Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #209 BITESIZE | How to Create a Happy Life | Professor Paul Dolan

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

We all want to be happy, but what truly brings us happiness is often not what we think.   Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests.   Today’s clip is from episode 54 of the podcast with behavioural scientist and author of the books ‘Happy Ever After’ and ‘Happiness by Design’, Professor Paul Dolan.   Paul believes that happiness is subjective and if we free ourselves from the myth of the perfect life, we can each create a life that’s worth living. Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Support the podcast and enjoy Ad-Free episodes. Try FREE for 7 days on Apple Podcasts https://apple.co/3oAKmxi. For other podcast platforms go to https://fblm.supercast.com. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/54   Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk   DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website. 

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better, Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 54 of the podcast with Professor Paul Dolan. Paul is a behavioural scientist and he's author of the books Happy Ever After and Happiness by Design. Paul believes that happiness is subjective and if we free ourselves from the myth of the perfect life,

we can each create a life that's worth living. What is happiness so happiness well i mean we've had two and a half thousand years of discussion around what happiness is i i see it as located in experiences in the things that we do and how we feel about the things we do things we pay attention to and the people that we're with and the so it's in our daily experiences and And within those experiences, as I argue in Happiness by Design, I think we've got two main sets of experiences. Ones that I gather up under the term pleasure and the others under purpose. Pleasure are all the usual hedonic adjectives of emotion, feelings of joy and excitement and contentment and the negative adjectives too associated with pain anxiety worry and stress but alongside those I think sit another category of experiences that

are to do with how worthwhile meaningful fulfilling or pointless experiences feel so I argue that happiness is the combination of both pleasure and purpose. And therefore, happy lives are ones that contain the right balance that works for that individual of things they find fun on the one hand and fulfilling on the other. Yeah, I really like that. It's a nice way to think about happiness. In your first book, you talk about how we can design our lives so we don't need to think about happiness. And I wonder for people who are not familiar with your work if you could summarize the sort of rationale behind that the behavioral sciences economic psychology principally um additionally now anthropology

and sociology and neuroscience too are telling us a very basic message that most of what we do comes about rather than being thought about. We make thousands of decisions every day. Most of those are made unconsciously, automatically, fast, and without thinking. So the extent to which we really deliberatively and consciously think about what we do is very limited. And the brain wants to create habit loops. It wants to create associations in the world that make life easier for itself. It's why sometimes when you want to, whether you have to check whether you've turned the oven off, locked the house, because these are automated processes that when you think about whether you've done them, you don't actually know until you check. So that's what the evidence tells us.

Then you've got a lot of self-help books, which are essentially around change your mind about things, you know, be positive, do these things, which, you know, it's kind of hard work. You know, you need to do it, but you don't know how to implement it. So drawing on the lessons that, you know, basically what we do simply comes about rather than being thought about, how can you design your environment? How can you make your life easier to make those habits easier, to make it easier for you to do the things that make you feel good, to actually be positive by the things that you do and not just by the statements you make. Is that, for example, what we're seeing here, you know, in your office and I'm resting my podcast recorder actually on your weights bench. In terms of a habit of working out regularly by

putting a weights bench and two dumbbells in your office, do you think it makes it much more likely that you're going to get a workout in? It does. And also planning it into that you know you just make sure you have time to do it when people often say that they don't have time to do things what they really mean is they don't prioritize it i mean often you know often we don't have time and people that are working really hard and long hours and you know on low pay they don't have time but but many of us can find the time and make the time it's just that we don't make it easy for ourselves the really simple lesson is that if you want to do something, make it easy. It's like what we call in the academic literature, implementation intentions. So you have an intention to change your behavior. We all have all sorts of intentions to do all sorts of things. I'm going to work out more. I'm going to read more books.

But unless you have a plan, a detailed plan about how you're going to implement that intention, it doesn't happen so you know reading more books or working out or whatever it is doesn't just happen there's a series of discrete behaviors that lead you to that final consequence and it's all about making that easy so that it then becomes encoded in habit and then you just do it without thinking about it and my my you know gym time now is done almost automatically without too much effort and thought. So I guess that really, if we extend it out, why are you working out more? Sure, it could be for your physical health.

But overall, I'm guessing working out more improves your levels of happiness. So you've got something going on in your life. You've made it easy to do something that makes you happy. See, I don't think people... So some of the insights are really obvious but overlooked right so listen to more music go outdoor spend time with friends people say to me well that's obvious i know that i'm like okay but so obvious why are you doing it then yeah and you're not doing it because you're not making it easy for yourself and you you don't have this implementation intention you don't have a plan

that makes those things more likely to get done so what can people people who are listening to this you think yeah i get it i've heard that before listening to music going out in nature um you know doing some formal physical activity whatever these things are going to improve my mental health and improve the way that i feel yeah i know that so what's that gap what sits in between knowledge and action yeah Yeah, it is that implementable plan. So this bench is very salient. It's a prime in my office. It makes it more likely that I'm going to do it because it's there.

Surround yourself with people that engage in the behavior that you want to do. We're very influenced by those around us, social norms, peer effects. That's a big one, isn't it? That's a really big one. It's a massive effect. I mean, if you don't want to drink so much alcohol, for example, and all your friends go out and get drunk every night it's really hard not to right it's then so you need to sort of redesign some of your networks and peer groups

which can be hard i appreciate that can be hard but if you do that it's going to just make it much more likely if you want to go to the gym find a gym buddy to go with have a fixed time day place time whatever that you go with. It just becomes then routine. Basically, the brain's lazy and it doesn't want to work very hard. And so you need to make it easy for itself to create good habits and break bad ones. I guess in some ways you're saying, let's try and take our willpower out of the equation because- Design power is the key thing. Willpower is weak. Most of us are weak. We'll give in to temptations that are in front of us. Make the temptation in front of you something that's good for you, that you want to do more of. It's going to make it more likely.

Yeah, I like it. I really like it, actually. It's quite consistent with the way I try and make changes myself with my patients. You talk a lot about these various social narratives these these stories that we tell ourselves about happiness and i wonder if you could just expand a little bit on that let me um start with that by finishing with a story from happiness by design which was actually one of the most like resonant stories in the book everyone that picked up on the quote on the paperback is the book that'll make you quit your job it's the only time i ever talk about jobs once in the book really is is a friend who worked you quit your job. It's the only time I ever talk about jobs, once in the book, really, is a friend who worked at Media Land.

She and I went for dinner and she spent literally, I mean, a whole two hours or however long we were at dinner, complaining about every single aspect of her job, her boss, her colleagues, her commute. Everything was miserable. And then we got up and we were leaving dinner and she said, without any irony, I love working at Media Land. I was like, I looked at her incredulous, but that actually wasn't an ironic thing. There's basically two ways of thinking about happiness, in experiences and in evaluations.

In her experience of her job, it was categorically miserable. In her evaluation, it was a good job. It was somewhere she'd always wanted to work. Her parents were proud. Her friends were jealous. How could she not be happy there when she thought about whether it should make her happy and so much of what we do and how we live our lives are according to the things that we think should make us happy based upon our parents expectations our own expectations evolution historical accident social construction without paying enough attention directly to actually whether it makes us feel good day to day. When I heard you speak last night, you went through a number of narratives that you expanded upon in your book. One of them was to do with wealth, being successful

and being clever. What is that social narrative and where does that come from? So these are the category of reaching narratives. These are the first three chapters in the book and they they're they're narratives around aspiration they're narratives around addiction all right you can never have enough right once you start consuming money and and success and education you can't be too rich successful or too clever you can you just keep going and keep going and keep going past the point actually at which the evidence tells us you should stop. Poverty, any lack of status and ignorance are not good for happiness, but you don't need very much of these things, of wealth, success and education, in order to be happy. And so the sort of mantra for the first part of the book summarizes really just enough rather than more please. So reach a point at which you don't need

any more of wealth, success and education. And it's really difficult, right? Because the whole of our construction is to just keep going and keep going and keep going. People will ask people that are even very successful, what are you doing next? Right? It's kind of a question. What's next? What's next? It's like, well, why not now? why is that why does it have to be a next you know what you're gonna do next we're gonna do next we're gonna do next we're gonna do next keep going keep going keep going so hold on just calm down for a minute the evidence is very clear i think on this that you know there is a point at which you'll you'll keep going too far i remember watching this uh 2011 film called happy they speak I think, a professor of happiness

in the US. And I think he talks about this whole idea that basically once you've got enough money to put a roof over your head and feed your family, actually more money is not correlated with more happiness. And that's really what you're saying, isn't it? Yeah. And also it's really important with the income thing to talk about social comparisons because you are certainly made less happy when other people get richer. Right? Because we compare ourselves to other people nearly always upwards, never downwards, thankfully, earning more than other people, but upwardsly envying that they have more. The likelihood of filing for bankruptcy increases in neighborhoods where lottery winners live really yeah yeah causal causal we we can we can we can see that very

clearly from the evidence so you you have someone around you wins a lot of money you've got to try and keep up with me you've got to buy a faster car whatever just so you feel good in yourself well yeah because that's you know we do we we don't really know if i ask you whether you're you're well paid or not you need some reference in which to base that on don't you um and nearly always the reference is is people like us and maybe people that are just a little bit more who have just a little bit more than us rather than less so so i guess on that if we sort of extend that out, then happiness in many ways is subjective. In every way. It's only subjective. It's really interesting when people talk about it. I've heard

every possible criticism, I think, of happiness. And one thing to say, well, it's just subjective. I'm like, well, yeah, but that's the point, isn't it? You know, many of us as parents, we put our own, the narratives that we've been told, we start putting them on to our kids. That actually, if you do this, you'll get a better job. If you do this, you're going to earn more money. And maybe we as parents can play a role at starting to change that narrative. Yeah, and we can. And also to get them to think about how they might use their time and money differently.

Empathy is nearly always seen as a good thing. If you can put yourself in the shoes of somebody else, then you care about them. But for you to put yourself in someone else's shoes, it helps if they have the same size feet. And that leads us to then care more about people that are essentially more like us and then use our pro-social time and energies

in ways that are quite parochial. Instead, we need compassion, not empathy. Compassion is a more detached account of caring and where we really then think about where we're going to do the most good with our time and money and compassion. And kindness and compassion, as you know only too well, are really highly associated with happiness. And good health. Gratitude and good health. And good health. And good health.

Longer, healthier, happier lives. That's exactly what you get from kindness, compassion, gratitude. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest. And if you enjoyed this episode, I think you will really enjoy my new bite-sized Friday email. It's called the Friday Five. And each week I share things that I do not share on social media. It contains five short doses of positivity, articles or books that I'm reading,

quotes that I'm thinking about, exciting research I've come across, and so much more. I really think you're going to love it. The goal is for it to be a small yet powerful dose of feel good to get you ready for the weekend. You can sign up for it at drchastity.com forward slash Friday five. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I'll be back next week with my long form conversation on Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.