Happiness by Design

by Paul Dolan

  So, in general, it is better for your happiness if you have modest expectations. Take having a party. Those with high expectations about and big plans for the millennium celebrations were less happy on the night than those with low expectations and not much planned.69 And you know that about nights out on the town: the best ones tend to be unplanned. In the end, expecting to be very happy is probably a surefire way of not being so.

  Modest expectations will also mean that you can avoid false-hope syndrome, whereby we stick with crazy expectations way past the point at which we should have reined them in.70 False hope springs from optimism, but having modest expectations need not be incompatible with optimism. Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst.71 It doesn’t mean we always need to expect the very best or ignore the worst when it occurs. When facing an uncertain future, the rose-colored glasses of optimism serve us just fine, as long as we can take them off from time to time for a dose of realism. Although figuring out what are and are not sensible expectations is difficult, you should at least experience pleasure and purpose as you work toward a goal you have set. As we will see later, there are some effective ways to obtain this feedback from yourself—and from others—in order to know what to stick with and what to abandon.

  Other times, however, we try hard to force our behavior to be more like that of the people we want to be. Self-improvement is important, but it needs to be conducive to your happiness. If an ambition will not make you or those you care about any happier, then there really is no point in striving to be someone else. You should carefully consider your reasons for the ideal self you construct and then select goals and ambitions that are sensible and conducive to your happiness.

  Accepting too little

  Whatever else you do, don’t be too hard on yourself, because trying to force yourself to be different never really works. One of the most effective ways to get others to do as you would like is to make them feel that they are doing it voluntarily.72 If they feel coerced, they are much more likely to resist. What applies to conversations with other people also applies to the conversations we have with ourselves. Try as hard as you can to stop yourself from thinking about a white bear and you won’t be able to stop yourself from thinking about it—in fact, even more thoughts of the darn bear will pop into your head when you are allowed to think about it once more.73

  In general, we need to learn to accept much more about ourselves than we do, thus integrating our evaluations with our actual experiences. Nonacceptance is seen as an internalization of feelings of shame, which then results in a range of other negative emotions that get in the way of behavior change.74 Ignore the fact that you are a lousy cook and you’ll just keep your dinner guests away, wondering why nobody ever takes you up on your invitation for a home-cooked meal. Effective behavior change can only really come about after you accept what you already do. Accept that you are a lousy cook and you might be motivated to get some lessons. And even if you don’t, accepting that you are an imperfect, fallible, and mortal creature will mean that you are happier in your own skin. This was certainly true for my stammer, especially when I accepted that there was no need to be ashamed by it.

  The serenity affirmation Alcoholics Anonymous uses says: “Grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and wisdom to know the difference.”75 Separating the wheat from the chaff of your ideal self—knowing which ideals to hold and which ones to fold—is a real challenge. Ultimately, you need to consider the various ways in which your thoughts about yourself are helping and hindering you in the pursuit of happiness.

  Making mistakes along the way is absolutely fine, so long as you learn from them. There are good and bad mistakes. Good ones are those that you learn from and that you do not attempt to hide, especially from yourself.76 Bad ones are those that you keep repeating. As Einstein is famously attributed with saying, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

  Following Shakespeare’s Macbeth, it has often been said that someone has been the “architect of his own destruction.”77 I have certainly been my own worst enemy at various times over the years, and I’m sure you have thought or done things that made you wonder what the hell you were thinking—perhaps even at the moment of doing them. It seems to be human nature that we often spend far too much of our time thinking about how other people have wronged us, when we should really be paying a bit more attention to the harm we do to ourselves. If you think one of your friends has been mean to you, perhaps stop and ask yourself why you allow him to be. In fact, first off, perhaps consider whether he really was being mean at all. Nobody’s perfect, and to be happy in any relationship, you can either accept the other person, flaws and all, or walk away. You live with yourself forever, of course, and this means accepting yourself as both imperfect and able to change.

  Reallocating attention

  The fundamental reason why most of us aren’t as happy as we could be is that we allocate attention in ways that are often at odds with experiencing as much pleasure and purpose as we could. It’s not surprising that we aren’t as happy as we could be when we allow our evaluative self to attend to mistaken desires about what should motivate us and make us happy. It’s no wonder that we make choices that are incompatible with our future experiences of happiness when our attention is focused on what’s in front of us right now rather than on what will be in front of us once we have made a decision. And it’s actually quite easy to be miserable when our beliefs and behavior conflict, when we set lofty expectations about ourselves, or when we can’t even accept ourselves in the first place.

  So if the misallocation of attention is our fundamental problem, the reallocation of attention must be the fundamental solution. You need a more efficient production process to become happier. Fortunately, behavioral science provides you with some help in understanding some of the reasons why you might not be allocating your attention as well as you could. Better still, it provides illuminating insights into how you can reorient your attention to “deliver happiness,” as we shall now see in part 2.

  PART 2

  Delivering Happiness

  The ways in which you can reallocate your attention to be happier are best understood from three separate but related perspectives: deciding, designing, and doing. Chapter 5 shows how you can mitigate the attentional obstacles to happiness by deciding to pay attention to what makes you happy, including decisions ranging from which job to take to what to do this evening. Chapter 6 considers how you can design your surroundings so as to become happier without having to think too hard about it, such as when you set a particular home page on your computer. Chapter 7 will show that, as a rule, we are all happier when we give activities, like talking to friends, our full attention. The most effective ways to be happier will involve joining up these various components, and so chapter 8 illustrates how to bring together deciding, designing, and doing to address, separately, two behaviors that I hope will resonate with many readers: how to procrastinate less and how to help others more. Even if they don’t directly apply to you, there will be general lessons that can be applied to other behaviors you might wish to change. But let’s first get into the details of the “three Ds.”

  5

  Deciding happiness

  We’ll now turn our focus toward the perspective of deciding the production process, concentrating on how to mitigate mistaken desires, projections, and beliefs. A major part of the solution to these problems is right under your nose: it lies in the experiences of pleasure and purpose you have, and in the judgments that those close to you make about your happiness. You need to be careful not to overthink things, though.

  Pay attention to your own feedback

  Do you ever think about what brings you the most pleasure and purpose in your experiences? One important and useful way to deal with the various mistakes you might make ab
out your happiness is to pay attention to direct feedback about what brings you pleasure and/or purpose and what does not, and then to use this information in your anticipation of future happiness. This section is therefore all about how you can find out which inputs into your happiness production process bring you pleasure and/or purpose and which ones do not. You are seeking to establish equilibrium so that you can stop monitoring your production process, reallocating attention thereafter only when you have good reason to (such as when the inputs, or their impacts, change).

  Making happiness salient

  Your happiness is the most important feedback you can get from your behavior, but it is not always the most salient. Something is salient if it is noticeable and relevant. When I hear people talking in a foreign language, it’s noticeable but I quickly zone out because I do not understand what is being said. When I hear someone with a regional accent, it is noticeable (especially among senior government officials in the UK) and I can usually make out what they are saying, and so it is salient: both noticeable and relevant.

  Our happiness is sometimes not very salient, and we need to do what we can to make it more so. Imagine playing a piano and not being able to hear what it sounds like. Many activities in life are like playing a piano that you do not hear; you’re experiencing pleasure or purpose but you are not appropriately attending to the experience. You can tune in by better attending to inputs and noticing how you feel. Once you do this and learn what the songs from the activities of your life sound like, you can feed this information into your predictions of how the piano will sound the next time you play it.

  Tuning into salient feedback is critical in everything that you decide to do. Nowhere is this more important than in understanding adaptation processes. Imagine that someone dented your car and drove off. You might react immediately by getting it fixed because looking at the dent makes you feel miserable. But you might leave it a week or two and see if you still feel the same. If you do, get it fixed; but if the dent does not bother you anymore, you could leave it until some other idiot crashes into you or until you want to sell the car. Monitoring the effects of any event beyond its initial impact will serve to show you what you get used to and what you do not.

  This kind of information can be especially useful if you are trying to give up something. Smokers’ physical cravings peak at around three days after quitting and last for about three to four weeks; for caffeine, physical withdrawal symptoms peak after about thirty-six hours and subside after about one week.1 Knowing these kinds of facts, especially when they are generated by your own direct feedback, can help you make better-informed decisions about what to do and when.

  In situations where you are facing some painful uncertainties, it will almost certainly be better to turn them into adaptable realities. Do you have an unopened bill that’s bothering you? Then open it. You will have to do something about it eventually and, when you do, its impact on your happiness will wane. Resolve the misery-making uncertainty and get quickly to the adaptation process by confronting the uncertainty head-on. Monitoring the feedback of resolving painful uncertainties will show just how quickly you do generally get over things.

  You can trust your own experiences more than your desires. You might think that being the next Lady Gaga will make you happy and attempt to achieve it but then find that all your experiences along the way are miserable ones. It’s uncertain what your experiences of fame would be like if you were to attain it and so if you aren’t experiencing pleasure and purpose along the way, you are giving up happiness now that might not lead to more happiness later. Keep your eye on the happiness prize by tuning into the feedback from your experiences.

  You can also trust your own experiences more than your projections. Whatever you choose to do, you will only ever experience your choices, not the other options involved in the decisions, and so you won’t spend anywhere near as much time thinking about what might have been as you think you will. You’ll open the bill and not wonder what it would have been like if you hadn’t.

  We often think about small decisions more than we need to and about big decisions much less than is optimal for our happiness, such as spending days looking at what colors to paint the walls but only a couple of hours visiting the house we buy. We also agonize over decisions with highly uncertain outcomes more than those with more certain ones, such as which class to take as compared to what notebook to take to class. When it comes to the small and uncertain, getting feedback from the consequences of our decisions will show that our experiences of pleasure and purpose are rarely as affected as we imagine they will be.

  And you can trust your own experiences more than your beliefs. If you can get yourself to behave in ways that produce more pleasure or purpose, you will then construct an attitude that is consistent with this kind of action, thus reinforcing the behavior. Actions do speak louder than words. And you may recall that past behavior is a much better guide to future behavior than our intentions are.

  Imagine that losing weight would make you happier. You might remember an indication in chapter 3 that it may not, unless you get really sick, but let’s assume here that you would be happier from losing weight. There is nothing more salient about your weight than . . . what you weigh. So get a reliable scale and stand on it twice a week at the same time of day (because you weigh less in the morning than the evening). Getting feedback about what you really weigh might just help you to put some of your feed back. I weigh myself every other day, but I admit this might be a bit over the top. Although I have been trying to gain weight rather than lose it, I am convinced that frequent salient feedback can in itself have an effect on your behavior. There is evidence from other areas to support this claim. Pedometers, which monitor the number of steps you take, increase walking.2 People who self-monitor their blood pressure are better able to reduce it.3

  When it comes to diet, if we are asked to estimate how much we eat, many of us gauge our daily caloric intake as being much lower than it really is—even when our body weight might suggest something quite different. Over six hundred diners at a fast-food restaurant estimated that their meals contained an average of about 120 calories less than they actually did.4 So the suggestion to write down all the calories in what you eat and drink to help you lose weight is a good one.5 Once you have a better idea of what you’re eating, you can stop monitoring until you change what you typically eat, just as you can stop monitoring your happiness feedback once you know what makes you happy. You will only need to begin monitoring again if the inputs into your happiness production process, or their effects, change, such as if you start eating different meals.

  We can see from chapter 2 that, on average, eating is a quite a pleasurable activity. There is now evidence, though, that obese people get less pleasure from food, which may explain why they need to eat more of it. In one study, a group of overweight and obese women had their brains scanned while they were drinking milk shakes at the beginning and end of a six-month period. Relative to the women who did not gain weight over this period, the women who gained weight showed less activation in the regions of the brain that produce dopamine, which, as you may recall, is the neurotransmitter in our brain associated with reward and feelings of pleasure.6 Whether getting less pleasure from food is a cause or a consequence of weight gain doesn’t really matter because people who are overweight get less pleasure from food, regardless of the cause. Taking this into account, the latest weight-loss pill actually aims to increase the pleasure effects of food so that people feel the need to eat less.

  In general, attending to the pleasure from food can be good for your waistline. When you are not paying attention to the food, the feedback for your happiness is less salient, and eating is less pleasurable, so you eat more to get more pleasure. Ideally, attending to your food will help you eat more slowly, enjoy the food more, and consequently eat less of it. People eating at McDonald’s in Paris take about twenty minutes longer to eat their food than diners at McD
onald’s in Philadelphia.7 This study did not look at overall calorie consumption, but other data confirm that the French typically eat less than do Americans.

  We’ve also learned that it’s generally good for us to be with other people. Remember that doing so increased the pleasure people experienced from eating in both the German DRM and the ATUS data. But if you want to lose weight, paying attention to people means that you might be distracted from paying attention to what you are eating. As evidence of this, we will generally eat more when we are around other people.8 We tend to want to keep eating if we are around others, whereas if we are alone, our desire to eat again lessens after eating.9

  This highlights the importance of being alert to context. As we shall consider in more detail in the next chapter, most of the time it’s more effective to design your environment in ways that automatically shift your attention so that you don’t have to think too hard about the behavior that follows, but sometimes, as with eating, you may deliberately want your attention drawn to what you are doing. If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback will be a big part of the solution.10 The main point of salient feedback is to help you make decisions about the inputs into your production process of happiness. Feedback itself is often not enough to change your behavior and improve your happiness, however, and we shall see later that a well-designed environment is also critical to being happier.