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The happiness professor's guide to looking after your wellbeing in lockdown
Paul Dolan says we can redesign our lives for maximum happiness, even in the most challenging of circumstances
Paul Dolan is as ebullient over the phone as he is in real life. Lockdown, on the surface, has not dulled the spirits of the man nicknamed the “Professor of Happiness”.
A government adviser on wellbeing and author of two books, Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After, Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, has long argued that we can redesign our lives for maximum happiness.
That’s why I’ve phoned him, to glean any insights he might have as we enter week seven (or is that week six? or week eight?) of lockdown.
The honeymoon period, if there ever was one, is waning and, with sourdough starters languishing in cupboards across the nation, and the novelty of Zoom chats having well and truly worn off, I wondered whether he might have some words to gee us all up.
What I’d forgotten is that Dolan isn’t a “happiness guru”. He’s an evidence-based, serious academic who during his time as a visiting scholar at Princeton worked closely with the Nobel laureate psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman (he wrote the foreword to Dolan’s first book).
And so he tells me: “There’s this idea that you can just bounce around and find things that are going to make you happy, but it’s OK to have acceptance of the situation, the sense that it’s OK to feel a bit s---.”
Not quite what I expected, but it’s bluntly what we all need right now. As the stabs at self-improvement slough away to reveal a deep craving for certainty, and as many of us struggle financially and emotionally, we can’t help but agonise over what the new normal might look like once this is all over.
You might even be the one in need. The happiness we gain by helping others has been well established, the so-called selfishness of selflessness, but maybe right now, you might be the one in receipt of a little altruism. In other words, it’s OK to have an unhappy lockdown. “You can be honest that life’s not as good as it was,” says Dolan.
In Happiness By Design, published in 2014, Dolan encouraged us to listen more to our real feelings of happiness than to our reflections on how happy we think we are or ought to be. It makes sense that we might be struggling to put a brave face on things right now.
His own happiness levels, something he’s not usually that keen to talk about (“It’s the hardest question to answer”), aren’t currently zinging out of the park.
And he’s one of the lucky ones. He’s got a lovely garden at his home in Brighton, and enough rooms in the house for himself, his wife, 12-year-old daughter and son, 10, to each enjoy their own space.
But what is happiness? In Happiness by Design, he said it was the flow of experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. No one- size-fits-all method, but a framework around which all our personal differences can fit. With pubs, galleries and national parks shut right now, our various pleasures have been severely restricted. Meanwhile, purpose, particularly for those furloughed, has been stripped away. As we try to rebuild what gives us pleasure and purpose from home, some of us will cope better than others.
“Introverts are finally having their moment in the sun,” says Dolan, then laughs, “or not, because they’re not allowed to sunbathe.”
Meanwhile as an “extreme extrovert” he’s realised that he’s geared up for the outside world, which is no longer available on tap. “It’s one of the reasons I’m struggling.” He talks wistfully about when things might get back to normal. For him, there will be a decent haircut (currently home-dyed pink and self-chopped), resumption of his gym sessions five times a week, and takeaway coffees where he enjoys bantering with the barista.
Even the things that have always given him pleasure aren’t quite the same in lockdown. He’s been lifting weights in his garden but has realised that it’s not purely about the weights. “It’s about going to the gym and doing it. It’s my mindfulness. Doing an activity with flow.”
Read more: How to look after your mental health in lockdown
My journalist colleagues and I have been responsible for a plethora of articles extolling the virtues of new lockdown hobbies and how this might be your chance for self-transformation, but he’s unconvinced we can use this caesura to tick off those long-harboured ambitious projects.
“First of all, we’re lazy. We don’t really change much about ourselves very often and if we are going to, we need to have a plan, we need to create habits, we need to invest effort into it,” he says.
If you do want to make the most of your time in lockdown, it’s about what academics call the implementation of intentions.
“You don’t suddenly start writing a book,” says Dolan. “There’s a series of steps that you take in order for you to pick the pen up in the proverbial sense. It’s about designing it into your life. You’re not going to do it by simply saying you’ve got the intention to.”
And before that implementation, ask yourself if it’s something you actually want to do, or whether it’s something you think you ought to do because it’s what is expected of you if, say, you’re a journalist like myself.
“When you don’t write the book, is it because you’ve been lazy and haven’t planned to do it properly? Or is that you actually deep down don’t want to do it?”
Suddenly, I feel very seen. And happier for being let off the hook.
Yet lockdown does provide an avenue for change in a really positive way. It’s an opportunity to break out of our habit system, comparable to moving house or starting a new job.
Now is an opportunity to establish new, positive habits that, if we do them with enough regularity, might just stick with us post-lockdown.
Trying new things, a challenge in the current climate, is proven to be good for us. Even when we don’t want to try new things because we think we won’t like them. Dolan has joined a few informal socials online with colleagues, despite dreading it, and: “I have to say, I have quite enjoyed them, much more than I anticipated I would.”
As a society, lockdown is challenging our preconceived notions about what makes us happy. In his second book, Happy Ever After, published last year, Dolan addressed the social narrative traps that people fall into: that finding everlasting love, or being rich and successful, will make us happy. He urged us not to sweat the big stuff, that freeing ourselves from the myth of the perfect life might make us happier.
To that end, the Thursday Clap has fascinated him. While he doesn’t expect the world to change and start paying nurses and shop assistants huge amounts of money, it’s highlighted how those people who occupy generally low status and low-paid positions are who we truly rely upon right now.
“A lot of the jobs that we have aspirations for, we just don’t need,” he says. “They’re just not valuable at a time of crisis.”
Might we see people re-evaluating the value of those big-salaried jobs? One of the major lessons of Happy Ever After is that we need to learn to say “just enough” rather than “more please”. Lockdown has shown us that, but will we remember to consume less once it’s over?
Dolan is unconvinced: “It’s like every time you’re sick you say you’ll remember how this felt, and as soon as you’re well again you forget.”
Still, he is careful to preface any discussion of happiness and income by saying that poverty makes people miserable. “It’s attention-seeking. If you pay attention to something that makes you feel good, you’ll be happy. If you pay attention to something that makes you feel bad, it’s going to make you miserable. If your attention is being drawn to how you’re going to pay the bills, the rent, feed the kids, then that will make you miserable,” he says, adding: “It’s incumbent on us as a society to take care of the worst-off.”
And if you are someone who is privileged enough to be waiting out the crisis with few financial worries, a stable and safe home life, then appreciating your privilege is important.
He worries about the children sent home from school trapped in dysfunctional home lives, the women and men in abusive relationships, and those in poorer countries where the health systems are unable to cope with the crisis.
“Rather than looking upwards all the time, remind yourself that most of us haven’t got it that bad, even now.”
Invoking the need to practise gratitude makes him sound awfully like a self-help guru…
“I often shy away from saying that, as it might sound glib coming from my privileged position, but there’s good robust, academic evidence on that,” laughs Dolan. “Good studies have shown gratitude to be significant in improving happiness.”
Work
For those of us privileged enough to still have jobs that we can do at home, the challenge is finding the distinction between work time and leisure time, which was much more obvious when we had more set hours. Arrange to have a drink online with a friend at the end of the day. Make a commitment that you stick to.
Perceived control and autonomy makes us feel happy. If you feel like you’re master of your destiny you are happier than if you feel like you’re facing a life full of constraints. Lockdown has imposed constraints on everybody, so what we need to do in order to be happy as individuals is to try to find a little bubble of volition within that. So far as it is possible, choose different work hours to suit you. You might be someone who likes to work late or get up early. Change your office day to those hours and it makes you feel like you’re a bit more in control.
It’s almost certain that most people will be working from home more after this. Universities have spent 20 years saying why it is not possible to teach online, but we all learnt to do it in a week.
I’ve given lectures on Zoom, and the good thing for me now is that I can see the students’ names come up on the screen. I’m engaging with them more on a first-name basis than when I was face to face with them.
Exercise
Now is an opportunity for people who wanted to do a little bit more exercise to get up in the morning and have a go. If the lockdown continues, then there has been enough time for something to become a bit more automatic. It takes time to embed some of those behaviours we start under lockdown into habits.
Right now speaks to people who always say they don’t have time to do things. It’s not that you don’t have time, it’s that you don’t make time. People often ask me how I go to the gym five times a week, and I did that for 20 years until these last couple of weeks. It’s because it’s in my diary. It’s planned, it’s organised because it matters to me and it’s important. There are things that you can do to take back control in this current situation so you have little pockets of autonomy, even if the rest of it feels constrained.
Family
When we go on holiday, the things we remember are never how long you were away for. It was that moment when you saw a site that you all loved, or a sunset. It is a moment. That’s what we encode in our memories. You can’t engineer these things; if you try to create memories they become inauthentic, but insofar as we can remind ourselves, it’s useful to know it is the small unexpected moments that will form our future memories.
We don’t watch much television together, but one thing we have started doing as a family together is watch Modern Family from the beginning. It’s just-about age appropriate and it’s nice to have that as a shared experience. They’re 20-minutes episodes, so you can duck in, do one and disappear again.
I like watching Modern Family with the kids, but I don’t want to be with them all the time. Any honest parent knows that time, especially with young kids, is really hard. There are moments of joy and long periods of misery. That acceptance of being able to say that; maybe that’s something we can be a bit more honest about now.
Food
In previous recessions mental health problems increased, but physical health improved. That was until the last recession, when people started buying more takeaways and cheap processed foods that are quicker to consume. In previous recessions the reason was that people had more time and they prepared healthier meals that take longer. That’s something those that enjoy cooking, and even those who don’t, can do right now. Plan a meal, cook it together and listen to music while you do it.
Relationships
In Wuhan, people were rushing to separate the moment lockdown was lifted. The divorce rate in this country is bound to increase significantly after lockdown.
Normally I say to people, “If in doubt, get out”, but context matters so much that you might not want to do that the moment lockdown ends. There might not be anything fundamentally wrong with the relationship. You might want to wait a few more weeks to see if you can actually tolerate this person when you don’t have to spend every minute with them.
We’re not very good at understanding the impact of context generally. We imagine ourselves and other people as these consistent and coherent creatures. We consider a relationship as either strong or weak, regardless of the environment we find ourselves in. I think all good, functioning relationships work well when you’re not together. No one’s supposed to spend six weeks with the same person all the time.
I never need to be on my own, whereas my wife craves time on her own, so both of us are alert to that difference, and we manage it in a way that suits us both to some extent.
If you have unrealistic expectations of a blissful relationship, you’re going to be sadly let down. Your loved one might start to get on your nerves, and that’s OK. Maybe you can tell them that and they can tell you. We don’t want to be honest, because it’s harmful to people, but a little less skating around the subject might be helpful right now.
Paul’s tips for staying happy
1. Accept that things are messed up
It’s good to think positively, but be realistic. Many people are afraid of Covid-19 and the policy responses affect us all. Happiness levels will fall and the disruption to normal life is difficult to deal with. If we accept this, though, a lot of the pressure to be happy will be lifted and, counter-intuitively perhaps, we will be happier as a result. Insofar as you want to change anything, it will also make effective behaviour change more likely. The various types of therapy out there share a common initial emphasis on accepting who we are, and from this behaviour change becomes possible.
2. Have realistic expectations about what you will change
I have heard lots of people say that they are going to use the time at home in ways they have never used before, such as reading more books. Many of these same people have been saying something similar every new year or summer holiday for years. But past behaviours predict future actions much more accurately than do intentions, and so most of us won’t do in the next few weeks things we have not got around to in the past 20 years. So, set yourself realistic expectations about what you will change, by how much and when.
3. Find a balance between pleasure and purpose
Happiness is best conceptualised as the flow of pleasure and purpose over time. We need a balance between activities we find relatively fun on the one hand and relatively fulfilling on the other. My balance may be different to yours (you might be happier with more purpose than fun) and what we find pleasurable and purposeful might also differ (I love the gym, you might hate it). So, think about what makes you happy and in what ways. Right now, you might want to focus more on purpose, since many sources of pleasure have been removed. However, the small pleasures are now more precious.
4. Design your environment to make it easier to do what you want to
Willpower can only get you so far (and intentions hardly anywhere at all). The heavy lifting of behaviour change is done by design power. In other words, we are more likely to change what we do in response to the cues and triggers around us than by simply urging ourselves to change. If you want to read a certain book, make a commitment to your friends that you will do so by the time that the lockdown is over. If you want to go for a run in the morning, create a norm by enlisting your spouse or housemate.
5. Help others
One of the most beneficial activities you can engage in is to help someone else. Once you have established that your donation of time or money is in their best interests, not only do they benefit, but you do too. Even if we don’t do it for external recognition, helping others makes us feel better about ourselves. Social distancing has made helping others a little more challenging, but it is still possible to volunteer or to donate to charities. Alternatively, reach out to someone in your friendship group who might feel lonely or vulnerable. The need for support has rarely been so acute.
6. Create new habits
Your brain is lazy and creates habit loops to save you from thinking too hard. Those habit loops (for example, checking emails on your commute) get broken when the environment changes. A lockdown is a great opportunity to reboot what you do. If you’ve always wanted to exercise when you wake up, now you can. It might just stick when lockdown ends.
7. Plan your days
The idea of no routine is enticing, but it’s a recipe for either doing nothing or doing too much of one thing, such as working long hours. Without a plan, we take the path of least resistance. To get some work and/or exercise done and find an optimal work-life balance, do key activities (e.g. showering, getting ready for work and exercising) at the same time each day.
8. Go outdoors
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to happiness, there are some activities that are good for all of us. Going outdoors is one of these. Thankfully, the lockdown recognises this and does not preclude us from venturing outside. Take the opportunity for some fresh air (and the air will be fresher wherever you live due to the reduction in pollution).
9. Listen to music with other people
Listening to music is the only activity that stimulates the whole brain and we are all happier when we are with people whose company we enjoy. So, the lockdown is the ideal time to get a few friends with similar music tastes together online and listen to some tunes that you all like.
10. Ask for help
Many people’s lives are being adversely affected by the lockdown. Accepting that might only get you so far. You might also need some help from other people and support networks. Look to get that support if you require it. There is no shame in doing so. And remember, you are making someone else happy by asking for their help.