I once took an early morning commuter train into Philadelphia. When I looked around at my fellow passengers, I noted with surprise — and some amusement — that most of them were reading self-help books. Some were of the “chicken soup” variety, more were of the “how to make a million in a year”. One thing was clear: My fellow passengers were engaged in hot pursuit of material happiness. This should not have surprised me, after all the pursuit of happiness is part of the American Declaration of Independence.
I shouldn’t mock self-help books; in fact I am no stranger to them. I was once handed M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled by a stranger in a bookshop. “You must read this”, she told me, “it’ll change your life”. I did read it. It opens with the words, “life is hard”, and then goes on to tell us that the road to happiness requires self-discipline, delayed gratification, the acceptance of the consequences of our actions and an emphasis on spiritual growth. I’ve also read that other star of the international bestseller lists: Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, an enchanting story which tells us not only that we can live our dreams but that we have a duty to do so. I found these books inspiring; they dazzled me with their promise of a happier life, but they didn’t take me very far.
The self-help books I’ve found helpful were those that teach positive thinking.
Later, when I studied psychology, I understood the theory behind it. It is not dissimilar to the “glass is half-empty” analogy. In simple terms, how we think affects not just what we feel but what happens to us. It is about both thought patterns and attributions. The critical aspect is that these thoughts are automatic; they are almost like background noise in our heads. Any banal event — say someone canceling a lunch date — can trigger a chain of negative thoughts which we are often not consciously aware of, and these in turn lead to negative affect, or the blues. Recognizing and challenging these negative thoughts can drastically change the way we feel.
Part of the power of positive thinking is that it gives us a sense of control over our destinies. Rather than viewing ourselves as pawns at the mercy of forces beyond our control, it takes the view that our cognitive abilities enable us to determine much of what happens to us. At first sight it is an approach that does not sit well with some religious thinking. It is not fatalistic, there is no sense that we must accept what has been “written” for us or that we must seek help from external forces in order to overcome our problems. But on closer inspection the opposite is true; it is very much a Muslim state of mind. After all we are enjoined to: “Expect good and you will find it”. Positive thinking is based both on taking an optimistic outlook and on emphasizing what we have. In other words in seeing the glass as half-full.
“Are you happy?” Most Muslims will answer this question with exactly the same words: “Alhamdulillah”. Perhaps it is an odd question, what exactly does it mean to be happy? Certainly it is not a question someone like my grandfather would have ever asked me. For someone as deeply religious as him, the concept of individual happiness was irrelevant; happiness was purely a function of your relationship with God. His goal in life was not to be happy, it was to be good.
The quest for individual happiness is very much a modern phenomenon and a peculiarity of wealthier nations. Those below the poverty line are too busy trying to survive to ask themselves if they are happy. But once your basic needs are met, then existential concerns start to rise to the fore. What I find interesting is that when people complain of being unhappy, they most often talk about the material circumstances in their life — money or the lack of it, their relationship problems, their difficulties at work — and yet when these circumstances change for the better, they often wind up just as unhappy as before but find a new problem to complain about.
The answer to this phenomenon may lie in something referred to as the “set point” of happiness. This theory posits that we all have an innate baseline level of happiness. When our circumstances change, we may experience an initial surge or fall in happiness depending on the nature of the change, but we eventually revert back to our baseline level of happiness. On the face of it, it’s a depressing theory; it suggests that we’re stuck with the level of happiness (or unhappiness) that we were born with, but that is not the full picture. What the research behind the set-point shows is that human beings have a great capacity to adapt and that, at the end of the day, it is not material circumstances that determine your level of happiness. In essence, it says that social disparities are not matched by disparities in subjective well-being. It is quite egalitarian in nature; it predicts that those at the bottom of the ladder are just as likely to be happy as those at the top. Happiness then, to use an old phrase, is a state of mind.
Most important, the set point is not set in stone. It may be a product of our genetic heritage, but it is not a life sentence; we have the capacity to raise it.
And how do we raise it? What is it that those millions of self-help books are essentially telling us? Many can be summarized by the following: Be physically active, be thankful, think positively, help others, meditate or pray, build long-lasting relationships, treat yourself, smile, laugh and have fun. Not a bad way to live!
