A Q&A with the world's
leading expert on happiness (who is also a huge meathead).
BY KIT FOX
The Willpower Workout Four ways
to train willpower like a muscle.
Paul Dolan is one of the
world’s foremost experts on happiness research. The 46-year-old holds a chair
in behavioral science at the London School of Economics. He counts Nobel
Laureate Daniel Kahneman and essayist Nassim Nicholas Taleb as fans of his book
Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think. And he’s also a
huge meathead, nicknamed “The Prof” by the competitive bodybuilders he trains
with. Here he talks about how to be happier, weightlifting, and why he
consulted scientific data before having children.
MF: What is happiness?
PD: I argue that happy lives
are ones that contain a good balance of pleasure and purpose. If you’re having
lots of fun in life, you could probably be happier if you found something
fulfilling and equally, if you’re doing lots of things that make your life
experiences purposeful, you could probably be happier overall by having more
pleasure.
MF: Basically what you’re
saying is if I have all the money in the world and I just go and live on my
private island, I’m not going to be the happiest I can be? Why is purpose so
important?
PD: I think the interesting
question is why you think you would be happy on your island with all that
money. When you’re thinking about being on the island with all that money,
you’re not actually thinking about being on the island with all that money; you’re
thinking about becoming someone who is initially on the island. That’s what we
project. We don’t project what it’s like after 20 years. We think about what
it’s going to be like after 20 minutes. For those first few days, weeks, or
even months, being on the island with all that cash is going to be great. But
you’ll get used to it.
MF: How will I know if
something is going to make me happy then?
PD: If something doesn’t feel
like it’s either pleasurable or purposeful, you should probably ask yourself ‘why
the hell am I doing this?’ For example, sports stars go run at 5 o’clock in the
morning; it’s pissing down rain; it’s a miserable, horrible experience; what
for? For some prospect of running a faster time in some race? Actually, I think
that waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning feels quite purposeful to them, but
if getting up at 5 o’clock in the morning is only ever painful and it doesn’t
feel like it’s worthwhile in any sense to you, then you should probably stop
doing it.
MF: So how do I become happier?
PD: One of the things we know
is happiness slows down the passage of time. We’ve found time passes really
slowly for children, and we think the principle reason is because every day is
a new day with a new set of experiences for them; whereas when you get older
you do the same thing and you've seen it all before, so time passes really
quickly. Having new experiences is a really important thing to do, and that's
why you should try lots of different things. If you do something and it feels
really awful, you should probably stop. And if you find something pleasurable
or purposeful then you should carry on.
MF: How do I know if something
is purposeful, or if I really just don’t like it?
PD: What you should do is pay
attention to the feedback that you get from those experiences. Take two people
who are going out on a 5 a.m. run. One of them is doing it because they have
some story that they're telling themselves; that this is a good thing to do and
the kind of person that does this is happier, or healthier, or better in some
way. But it just only ever feels painful. They should stop. They should stop
listening to the story and pay attention to the experience. In contrast,
someone else is going out on the 5 a.m. run and they just feel like there's
something purposeful and good about the experience. That’s how I feel in the
gym. The pain of the rip in the muscle fibers, I actually love that. There's a
real purpose in the pain. It's lovely knowing that muscle soreness is a
byproduct of something purposeful.
MF: This all makes so much more
sense to me and is really making me rethink the terrible early morning run I
just had.
PD: That's really good though.
One thing that behavioral science teaches us is that we are creatures of habit.
So basically your brain is lazy. It wants to conserve energy and it will create
habit loops to make life easier for you. It wants to keep things in an
automatic system. That means sometimes you will create bad habits. You've
gotten this idea that doing your 5 a.m. run is good for you, it's a habit
you've always done so of course it’s making you happy. Well actually, you need
to pay attention to the feedback of the experience to know whether it does or
not.
MF: Do other things become
automatic, like in the office?
PD: It happens with a job. It
also happens with partner selection. One of the researchers I work with dumped
her boyfriend of eight years after reading my book because she realized that
she was living in a story. He was, on the face of it, the perfect boyfriend.
But her day-to-day experiences with him were quite different. They weren’t
actually making each other happy, even though she could tell a very good story.
Her parents liked him and all her friends liked him. How could she not be happy
with this great guy? Whatever you do, you need to think about how it feels and
not just how you think it should feel.
MF: So it’s the beginning of
the year and I'm a guy who knows that I'm feeling miserable. What's the first
thing I need to do?
PD: I think you've already done
the first thing actually. You've accepted that you could be happier. Most of
the time we think we need to beat ourselves up about not being the kind of
person we want to be because that will motivate us to change. That is complete
nonsense. The only way that you can ever change is to accept yourself. And
then, the simple behavioral science insight is that if you want to do
something, make it easier. And if you don't want to do something, make it
harder. If you actually think about your own life for a second, you probably
make it quite hard for yourself to do things you want and pretty easy to do
things you don't.
MF: Like what?
PD: Maybe you want to eat less
takeaway food, but every day you walk past a takeaway on the way home from
work. Well, you just made it very, very easy for yourself to do something that
you don't want to. If you don’t want to eat it, walk home on a different route.
Maybe you want to exercise more but you think you need to do that in a gym and
the gym is on the other side of town. You just made it really hard to do
something that you want to do. You could work out in the house. Or maybe you
say ‘I really want to be someone who’s fitter and exercises more,’ but you hang
out with lazy people. You need to re-group your social system to pay attention
to the people you want to be more like. One of the reasons I train so hard is
because I train with someone that does competition bodybuilding. What a perfect
training partner for me. If I had a fat slob as a training partner I wouldn't
exercise as hard. So design environments that make it easier to do the things
you want.
MF: If I have a goal in mind,
like writing a book or running a marathon, how will I know if it’s something
that will actually make me happier, or if I just like the idea of wanting to do
it?
PD: What you need to do is, if
you think that's what you should do, try and think of a way in which it would
make it easier for you to get started. Start it. See how it feels and how you
like it, and stop doing it if you don't. At least that way you will know, rather
than living in a story about what you think should make you happy.
MF: Have you used any of this
advice to make your life happier?
PD: I definitely wouldn't have
been a father had I not thought about purpose. You can’t do a more significant
thing on the basis of happiness than that. When I was thinking about whether to
become a father or not, as a good happiness maximizer, I thought I should look
at what the data tell me. And the data tell me that at best, children are
neutral and probably most likely to make you more miserable than they would
make you happy, so there would be no good reason to have children. But I think
while having children might not make you happier, it makes you differently
happy. So teaching my kids the times table is just a different sort of
happiness for me now. It's more purposeful and a little less pleasurable. It
seems to me to make a lot more sense to be a pleasure machine when you are
younger and a purpose engine as you get older.
MF: Do you hold the secret to
happiness then? What’s the greatest thing you’ve done to be happy?
PD: One thing I did leave out
in the book is my wife. She’s 34 but she suggested I leave her age out because
it might make me look like I was trying to show off a little bit about having a
younger wife, but I do think that's a key to happiness. Find yourself a younger
wife.
