The fast track to happiness

BY MARK BROATCH

Most self-help methods don't work, quick fixes even less so. But a psychology expert has trawled decades of academic research to find simple, quick techniques that science proves can make you happier, a more loving partner and a better parent. He shares his wisdom with Mark Broatch.

SELF-HELP BOOKS rarely do what they claim, says psychology professor Richard Wiseman, and may actually do you harm.

Much of the advice in them – dressed-up folk wisdom, cherry-picked anecdotes and baseless promises – might make you feel good, but won't make a positive long-term difference, he says, which is why you're back the next week to buy another book. Wiseman, an internationally renowned researcher on subjects such as luck, deception and the paranormal based at the University of Hertfordshire, goes further. "Anything that offers a miracle cure, an overnight quick cure, is almost certainly not worth reading."

So what's a respected academic and frequent critic of junk science doing writing a book on self-improvement techniques that can be carried out in less than 60 seconds?

The difference, Wiseman says, is that he trawled serious academic journals for findings that actually worked – useful psychological insights backed up often by large-scale, peer-reviewed research. Hidden among the footnotes and academese he found hundreds of simple and (urged on by a friend who said a minute would be the ideal implementation time) quick techniques that can greatly improve your happiness, relationships, work life, decision-making, stress levels and parenting skills.

The result, 59 Seconds, is a self-help book for sceptics of self-help books, endorsed by the likes of arch-debunker Derren Brown and New Scientist magazine. Wiseman found that many scientifically tested quick and simple techniques work well, and that several longstanding others – brainstorming, visualisation, analysing handwriting – don't really work at all.

The Sunday Star-Times quizzed Wiseman on five subjects many of us never tire of talking about – happiness, relationships, diet, parenting and finding your dream job – to find out what science has to say.

 

DON'T WORRY, BE HAPPY

For a start, forget about positive affirmations. "People could be doing themselves harm, if they try and fail, because it robs them of any sense of hope and they become quite fatalistic. It could be that a large section of the population is suffering because of self-help." Affirmations are also flawed because those who practise them frequently are too. "One of the big problems with that `Every day I'm getting better and better' is that often the people telling it to themselves are fairly low self-esteem and they don't trust their own opinion."

A big myth about happiness and something that particularly upsets him in self-help books, says Wiseman, is the notion of suppressing negative thoughts. "Try to push them out of your mind and they come back again," he says. "What you're much better off doing is distracting yourself away from those thoughts with other activities." Paradoxically, very simple things can make you happier. "Forcing your face into a smile, acting like a happy person, you get that facial feedback going and suddenly you feel much better. Or even just jotting down three or five things you have a sense of gratitude for, because often we habituate those things very, very quickly. All those sorts of things have a quite big impact on happiness."

Isn't this just faking it, though? Not if you agree with the now-widespread idea that our personalities are not fixed, but an interaction of our thoughts and actions, he says. "There is a thread running through the book, which is: you are how you behave. So rather than you being a particular person that causes your behaviour, if you behave in a certain way, that causes you to think and feel like the person you are behaving like. So there is some truth in the fake it [till you make it] notion, but it may not be faking it. It may be that who we are is actually determined by our behaviour. Many psychologists would argue that. So, yes, you can modify how you see yourself, how you think or feel, by actually modifying your behaviour first."

Wiseman says that helping others will usually make you happier, as will generally trying not to be too materialistic, but how can you counter the fact, noted in the book, that 50% of happiness may be genetically predisposed?

"The truth of the matter is you can't, so you'll have a natural level of cheerfulness, and we all know people terribly cheerful whatever happens to them and others are not even if they win the lottery. But what you can do is maximise the other 50% that is open to be changed. Something as simple as knowing that if you buy goods to cheer you up, they get out of date fairly quickly and don't age fairly well, whereas an experience, which forces you to be with other people or at least talk to other people about that experience afterwards, that ages very well. We tend to remember the positive experiences, plus it pushes you into social contact, which is the number one correlate of happiness."

It may in fact save your life: another study out last week suggested that loneliness can be as bad for you as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.

LOVE ME DO

Improving your chances for a date can be as simple as a light touch on the other person's upper arm (typically, a finding arising out of a French experiment) "which is far more likely to yield a phone number or a yes, I'll go out for a drink with you". Expect an epidemic of people in bars around the country putting fingers to tricep. If you're doing speed-dating, keep in mind that people are making up their minds in three minutes. Find out what you disagree on: "A shared dislike is more powerful than a shared like."

"Also trying to get the other person to talk about themselves in an unusual but interesting, creative way. Because the problem with speed-dating is people having the same conversations time after time – `If you were a pizza topping which would you be?' All these things have quite a big impact."

Getting the person to talk about themselves is key. "This is one of the basic [Dale] Carnegie rules; it dates back way before 59 Seconds – this notion of being interested in others. [Being able to see] the world from other people's point of view is one of the most basic social skills."

And once you're in a relationship? "The five to one ratio of criticism to positive comment is a very good one. People do tend to get into this rut of criticising their partner – you're around them a lot of the time, sometimes you've got a lot of material at your fingertips. Negative comments weigh very, very heavily on our minds versus positive ones."

THE CAREER LADDER

Visualisation, the idea that you visualise your career end-point, "which loads of books are very big on at the minute, I think is a complete nonsense. Visualising what you need to do, in order to move on to the next rung of the ladder, rather than visualising yourself in the top job, is a much better way of moving forward. I also think that people underestimate this notion of likeability. It tends to be likeable people that are promoted. And so working on those people skills, as well as what is required to do the job competently, is extremely important." This applies as much for the job interview as once you're employed.

How can people develop those skills? "A big part of it is just being interested in other people. They are the most important thing to their universe, and the more you can get them to talk about themselves, the better. The more you can be helpful – having a can-do attitude rather than can't – all those things are good. There's the question of trying to fit in, because often people think it's all about competence, it's all about doing your job properly, and actually if you look at the literature, a bit like the interview stuff, it's all about who do we actually like."

A WEIGHTY ISSUE

And then there's dieting. After a group of hotel maids were told how much energy they expended in an average week, they quickly lost weight and their health improved, as compared to a similar group that had not been told. But is this extraordinary placebo effect transferable? Probably not directly, Wiseman says, but paying attention to how much activity you are doing during the day does seem to have some impact on weight, as does noting what you eat. Putting a mirror in the kitchen can have a huge effect, as can chewing your food more. "Those things have big, big effects, and should really be common knowledge."

CHILD'S PLAY

How we praise our children affects how they deal with success and failure in future. "The notion of reward is an interesting one. If you reward your child for doing something they enjoy, they stop doing it as soon as the reward goes away. Also the notion of rewarding effort rather than attainment is incredibly important. There's a very long research project [that suggests parents should tell their child] well done for revising hard, not well done for getting the A, because the problem with getting the A grade is because next time they become very anxious because some of those factors are outside their control, they are trying to get a good grade rather than being rewarded for effort. Again, that should be known in every school in the country and by every parent, but for some reason it hasn't seeped out from academia."

Can we make our children smarter? It's unlikely, says Wiseman. "You probably can't increase their IQ per se, but you can teach them resilience, how to bounce back from defeat, and also the ability to focus and to concentrate. Teaching them a musical instrument is one way of doing that." He cites a study that made children do the opposite of what they were told – for instance, remembering to put their hands on their hips rather than their head. "Those sort of things that force them to focus on their activities seem to have quite big impacts."

One of the more surprising findings in the book is that those who have a surname beginning with a letter in the first half of the alphabet tend to be more successful than those in the latter half. This is probably due to the A-Ms being called on earlier and more often throughout the formative periods of their life, the book suggests. It's not something we can readily change apart from by deed poll, but names influence our lives more than we can imagine, Wiseman says. Research suggests that if you want your baby to be a successful adult, the best names to give him or her are those with regal associations, he says, or those "that sound more physically attractive".

THE QUICK FIX PARADOX

There's much more in 59 Seconds of great use, including how to pick a liar (almost nothing of what you would expect) and how to ensure a lost wallet will be returned, but isn't the whole premise of the book just encouraging the quick fix? It depends on the problem, says Wiseman. "If someone's got a `proper' problem like depression, they shouldn't be reading 59 Seconds. They shouldn't be reading anything from the bookstore. They should be going to their GP. This is for `normal' people, as it were, and I think there are things you can do very, very quickly. That doesn't mean that the other stuff, which takes a lot longer, doesn't work. It does. It's just that there is a subset of all of this stuff which can be done quickly."

And what's one finding in the book Wiseman uses most regularly? The section on procrastination. Doing a tiny amount of a project or task you've been putting off actually turns out to have a massive knock-on effect psychologically, he says. "Just make a start, force yourself to do five minutes or whatever. It's the thing that comes up most often in Q&As. Procrastination is a huge problem."

So just do it. It'll only take a minute.

WHAT DOESN'T WORK

Visualisation and positive affirmation. Researchers speculate those who fantasise about goals might underestimate setbacks or are reluctant to put in the effort. Instead, break it into sub-goals with rewards attached, tell everyone your plans and write them down, and maintain an objective checklist of eventual gains.

Brainstorming. Studies suggest people working on their own come up with more and better ideas than those in groups. Meetings of like-minded people tend to come up with riskier, more extreme decisions. To be more creative, distract your conscious mind while working on a problem, or get out into nature (even a pot plant will help). Instead, laugh, listen to classical music, get out into the sun, or pray for someone else.

Getting out your aggression. A group that hit punching bags or similar were, compared with a control group that sat in a quiet room, far more aggressive afterwards.

"Active listening." The idea of listen, paraphrase, empathise to improve your relationship is a nice idea, but the research says the most successful and happy couples rarely engaged in anything like active listening. Better to keep your positive comments to negative at a ratio of 5:1, and use BUT a lot: "She's a lousy cook but it means we go out a lot; he's argumentative but it means we always get a table at the restaurant."

WRITE YOUR OWN EULOGY

One of Richard Wiseman's more striking suggestions for how you might improve yourself is to imagine a close friend or family member standing up at your funeral and presenting your eulogy. The twist is, you get to write it. How would you want them to describe your personality, relationships, behaviour towards others, achievements, personal strengths? Avoid modesty, suggests Wiseman, who hasn't yet written his ("Maybe I should spend 60 seconds doing it"), but keep it realistic. Once you're finished, take a long, hard look at it and ask yourself: is there work to be done to justify your friend's kind words?

"Some people find that quite threatening," says Wiseman. I wouldn't say I did, more sobering and quite reluctant to actually reach that point. Your response will depend on how complete a person you have been to date. You might find, as I did, that you could cope with a bit of stick ("He could never make a decision"; "She was always late"). But you'd probably want people to think that you cared, that you were generous with your time, attention, patience and loyalty at least as much as your cash, that you achieved something with the talents you had.

You'll probably find that you write a lot about your relationships with other people. Are you as good a friend, as patient a parent, as thoughtful a child, as you might be? Another article published last week suggested we all have lots of emotional timers running in our heads: I haven't called mum for a few days. Must email my friend. Want to call her before she goes away. Do you pay enough attention to those timers? Relationships need regular investment.

If you find no faults in your eulogy, perhaps you should show it to the friend. If they laugh, it's probably a bad sign.

SELF-HELP: The big sellers

Richard Wiseman is more open to self-help books that focus on the "cognitive-behavioural  stuff that is coming out of positive psychology". It's closer to the material of 59 Seconds.

Top of Amazon.com's self-help bestseller lists is a reprint with the cover-the-ballpark title of Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything, by Geneen Roth. Says a pocket review: "She gives us a practical way to use our bodies  along with some of the most difficult parts of our emotional lives  as gracious and transformative portals to our soul."

Roth is the author of, among other books, Breaking Free from Emotional Eating and Feeding the Hungry Heart: The Experience of Compulsive Eating. It doesn't need a scientist to tell you that if one of these books worked, there would be no need for Roth to write another.

No 2 is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R Covey, who has written a small library of self-help books including, inevitably, The Eighth Habit.

No 3 is a book about The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and not far behind is The Secret by Australian Rhonda Byrne, who was a producer on the I-see-dead-people show Sensing Murder. Apparently not finished with divulging mysterious hidden truths, Byrne will in days release The Power.
Helping oneself is clearly a task that is never quite finished. Thankfully, unhappy people are motivated people. Or at least motivated to buy self-help books. The rest of the list can be categorised as self-help on three main subjects: work, weight, worry.

No 20 on the list is guru Dale Carnegie, for whom Wiseman has much time. "I am a big Carnegie fan."

59 Seconds, Richard Wiseman, Macmillan, $29.99

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