‘Stop kidding yourself that you can control more than you actually can’

Paul Dolan, a government adviser on wellbeing, author of ‘Happiness by Design’ and ‘Happy Ever After’ and a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics

It pays to be realistic. Your happiness levels will always rise and fall, and the disruption to your daily life that a second lockdown would bring is difficult to deal with. But if you can accept this, and get comfortable with this feeling then a lot of that pressure to be happy falls off you and, counter-intuitively, you can be happier as a result.

Accepting that things aren’t as good as they could be for reasons that are largely out of our control is in some ways quite liberating. In normal times, it’s all too easy to beat yourself up when things aren’t going well. In the face of a pandemic, there is an opportunity to stop kidding yourself that you can control more than you actually can. There is peace to be found in accepting that things are tough.

Once you’ve done that, as humans it’s good to remember that we need very few things to truly feel happy. The first lockdown was hard in myriad ways but, if nothing else, it taught us we don’t need much to feel OK. A bit of time outside, feeling connected to a small number of key people, having something to occupy our brains and stimulate us. All of that is still possible. Try to remember that. Think about what makes you happy and in what ways. Can you still do those things in some way or another? The answer is probably yes. There is a chance that some of our liberty might be removed again, and that’s going to be hard to take. But small pleasures always trump big ones, and people are more able to cope with less than they think they are.