by Meik Wiking
Ilsa and Rick are lovers in Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War. Ilsa believes that her husband, Laszlo, a key figure in the Resistance, has been killed. When the Nazis invade France, Rick and Ilsa plan to escape on a train together and Rick intends to marry Ilsa on that train, but Ilsa doesn’t join him, as she discovers that Laszlo is still alive and leaves Rick abruptly, without explanation. Their love affair is over. Later, Ilsa and Laszlo turn up in Rick’s bar in Morocco and Rick and Ilsa’s memories of their time in Paris resurface.
In the final scene, Rick has accepted that he and Ilsa will never be reunited—there are more important things going on in the world—and Rick tells Ilsa, “We will always have Paris.” They will never have each other, but they will always have their memories of Paris. It was a great love, but it is gone. That’s nostalgia in a nutshell. It may help and hurt at the same time, but we own it and nobody can take it away from us.
So happy memories can be bittersweet, but they also assure us that we are valued as people, that we have deep connections with other people and that we have led a meaningful life.
However, when it comes to happy memories, the importance of connection includes more than other people. Connecting with nature, connecting with our bodies and connecting with the world are also common denominators when we examine people’s happy memories.
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It could be skinny-dipping in a lake in Finland, playing in the snow in Scotland or hiking up Table Mountain in Cape Town. It could be watching the sun set or watching it rise, or watching the snow fall in the Alps. It could be trekking or surfing or running barefoot in the grass, or sitting on a pebbly beach or on top of Mount Kanchenjunga, watching the world down below. It could be a snowbike ride with our son in Newfoundland or standing on a quiet beach in Pembrokeshire with a friend. It could be horseback riding or dog walking or seeing a blue whale in the Arctic. In short, happy memories are what make life magical and meaningful.
One Danish woman in her late twenties recalled an event when she was twelve. One summer afternoon, she was lying in the long grass in a meadow.
My family and I had been attending an outdoor field trip with my younger sister’s school class. It had ended a little earlier, and people had left. My sister was lying next to me and we were looking up into the clear blue sky, chatting. It was the purest feeling of happiness. The warmth from the late-afternoon sun, the feeling of being so close to nature as I lay in the grass, the connection I felt to my sister and the contrast of the event that had just ended (with so many people, a lot of chatter and lots of things going on) to the calm and intimate feeling of just me and my sister being there after everyone else had gone.
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THE MILESTONES
Our happy memories are populated by our loved ones and we experience meaning when we connect with others and with the world, but we also experience it when we feel that we are reaching our potential or an important milestone or goal. Happy memories are moments when we became what we dreamed we could be.
“Succeeding in a very difficult exam.”
“Finishing my first marathon in October 2016.”
“My acceptance into university.”
“Hitting a perfect forehand in tennis last week.”
When you read people’s memories, you can sense their pride. When you read people’s memories, you can hear the echo of their triumphs. When you read people’s memories, you learn about their hopes and their dreams.
The mountains they climbed, the marathons they ran, the letters of acceptance they opened and the big deals they closed—these are the memorable moments, the ones that were meaningful to us.
They are the young Iraqi man who remembers being eleven and buying a toy with his own money.
They are the woman who remembers finally receiving her university degree at the age of thirty-eight. They are the man who started his own company, put in a proposal for a big project with his heart in his mouth and won the project.
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They are the young person who remembers starting testosterone treatment when transitioning to become a man and a grandmother who finally fulfilled her life-long dream of having a motorcycle.
These are the important moments that make up our life’s narrative. We remember the defining moments in our lives, the moments that made us who we are, the moments where we became who we hoped we could be.
As a happiness researcher, I have observed that happiness is often found when three views align: who we feel we are, who we want to be and how others see us. When our loved ones see us and love us for who we really are, and when we manage to become who we know we can be, that is where we find happiness.
WHAT DOES THE MEANING OF LIFE MEAN?
How do you measure happiness? What is the good life? When you tell people you work in happiness research, they ask a lot of questions.
Happiness surveys often explore meaning or a sense of purpose. In fact, it is such an integral part of the good life that the UK Office of National Statistics dedicates one of the four questions in its annual well-being survey to it: “Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?” The three other questions cover overall satisfaction with life and the level of happiness and anxiety people felt the day before.
There is a connection between all four. A great sense of meaning in life goes hand in hand with overall life satisfaction and how happy you felt a day ago.
Other surveys take a deeper look at meaning and ask whether you feel your social relationships are supportive and rewarding, whether you feel engaged and interested in your daily activities, and whether you feel competent and capable in the activities that are important to you.
To me, the good life—a full life, a rich life—is a life both of purpose and pleasure. It is when life offers satisfaction with the present, hopes for the future and peace with the past. Happiness is not a one-ingredient dish.
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HANNAH AND HER SISTERS—A VERY SIMPLIFIED VIEW OF HOW MEMORY WORKS
Memory is our ability to encode, store and recall information.
The processes involved in memory are encoding (“This is Hannah, my sister’), storage and consolidation (Hannah is Bob’s sister) and recall (“Hi, Hannah. Nice to see you again’).
We first experience the world through our senses. When you meet someone new, you may register the color of their eyes, the sound of their voice, the scent of their perfume and the firmness of their handshake. This is the first part of the encoding phase of a potential memory.
All these sensations are combined into one single experience and analyzed before our brain decides whether the information should be committed to long-term memory. Different factors have an impact on this. For instance, as we saw earlier, paying attention increases the chance that we will remember the experience. And, as we will see in the next chapter, emotion makes the experience more intense and tends to increase how much attention we pay to an experience.
A potential memory starts off in short-term storage—our short-term memory. This is also known as the working memory, and it’s our limited and temporary memory storage facility. Think of it as being like computer RAM. It focuses our attention on the sensory input and holds it long enough so that we can solve the problem at hand and react to the sensory input. “Hi, Hannah” (eye contact, smile, firm handshake—“Well done, brain.”)
We can hold on average seven (plus or minus two) chunks of information for up to twenty or thirty seconds at a time. That is why you are likely to remember phone numbers but less likely to remember your credit-card number. This was first documented in 1956 by George Miller, a psychologist at Harvard University, in the paper “The Magical Number 7, Plus or Minus 2,” so it is sometimes referred to as Miller’s Law.
“Oh, and let me introduce you to Hannah’s six sisters.”
“Great.”
“And their spouses.”
&nbs
p; “%&€###!”
We can apply different memory strategies to remember what we need to remember for long enough—for instance, by repeating the number and thereby resetting the short-term memory clock over and over, or dividing the numbers into chunks, for example, 18006169335 becomes 1-800-616-9335.
According to Miller, it is the chunks of meaningful information that represent the limit. So, you would probably have trouble remembering the twenty-two letters CIANHSNASABBCFBISOKMTV, but you would probably have a better chance of remembering that Hannah and her sisters work at CIA, NHS, NASA, BBC, FBI, SOK, and MTV. But these chunks also depend on the knowledge of the individual person trying to remember. That is why you would have more trouble remembering SOK than I would: it’s the Danish Navy Operative Command (Søværnets Operative Kommando).
While encoding usually describes the processes that happen during the experience of an event, consolidation usually describes the processes that happen after an event has taken place—this means keeping a memory after you first acquired it.
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The more important the information is, the bigger the likelihood that you will transfer the information to your long-term memory. Is it the name of a person you will never see again, or do you think you might just have been introduced to the love of your life? (“By the way, this is Hannah’s colleague. I’ve been meaning to introduce you two for a long time—you have so much in common.”)
So, the important experiences—the first time we met our future spouse, our wedding, when two became three, and so on—are more likely to be transferred to our long-term memory, and this is why we see an abundance of important and meaningful events in our Happy Memory Study.
If we have encoded and stored information or an event, we have the opportunity to recall or retrieve it. A memory is only a memory when you remember it. It’s kind of like Santa: if nobody thinks of him, he ceases to exist.
The more you think about a memory, the more likely it is to be remembered. And we are more inclined to think about experiences that were important and meaningful to us. Our memories are essentially connections between neurons in the brain. In order to keep those connections intact, they have to be exercised or activated regularly. Retrieval is therefore one of the best ways you can strengthen a memory. In that way, memory is like a muscle.
“Wait, didn’t you just say that memory is like Santa?” you ask. “So which is it? Like Santa, or like a muscle?” It’s a muscular Santa, okay? Santa on steroids. I mean, he works one day a year. The elves are doing all the hard labor in the toy factory. Maybe he checks in for status meetings once a week. What did you think he would do with all that leisure time? He’s going to spend it getting ripped. In fact, Santa is so ripped he was offered the role of Magic Mike in the movie, but he couldn’t take the part because there was a clause in his contract. Anyways, ripped Santa. There’s an image for your memory bank.
HAPPY MEMORY TIP:
MAKE AND CELEBRATE MORE MILESTONES
Bring out the notebook, then bring out the bottles.
One of my favorite movies, besides Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, is Breakfast at Tiffany’s. If you don’t know it, the movie is based on a novella by Truman Capote and tells the story of a romance between Holly Golightly, gold digger and diamond enthusiast (played by Audrey Hepburn), and Paul Varjak, struggling writer and paid boyfriend (played by George Peppard).
One morning, Paul shares with Holly the news that he’s had a story published. She wants to celebrate and asks him to open a bottle of champagne before breakfast. Paul has never had champagne before breakfast before so Holly suggests that they should spend the day doing things they’ve never done before. (Well done, Miss Golightly—straight out of the Power of Firsts playbook.) Later that day, Holly and Paul go to the main branch of the New York Public Library, where Holly has never been, and Paul autographs a copy of his book, Nine Lives.
The film is a classic. It is heartwarming. It has Audrey Hepburn in it. And throughout the movie the music of Henry Mancini flows—including the iconic “Moon River.” So what’s not to like?
Ever since I first saw the movie I’ve wanted to pull a Paul Varjak, so it’s been a long-term goal for me to sign my own book at the New York Public Library. So, last year, I found my book there, on the corner of 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, and signed it. Now when I watch the movie I’m taken back to that wonderful day in New York and to something that was a meaningful milestone for me.
Start planning which milestones you would like to celebrate. They may be big or small, for example walking ten thousand steps each day for a month or finishing renovating the kitchen or finding a new job. Make sure you also note down how you’re going to celebrate them. Will you go out for a nice dinner or allow yourself to stay at home the entire weekend watching your favorite films?
Last year, I bought two bottles of bubbly for each employee at the Happiness Research Institute and asked them to write down which milestones they would have to pass in order to open them. So far, we have toasted weddings, finished reports and surpassing our archenemy think tank in terms of followers on social media.
Chapter V
Use the Emotional Highlighter Pen
On September 6, 2017 I was sitting in the Green Room of the This Morning television show in London, waiting to talk about my most recent book.
I was nervous. The show has almost as many viewers as I have fellow countrymen—and it was live. My wonderful publicist, Julia, was there to help me prepare. I forget what she said precisely, but I remember that, between the lines, she pleaded: “Don’t screw this up, Meik.”
Spoiler alert: I did.
The interview started out fine, but as we were drawing to an end, Phil, one of the hosts of the show, asked, “So you have written The Little Book of Hygge, and now The Little Book of Lykke—what are you going to do next?” I thought the way he pronounced the Danish words hygge and lykke was very good and I wanted to compliment him. I also knew that a lot of people in the UK had been watching Danish dramas such as Borgen, The Bridge and The Killing and hearing them in the original language, so I thought that could explain why Phil’s Danish was so good. “Well done on your pronunciation of Danish,” I said. “You must have been watching a lot of Danish Borgen.” He heard a completely different word and started to laugh and blush, along with the other hosts. I had no idea why they were laughing. “What did he say?” asked Holly, the other host. “I’m afraid to ask,” said Phil. End of interview.
Later that day, when I read an article with the title “Host Mishears Danish Guest” I was reminded that, in the UK, people pronounce it Bor-gen, with two syllables, but in Danish it is pronounced differently and Phil had heard, “You must have been watching a lot of Danish porn.” When I realized what the hosts thought I had said, I wanted to find a very small hole to hide in. I often think about it. Every time I have to do a live interview, I think to myself, Well, it can’t be any worse than me talking about porn. We all have these palms-to-face experiences, ones we still haven’t got over even years later. They pop up in our memory when we least expect them and when we least want them to.
The reason for their stickiness is that emotions act like a highlighter pen, for example, the embarrassment I felt after my live TV faux pas. Emotional reactions such as fear or embarrassment are processed in the amygdala (the part of your brain where the fight-or-flight response also begins), allowing you to learn the aspects of the situation that are relevant to the emotions you experience. So now when the lights go on in live TV interviews, I remember to steer clear of talking about Danish TV shows.
An emotional reaction will make experiences and moments more memorable, so the art of making memories means making the emotional highlighter pen work for you.
In the Happy Memory Study we conducted at the Happiness Research Institute, 56 percent of the memories could be labeled as emotional experiences: children being born, people getting married, first kisses.
“One of
my happiest memories is the day my husband and I got married,” wrote a young woman from the US. “I had just graduated from college, and we were getting ready to follow our dream to move west. We didn’t have a lot of money at the time, and neither of our families helped us pay for the wedding, so it was very small. We only spent around $300 for everything. We got married in the gardens of the art museum where we had one of our first dates. We wrote our own vows and, during the ceremony, white flowers from the trees began to fall all around us. We couldn’t have asked for a more perfect day. There was beauty in its simplicity because we focused on what was important (marrying each other!) rather than getting caught up in making it extravagant.”
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This is also why we remember first kisses. You probably have a quite vivid memory of your first kiss. Where it took place. What you were doing in the minutes or hours leading up to it. Whether you locked eyes before and knew the kiss was coming or whether it took you by surprise. Days when we are emotional might be some of our happiest days—but emotional days might also be some of our unhappiest. We all have sad and painful memories, and some of them are unique to us and some of them we share with the world.
HAPPY DAYS ACCORDING TO TWITTER
So what happens on days when people are happy or unhappy? One way to answer that question is to use the Hedonometer.
It’s based on research by Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, both professors in math, and their team at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont.
The Hedonometer is based on people’s online expressions and uses Twitter as a source. Roughly ten thousand words have been given a happiness score from 1 to 9; 1 for very sad and 9 for extremely happy. For instance, “love” has a score of 8.42, “cried” 2.2, “disappointed” 2.26, “butterflies” 7.92 and “memories” 7.08.