Are you constantly disappointed that the things you buy don't bring your lasting happiness?
Do you feel like you're on a treadmill where happiness is just around the corner?
If so, let me help you understand why.
I've spent a great many years now studying the science of happiness.
I look into what happiness is and
what things cause it.
I'm not a self-help guru.
I'm not here to tell you what to do,
but I am here to give you some tips and some advice so that you can make yourself happier.
In one way or another all of us want to be happy.
We want to feel good.
And not just only for feeling good
but because feeling good improves other things in our lives too.
We're healthier, we're more productive, we have more friends.
So happiness matters in itself,
but also because it causes other things that we care about too.
Self help books sell their bucket load because they don't work.
Your likelihood of buying a self-help book
is predicted by whether you've bought one before.
They give you very glib advice like be positive,
but what's really important is being able to embed that in your daily practices,
is to actually do things that make you feel better.
If we're going to understand what makes us happy we
need to understand, first of all, what happiness is.
Now, happiness is in our experiences.
It's in what we do. It's in how we feel day to day.
It's in the things we find pleasurable
on the one hand and things that we find purposeful on the other.
And happy lives are ones that find
the right balance between fun and fulfillment.
It's not for me to tell you what that balance is,
it's for you to work it out.
I've got the sea in the background here – now I know that everybody
can't live by the sea, but looking out at a nice view, it's something that isn't quite as nice
the 100th time as it is the first but it's not far off.
So if you can find things that draw attention
to themselves in ways that continue to make you happy, you're going to feel happier longer term.
Now we know that poverty makes people miserable, but that doesn't mean that getting more and more
money is going to make you ever happier.
In fact, you can reach a point where more money won't make
you happy and actually might make you less happy
if you're sacrificing some of the things that make
you happy day to day in order to get rich.
So, if you're not seeing friends as much as you would like to,
if you're not having good experiences and instead chasing the dream, as it were, then that's
probably not going to make you happier either long term or short term.
We often think that a fantastic job is going to make us happier,
and it might, but sometimes it doesn't because that
fantastic job is only a fantastic job in theory. It's the one that we've always wanted, it's the
one that our parents are proud of, our friends are jealous, but day to day our experiences might
tell us something quite different.
We might have a bad boss, horrible colleagues, a terrible commute
and if that's the case we really need to ask ourselves, "what's perfect about the job?".
Let's think about how we spend our money.
So often we buy stuff
thinking that the hit's going to last for a long time but it doesn't, it wears off quite quickly.
Experiences on the other hand, especially with other people, continue to make you happy not just
in the experience but in the stories that you can tell about them afterwards.
So, often, it's better for us to do things than it is to buy things.
Imagine buying a new phone.
A really expensive phone you think that's going to continue to make you happy
because you're paying attention to the expensiveness of the phone,
but actually in using the phone it's the functionality that matters.
It doesn't really matter, then, whether it's the most expensive phone or the next most expensive,
it's going to be a phone that you'll use, and you need to pay attention to the using it,
We all need to pay attention to the doing and using of things
and not our imaginations of how they're going to be.
When we think about happiness as experiences over time –
because little part of our experiences are
in anticipation and in memory – it's not just in what we do it's in how we imagine
how we feel when we do it and how we remember it afterwards, and I think it's important that we
keep that in mind because it will help you think about, for example, what kind of holidays to have.
Try to have some really good experiences, that's an obvious thing to say, so that you can
draw down memories afterwards.
Perhaps less obvious is don't go away for too long because
the evidence tells us that we don't remember duration, we don't remember how long things last.
So have sort of short, sharp experiences rather than one big long drawn out ones.
If you spent a little bit more time each day listening to music that you enjoy,
you're going to be happier.
If you've got outdoors a little bit more, you'd be a little happier.
If you spend a little bit more time with people you like being with,
you'll be a bit happier.
Helping other people, that's really good for us.
That's actually a selfish thing to do, to help other people:
they feel good and we feel good too.
All of these things that you can do just a little bit more of, that irrespective
of how happy you are, irrespective of how much money you have or the house that you live in,
you're going to be happier.
One of the ways in which we can make better decisions about our happiness
is to ask other people for some advice.
But be careful who you ask. Don't ask those people who
have expectations of you about the life that they think you ought to be leading
but rather look to those people who care about your experiences.
Or maybe even ask people who've had the experiences
that you might be thinking of having.
We are different and people experience things differently but we're often quite similar too,
and if something felt good for someone like you chances are it will for you too.
All of us are trying to be happier
but we sometimes get it wrong and there's lots
of reasons for that, but principally it's because often we're living in stories about
the lives that we ought to be leading and things that we ought to be doing
rather than paying attention to what actually makes us happy day-to-day.
We need to strip away the stories of expectations on ourselves and of other people
and instead pay attention to the feedback that we get from the
things that we do that bring us pleasure and purpose.
If you're finding that something is bringing you neither pleasure nor purpose,
stop doing it.