Happiness is… making every minute count

There’s a simple science to contentment – it’s about reframing your time around life’s little pleasures

few months ago, Nick Cave went on BBC’s Newsnight. Near the end of the programme, the interviewer Kirsty Wark quoted Cave’s wife – fashion designer

Susie Bick – back to him. ‘Your wife Susie says it takes great courage to be happy.’

The 65-year-old singer looked slightly startled. ‘Did she say that? Huh, she’s clever.’ Wark confirmed that, yes, Bick had said that, and Cave paused, thought about it, then spoke. ‘It’s a defiant position, happiness, and it’s hard earned. It’s a deep thing. I don’t think there is such a thing as simple happiness. I think you lift the lid and there’s all sorts of stuff going on underneath a person’s ability to be optimistic about the world. So, I agree with her. I agree with everything she says.’

Cassie Holmes agrees too. ‘There’s some grit involved in happiness,’ she says.

‘It’s not this flippant, easy thing that you move through effortlessly. It does require strength and we have agency in it. And, ultimately, it is a choice.’

Holmes, 43, is a psychologist and lecturer at the University of California,

Los Angeles’s business school – and her specialist subject is happiness. For four years, she has run a course called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life

Design, which teaches frazzled

MBA students how to make the most of their (limited) free hours and be happier.

The syllabus is not what you’d expect at business school. Holmes has her students write ‘gratitude letters’ to people who have impacted their lives; they have to perform ‘random acts of kindness’ to strangers; and they have to complete compulsory ‘digital detoxes’, during which they can’t check their phones for six hours. They love it.

So far, around 600 students have taken the course.

And now, we non-business-grads can learn Holmes’s secrets to happiness too; her debut book Happier Hour: How to Spend Your Time for a Better, More Meaningful Life came out this week.

The 310-page manual is based on Holmes’s course and was published last year in the US to buzz from all sorts of commentators. The very businessy magazine Forbes said it was a ‘must-read’; the very woo-woo Gwyneth Paltrow liked it so much she interviewed Holmes on her Goop Podcast.

Holmes has always been happy. As a child her family called her ‘Little Miss Happiness’. And today, on Zoom from her

home in Santa Monica, surrounded by books, she is really smiley. ‘Research shows that your inherent disposition does have a big influence on the happiness you feel,’ says Holmes, ‘and I’ve always had a very cheery one.’

But life, as it tends to, gets in the way. When Holmes was 27 she got engaged to her childhood sweetheart. They planned a huge wedding, the family flew in from all over the country, and then, two weeks before the event, as Holmes was driving with her wedding dress in the back of the car, her fiancé rang and called it off.

‘He told me, “I’m not ready.” And I said, “Well, f*** you, I’m never talking to you again.” Which I haven’t!’ (Until this point in our conversation, Holmes has been very sunny and American – she says ‘Oh my gosh’ not ‘Oh my God’. Hearing her swear is wonderful.)

Now, Holmes is married to another man and has two children. But, back then, the whole thing ‘shattered’ her happiness; for the first time her naturally upbeat disposition wasn’t enough to keep her content. Still, Holmes didn’t wallow for long. She had already been researching happiness and her own misery was actually helpful. She had new questions she wanted to find answers to. ‘I was like, “How do I get out of this? How do I move through this?” Because, yes, time heals – but I’m impatient. I wanted to heal quickly.’ What she found was that happiness has a lot to do with control and time. On average, people are happiest if they have between two and five hours of ‘discretionary time’ a day. Any less and you’ll feel stressed, any more and you’ll feel aimless. As a former English student with only four hours of lectures a week, I know the latter is true.

And for everyone thinking, ‘But I don’t have two hours of spare time a day’ – well, you probably do. Last year, the average person spent four hours every day looking at their phone, and I doubt they all felt happier for it. Holmes recommends banning phones for a few hours – ‘no-phone zones’ as she calls them – at designated times during the week. But if you really don’t have two hours spare, Holmes has solutions for that too.

First, ‘bundling’ – the act of combining an activity you hate (but can’t avoid) with one you like, to make it more bearable. So, if you despise your commute, bundle it with a podcast. If ironing makes you want to scream into the void, bundle it with an episode of The Great British Bake Off.

Second, turn routine into ritual. According to Holmes, if you do an activity regularly, ‘You often don’t think about it while you’re doing it’. But if you reframe that activity as ritual, ‘It makes that time more special’, and you might even feel happy doing it. For instance, she has rebranded her morning coffee run with her daughter as a ‘coffee date’. They go to the same spot, they order the same thing (one flat white and one hot chocolate), and they listen to the same songs (Whitney Houston and Cyndi Lauper) on the drive there.

Because really, says Holmes, time has a lot to do with perception. And, once we realise that time is precious, we are more likely to be made happy by simple – even boring – things. Holmes has a trick for this: pick an activity and calculate how many times you have already done it; then

‘ONCE WE REALISE TIME IS PRECIOUS, WE ARE MORE LIKELY TO BE MADE HAPPY BY SIMPLE, EVEN BORING THINGS’

calculate how many times you are likely to do it again. The idea being that, once you know you only have 65 more times to walk your child to school in the morning, you might not get so cross when they take ages to put their coat on. That said, I’ve done the maths and I’ll have to take the bins out around 3,120 more times in my life. Knowing this number does not make me feel any happier.

But still, I like Holmes’s idea; it reminds me of the Wendy Cope poem The Orange. It’s about being made happy by tiny things – in Cope’s case, having lunch with friends and eating a comically large orange. After speaking to Holmes, I googled The Orange and took a picture of the last verse on my phone:

‘The rest of my day was quite easy.

I did all the jobs on my list,

And enjoyed them and had some time over.

I love you. I’m glad I exist.’