior.
Happier by designing
The key to finding happiness is to find the ways in which going with the grain of your human nature makes it easier to be happier. The main elements that will help you to do this are summarized in the table below. You can refer to it to address any behavior you might wish to change from now on. Try it out now if you feel like it, or save it for later. I’ve given the example of wanting to read more, which was one of the top New Year’s resolutions of 2013. It seems that doing something that feels purposeful is quite high on people’s desires. With a little initial effort like this, you can help yourself become happier by design.
Design element
Behavior to change (e.g., read more)
Behavior to change (e.g.,)
Priming
Put books in every room of the house
Defaults
Set Internet home page to a book review website
Commitments
Make a date with a friend to attend a book fair
Social norms
Join a Facebook group that reads and reviews books
We are all creatures of our environments and so we need to pay careful attention to what other people do in the contexts we are likely to, or would like to, experience. Just as naturalists watch animals in their native environments, you must spend more time watching yourself and other human animals in your natural environments—and spend much less time asking yourself questions about what you intend to do or about the reasons for what you just did. Be more like David Attenborough and less like David Letterman.
7
Doing happiness
Once you have gotten the feedback about what makes you happy and what doesn’t and designed your landscape accordingly, you then need to pay attention to what makes you happy. You should generally pay attention to what you are doing and who you are doing it with, while doing your utmost not to get distracted from those experiences.
Pay attention to what you are doing
In general, you should focus on what you are doing rather than looking for a mental escape route to somewhere or something else. When you are in the flow of an experience, you will become completely absorbed, even losing track of time and pretty much everything else except, eventually, tiredness, thirst, and hunger.1 Think about when you become engrossed in a good film: time passes really quickly. If you are purposely engaged, attention is directed only at what you are doing and not at how long the experience lasts. As someone who is quite easily distracted, I am sure that one of the reasons I enjoy going to the gym so much is because it is one of the very few activities that receives my undivided attention.