There is no secret of happiness, just the ability to put your own mind at ease
15 years of unique study has convinced Dr Andy Cope that the only way to be happy is to grasp positivity and let the rest of your life take care of itself
Pssst… wanna know the secret of happiness? I’ve been studying the science of happiness and wellbeing, culminating in a PHD from one of the finest institutions in the land. My job, for the best part of 15 years, has been to seek out happy people and squeeze them of their secrets. I’m the UK’S one and only Dr of Happiness, so I’m well qualified to reveal, once and for all, the secret of happiness.
(please imagine the drum roll for me, it makes it more exciting…)
After 15 years of academic slog, I can announce, once and for all (you might need to sit down for this)… THAT THERE IS NO SECRET!
Sorry about that, but please keep reading because there’s a cracking top tip coming up. The thing about wellbeing and happiness is that the solutions are obvious. Often “as plain as the nose on your face” obvious. So although there’s no secret, the magic comes not from knowing, but from doing.
For example, you already know that the top ten happiest moments of your life have been experiences, not products – magical times that you’ve enjoyed with people you love, and probably with no wi-fi involved. You also know that gratitude makes you happy. And snuggling up with your family. And walks in the countryside. Sunsets, sunrises, a Sunday roast. And chocolate, probably. So a top
happiness tip is to figure out what makes you happy and do more of it.
But seeing as you’re discerning enough to be reading The Scotsman, I’ll share a little something with you. A little-known little something, that is actually a very big something: your happy place.
Context first. I was chatting to a head teacher who admitted she was really stressed but would be OK in three weeks because she’ll be on holiday in her apartment in Spain. There was a particular beachside restaurant that she was looking forward to visiting. “That’s my happy place. I’ll chill, destress and relax.”
Let that sink in for a wee second. She’s got an actual place that she goes to, to be happy.
While I totally understand what she means, it’s also totally ridiculous. What she doesn’t realise is that when she’s in Spain she’s giving herself a mental holiday, letting the feelings of busyness fall away, dropping her stress. Because she’s not thinking work thoughts, they don’t feature in her feelings. Happiness is less about the place where your feet are and more about the place your head is. Her 14 days in Spain is respite from her usual thinking but she’s not “cured”. As soon as she arrives home she’s plunged straight back into busyness thinking.
Research suggests that only a thin sliver of your happiness is determined by what’s going on around you. Hence your circumstances matter, but not nearly as much as you think they do. The totality of your circumstances – e.g., gender, ethnicity, traumas, triumphs, marital status, education level, health, income, physical appearance and your lifestyle – accounts for only 10 per cent of your happiness. The point is that by changing your outside circumstances you can influence 10 per cent of your happiness.
Yet that’s the sliver that we focus most of our efforts on. We go to extraordinary lengths to create an external lifestyle that makes us happy. In the case of that head teacher, she was working incredibly long hours to create enough money to buy things that will make her happy. She’d achieved her nirvana, an apartment in Spain. Her happy place.
A much bigger chunk of your happiness can be influenced by changing what’s going on inside your head. Back to that head teacher again. She had bought peace and tranquillity for two weeks every year. In Spain. Without realising that she could have Spain every day. In her head.
Unless you change your thinking, all you end up doing is bringing your internal world to the external environment. Guess what, you achieve brief respite but nothing changes!
Create the life that you want from the inside out. Do that first and you’re more likely to create an external world that works for you.
Hang on. We need to ponder those sentences. They’re so much bigger than they sound.
Maybe it’s not the big house? Maybe it’s not Spain? If the inside bit (your thinking) is right, the external requirement is different from the one you originally imagined you would need.
Confused? Let me try again, from another angle.
If I made you an offer – you can have £1 million or not be dead – you’d be perplexed at the randomness of it but the silliness would be shrugged off with the obvious choice of “not be dead”, thank you very much.
I can upgrade you to £10m or £50m and you’d still go for the “not being dead” option.
Yet we rarely wake up with that at the forefront of our minds. Here’s some BREAKING NEWS; skipping out of bed, opening the curtains, looking at the drizzle and shouting “Yippee, I’m alive” – that’s not normal.
Forget the usual suspects, the Gandhis, Luther Kings, Kung Fu Pandas and Mandelas. Michael Jackson, the prince of pop, was also a bit of a personal development guru. Our single-gloved, crotch tweaking, no-nosed megastar believed that if you want to make the world a better place you needed to take a look in the mirror and make that change. Hoo!
Hence, I want to introduce you to your very own happy place; your mind.
Their biggest intentional strategy is the simplest and most obvious. It’s simply this: happy people choose to be positive. They actively and consciously choose an upbeat attitude. This is the single biggest strategy they deploy and, to be clear, just because you choose to have a positive attitude it doesn’t mean the rain goes away, that bad drivers stop cutting you up or that your imminent work restructure melts away.
The choice to be positive doesn’t change anything in the external world. Rather it changes your internal world – your thinking – so you’re better able to deal with the drizzle, commute and re-structure.
Please note, I am not reporting that happy people
“Create the life that you want from the inside out. Do that first and you’re more likely to create an external world that works for you”
choose to be happy. There is a lot of well-meaning syrupy wittersphere memes claiming happiness to be a choice. It’s not. Happiness is an emotion. A feeling. You can open up to happiness and let it into your life a bit more, but that’s “allowing” not “choosing”. Positivity, however, is not an emotion. It’s an attitude. And attitudes are something you can take charge of. Spookily, the better you get at consciously and deliberately choosing to have an upbeat attitude, the more likely you are to experience happiness.
My research also shows that actively choosing to be positive requires effort. It’s much easier to coast through life on auto-pilot, putting effort into your emails and social media, but without ever really attending to the attitude you carry around with you.
I’m not claiming that I’ve invented the concept of “positive attitude”. I’m claiming the fact that, despite its apparent obviousness, only a tiny minority of people are exercising the choice. And, as a consequence, this tiny minority are living happier and more energetic lives. Oh, and their zest leaks out of them and creates an emotional updraft in those around them.
That’s it. At ease. Thanks for reading. Craft an attitude that works for you.
Now crack on with the rest of your life.
● Dr Andy Cope is a happiness expert and bestselling author of The Little Book of Being Brilliant available now on Amazon.
Find out more about Andy at www.artofbrilliance.co.uk