Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

Today’s a grey, windy day. It would be so easy to think myself gloomy. Which got me thinking again about thinking, and how it relates to happiness and depression.

Last month I wrote about a recent study suggesting it may be hard to think your way out of depression. I warned readers not to let such results stop us from watching how we think,  and perhaps avoiding depression in the first place.

As a further note-to-self to watch those thoughts, consider another thought-ful study.

Here’s what the study did.

• People were given tests of negative thinking to identify their risk of developing depression. People in the top quarter of scores were put in a  high-risk group and people in the bottom quarter were put in a low-risk group. Currently depressed people were excused from the study.
• Participants’ mental health was assessed regularly over 2.5 years*. The assessors didn’t know which people were in which group. 

Here’s what the study found.

• Whether or not people had a history of depression, a greater proportion of the high-risk group than the low-risk group developed both major depressive disorder (the clinical term for depression) and minor depression.
• For people with no history of depression, 17% of the high-risk group, compared with only 1% of the low-risk group, developed major depressive disorder. The high-risk group also had many more minor depressive episodes.
• The researchers concluded that negative thinking makes you more susceptible to depression.

Some studies look at the relationship between negative thinking and depression at a snapshot in time. But knowing things go together doesn’t say which came first - do you think negatively because you’re depressed or are you depressed because you think negatively? Because this study unfolded over time and excluded already-depressed people, it could say that depression followed thinking.

That doesn’t prove negative thinking causes depression, but it’s good evidence that negative thinking could be a contributor.

So please - watch what you think. It’s powerful.

Study details: Alloy L.B., Abramson L.Y., Whitehouse W.G., Hogan M.E., Tashman N.A., Steinberg D.L., Rose D.T., & Donovan P. (1999). Depressogenic cognitive styles: predictive validity, information processing and personality characteristics, and developmental origins. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 37, 503-531(29).

*The study was part of a series for which data was collected over 5 years. The results described here apply to the first 2.5 years of the data.

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Maybe you can’t think yourself out, but don’t think yourself in

Are you a clutter-rebutter? If so, you probably respond to the sound of jaw-hitting-ground when someone sees your office, home or car with one of these convincing gems:

I know where everything is.
Then where’s that great magazine article you saved? Your left tennis shoe? The cat you were minding for the neighbors?

Creative people need mess.
Did we miss your last exhibition?

Name anything and I’ll find it!
We’ll let you know when they invent that scintillating game show.

Having a place for everything and everything in its place isn’t for everyone, but having everything all over the place is unlikely to prove an effective happiness strategy either.

Here’s why:

• If you have clutter in your home, office, glove-box or computer, it takes you longer to find anything - you waste time.
• If you can’t find the remote-control, hamster or family heirloom then you have to buy another - you waste money.
• If you have too much stuff you forget what you do have and lose the chance to use and enjoy it - you waste opportunity.
• If you keep seeing clutter it’s a constant reminder that you need to clear it, causing frustration and irritation that achieves nothing - you waste energy.

In other words, impedimenta - mindless, lifeless things – become a despot over your time, money and happiness.

Step 1: Admit you have a problem

If you’ve ever:

• Missed an appointment because the reminder card was trapped under magazines hyping shoulder pads and New Romantic bands -
• Bought a second copy of Tchotchkes for Dummies because you mangled the first extracting it from an overstuffed drawer -
• Been offered a contract to open your house as an eBay showroom -

Then it’s time to quit clutter-rebutting and admit you’ve fallen under the tyranny of stuff. You needn’t go from Oscar to Felix overnight, but to conquer clutter it helps to admit that superfluous stuff is moving you crap-ward on the happy-to-crappy scale.

If you’d like to re-claim your happiness from under all that stuff, then make a note to check back here soon for Step 2.

If you can find a pen.

Step 2: Purge

Step 3: The secret to staying clutter-free: OCI-OGO

In home-decorating lingo, I’m what they call anal. My wardrobe is color-ordered. My library is Dewey-decimalized.  My linen is fold-perfect - corner to corner, edge to edge, smooth lines facing out. Neatness and order bring me calm, as well as something I can best describe as happiness.

Until recently, my books were pristine. I’d buy only perfect-condition volumes and read them with care to avoid breaking the spine or curling the corners.

If I thought I might want to return to a beautiful passage of fiction, I’d try to remember the page number. Effectiveness rating: 0%.

To look up an index, I’d perform minor acrobatics to hold open the index page while contorting myself to plaster the relevant sections with post-it notes (to be removed later). It produced neck twinges and paper cuts, and looking up the topic again, as I sometimes do, meant repeating the gymnastics. Annoyingness rating: 100%.

One day, feeling particularly put out by these contortions, I dog-eared an index page and highlighted the entry. I looked around. Nothing happened. I did the same with each reference. Armageddon remained at bay. I kept going, defacing the book but also, strangely, engaging with it. When I’d finished and closed the book it seemed heavier, like the little folds had trapped something extra in them.

I tried it with fiction, dog-earing a page of wonderful prose. I closed the book, then re-opened it at the dog-ear. There was the passage: lovely and accessible.

I now routinely highlight, annotate, spine-crack and dog-ear my books. Before, we had an acquaintance - one-sided and aloof. Now, we have a relationship.

And as with any relationship, we each make our mark on the other.

Postscript: Don’t try dog-earing extraordinary novels like Atonement by Ian McEwan or you’ll end up with a pentagon-shaped book.

Schopenhauer* believed that life does not hold intrinsic meaning. Nor should we look to the world to make us happy. Rather, as in the animal kingdom, much of human life consists of repetitive efforts to meet our needs, interspersed with brief moments of satisfaction.

Although this may seem a gloomy perspective, it’s actually rather liberating. Once we stop expecting the world to show us a good time, we’re freed from the inevitable disappointment when it neglects to do so. Perhaps we’re less bitter when love lets us down, less devastated when we fail.

In other words, Schopenhauer believed that assuming the world is there to make you happy can be a source of heartache and disappointment.

Happiness strategies inspired by Schopenhauer

Pursuing happiness: If we accept that happiness is not automatic, then it puts the onus on us to find and create happiness for ourselves. We can take a more active approach to designing a pleasing life for ourselves.

Expectations: Perhaps the most helpful idea for our happiness is to accept the inevitability of disappointment. By setting our heart on outcomes with the understanding that some things will go our way and some won’t, we may find ourselves more pleased when things go well and less distressed when they don’t.

Meaning: Meaning may not be inherent in the world, but we can invest our lives with purpose. Our sense of purpose could come from anything that has meaning for us - including religious faith, our relationships, raising children, creating something that outlasts us, contributing to human knowledge or helping others.

Relationships: Being in a relationship purely because it ‘makes you happy’ may leave you more vulnerable to disappointment than one in which you also share common values or one in which you can make yourself happy.

Schopenhauer’s ideas about happiness are confronting, but ultimately freeing. Instead of clinging to the hope that happiness is your right, you can choose to be more active in finding meaning and happiness in what can sometimes be a disappointing world.

Read more philosophers ‘On Happiness’.

*To learn more about Schopenhauer you might like to read The Consolations of Philosophy by Alain de Botton.

This is the ninth of 10 tips for unwavering woe. 

The ocean of discontent is fraught with dangers - from blithe buccaneers to distress-eating sharks. In navigating these perilous seas, one of the surest ways to keep your waters stormy is to make a commitment to always being right.

The question ‘Do you want to be happy or right?’ is a helpful one. It alerts miseratis and woe-foes alike to the reality that you can’t always be both; you need to pick a side. If you think fence-sitting will work - well, look what happened to Humpty.

Always being right has two big advantages in avoiding happiness:

1. You don’t learn anything new or broaden your horizons (and let’s face it: the existing horizons are enough of a problem on open waters).

Woe-foes admit to not knowing or even - are you sitting down? - being wrong about things, and the consequences are dire. They’re forced to accommodate new information, sometimes confronting the fabled ‘other side’ of an issue - and before you can say ’shiver me timbers’ their rogers are irksomely jolly.

By contrast, if you’re always right you get to stay limited to the small sum of knowledge you acquired before your ego assumed guard duty, probably around age 7. Think Wikipedia where the only contributor is you. Nice.

2. You become a colossal pain in the butt.

Being right about everything virtually guarantees you’ll never be a fisherman’s friend - or anyone else’s for that matter. People who admit to being wrong suffer the respect and liking of their peers as well as other harbingers of smooth sailing on the friendship.

Instead, let the saying ‘no-one likes a smart-ass’ be your compass: keep your ass smart and woe shall betide you.

Being right requires you to invest considerable time, energy and the occasional fisticuff into defending your point. To help hone your correctitude, try these pointers:

• Smarten your ass
  Offer digressive facts, irrelevant corrections and tedious myth-busting revelations at every opportunity. If you have the information on good authority, fine; but don’t let dubious sources stop you from holding forth. Keep the volume and obnoxiousness turned up to 11.
• Chant this mantra: I think, therefore I am right
  In disagreements, see others as encumbered by mere opinion while you yourself enjoy direct access to reality, truth, and The Way It Is. Accordingly, let a haughty tone pervade everything you say. Sprinkle your responses with a small, superior laugh.
• Make it personal
  In many cases your sheer bombast will stave off inquiry. However, should you find yourself impeached, quickly resort to sarcasm, put-downs and offensive remarks - anything that has your challenger defending their  hygiene/lobotomy history/mother’s personal predilections and distracted from the issue at hand. If all else fails, execute the cunning hey-look-over-there technique. It works for politicians.
• Don’t let them get you with their legal mumbo jumbo
  You have to be quick in your sleight of mouth and dogged in your arrogance to prevent an argument from deteriorating into the use of logic, fact, or evidence. Once that happens, you’re going to need a bigger boat.

With a little practice, you’ll be clinging to being right like it’s a mast in a storm. But don’t just dip your woe in the water, take the plunge - you’ll discover new depths of despair.

Other tips in this series of 10 tips for unwavering woe:

• Tip 1: Take offense
• Tip 2: Never take responsibility
• Tip 3: Pity yourself
• Tip 4: Be needy
• Tip 5: Be ungrateful
• Tip 6: Avoid reality
• Tip 7: Make happiness chase you
• Tip 8: Be neurotic
• Tip 10: Be perfect