The How of Happiness

"The How of Happiness I would describe as the state of the art in evidence-based positive psychology. Sonja Lyubomirsky has done the best studies on how simple interventions, simple things you can do, on a daily or weekly basis, have measurable effects on your happiness. So if your goal is to actually raise your happiness level, then this is the best book to read – it has very concrete suggestions of what you can do. One example is that doing good deeds for others does raise your happiness – but not if you try to do it every day. If you do it every day, it can get kind of tedious, it can make you resent people. So she found that assigning people to do one or two good deeds a week is more effective than doing it every day."

"It’s much more than a self-help book, though. Most self-help books are just made up. The people who write them don’t know anything – they just put together some cute package that will sell lots of copies. What makes Sonja Lyubomirski’s book different is that it’s actually based on scientific research on what makes people happy. She’s part of a research programme that’s been very active in psychology in the last ten years, called positive psychology. Traditionally psychologists were more likely to study people’s unhappiness – problems like depression and anxiety. In the last decade there’s been a very strong movement to turn that around and use the methods of scientific psychology to try to look at the more positive side. Lyubomirski has been one of the leaders in that movement, along with people like Martin Seligman. But the key thing is you don’t get to make things up – you’ve got to do studies and experiments to try to figure out what actually does make people happy. And I think her findings are maybe not shocking, but they’re very interesting and very useful. She talks about a dozen or so happiness activities that are known to make people happier. Things like expressing gratitude, cultivating optimism, not thinking too much about things you shouldn’t be worrying about. Being kind, having social relationships. These things are all common sense, but you don’t know they’re actually true. She talks about strategies for coping, learning to forgive, savouring life’s joys, practising religion and spirituality, taking care of your body. I think these are all good pieces of advice, but at a level over and above what you usually find in self-help books – because she’s doing it from a scientific perspective, where there’s actually evidence that supports her claims that these are ways people can be happy. Also, she shows that a lot of the views that people have about happiness are just wrong. Thinking, for example, that the best way to be happy is to be rich. The data on that are really quite interesting. It certainly makes you unhappy to be poor, but over a certain threshold, people don’t get much happier by having more money. That’s a really important thing, I think, for people to know. Especially if, as she tends to assume, the goal of life is happiness. That’s where I disagree with her. I don’t actually think happiness is a meaning of life, though lots of people assume that. Still, happiness is something folks care about, and she gives the best discussion I know, of the nature of happiness and the ways that one can practically accomplish it. It can be both. Actually, after reading her book, I tried an experiment. I started tipping more. I always gave reasonable tips – 15 per cent in a restaurant or a taxi. But, as an experiment, I tried tripping more than is expected – 20 per cent. It’s really quite interesting the effect you get, because people really appreciate it. That was something I tried based on her book and I actually quite enjoyed the experience. I think happiness is certainly important to people, but I see it as an effect, rather than as a prime goal. The arguments that I make in my own book, The Brain and The Meaning of Life, are based partly on ways in which happiness is independent of meaning. There are people whose lives are extremely meaningful, even though they may be short on happiness. Consider, for example, people who are really struggling with a difficult situation – an example I use is a single parent with a disabled child. This is someone whose life is clearly very difficult, and there may be limitations on happiness. Nevertheless, I don’t think that person’s life is lacking in meaning. On the other hand there are ways of getting happiness that are really quite trivial. Someone could be perfectly happy just watching bad television while taking drugs. There are ways of generating happiness that don’t seem to contribute to a meaningful life at all. On the other hand, when people are satisfying what are really human needs, then happiness usually comes along with it. So then the question becomes: what are human needs? Here, like Flanagan, I take a naturalistic approach. I think we can look at human biology and human psychology and figure out what are the things without which we can’t lead meaningful lives. Obviously, you have biological needs like food and water and shelter and healthcare. But on top of that, if you look at the evidence concerning the fundamental needs that seem to matter in people’s psychological lives, for this I draw on a bunch of psychological and neurological evidence to argue that love, work, and play make up the most meaningful pursuits. Love is obviously relationships, work gives accomplishments and confidence which I think are important, but I also threw play in there because I think kinds of entertainment that people enjoy are an important part of people’s lives – from the time they’re kids, when play is the most important thing they do, all the way through to retirement – when people aren’t working so much any more but still can find meaning through various kinds of entertainment pursuits. If you look at people’s psychological needs and the way they meet them through love, work and play, you should see those as the primary goals, rather than happiness."