How to fill your head with happiness

He brought us the cosy Scandi trend of Hygge. Now the world’s top happiness expert says the key to beating anxiety is your joyful memories. From smelling flowers to printing out family photos . . .

would a date — pay attention to them! Imagine you are out on a first date with someone. You are not just seeing, you are observing. You notice the colour of their eyes, the sound of their laugh, maybe even the scent of their perfume when you first said hello.

When you’re happy, harvest the details. If you described the scene in a novel, what would you write?

USE AN EMOTIONAL HIGHLIGHTER PEN

You probably remember where you were when 9/11 happened. or when you heard about the death of Princess Diana.

They are likely to be ‘flashbulb memories’, a term coined in 1977 by Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik, who believed that when important events happen, they are stored in a vivid and detailed way so we can access the memory later on, analyse the experience and perhaps avoid similar events in the future.

We often speak of flashbulb memories as national or international events, but one study conducted with American university students showed that only 3 per cent of their flashbulb memories were like this. The vast majority were personal: I love yous; exams; broken legs . . .

Happy events as well as dangerous or traumatic ones are stored as flashbulb memories. Emotional reactions are processed in a different part of your brain to that used 1. for purely cognitive learning, and they stay with us for longer. Make that work for you.

MAKE A MEMORY: Try the Ten Years’ Time Test. When choosing what to do, consider what you’re most likely to remember in a decade. You might feel like spending holidays reading on the beach, but don’t pass up the opportunity to jet ski around the bay. The fear, the exhilaration, the relief when it’s over — that’s what you’ll remember best in the future.

STAY AHEAD OF THE FORGETTING CURVE

GERMAn psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909) was one of the first to perform rigorous experiments to find out how memory works.

First, he learned some nonmeaningful information — strings of letters parcelled into groups. And then he forgot it. By studying what he forgot and timing how long it took him, he was able to plot a graph showing a curved shape, the ‘forgetting curve’.

When there’s no attempt to retain information, found Ebbinghaus, it’s lost fairly rapidly — after 20 minutes, you lose around 40 per cent, and after one day, around 70 per cent is lost.

But Ebbinghaus made another discovery. We can alter the slope of the forgetting curve by repeating learned information at particular intervals.

Learning isn’t just about repetition; there has to be space between each repeat. If the fact is already in the front of your mind, there’s no work being done to enable you to recall it, but if the information is retrieved at intervals, the brain has to reconstruct that memory, and this strengthens it, like you strengthen a muscle. You are giving your brain a workout.

Today, the principle is known as ‘spaced repetition’.

MAKE A MEMORY: When you want to hold on to happy memories or have your children or grandchildren hold on to them, practise spaced repetition. Talk at night about a happy moment you shared that day. Tell the story in full. Talk about it the next day, too; then a week later, a month later, three months later and finally a year on.

BUY A PHOTO ALBUM AND PRINT OUT PICTURES

WHEn asked what they’d save if their house was on fire, the most common answer people give is their photo albums.

I am no different. I see photos as the key to a vault of memories. If the key was lost, I fear the memories would be sealed off for ever.

This year, I brought home a collection of photo albums from my childhood, which my brother and I packed up after our mother died — photos I hadn’t seen in 20 years. The photos are not of great quality, but trigger so many memories. As I look at them, I feel snapshots of emotion or names resurface, and then a whole range of other connections start to be made.

The trouble is, most of our photos these days are locked inside hard drives. We risk digital amnesia when we lose a laptop or a phone. Pictures taken to post on social media, meanwhile, are often chosen to depict a version of life that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

MAKE A MEMORY: Take pictures for you! Instead of being the curator of how other people see you, try to be the curator of how your future self can look back.

That means pictures of your everyday life; of objects that might not seem memorable now, but will be great fun to look at years from now. Snap away, then print them out and put them into an album you can hold in your hands.

WATCH OUT FOR THOSE DECEPTIVE DOORWAYS!

WE’vE all been there: you’re at home, in front of your computer, and you get up to consult the letter on the kitchen table. You go to the kitchen, only to stand there, not knowing why you came in. You go back to your computer — and remember.

This is a common short-term memory failure. The phenomenon of going into a room only to forget why you went in there is known as the ‘doorway effect’.

In 2011, a team of psychologists at the university of notre Dame in the u.S. published the paper Walking Through Doorways Causes Forgetting. ‘Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an “event boundary” in the mind, which separates episodes of activity and files them away,’ explained researcher Gabriel Radvansky.

In other words, the act of walking through the doorway makes the brain believe a new scene has begun and that there is no need for memories from the old scene. We remember things by association. So forgetting may be caused by a simple lack of appropriate cues that spark the memory.

KEEP YOUR HAPPY MEMORIES SAFE

WEnDY MITCHELL is from Yorkshire. She worked for decades as a team leader in the nHS.

Today, she finds writing easier than talking and, with the help of a ghost-writer, last year published the book Somebody I used To Know, a gripping, heartbreaking story and an insight into what we lose when we lose our memories.

It shows the challenges of living with dementia. How finding your way home from your favourite cafe becomes an issue. or where in the kitchen you keep the tea.

But it is also an inspirational and heartwarming story. Wendy is resilient and resourceful and she is finding ways to outwit the disease for as long as she can.

She has created a ‘memory room’ with photos in rows across the walls. She labels them. The ‘where?’s, the ‘who?’s, the ‘why?’s. one row has pictures of her daughters, another the places Wendy lived, a third her favourite views — the Lake District and Blackpool beach.

‘I sit on the edge of the bed in front of them, feeling that same sense of calm and happiness. When the memories have emptied on the inside, they’ll still be here on the outside — a constant, a reminder, a feeling of happier times,’ she writes.