You cannot add
to the peace and good will of the world if you fail to create an atmosphere of
harmony and love right where you live and work. -- Thomas Dreier
Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
A Hairstylist Provides Free Cuts to the Homeless
By ALYSON KRUEGERDEC. 10, 2014
David Terry is 50 years old,
H.I.V. positive and homeless. He spends his nights at Bailey House, a nonprofit
in Harlem that provides housing for people living with H.I.V., and his days
wandering the streets. “I get very depressed because it’s like I’m on the
treadmill going 80 miles an hour with the brakes on,” he said.
But for one hour the other
Sunday, life slowed down to a happy pace. Sitting on a park bench on the corner
of East Houston and Chrystie Streets, Mr. Terry was getting a haircut from Mark
Bustos, a professional stylist with a celebrity clientele.
“Can you believe this is
happening?” Mr. Terry said, a white bib wrapped around his neck, cigarette in
hand and Stevie Wonder’s “Conversation Peace” playing in the background. An
hour later, he looked in the mirror, and saw that his messy mop was now a
stylish flattop. “Yeah, baby, I’ve still got it,” he said, striking a victory
pose. “I’m the king of the world.”
Every Sunday, Mark Bustos, 30,
a hairstylist at Three Squares Studios, an elite salon in Chelsea that charges
$150 to clients like Norah Jones, Marc Jacobs and Phillip Lim, hits the
sidewalk and provides free cuts to the homeless.
Mr. Bustos often wanders around
Union Square, the Lower East Side and Midtown, where he has gotten to know some
of the homeless by name. “See that guy over there,” he said, walking down the
Bowery. “That’s Cowboy Ritchie,” whose wife, Mr. Bustos added, “wants him to
shave his beard off because it looks too good and the other women flirt with
him.”
Other times, Mr. Bustos meets
his unsuspecting new clients through friends and paying clients, who tell him
about people in their neighborhoods. He does up to 10 haircuts a day.
He started offering haircuts to
the homeless two years ago. The idea, he says, is to simply give back. “Whether
I’m giving one at work or on the street, I think we can all relate to the
haircut and how it makes us feel,” Mr. Bustos said. “We all know what it feels
like to get a good haircut.”
In some way, Mr. Bustos, who
lives in Jersey City, has always been generous about hairstyling, which he
taught himself at a young age. When he was 14, Mr. Bustos set up a chair in his
parents’ garage in Nutley, N.J., and cut friends’ hair for free, so they could
pocket the barbershop money they got from their parents.
A 2012 trip to the Philippines
to visit family made him realize he could do more. He was struck by the number
of impoverished children and decided to rent a barbershop as his way of
helping. “It made me feel so good,” Mr. Bustos said. “It was right to bring it
home to New York.” Since then, he has spent most Sundays in New York, styling
the hair of the homeless.
Mary E. Brosnahan, the
president and chief executive of Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit
advocacy group, said that a haircut is often more than a haircut. It can remind
the homeless of who they once were, and offer a rosier version of their
current, shattered selves. “It helps shift the gear out of survival mode,” Ms.
Brosnahan said, letting them envision a better life.
Joi Gordon, the chief executive
officer of Dress for Success, which provides professional clothes to homeless
job seekers, has similar stories of transformation. “For most women, this is
the first time that they’ve ever put on a suit in their lives,” she said. “That
blazer really serves as a life jacket.”
Mr. Bustos tells a similar
story of a homeless man who once looked in the mirror after a haircut, saw his
fresh look and said: “Do you know anyone who is hiring. I’m ready to go get a
job.” Mr. Bustos hasn’t seen him on the street since, something he considers a
good sign.
His haircuts are always
conducted on the street. If a park bench is not available, Mr. Bustos will find
a milk crate or turn over a shopping cart. Rain or freezing temperatures do not
deter him. (Since many homeless do not have regular access to washrooms, Mr.
Bustos wears gloves, carefully disposes of hair clippings and disinfects his
tools between every cut, just as he does with his equipment at work.)
“I do it on the streets, on the
sidewalks, in the parks,” he said, “so people who walk by can find some
inspiration in what I do.”
That is the same reason that
Devin Masga, a street photographer, accompanies him and posts before-and-after
photos to Mr. Bustos’s Instagram feed with the hashtag #BeAwesomeToSomebody.
Mr. Bustos has more than 215,000 Instagram followers, some of whom donate
supplies and gift cards, or ask how they can get help. “People ask me if I can
come out with you or join your team,” he said. “My answer is just go and do
it.”
“Just because they live on the
street looking a little scruffy with their hair long doesn’t mean they can’t
clean up and look great,” he added.
‘You’ve Gotta Be Kidding’ Waitress Told Strangers Who Wanted to Replace Her Beat Up Car
by Good News Network
Her car was barely drivable
after multiple run-ins with deer on roadways. She covered two windows with
plastic and cardboard and held together the front end with a strap.
Cindi Grady was depressed
because this might be the second Christmas without a tree and few presents for
her disabled son. As a server at the Cracker Barrel restaurant in Branson,
Missouri, she didn’t know how she would pay for it all.
Then, while at work, she got a
$20 tip — twice the normal size — and thought things were looking up. The
couple at the table had been semi-regulars in the restaurant over the summer.
Suddenly Cindy’s boss told her
to put down the tray and follow her. She was wracking her brain to figure out
what she had done to warrant a conference with management, but instead of the
office, she was led outside to the parking lot where the couple was standing
next to a silver car with a red bow on it.
“They told me they had seen me
come to work all summer in my shabby car and wanted to bless me with a 2008
Ford Fusion,” wrote Cindi on Facebook.
Gary and Roxann Tackett from
Quitman, Arkansas handed over the keys and paperwork to the car they had just
purchased especially for Cindy. “It’s not new, but it’s new for you,” the Gary
said as he held open the door for her.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me,”
she said through tears. “No way.”
“I’m still shell shocked,” she
wrote later. “Now I can concentrate on catching up with my bills so my son can
enjoy the upcoming holiday as well…This year is so much different thanks to the
Tacketts.”
She even put deer whistles on
her new car to alert the animals to stay away.
How to Be Happier
by Aisha Sultan
There are times when a foggy
malaise can settle into a spot. Even when cracks of sunlight break through this
vapor, a heaviness lingers.
Despite being a reporter -- a
job where we're conditioned to notice and document what's wrong, unfair, tragic
and broken -- I usually enjoy being a happy and positive person. But there has
been so much striking and detailed pain on display in our world recently.
This summer, the gruesome
images of the war in Gaza were soon joined by heartbreaking ones out of
Ferguson. Couple this with the fact that my generation has entered that period
of life when there's a steady stream of devastating personal news among our
peers: Parents (or even children) die, alarming diagnoses are more common, and
friends divorce.
We have been through cycles of
tragedy, death and destruction before. But this prolonged dark period provoked
a deeper anxiety in me. From the personal to the political, the onslaught of
bad news has felt relentless.
It was in the midst of this run
of gloominess that I decided to embark on a happiness project. Not happiness as
in a constant state of chipper: Some of the most outwardly cheerful people I've
known have been deeply unhappy inside. But happiness in the way that
psychologists have defined it: the pleasure of feeling good; engagement in
living a good life with family, friends, work and hobbies; and finding meaning
in being able to use our strengths toward a greater purpose.
Is it possible to increase
those pieces of happiness, thereby becoming happier?
There's an entire body of
research that looks at ways to make people happier in life and work. I sifted
through some of this positive psychology analysis and watched the most popular
TED talk on the subject.
Positive psychology experts
Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan have written extensively about the habits that
can train our brains to think more positively, which they argue leads to our
brains making us feel happier. Scientists say there's a biochemical process at
work: Positive emotions like love and joy release dopamine and serotonin into
our brains. This biochemical wash helps our brain process new information,
think more quickly and creatively, and connect better with others.
Achor and Gielan suggest that
incorporating these five daily habits for as little as 21 days can make us
happier:
1. Write down three unique and
new things you are grateful for every day. This teaches the brain to scan for
new, good things.
2. Spend a few minutes writing
down in detail the most meaningful moment from your day. This allows you to
relive what made it meaningful for you.
3. Praise or thank a different
person in your social network every day, either by email or phone, for
something specific. This will remind your brain of the support around you.
4. Exercise for 15 minutes a
day. The effects can be as powerful as taking an antidepressant.
5. Take two minutes to meditate
and breathe. Pay attention to your inhale and exhale. It will focus your
attention and lower stress.
I tried to do all five habits
and recorded my efforts daily for 21 days last month. I just kept a log in a
note in my iPhone where I documented results at night. The only ones I did
religiously for three weeks were listing three new gratitudes each day,
describing the most meaningful moment and thanking a person for a specific act
each day. The 15 minutes of exercise was hit or miss. I completely failed on
the meditating. That was very challenging.
About a third of my meaningful
moments were with my children. The rest were through interactions at work, with
friends or with people who were essentially strangers. It was revealing to keep
track of which moments actually moved me during the day.
And, the researchers were
absolutely correct. While I was committed to this task, I became more attuned
to the good things, no matter how small. I spent more minutes in my day
contemplating the positive. I felt more grateful and engaged with people and connected
to the meaning in my life.
A few times, I struggled to
come up with a meaningful moment or a different person to thank. On the days I
was very tired, it felt like a chore. But overall, I think it lifted my spirit
in a way that had been missing for a while.
When things looked especially
bleak, this happiness project was an antidote.
The only defense we have
against the at-times overwhelming and random pain in this life is belligerent
happiness.
Why happiness levels shoot up after 50
A few months ago, bioethicist
Ezekiel Emanuel had an essay in The Atlantic saying that, all things
considered, he would prefer to die around age 75. He argued that he would
rather clock out with all his powers intact than endure a sad, feeble decline.
The problem is that if Dr
Emanuel dies at 75, he will likely be missing his happiest years. When
researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate
themselves highly. Then there is a decline as people get sadder in middle age,
bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up, so that old
people are happier than young people. The people who rate themselves most
highly are those aged 82 to 85.
Psychologists who study this
now famous U-Curve tend to point out that old people are happier because of
changes in the brain. For example, when you show people a crowd of faces, young
people unconsciously tend to look at the threatening faces, but older people’s
attention gravitates towards the happy ones.
Older people are more relaxed,
on average. They are spared some of the burden of thinking about the future. As
a result, they get more pleasure out of present, ordinary activities.
My problem with a lot of the
research on happiness in old age is that it is so deterministic. It treats the
ageing of the emotional life the way you might treat the ageing of the body: As
this biological, chemical and evolutionary process that happens to people.
I would rather think that elder
happiness is an accomplishment, not a condition, that people get better at
living through effort, by mastering specific skills.
I would like to think that
people get steadily better at handling life’s challenges. In middle age, they
are confronted by stressful challenges they cannot control, such as having
teenage children. But, in old age, they have more control over the challenges
they will tackle and they get even better at addressing them.
Aristotle teaches us that being
a good person is not mainly about learning moral rules and following them. It
is about performing social roles well — being a good parent, teacher, lawyer or
friend.
IMPROVING WITH AGE
It is easy to think of some of
the skills that some people get better at over time. First, there is
bifocalism, the ability to see the same situation from multiple perspectives.
Dr Anthony Kronman of Yale Law
School once wrote: “Anyone who has worn bifocal lenses knows that it takes time
to learn to shift smoothly between perspectives and to combine them in a single
field of vision. The same is true of deliberation. It is difficult to be
compassionate, and often just as difficult to be detached, but what is most
difficult of all is to be both at once.”
Only with experience can a
person learn to see a fraught situation both close up, with emotional
intensity, and far away, with detached perspective.
Then there is lightness, the
ability to be at ease with the downsides of life. In their book, Lighter As We
Go, Dr Jimmie Holland and Dr Mindy Greenstein argue that while older people
lose memory, they also learn that most setbacks are not the end of the world.
Anxiety is the biggest waste in life. If you know that you will recover, you
can save time and get on with it sooner.
“The ability to grow lighter as
we go is a form of wisdom that entails learning how not to sweat the small
stuff , learning how not to be too invested in particular outcomes,” write Drs
Holland and Greenstein.
Then there is the ability to balance
tensions. In Practical Wisdom, Dr Barry Schwartz and Dr Kenneth Sharpe argue
that performing many social roles means balancing competing demands.
A doctor has to be honest, but
also kind. A teacher has to instruct, but also inspire. You cannot find the
right balance in each context by memorising a rule book. This form of wisdom
can only be earned by acquiring a repertoire of similar experiences.
Finally, experienced heads have
intuitive awareness of the landscape of reality, a feel for what other people
are thinking and feeling, an instinct for how events will flow.
In The Wisdom Paradox, Dr
Elkhonon Goldberg details the many ways the brain deteriorates with age: Brain
cells die, mental operations slow. But a lifetime of intellectual effort can
lead to empathy and pattern awareness.
“What I have lost with age in
my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for
instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight,” Dr Goldberg writes.
It is comforting to know that,
for many, life gets happier with age.
But it is more useful to know
how individuals get better at doing the things they do.
The point of culture is to
spread that wisdom from old to young; to put that thousand-year heart in a
still young body.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
David Brooks, a New York Times
columnist, is an author of several books.
That's happiness.
Will and I could hardly wait for the morning to come to get at something
that interested us. That's happiness. -- Orville
Wright, co-inventor of the airplane
The key to happiness
Being successful is great but
it isn’t the key to happiness. It’s the other way around. The happiness is the
key to success. So logically, if you love what you do, you’ll be successful.
No one ever thinks they’re awful
“No one ever thinks they’re
awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival
mechanism.” Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
This is what happens to long term foster kids
“Look at a stonecutter
hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack
showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I
know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.” Jacob
A. Riis
To learn who rules over you
“To learn who rules over you,
simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”
Voltaire
Don't worry, be happy
Happiness is in the moment you
are in
Colleen Crawford Battlefords News-Optimist
“Do not dwell in the past, do
not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” — Buddha
Life is sending me little
messages everywhere I look.
An inspirational email spoke of
the topic of happiness. If you cannot be happy in the moment you are in, you
will not find it when you stumble across a financial windfall or when you
retire or when you go on a vacation. Happiness is now, within you, every
moment. It is not what happens to you, it is how you choose to react to life's
little surprises.
Another message was short and
sweet. It said, "Stop worrying. Yes, 'you'!" It was as if someone
read my mind at that very moment. I was letting everything pile up. I was
worrying. I know worrying is a waste of energy, but I was doing it anyway. It
was time to do what is within my power to do, and to stop worrying, now!
I found myself wallowing in the
negativity of the moment one day. It was a half hour after lunch.
In my role as a daycare
provider, clean up and after lunch digestion takes extensive time and energy.
More so, when you have a two-year-old in the mid-phases of toilet training. I read
the signs and knew he “had to go.” He didn't. After some time we gave up on
that moment. Then minutes later, he “went.” And it wasn't where he was supposed
to go. Aaaack!
I plunked myself down in the
middle of the living room floor and started picking up a few toys before I put
the kids down for their naps. I was quite likely pouting. I was not exuding an
aura of happiness.
Then my little one-year-old sat
down beside me and twisted her body so she was face to face with me and said,
"Hi!" This little girl lights up my world. Her heartfelt, eye-to-eye
"Hi!" changed the way I saw the world at that moment. Then? She
leaned in and gave me one of her famous bear hugs. Then another. And another.
There is nothing like
surrounding yourself with one- and two-year-olds to remind you that happiness
is in the moment you are in. And of the magic of a hug.
Be present in each and every
moment today. See what wonder you can find in what you already have. Live your
day with childlike wonder and rediscover why a child’s smile lights up a room.
The Geography Of Happiness: Where Americans Are Happiest And Why
Ben Schiller is a New
York-based staff writer for Co.Exist, and also contributes to the FT and Yale
e360. He used to edit a European management magazine, and worked as a reporter
in San Francisco, Prague and Brussels
Sorry, city dwellers. Suburban
counties tend to be happiest (as long as you don't have to get in your car to
go to work).
The United States was founded
so people could pursue happiness, but some places seem to do a better job of it
than others. There's a big difference between the happiest and least happy
places in the country, according to new research.
Led by Stephan Goetz, a
professor at Penn State, the study looks at the number of "poor mental
health days" reported per county—that is, the number of days people said
they were in a negative mood. The "least happy" communities reported
up to 8.3 days a month, compared to less than half-a-day for the happiest. (See
the results plotted on the map here, with the highest number of mental health days
in red and the lowest in green).
What's behind the variation?
Goetz says suburban counties tend to be happier than urban or rural ones, and
that non-white counties tend to be happier than whiter ones. People were also
happier when they commuted less, moved homes less often, and lived in places
deemed to have more closely-knit communities (higher levels of "social
capital").
For example, a 1% increase in
the share of non-whites in a county reduced the average number of poor mental
health days by 0.08%—which is actually a larger number than it might seem, when
you consider the whole country. "After controlling for other factors
including income, educational attainment, place of residence, commuting time,
social capital, there is still a residual, unexplained factor that leaves
whites a little bit less happy than non-whites," Goetz says via email.
"One possible factor that may explain this difference could be religious
adherence, to the extent that it varies between whites and non-whites."
Goetz says suburbanites can
have the best of both worlds. They can be close to their jobs but also near
enough to activities downtown. They can avoid being around a lot of other
people, but then they're not too far away either. However, the effect is dulled
by commute times: The research found the longer people spend traveling, the
less happy they feel.
The results are based on a
large-scale phone survey (using the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System)
and come from a six-year average of data from 2002 to 2008. The researchers
deliberately chose a period before the recent recession, fearing that might
skew the results. The study is the first to look at the factors behind mental
health at a county level, the researchers say.
Interestingly, Goetz says
poverty is a bigger factor in making people unhappy than inequality, despite
the prominence of the latter issue recently. "Recently, inequality has
received considerable attention from the public. As a result, the issue of
poverty has received less attention," he says. "Our work suggests
that policies directed at reducing poverty will go further in terms of reducing
poor mental health than will policies directed at reducing income
inequality."
Goetz argues that the level of
down-days is an important economic indicator as unhappy counties tend to be
less productive. The real benefit of the study is that we now know where people
are unhappy and what might be driving that.
Good luck
We seldom realize it when it
happens, but every now and then not getting what we want the most is an incredible
stroke of good luck.
Don't worry...be happy
Five daily practices to bring
happiness
By Aisha Sultan
There are times when a foggy
malaise can settle into a spot. Even when cracks of sunlight break through this
vapor, a heaviness lingers.
Despite being a reporter – a
job where we’re conditioned to notice and document what’s wrong, unfair, tragic
and broken – I usually enjoy being a happy and positive person. But there has
been so much striking and detailed pain on display in our world recently.
This summer, the gruesome
images of the war in Gaza were soon joined by heartbreaking ones out of
Ferguson. Couple this with the fact that my generation has entered that period
of life when there’s a steady stream of devastating personal news among our
peers: Parents (or even children) die, alarming diagnoses are more common, and
friends divorce.
We have been through cycles of
tragedy, death and destruction before. But this prolonged dark period provoked
a deeper anxiety in me. From the personal to the political, the onslaught of
bad news has felt relentless.
During this run of gloominess I
decided to embark on a happiness project. Not happiness as in a constant state
of chipper: Some of the most outwardly cheerful people I’ve known have been
deeply unhappy inside. But happiness in the way that psychologists have defined
it: the pleasure of feeling good; engagement in living a good life with family,
friends, work and hobbies; and finding meaning in being able to use our
strengths toward a greater purpose.
Is it possible to increase
those pieces of happiness, thereby becoming happier?
There’s an entire body of
research that looks at ways to make people happier in life and work. I sifted
through some of this positive psychology analysis and watched the most popular
TED talk on the subject.
Positive psychology experts
Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan have written extensively about the habits that
can train our brains to think more positively, which they argue leads to our
brains making us feel happier. Scientists say there’s a biochemical process at
work: Positive emotions like love and joy release dopamine and serotonin into
our brains. This biochemical wash helps our brain process new information, think
more quickly and creatively, and connect better with others.
Achor and Gielan suggest that
incorporating these five daily habits for as few as 21 days can make us
happier:
1. Write down three unique and
new things you are grateful for every day. This teaches the brain to scan for
new, good things.
2. Spend a few minutes writing
down in detail the most meaningful moment from your day. This allows you to
relive what made it meaningful for you.
3. Praise or thank a different
person in your social network every day, either by email or phone, for
something specific. This will remind your brain of the support around you.
4. Exercise for 15 minutes a
day. The effects can be as powerful as taking an antidepressant.
5. Take two minutes to meditate
and breathe. Pay attention to your inhale and exhale. It will focus your
attention and lower stress.
I tried to do all five habits
and recorded my efforts daily for 21 days last month. The only ones I did religiously
for three weeks were listing three new gratitudes each day, describing the most
meaningful moment and thanking a person for a specific act each day. The 15
minutes of exercise was hit or miss. I completely failed on the meditating.
That was very challenging.
About a third of my meaningful
moments were with my children. The rest were interactions at work, with friends
or with people who were essentially strangers. It was revealing to keep track
of which moments moved me during the day.
And the researchers were
absolutely correct. While I was committed to this task, I became more attuned
to the good things, no matter how small. I spent more minutes in my day
contemplating the positive. I felt more grateful and engaged with people and
connected to the meaning in my life.
A few times, I struggled to
come up with a meaningful moment or a different person to thank. On the days I
was very tired, it felt like a chore. But overall, it lifted my spirit. When
things looked especially bleak, this happiness project was an antidote.
The only defense we have
against the sometimes overwhelming and random pain in this life is belligerent
happiness.
Aisha Sultan is a St.
Louis-based journalist who studies parenting in the digital age. On Twitter:
@AishaS.
The seeker
“The seeker after truth should
be humbler than the dust. The world crushes the dust under its feet, but the
seeker after truth should so humble himself that even the dust could crush him.
Only then, and not till then, will he have a glimpse of truth.” Mahatma Gandhi
Happiness, Bodybuilding, and a Ph.D.
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.
Don't worry, be happy
Your body could use a belly laugh
Markham Heid @markhamh
It may not be the best
medicine. But laughter’s great for you, and it may even compare to a proper
diet and exercise when it comes to keeping you healthy and disease free.
That’s according to Dr. Lee
Berk, an associate professor at Loma Linda University in California who has
spent nearly three decades studying the ways the aftershocks of a good laugh
ripple through your brain and body.
Berk says your mind, hormone
system and immune system are constantly communicating with one another in ways
that impact everything from your mood to your ability to fend off sickness and
disease. Take grief: “Grief induces stress hormones, which suppress your immune
function, which can lead to sickness,” he says. Hardly a week goes by without
new research tying stress to another major ailment.
Why mention stress? “Because
laughter appears to cause all the reciprocal, or opposite, effects of stress,”
Berk explains. He says laughter shuts down the release of stress hormones like
cortisol. It also triggers the production of feel-good neurochemicals like
dopamine, which have all kinds of calming, anti-anxiety benefits. Think of
laughter as the yin to stress’s yang.
Thanks largely to these
stress-quashing powers, laughter has been linked to health benefits ranging
from lower levels of inflammation to improved blood flow, Berk says. Some
research from Western Kentucky University has also tied a good chuckle to
greater numbers and activity of “killer cells,” which your immune system
deploys to attack disease. “Many of these same things also happen when you
sleep right, eat right, and exercise,” Berk says, which is why he lumps
laughter in with more traditional healthy lifestyle activities.
Berk has even shown that
laughter causes a change in the way your brain’s many neurons communicate with
one another. Specifically, laughter seems to induce “gamma” frequencies—the
type of brain waves observed among experienced meditators. These gamma waves
improve the “synchronization” of your neuronal activity, which bolsters recall
and memory, Berk says.
How does laughter accomplish
all this? That’s where things get murky, says Dr. Robert Provine, a
neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of
Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond.
Provine calls himself a
“reserved optimist” when it comes to laughter’s health-bolstering properties.
“One of the challenges of studying laughter is that there are so many things
that trigger it,” Provine explains. For example, you’re 30 times more likely to
laugh around other people than when you are by yourself, he says. Social
relationships and companionship have been tied to numerous health benefits. And
so the social component of laughter may play a big part in its healthful
attributes, Provine adds.
Here’s why that matters: If
you’re going to tell people they should laugh to improve their health, there
may be a big difference between guffawing on your own without provocation,
watching a funny YouTube clip or meeting up with friends who make you laugh,
Provine says.
“That doesn’t mean the benefits
aren’t real,” he adds. “But it may not be accurate to credit laughter alone
with all these superpowers.”
But even for researchers like
Provine who aren’t ready—at least not yet—to coronate laughter as a panacea, he
doesn’t dispute the benefits associated with a hearty har har. He only
questions science’s current understanding of the underlying mechanisms.
When we laugh, we’re in a happy
place,” he says. “That’s always a good thing.”
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