It’s a New Year. This means, for a limited period only, it’s acceptable to tell strangers about our grand plans to win at life: how we’re going to be doing daily 5am runs, refusing alcohol, campaigning for human rights and starting(/finishing) that book we’re working on.

Whilst we’d usually frown on this sort of anticipatory bragging, what makes it acceptable is that we know all of these changes are really unlikely to happen.

Why our resolutions (normally) fail

We fail to make changes for two reasons. First, we find it’s harder to change our habits than we expected. If behaviour change was just a matter of snapping our fingers, no one would smoke, no one would overeat, we wouldn’t need to make any new resolutions to get stuff done because we’d have done it already. We forget that much of what we do is done unconsciously, out of habit, and it takes a long time to re-wire the brain: think how long it took you to drive a car without thinking about it. (If you’d like a better, science-based framework for behaviour change, try EAST).

Second, we delude ourselves about how much we really want to achieve our resolutions. If you really wanted to write that book, or work out more, you’d be doing it already, wouldn’t you? If you tried and failed to change a habit repeatedly, it might be worth accepting you’d rather be doing something else with your time.

So, instead I’m going to suggest a different New Year’s resolution, one you’ve probably not thought of, almost certainly want, and can do in less than 12 minutes a day: train yourself to be happier.

Hopefully this gets over both barriers by being 1. easy and 2. something you actually want.

Why you’ve been getting happiness wrong your whole life

“Train yourself to be happier, what the devil are you on about, man?” I hear you squawk (for some reason, I imagine all my readers as mustachioed ex-brigadiers. Not sure why).

Let me explain.

First, I’m going to tell you how you’ve (probably) been getting happiness all wrong all your life. Then, I’ll explain how you can do better (in 12 minutes a day).

Typically, we think that we need to achieve certain goals in the real world – money, fame, rippling abs – then we’ll be happy. But this is a mistake. In fact, it makes two mistakes.

One, we adapt to nearly all the changes that do or can happen to us. Studies show both those who win the lottery  and those who become disabled revert to their prior level of happiness after about 6 months. This explains why, despite the fact we’ve gotten colossally more dosh in the last 60 years, life satisfaction scores are flat. As flat as those washboard abs you’re dreaming of (I imagine this is what ex-brigadiers dream of).

Researchers call this the hedonic treadmill, because your expectations and desires change in tandem with your circumstances and you don’t get any happier. Here’s a simple way to make the point: for the entirety of existence, apart from the last few years, humanity has survived without the internet, but how long are you going to last if I take away your wifi?

The explanation is we’re evolved to respond to changes: it’s the changes that are interesting to your survival and reproduction, and make your neurons fire, not the static stuff.  A cruelty of evolution is that we adapt but we never expect to adapt: studies show people mispredict the magnitude and duration of life events, always expecting events to cause a big impact, for longer, than they do. Most people think it would ruin their lives to become disabled, but most disabled people still say they’re happy. For example Stephen Hawking, the famous theoretical physicist, says he is happier than before the onset of motor neurone disease, explaining: “my expectations were reduced to zero when I was twenty-one. Everything since then has been a bonus.” (Caveat: there’s mixed evidence whether the adaptation to disability is total or partial)

In essence, science says we can’t help but think a bit like someone who’s just been dumped: you think you’ll feel this way for ever, even though you know, really, you’ll only mope for a week before you power up Tinder and start auto-swiping right again.

And two, happiness – experiences of pleasure and meaning – isn’t just determined by what’s happening in our lives, but how we judge those things. As Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius said: “life itself is but what you deem it.” We also don’t realise that we can re-train our brain to experience more positive emotions. Our brains have a property called ‘neuroplasticity’, which is science-babble for saying we can re-wire our brains based on what we make them do. For example London cabbies, who have to spend two years learning every street in the city before they can get a license, have a much bigger hippocampus (the bit of the brain that deal with memory) than the rest of us because they’ve trained it so hard. Most interestingly for our purposes, brain scans of Buddhist monks, who are long term meditators, show massively more activation in the areas associated with positive emotions than normal folks. If you think of the brain as a muscle, these guys are the bodybuilders of the mind.

Not seen: monk’s robes

Taking these two mistakes about happiness together, what it means is that we tend to try and change stuff in the real world, not realising it won’t make us lastingly happier even if we succeed. And we rarely try to change how we think about the world, even though we can train ourselves to be happier.

I think happiness is caused by how we feel about what we pay attention to. The reason external changes only affect our happiness for a few weeks or months is because we adapt, and stop paying attention to them. And when we do pay attention to things, what matters is whether they make us feel good or bad.

Enough theory: how do you get happier in 12 minutes a day?

In short, all happiness improvements come from changing how you feel about something, or changing what you pay attention to.

Minutes 0-1: write down three things you’re grateful for

Simply, write down three things you appreciate in your own life. These can be anything: the weather, your family, what happened yesterday, your good luck. It really doesn’t matter. Nothing is too big or too small. All that matters is that, when you reflect on it, you realise you’re grateful for whatever it is and would be saddened if it changed or were no longer part of your life.

Studies show gratitude journaling causes a long term change in the amount of positive versus negative emotion people feel. You’re teaching your brain to see the good things which we often just take for granted. This doesn’t change the world, just how you see it. Imagine walking out of your house when it’s grey and rainy compared to when it’s bright and sunny. The road, building, cars are all the same, just you see them differently. There are a number of gratitude journaling apps, but you can just use a pen a paper.

Minutes 2-11: practise mindfulness

If gratitude journaling helps you change how you feel, mindfulness helps you become aware of, and control, your attention. Mindfulness has suddenly become very popular – meetings at Google start with 2 minutes of it, the Harvard Business Review says CEOs should do it – because people have started to realise how effective it is for teaching them about their thoughts and allowing them to find inner calm. Clinical trials show it’s as effective as anti-depressants for most forms of depression, and works just as well to make happy people happier.

If you’re not familiar with mindfulness, it’s basically a form of meditation. It’s a skill, one you need to be taught and will get better at with practice. I’d suggest an app called ‘Headspace’ as the best place to start: it gives you a really neat 10 day free introduction to what it is and how it works.

Minutes 11-12: track your happiness

You can’t change things you don’t notice. Gratitude journaling and mindfulness will help change how you think, but that’s only part of the battle: you need to learn how you spend your time and what makes you happy. The big problem here is overcoming our own memory. A study by Nobel Laurate Daniel Kahneman collected experience reports both during and after a painful medical procedure. He found our memories are inaccurate and susceptible to bias: people remember the ‘peak’ and ‘end’ moments of the procedure, not the whole thing. So if you want to know what really makes you happy, rather than what you think makes you happy, you need to track your experiences as they happen. In other words, because your boring NYE party had fireworks, your brain has tricked you into thinking you had a great time.

Fortunately, modern technology makes this easy to do with an app, because we all carry our smartphones with us everywhere. I’d like to suggest Hippo, the app I’m developing (only available on android currently) which allows you track how you’re feeling and what you’re doing, then shows you how this has changed over time. The app prompts you once a day to enter your data, which takes 20 seconds, but you can enter it yourself when you want as well (Hippo also does other stuff, but I wont plug it here). If you do it three times a day, you’re still improving your happiness in just 12 minutes a day. Alternative happiness trackers are Trackyourhappiness and Mappiness.

Hippo not included with download

In essence, brains are very good at telling us stories, most of which are nonsense, about why we do what we do and whether we enjoy it (as those who have read Thinking, Fast and Slow, will know). Data tracking gives you hard evidence.

Just 12 minutes a day?

I’m confident anyone can make a real difference in just 12 minutes by targeting the things that are most effective for increasing your happiness. It’s a bit like a super-effective 12 minute gym work out for the mind, except this won’t be at all tiring and you won’t have to sweat, or make polite conversation with a personal trainer who’s probably called ‘Jed’, or ‘Dan’ (or something else with only 1 syllable). So only a bit like a gym work out.

Finally, I’d recommend doing this at the same time every day to help you form the habit. I write down the three things I’m grateful for when I have my morning coffee (I have a little notebook I write in), then do my mindfulness. If you do it this way you might suddenly find, like I did, that you’re really grateful for coffee in the morning…

That’s it. 12 minutes a day. You won’t feel different overnight, because you’re re-wiring your brain and that takes time. But if you don’t feel radically happier in 4 weeks, I’ll give you your money back. Wait, am I charging for this? I’m not? I should really start charging for this…

Want more advice about happiness?

Why not write a comment below or send me a message and suggest what I should write next?