Don’t worry, be happy

By Jackie Randles

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 80 winter 2010

Jackie Randles rocked up to the annual Happiness and its Causes conference nursing the same gripes she’d had a year ago.

As I took my seat in the huge auditorium and flicked through the 2010 conference program, I realised that, despite my ongoing interest in finding new ways to deal with things that make me miserable, I was still facing the same kinds of problems as this time last year.

Was I any happier? Well, yes and no. Happy with many aspects of my life, but deeply troubled and dissatisfied with others. As always. So it was with some discomfort that I listened to a stellar line up of happiness experts. Their commonsense behavioural techniques challenged my very way of being. Looking around me, I wasn’t the only one smiling and nodding in agreement – it all seemed so simple.

Speaker after speaker reminded us of the strategies available to help make us happier: We could stop complaining, count our blessings and make more efforts to practice gratitude and kindness. We could do more exercise and drink less alcohol. We could find our signature strengths and make sure we put these to use in everything we did. We could make a tree change and take steps to find a career that matched the true colours of our parachutes. We could draw on the store of wisdom and courage we all possess. Most of all, we could learn to think differently, and more creatively, about the things that get us down.

Best-selling author Dr Edward De Bono (who invented the term ‘lateral thinking’) urged us to face up to our problems then shrug them off.

Affirming my tendency to indulge in regular stock takes of what’s not working well, Dr De Bono said it’s important to think carefully about things that make us less happy in order to solve these problems. “Ignorance is not bliss,” he said. But you then need to be able to accept setbacks, then shrug them off in order to move forward.

“Too much choice paralyses us and makes us unhappy,” said Professor Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice.

Choice overload certainly dulls my enthusiasm to make changes when faced with so many options. If there’s too much on offer, I reach the point where the choices I make are arbitrary and made simply to get the process over with.

Or I snatch at a random solution that might help parachute me out of one unsatisfactory position only to land in another. Dissatisfied with that decision, I might later mourn the choices I didn’t make. Or if I can’t decide, I abandon decision-making altogether.

The more our options, the greater our regret … Having made one choice, it can be hard to let go of other choices that got away. Then you’re stuck wondering what would have happened if you’d chosen the road not taken. A perpetual conditional tense: if only I’d done this or that …

Professor Schwarz did not suggest that we abandon decision-making altogether, but simply be more selective about when we decide to choose. We could also view decisions as simply choices to do one thing over another: they are neither right nor wrong. We simply decide to do one thing and set forth a chain of events that would have been different had we decided to do something else. So there’s no need to regret the choices that we did not make.

When it comes to buying things, Professor Schwarz suggested we practice choosing not to choose. We could instead turn to others who’d put time and effort into choosing and then ask them what to do. Hopefully, they wouldn’t mind doing the legwork for us. We’d also be wise to accept that in many cases, good enough is good enough. We don’t have to always make the best choice.

Dr Timothy Sharp, an adjunct professor in positive psychology at the School of Business at the University of Technology Sydney (who also founded The Happiness Institute) said that bosses place too little attention on our happiness at work. Not surprisingly, in situations where staff feel unappreciated and under paid, productivity slides along with morale. Another detrimental aspect many workers face is not seeing the end results of their endeavours. They miss the satisfaction of seeing a job well done. His advice for workers?

Nobody is putting a gun to your head to go into the office. Remember it’s a choice ... you decide how you approach work, not only whether you walk in the door, but the attitude you take to work.

Of all the speakers, psychologist, social researcher and author Hugh Mackay got my vote by arguing that happiness is beyond our control.

In a somewhat provocative address for a happiness conference, he questioned the notion that we should strive above all for happiness, arguing that it is just one among many emotional states that we must learn to recognise and embrace as signs of our humanity.

... sadness is as authentic an emotion as happiness. The fleeting moments of bliss and joy, and even the deeper sense of contentment that occasionally envelopes us, only make sense because they represent such a contrast with the experience of pain, trauma or sadness, or even with those times when we feel ourselves trapped in a tedious, dreary routine.

It was good to be reminded by Hugh Mackay that every life – examined or unexamined, reckless or responsible, sacrificial or self-centred – has value, if only because every life expresses something about what it really means to be human.

FInd out more at www.happinessanditscauses.com.