Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

In this 12-minute TED talk, Buddhist scholar Bob Thurman shares simple yet profound insights about happiness. If you don’t want to watch the video (don’t worry - you won’t miss any how-to-be-happy demonstrations), then here’s a summary:

Self-obsession is boring

Thinking of ourselves as alone in the world puts us into a delusion. The more we focus on how we feel, the worse we feel. Thurman quotes the Dalai Lama, who says our own pains and pleasures are too boring, too small a theatre for our intelligence.

We can move into compassion

We can move beyond this obsession with ourselves - through art, meditation, understanding, and becoming aware of our interconnectedness with others. Doing so forces us to feel what others feel, to experience compassion. When we’re no longer locked into ourselves, when we escape the prison of I-me-mine, then we start to become interested in others, and to feel our own selves differently.

Helping is more fun than being caught up in ourselves

To help the suffering we don’t have to join their pain or be miserable. Instead, we can be buoyed by a sense of hope, of what is possible through helping. Being compassionate and generous is fun. Again Thurman cites the Dalai Lama - who’s a great example of joy, despite how deeply he feels the pain of the world.

We can end our self-centered focus, thinking instead of how to help someone else - even a pet! - to be happy. And as soon as we make someone else happier, our whole perception broadens. Suddenly, we’re happier too.

My (&GBS’s) 2 cents

We don’t have to be Buddhist scholars to appreciate the value of focusing less on our own boring dramas and more on how we can contribute to our world. Indeed, the Irish-born, Nobel-Prize-winning writer George Bernard Shaw noted something similar more than a century ago:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

This is the irony of compassion, the karmic trick of kindness. When we think about ourselves, those ailments and grievances loom large in our lives. It’s when we turn our attention to others that we somehow stumble onto the ‘true joy in life’.

In Gilbert’s view, our hike to happiness is ungainly because we  use our powers of imagination as our compass - we imagine what will make us happy. Problem is,  imagination lets us down in three important ways:

1. Imagination is a kind of simplification - it fills some bits in and leaves others out - and the omissions can be crucial to how we’ll feel. As a result, we’re poor at gauging how happy something will make us.

2. Imagination leads us to project the present, including feelings and current levels of satisfaction or longing, onto the future. We can’t estimate how much we’ll enjoy a food tomorrow if we’re stuffed full now.

3. Imagination leads us to discount how different things will seem when they actually happen. A bad thing, like losing a job, will appear worse when pictured in the future than when experienced during the present, because in the present we tend to rationalize the loss.

According to Gilbert, his friends say he points out problems without suggesting solutions - but they never tell him what to do about it (boom-tish).

He does have a solution to the imagination problem, he says, it’s just not one that people like. He says we’d do well to rely less on our own imagined futures and more on others’ actual experiences in choosing what will make us happy. ‘It doesn’t always make sense to heed what people tell us when they communicate their beliefs about happiness, but it does make sense to observe how happy they are in different circumstances’ (page 233).

In short:
Gilbert’s book describes itself as ‘not an instruction manual for how to be happy’. Instead, it surveys recent scientific findings about how people imagine their futures and how effective they are in predicting what will be most enjoyable.

Gilbert takes a long route to do this, with pretensions (chapter titles include Journey to Elsewhen and Paradise Glossed) that may frustrate get-to-the-point readers. And his ultimate recommendation to be guided more by what brings happiness to others than by our own imagined outcomes, may feel inadequate to justify the whole book.

But if you’re happy to ramble long the research path, then this is a pleasant journey.

Title: Stumbling on Happiness
Author: Daniel Gilbert
Publisher information: HarperCollins Publishers, London, 2006

If you think your senses give you a direct line to reality, you might be in for a shock. In Mind Tricks: Six ways to explore your brain, the cover story of a recent issue of New Scientist, Graham Lawton explores many of the ways our brains mislead us about the alleged real world.

Lawton compares the workings of our visual system to ‘a man blundering around in the dark waving around a flickering torch with a very narrow beam’. This is because our eyes continually dart about, processing pretty much nothing in between these fraction-of-a-second fixations.

Even face perception is wonky. When we look at a face we’re biased toward the left side - as processed by the right cerebral hemisphere. We perceive a chimeric face (a composite image with one side neutral and the other smiling) as whatever expression is on the left.

Nor is our hearing system any more reliable. Much of what people say to us is distorted, but we happily fill in the blanks through top-down influence - that is, we use what we know to round out what we hear. Listen for yourself how ‘knowing’ changes hearing.

Not only do the visual and auditory system each perpetrate their own trickery, they can also obscure one another. Sometimes seeing wins - as when the sound ‘ba ba ba ba’ is overridden by seeing someone mouth ‘ba da la va’. At other times sound trumps sight - as when a single flash accompanied by two beeps appears as two flashes.

Okay, so our tools of perception don’t exactly map reality one-to-one. But it gets worse. The information bits we process, however dysfunctionally, are only the bits we notice - and we only notice what’s relevant right now, carelessly filtering out the rest.

We suffer change blindness, can only attend to five or six items at most, completely miss gradual changes (you might need to jiggle the control to see what you missed) and even fail to realize that the person who asked us directions before a pair of door-carrying workmen passed between us is not the person we directed to the post office. If you think it wouldn’t happen to you, try to count the number of passes made by the basketball team wearing white T-shirts.

Lawton also explores how easy it can be to plant a false memory - as was done to Alan Alda (they made him think he’d been a doctor during the Korean War - only kidding! - it was a memory of overeating eggs as a child); and how implicit assumptions can lead to prejudices we don’t even know we have. Or did I just think he did all that?

My 2 cents

The approximations, simplifications and distortions entertainingly highlighted by Lawton are designed to help us navigate all the data we’re exposed to and zero in on what matters most. If we received all the external inputs ‘correctly’, whatever that means, we’d suffer information overload in the truest sense - we just wouldn’t be able to process it. So funky perception is good. Most of the time it gives us what we need.

What’s it got to do with happiness?

Well, it shows we make a lot of stuff up - what we see, what we hear, what we notice, what we completely miss, what we remember. Our perceptions are by no means an exact representation of what’s out there. Given all the filling in and leaving out, it makes sense to recognize the bias in how we perceive the world. Perhaps we can even choose our own bias - one that helps us to be happy rather than one that makes us miserable.

Now let’s take another look at that glass.

Today is blog action day, and this year’s topic is the environment.

(I’m a day late in Australia - sorry!)

Here are my 10 tips for being happy and environmentally responsible.

1. Only buy what you need. If all you need is a small car, buy a small car.

2. Only use what you need. Make things last longer - from the DVD player to the shampoo bottle.

3. Turn everything off when you’re done using it. Lights, TVs, computers - you name it. Just make it a habit.

4. Think before you print.

5. Leave the car at home when you can. Walk, take the bus, ride a bike.

6. Get a shower timer and take shorter showers. Save the relaxation for outside the bathroom.

7. Open the mail over your paper recycle bin.

8. Let windows and clothes help your personal temperature management - and take the pressure off your heater and air-conditioner.

9. Vote with your purse. Avoid buying from environmentally irresponsible companies. Say no to overpackaged stuff.

10. Be conscious of your impact on our world. Be happy that you’re a responsible earth citizen.

Here’s what some other bloggers had to say for blog action day:

The Butterfly Effect and the Environment: How Tiny Actions Can Save the World by Brian Clark

How Can Bloggers Be Environmentally Responsible? by Darren Rowse

Easy Ways to Live Greener by lifehacker

What if the water runs out by Yaro Starak

Blog Action Day: What are you doing for a healthy environment? by Patsi Krakoff

In stark contrast to the contemporaneous Stoics - for whom a virtuous soul was the key to happiness - Epicurus* believed ‘pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life’.

Now before you get carried away picturing hedonistic orgies, I should clarify what he meant by pleasure. Although Epicurus and his followers were rumored to live a profligate lifestyle, and still today the word epicure suggests indulgent eating, drinking and merriment, in fact Epicurus advised the opposite of abandoning yourself to pleasures of the flesh.

Instead, like Socrates, he believed that rationally analyzing our initial pleasure-seeking impulses would reveal them to be false paths to happiness.

His own analysis of a pleasurable life yielded three essentials:

1. Friendship - who you eat with, matters more than what’s on your plate
2. Freedom - ‘from the prison of everyday affairs and politics’
3. Thought - because rational thinking keeps pointless anxiety at bay.

His lifestyle expressed his philosophy, with a simple commune-like home and meals of water and vegetables and, for a treat, a ‘pot of cheese’.

Epicurus believed you could be happy with friends, freedom and thought, even without wealth; but wealth without the big three couldn’t make you happy.

Happiness strategies inspired by Epicurus

Friendship: Friends contribute to our sense of identity, support us in trouble and help celebrate good times. Many people think success without love would be empty, yet neglect to nurture their friendships or think proactively about who they value as friends. Making friendship a life priority can help protect the precious attachments that contribute so much to our happiness.

Freedom: It’s hard to avoid pressure and expectations when running the rate race. But we can choose to sacrifice some modern conveniences for greater freedom. We can work shorter hours, live somewhere less salubrious, forego the latest gadgets, make a simpler life for ourselves. We may give up status or money but gain a freer, more independent, happier life.

Thought: It takes effort and courage to question conventional wisdom and cultural expectations. But doing the hard thinking about what brings us happiness can finally put us in touch with genuine sources of joy, rather than the things we think should bring us joy. The obvious pleasures are rarely the heartfelt, lasting ones.

Wealth: Having money can bring many wonderful things and can certainly contribute to happiness. It’s what else we have - or don’t have - in our lives that can make all the difference to how happy our money makes us.

Epicurus’s ideas about happiness are surprising - both encouraging us to pursue pleasure but also warning us to think long and hard about what that pleasure means. Nurturing friendship, freeing ourselves from some of the shackles of life and thinking critically about life and happiness can help us find a happier way to live.

Read more philosophers ‘On Happiness’.

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