Professor of Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics and renowned expert on happiness, Paul Dolan, shows us in “Happiness by Design” how to find pleasure and purpose in everyday life. The author’s personal problem with stuttering was the launching pad for his research about happiness. His greatest discovery was realizing that the attention he paid to his speech was completely at odds with the attention paid by the people listening.
“Another important lesson was just how little it mattered even to those who knew me, how little they were judging me. My beliefs about myself were also at the heart of dealing with my stammer: It ceased to define who I was. Once I stopped paying so much attention to my speech, it stopped bothering me as much. So changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive”.
In other words your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to drives your behavior and this determines your happiness. The secret is to lead a life which allows you to be true to yourself so that you end up by being happier without having to think too much about it. “This” says Dolan “is happiness by design”.
The truth is that we generally pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focus on what actually does. This means that our happiness is based on our feelings and happy people have more positive feelings than negative ones. However, Dolan defines happiness as “experiences of pleasure and purpose over time”. Including the pleasure-purpose principle incorporates a wide array of sentiments into the daily experiences of life. You can get angry occasionally, work long hours, raise children while taking care of a house and you will not mind all those sacrifices because you are doing it for a good purpose.
Happiness is not only about the quantity of time but also about its quality. Einstein said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, then it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity”.
Whatever your preferences, your feelings of pleasure and purpose are always experienced in the moment. And the less pleasurable things that you do should be purposeful. Sport champions provide a meaningful example because they willingly give up a lot of fun in their lives to attend tough training sessions. However these athletes, in fact, experience purposeful gratification from training.
The key to happiness lies in the way you allocate your attention but we need to remember that attention is a scarce resource. You cannot devote your attention to two things at the same time.
“The key to being happier is to pay more attention to what makes you happy and less attention to what does not.”
You should also remember how making pleasure even more salient might be good for you. Find ways to laugh more and remind yourself how happy it makes you feel. You do not have to do a lot to get results: a little can go a long way. According to the author, studies show that smiling can cause happiness as well as be a consequence of it because the conscious decision to smile unconsciously makes you happier as a result. And so you will quickly and quite automatically feel better.
There is also another way to be happy which is to spend more time with the people you like. According to the author, the evidence quite clearly shows a strong positive association between happiness and doing things with the people you like and for those you care about. Having more social contacts is one of the main reasons why religious people are more satisfied with their lives. Being around other people can also help facilitate adaptation to difficult experiences; widows appear to withdraw attention from their loss more quickly when they have social support. Your friends not only make you happier because they’re there to spend time with you but also because they make you feel like you matter.
The topic of money in relation to happiness is also a case in point. It seems that the more money we have, the more we imagine what we can do with that money. But according to recent studies, people with less than a college degree have more leisure time than those with a college degree. The gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has widened considerably since the 1980s but the gap between the amounts of leisure time they have has widened, too, favoring those who are rich. While poorer people have more intrusive thoughts about money, wealthier people are more negatively influenced by those thoughts.
“There are some simple yet effective things that you can do to reorient your attention to being happier. Buy a few more experiences and a bit less stuff, switch between pleasurable and purposeful activities, and listen to music. Make a commitment to spend a little more time each day talking to people you like. And look to spending a little less time each day glued to your computer or phone … stay focused on one thing at a time and stop continually checking those darn e-mails and Facebook updates,” suggests Dolan.
In the end, the more time we spend doing things that make us happy, the happier we will be. It is important to stop doing things that make us miserable. In other words, we must change what we do and not what we think.
“You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy” is the leitmotiv of this book. Using the latest cutting-edge research, the author believes that wellbeing isn’t about how we think, it’s about what we do. By making deliberate choices that bring us both pleasure and meaning, we can redesign our lives for maximum happiness without thinking too hard about it.
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“Another important lesson was just how little it mattered even to those who knew me, how little they were judging me. My beliefs about myself were also at the heart of dealing with my stammer: It ceased to define who I was. Once I stopped paying so much attention to my speech, it stopped bothering me as much. So changing behavior and enhancing happiness is as much about withdrawing attention from the negative as it is about attending to the positive”.
In other words your happiness is determined by how you allocate your attention. What you attend to drives your behavior and this determines your happiness. The secret is to lead a life which allows you to be true to yourself so that you end up by being happier without having to think too much about it. “This” says Dolan “is happiness by design”.
The truth is that we generally pay more attention to what we think should make us happy rather than focus on what actually does. This means that our happiness is based on our feelings and happy people have more positive feelings than negative ones. However, Dolan defines happiness as “experiences of pleasure and purpose over time”. Including the pleasure-purpose principle incorporates a wide array of sentiments into the daily experiences of life. You can get angry occasionally, work long hours, raise children while taking care of a house and you will not mind all those sacrifices because you are doing it for a good purpose.
Happiness is not only about the quantity of time but also about its quality. Einstein said: “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, then it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity”.
Whatever your preferences, your feelings of pleasure and purpose are always experienced in the moment. And the less pleasurable things that you do should be purposeful. Sport champions provide a meaningful example because they willingly give up a lot of fun in their lives to attend tough training sessions. However these athletes, in fact, experience purposeful gratification from training.
The key to happiness lies in the way you allocate your attention but we need to remember that attention is a scarce resource. You cannot devote your attention to two things at the same time.
“The key to being happier is to pay more attention to what makes you happy and less attention to what does not.”
You should also remember how making pleasure even more salient might be good for you. Find ways to laugh more and remind yourself how happy it makes you feel. You do not have to do a lot to get results: a little can go a long way. According to the author, studies show that smiling can cause happiness as well as be a consequence of it because the conscious decision to smile unconsciously makes you happier as a result. And so you will quickly and quite automatically feel better.
There is also another way to be happy which is to spend more time with the people you like. According to the author, the evidence quite clearly shows a strong positive association between happiness and doing things with the people you like and for those you care about. Having more social contacts is one of the main reasons why religious people are more satisfied with their lives. Being around other people can also help facilitate adaptation to difficult experiences; widows appear to withdraw attention from their loss more quickly when they have social support. Your friends not only make you happier because they’re there to spend time with you but also because they make you feel like you matter.
The topic of money in relation to happiness is also a case in point. It seems that the more money we have, the more we imagine what we can do with that money. But according to recent studies, people with less than a college degree have more leisure time than those with a college degree. The gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has widened considerably since the 1980s but the gap between the amounts of leisure time they have has widened, too, favoring those who are rich. While poorer people have more intrusive thoughts about money, wealthier people are more negatively influenced by those thoughts.
“There are some simple yet effective things that you can do to reorient your attention to being happier. Buy a few more experiences and a bit less stuff, switch between pleasurable and purposeful activities, and listen to music. Make a commitment to spend a little more time each day talking to people you like. And look to spending a little less time each day glued to your computer or phone … stay focused on one thing at a time and stop continually checking those darn e-mails and Facebook updates,” suggests Dolan.
In the end, the more time we spend doing things that make us happy, the happier we will be. It is important to stop doing things that make us miserable. In other words, we must change what we do and not what we think.
“You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy” is the leitmotiv of this book. Using the latest cutting-edge research, the author believes that wellbeing isn’t about how we think, it’s about what we do. By making deliberate choices that bring us both pleasure and meaning, we can redesign our lives for maximum happiness without thinking too hard about it.
— [email protected]
