[You haven’t found the droids you were looking for]

Reading time: 3-5 minutes, 1200 words, 5 pics, only one of a topless Arnold Schwarzenegger

Realistically, I’d be surprised if there are a dozen people in the world who spend more time reading and thinking about happiness than I do. Unsurprisingly, I come across a lot of happiness advice and I consider most of it frustratingly bad. After a while I realised everything I read has at least one of four problems. I thought I’d share those so that you can spot what’s good happiness advice and what to ignore. If you find any pieces that has none of the four problems, please send it to me.

1. It doesn’t say what happiness is and isn’t

Gretchin Rubin’s book The Happiness Project has sold 1.5 million copies and was a New York times No.1 bestseller. Her definition of happiness, from page 7, is: “I know it when I see it.” Which is great, except that it isn’t. There are multiple, inconsistent ways of understanding happiness. How can you successfully pursue something if you don’t know what it is? Does happiness refer to a judgement you make about your life, a feeling, a philosophical account of the good life or something else?

It’s not like this doesn’t matter and you somehow magically get the same advice however you define or measure happiness. In 2008 Nobel Laureates Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton surveyed 450,000 Americans and helpfully named their paper “High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being.” Whether money makes you happy depends on which happiness measure you use and think is important. Irritatingly, these different measures are usually just called happiness, which is why you get ludicrous scenarios where one BBC article claims Switzerland is the world’s happiest country whilst another says Denmark is the happiest.

Maybe it’s the square flags and lack of people?

If you want to make all this “what is happiness?” stuff less mysterious, you might like this short Huffington Post article I wrote last year, or this much longer entry on happiness from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

2. It’s partial advice given without a good explanation

Let’s say you read this Guardian article which tells you the 5 easy steps to happiness are: 1. Don’t pursue happiness (a weird first suggestion, I’d have thought…) 2. Take responsibility 3. Don’t compare 4. Follow the flow and 5. Trust strangers.

You might wonder “Is that it? Are those really the only 5 ways to be happier?” This is equivalent to physical health advice which just says “eat more carrots” – I’m sure carrots are great, but I don’t believe carrots are the whole story. What about hummus? Is hummus important? Can I dip my carrots in hummus? I want to know what my full range of options are. Otherwise, how will I know which to ignore?

My god, stock photos are weird

Or you find things like 103 ways to live a happy life. I can’t believe this chap has missed anything in a list which contains “floss” and “don’t gossip” as top tips. I don’t really want endless suggestions, I want a simple, comprehensive account of how happiness works so I know what to do.

Here’s my account. There are three ways to be happier. You can change your external circumstances (wealth, where you live, your looks, job, CV, tinder profile, etc.), how you spend your time or how you think. Because humans are really good at adapting to things, it turns out changing your external circumstances will almost certainly make no difference (unless you live under a flight path, in which case, move) whereas changing how you spend your time and how you think might actually work. Weirdly, those are not the things people actually try to do. Once I realised this, all further happiness advice neatly falls into place and I can easily evaluate whether it’s useful or bullshit.

If you want a longer justification for my account, you can read an interview I did with Oxford University about my research. It also contains references for the claims I made in the previous paragraph.

3. It doesn’t tell you how to actually do any of the things it suggests

Everyone knows there are some things they should do to be happy. They should be grateful, take responsibility, not compare, etc. Of course I want to be bloody grateful, but how do I do it? How can I do it at the same time as taking responsibility? And which do I do first?

It’s like telling people who want to lose weight “just eat less” as if they didn’t know that already. If it was easy to do the things we wanted to, no one would smoke and everyone would look like Arnold Schwarzenegger used to.

And this is how he looks now. Confused, apparently.

There are two parts to this. The first is providing concrete guidance on what to do. For example, much better than “be grateful” is “write down three things you’re grateful for each day” and much better than “do more of what you like and less of what you don’t like” is “download a happiness tracker like Hippo (android only – my one) or Trackyourhappiness (iOS only – not mine), record your experiences for 2 weeks and then review them.” I’ve compiled the best free resources for being happier in another blog post which I strongly recommend.

The other part is telling people how to successfully change their behaviour. The most promising idea I’ve come across is using smart ‘nudges’ to ‘hack’ yourself or your environment and make it more likely you’ll do the things you want. A helpful framework here is EAST (click the link for the full, really useful report): if you want to do something, make it Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. Even better than suggesting “write down three things you’re grateful for is “write down three things you’re grateful for each day in a brightly coloured notebook/piece of paper (attractive) you keep next to your computer (easy). Write the three things in the morning at the same time you have your first cup of coffee (timely). And tell friends you’re doing this so you feel that you have to (social)”.

I don’t have a full list of suggestions for how to make happiness easy, but I’ll plan to write another blog on it eventually. If you want to learn more about how your brain works in the meantime, you might like Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow

4.  There’s no evidence to support any of the claims

This is probably the one I find most irritating. I’m only going to live once (probably) and life is too short to follow bad advice. I’m not terribly interested in hearing self-appointed ‘well-being gurus’ or ‘life coaches’ say “this works for me.” I want peer-reviewed evidence, or at least a plausible reason why an untested suggestion might work. I find it deeply arrogant when I see people confidently telling other people how to live without having anything to support their suggestions.

Science man. What jokers.

How well does this article do?

Hopefully, this article has made zero of the four usual mistakes, or at least provides resources to address all of them. If you’d like more advice about happiness that doesn’t suck, sign up for my Newsday Tuesday Newsletter.