Your happiness is the most important feedback you can get from your behaviour, but it is not always the most salient. Something is salient if it is noticeable and relevant. When I hear people talking in a foreign language, it’s noticeable but I quickly zone out because I do not understand what is being said. When I hear someone with a regional accent, it is noticeable (especially among senior government officials in the UK) and I can usually make out what they are saying, and so it is salient: both noticeable and relevant.
Our happiness is sometimes not very salient, and we need to do what we can to make it more so. Imagine playing a piano and not being able to hear what it sounds like. Many activities in life are like playing a piano that you do not hear; you’re experiencing pleasure or purpose but you are not appropriately attending to the experience. You can tune in by better attending to inputs and noticing how you feel. Once you do this and learn what the songs from the activities of your life sound like, you can feed this information into your predictions of how the piano will sound the next time you play it.
Tuning into salient feedback is critical in everything that you decide to do. Nowhere is this more important than in understanding adaptation processes. Imagine that someone dented your car and drove off. You might react immediately by getting it fixed because looking at the dent makes you feel miserable. But you might leave it a week or two and see if you still feel the same. If you do, get it fixed; but if the dent does not bother you anymore, you could leave it until some other idiot crashes into you or until you want to sell it. Monitoring the effects of any event beyond its initial impact will serve to show you what you get used to and what you do not.
In situations where you are facing some painful uncertainties, it will almost certainly be better to turn them into adaptable realities. Do you have an unopened bill that’s bothering you? Then open it. You will have to do something about it eventually and, when you do, its impact on your happiness will wane. Resolve the misery-making uncertainty and get quickly to the adaptation process by confronting the uncertainty head-on. Monitoring the feedback of resolving painful uncertainties will show just how quickly you do generally get over things.
We often think about small decisions more than we need to and about big decisions much less than is optimal for our happiness, such as spending days looking at what colours to paint the walls but only a couple of hours visiting the house we buy. We also agonise over decisions with highly uncertain outcomes more than those with more certain ones, such as which class to take as compared to what notebook to take to class. When it comes to the small and uncertain, getting feedback from the consequences of our decisions will show that our experiences of pleasure and purpose are rarely as affected as we imagine they will be.
Imagine that losing weight would make you happier. In general, attending to the pleasure from food can be good for your waistline. When you are not paying attention to the food, the feedback for your happiness is less salient, and eating is less pleasurable, so you eat more to get more pleasure. Ideally, attending to your food will help you eat more slowly, enjoy the food more, and consequently eat less of it. If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback is a big part of the solution.
You should certainly not lose sight of the salience of pleasure and of how making pleasure even more salient might be good for you. So find ways to laugh more and remind yourself how happy it makes you feel. And you don’t have to do too much to get results. Studies show that smiling can cause happiness as well as be a consequence of it because the conscious decision to smile unconsciously makes you happier as a result. And so you will quickly, and quite automatically, feel better. Even a false smile, such as one contrived by holding a pen sideways between your teeth, can make you feel happier. Others might know you are faking it, but you still feel happier.
It’s also important to find ways to make purpose more salient. Children’s behaviour and performance in school can be improved with challenging tasks. So find ways to challenge yourself in some of what you do. It has also been found that applying a variety of different skills at work is linked to higher experiences of meaningfulness on the job. Find ways to vary the skills you use. Our attention is attracted to what’s new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.
It is vital that pleasure and purpose are kept salient whenever you use feedback to decide whether an activity or a goal is, in fact, contributing toward your happiness. Your happiness bears the consequences of your behaviour, and so continuing with any behaviour requires positive feedback — and it needs it now. If an activity makes you feel happy and you are aware of that, you are more likely to carry on doing it. On the flip side, if another activity, such as overeating, does not make you feel miserable now, you have less incentive to do anything about it. This is especially true for pleasure and often for purpose, too, although purposeful activities do require more attentional effort and it’s easier to get sidetracked when engaged in them.
Ignore your mistaken desires, projections, and beliefs about how exercising now will make you healthier in the future, because health only weakly motivates behaviour now, if at all. It is generally a mistake for any encouragement of “healthy” behaviours to be based on what might happen in the uncertain and distant future. Instead, focus on how exercising makes you feel now. I am certain that my own exercise has very little to do with concerns for being healthy. I may experience some health benefits in a couple of decades’ time, but I may also have some joint problems from heavy training. Either way, it is all very uncertain and twenty years is a long way off. My ability to keep weight training — my “stickability” — is simply sticking with an activity that brings happiness in the current moment, rather than in the future. It’s the pleasure-purpose feedback you get while you are engaged in an activity that matters most.
In much the same way that happiness data can be used to guide policy decisions by showing the relative impact of different allocation decisions, such as treating physical health or mental health, your own happiness data can be used to guide to your own allocation decisions. You might think that putting in all those hours at the office to get promoted is worth the sacrifice of your home life but the feedback for your happiness might tell another story. Keeping your eye on the ultimate prize of sentiments of pleasure and purpose might rein in some of your more excessive desires, in and out of work.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.