David G. Allan, BBC Updated
7:46 AM ET, Wed September 30, 2015
David
G. Allan is editorial director of CNN Health and Wellness. He wrote this story
in 2014 for the BBC. He writes The Wisdom Project and you can follow
him @davidgallan or his column tinyletter.com/wisdomproject
Deep
inside the global tech behemoth Google sits an engineer with an unusual job
description: to make people happier and the world more peaceful.
A few
years ago, Chade-Meng Tan, one of the company's first engineering employees in
Mountain View, noticed many of his colleagues were stressed out and unhappy at
work, so he decided to do something about it. He persuaded his bosses to let
him create a course that would teach employees mindfulness skills to enhance
emotional intelligence and promote wellbeing, and he transitioned to the HR
department to run it. In a nod to his employer, he called it Search Inside
Yourself, an admittedly corny name that is also the title of his book about the
course's techniques.
At the
2014 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, I was curious about Meng's panel, called
"Make Yourself the Happiest Person on Earth." Not surprisingly, given
the talk's promise, every seat and spot of floor space in the hotel ballroom
was filled. Meng promised he was going to teach us the "scientifically
proven" secret of happiness in three easy steps.
I was
fascinated, but naturally skeptical. So in the weeks afterwards, I decided to
try Meng's three-step advice for myself to see if it made me happier. I also
took a closer look at the science that he claims support his techniques. Could
there be anything to it? Let's look at each of the steps in turn.
Step one: "Calm your mind"
To
introduce his first piece of advice, Meng led the SXSW audience through a short
collective breathing exercise to calm the fluffy particles in the
"snow-globes" (his metaphor) in our skulls. He advocates finding easy
ways to take pauses during the day and be mindful of your breath. "If
that's too hard, then just think about nothing for little bit," he joked.
His
book goes into more detail, focusing on what meditation is and how to begin
practicing it, citing a study by
Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical School that
mindfulness-training reduces reported anxiety.
Meng is
not the only one to suggest that meditation and mindfulness is good for our
mental health. For example, the monk Matthieu Ricard, who the press has dubbed
"the world's happiest man" has written a book on the topic himself.
But
does it work? There is some evidence that mindfulness can help stave off
negative thoughts. A recent review of 209 studies found that the practice can help treat depression, anxiety and stress.
(Some researchers even claim that the stress-reduction promised by
meditation could help slow the effects of
aging.)
It's
worth pointing out that dealing with depression and anxiety is not necessarily
the same thing as boosting happiness. Still, Meng's first piece of happiness
advice appears to have growing scientific credence.
Step two: "Log moments of joy"
This
means simply saying to yourself -- as you sip a great espresso, laugh at your
friend's joke or buy that shirt you've wanted -- "I am having a moment of
joy!" When negative things happen to us throughout the day we tend to hold
on to them, while the good things are more fleeting and ephemeral. So, by
consciously acknowledging the good things, says Meng, we increase our chances
that when we reflect on our day, we conclude it was happy one.
The
hypothesis that noting positive experiences counterbalances, or outweighs,
negatives makes intuitive sense. We can all relate to the power of a single,
even short-lived incident tainting a whole day, but rarely does the reverse
seem true. As Johnny Mercer sang, you have to "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative."
Recent
studies have tried to explore this effect, including one by positive psychology
researcher Barbara Fredrickson, which concluded we need a 3:1 positive-to-negative ratio of
thoughts to free our minds from the tar-paper effect of negative thinking.
However, this particular study has proven controversial, with some researchers questioning the
mathematical claims made in the paper.
One
2006 study, however, found that people who wrote down their
positive experiences in a diary reported greater feelings of
life satisfaction, and the effect lasted for up to two weeks afterwards.
Step three: "Wish other people to be happy"
According
to Meng, altruistic thoughts benefit us because we derive a lot of joy from
giving, even more than from receiving.
Meng
makes eloquent arguments for the (I think) self-evident need to infuse your
life with more compassion, but only cites one study -- on people performing acts for others --
to back his claim that "kindness is a sustainable source of
happiness."
In his
book Happiness: A Very Short Introduction, the philosopher Daniel Haybron
supports Meng's case by citing other researchers, particularly psychologist
Michael Argyle who has suggested "only dancing generated higher 'levels of
joy' than volunteer and charity work." Fredrickson, too, has studied the
benefits of a form of meditation that involved
thinking positive thoughts about others. She asked people to try the
technique for a few minutes a day for several weeks, and many reported feeling
more joyful and hopeful.
But
we're still far from Meng's logic leap that just thinking well for others is
enough. We'd be kidding ourselves if we think that wanting someone else to be
happy is the same thing as actually doing something to make them happy, such as
giving them a gift or, apparently, taking them dancing.
Science versus experience
In
fact, the more I looked into Meng's claims the less convinced I was that his
claims are heavily supported by existing research. Many of the findings in
these studies are tentative, and need to be replicated. According to Haybron,
there are actually other happiness factors backed by more robust studies --
such as autonomy, meaningful and skilled work, relationships/love, money (but
not too much) and security (but not too much because you'll be bored) and
non-attachment to things we could lose.
And
yet, at the same time the more I practiced the three-step method, the more it
seemed to be working. I started meditating at work. I programmed my
mobile phone to send me hourly reminders to wish happiness on others. And I
remembered to tell myself "I'm having a moment of joy!" when I was
having fun with my daughters, running in the park, drinking a delicious beer
and even writing this column.
I
needed to reconcile this gap between my increased happiness and the apparent
lack of full evidence to support it. Is Meng on to something real or was he
merely a "merchant of cheap sunshine", as Haybron describes some
happiness experts.
I asked
psychologist Tom Stafford, who writes the Neurohacks column for BBC Future about
the gap. "Squaring what works for you and what the science says is
difficult because happiness is a complex object," he told me. "There
will be local variations due to individual personality, so we've immediately
got a reason for expecting a gap between the science -- which tends to work
with group averages -- and any one person's experience.
"The
interesting general question, to me, is when do we trust our experience and
when do we listen to science," Stafford added. "Obviously some things
we don't need science for ('Does dropping a rock on my foot hurt?'), and some
things we do ('Is smoking bad for my health?'). Happiness, I'd argue, is in
between these two cases."
My
investigation between experience and science in terms of Meng's three steps put
me closer to the dropping-a-rock-on-my-foot camp -- giving more stock in my
experience than the studies. As Stafford notes, it may just be that meditation,
logging joy and wishing others' well works for me because of my own
personality.
It's
possible that future studies will shed more light on these issues. The field of
"positive psychology" is only a couple of decades old. "Part of
the reason you can't find the evidence," Stafford noted, "is that
people haven't been looking as long as they have at, say, why people get
depressed."
There
is growing and legitimate research on happiness, and Hayborn sees the topic as
valid as the much larger and older body of work looking at its inverse:
unhappiness. "Measuring happiness is no more mysterious or fraught then
measuring depression or anxiety," he concludes. "And should be no
more controversial."
To
many, Meng's three steps may seem obvious or simplistic. Yet he compared his
advice to showing us how to do a single push up or arm curl at the gym. You
know it does you good, but you have to do the exercise every day to get
results. I may be more experientially convinced than scientifically sated, but
it's enough to keep me going to Google's happiness gym and doing those
push-ups.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/09/30/health/google-happiness/index.html
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