Attention-seekers

Revisiting Happiness by Design a decade on

We will obviously adapt to some changes more quickly than to others, to a pay rise faster than to marriage, for example. Further, the impact of some inputs on the production of happiness does not appear to wane over time at all. Unemployment has lasting negative effects (even if we allow for the fact that less happy people are more likely to lose their jobs in the first place). This is not so surprising, is it? One of the first questions someone new asks you is “What do you do for a living?”

You may also become increasingly sensitised to some changes. That is, you pay more, not less, attention to some stimuli as time passes. Sadly, these are usually bad things, like noise, especially when the noise is unpredictable in its timing. The evidence shows that we don’t generally withdraw attention from traffic noise because cars do not go by at regular intervals. As disheartening evidence of this, children in urban areas who live in noisy, lower floors of apartment buildings have lower reading scores than those on quieter, higher floors where traffic noise doesn’t reach to the same extent. This result persists after the authors account for the educational level of the parents and also note that the apartments on each floor cost about the same, so it is not as if the poorer kids are living on lower floors.

Losing your sense of smell, which might even be considered to have its upsides in some instances, has a significant downside: you lose your sense of taste, too. This can lead you into a poor diet and reduce the functioning of your physical immune system. There is hardly any adaptation to not being able to smell and yet I suspect that many of us would think that we would get used to it quite quickly. We make a lot of mistakes about what will grab our attention and for how long.

There is an intuitively appealing model of adaptation called the AREA model. Events in life are attention-grabbing to begin with. You then react and, if you can explain the event, you will withdraw attention and adapt to it. Much of this process will occur automatically without conscious effort. Most of the time you can explain things and you will adapt as the impact of the stimulus wears off. A pay rise is generally quickly explained—you’re a good and loyal worker, right? And so you stop paying attention to it. Indeed, you are such a good worker that your pay rise should perhaps have been larger, right?

Sometimes, though, you will keep reacting if you are lacking that all-important explanation. If physical pain has an explanation, such as when the ache in your leg is due to a sports injury, then you will withdraw attention from the pain and adapt to it, but if it remains unexplained, it continues to draw attention to itself.

If you are able to resolve the uncertainty surrounding a situation, you will be better able to explain the consequences that ensue. This sounds obvious, but the implications aren’t: we have data that show that cancer patients report lower life satisfaction rates when they are in remission. My interpretation is that the “certainty” of death allows a person to put his or her house into order, and remission casts uncertainty on that purpose. It’s also consistent with the theory that your attention shifts to the present and the positive as you age because you perceive the future to be increasingly limited.

A similar story can be told for genetic testing. In a study looking at testing for Huntington’s disease—an inherited genetic disorder that affects muscle coordination and generally leads to psychiatric problems and early death—those who were told that they had a decreased risk of the disease reported better mental health over the year of the study following testing than those who were told their risk was unchanged. So far, so obvious. But those who were told that they had an increased risk also reported better mental health than the group whose risk was unchanged. The unchanged-risk group arguably still faced the same uncertainty as before, whereas the other two groups benefited from the uncertainty being reduced, even if was in a “bad” way.

These examples show how the resolution of uncertainty about bad life events is potentially good for your happiness. Your attention is diverted away from worrying about what might or might not happen (and all the possible stresses and strains that those scenarios might involve) toward dealing with a future that can be better planned and managed. This goes a long way toward explaining why people’s life satisfaction takes a massive drop close to the time of separation but then bounces back upon divorce. Divorce provides closure by resolving the uncertainty of whether you will get back together again – and it also sorts out the finances, too. Resolving the uncertainty surrounding a situation like divorce forces an explanation, and thus its impact as an input into the production process of happiness wanes.

Attention holds together our lives. It converts stimuli into happiness, and it drives our behaviour. We are often unaware of the effects of attention on our happiness and our behaviour, just as many people are unaware that background music affects their choice of wine. Yet this precious and scarce resource is responsible for all of what we do and how we feel. Attention explains why we adapt to weight gain and not to noise and stammering. It also explains why we might not be as happy as we could be.

Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.