Happiness By Design Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Happiness By Design

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Zusammenfassung von Happiness By Design

Name: Happiness By Design
Rating: 4.2 (79 reviews)
Author: Paul Dolan

Paul Dolan

Change What You Do, Not How You Think / Finding Pleasure And Purpose In Everyday Life

4.2 (79 Bewertungen)

17 Min.

Kurz zusammengefasst

Happiness By Design by Paul Dolan is a self-help book that explores the science of happiness and how we can design our lives to experience more of it. It introduces the concept of "pleasure" versus "purpose" and offers practical insights for finding joy and fulfillment.

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Happiness By Design
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What’s in it for me? Learn how to overcome the barriers to happiness.

We all want to be happier. That’s why we spend millions on books, videos and courses, which teach us how to be happy. Yet despite this, many of us spend large chunks of our life in the doldrums. We can’t seem to make ourselves happy all the time.

These blinks, however, are different. They show how our brain and our environment unconsciously affect our happiness levels, and not necessarily in a positive direction. Crucially they also show how we can manage these factors to ensure we remain happy in our lives.

In these blinks you will discover

why going to gym can lead you to eat unhealthily
why hearing French music makes you buy French wine
why happiness begins with switching your phone off.

You are happiest when you experience your daily activities as pleasant and purposeful.

Imagine being forced to spend the rest of your life watching your favorite comedy show. Would you really be happy? Chances are that eventually you’ll feel there’s not much point to your life. In the end, you might as well have spent your whole life working instead.

But why is this exactly? Well, happiness isn’t just caused by joy, but by feeling that what you’re doing has some purpose. In order to be happy, you need to experience a combination of joy as well as meaning in your activities.

Every day, your life consists of a mix of activities that you tend to regard as pleasurable or purposeful. For example, catching up on your favorite TV show is pleasurable, while creating a presentation for your work is purposeful.

In order to get the most out of your day, it’s best to alternate pleasurable activities with purposeful ones. For instance, at work, you can consciously integrate “pleasure” breaks into your day, like having a nice lunch and a chat with a colleague, or taking a short afternoon walk.

Interestingly, whether you prefer to have more pleasure or more purpose in your daily life largely depends on your personality.

There is no one-size-fits-all, so find the mix of work and play that suits you best. You might be more of a “pleasure machine,” requiring more fun to be happy , or you could be a “purpose engine” valuing your work more than your downtime.

Lastly, happiness is about feeling good in the moment. Being merely satisfied with your life situation may not indicate that you are happy every day, as happiness is more about spontaneous emotion than contemplating your general situation.

To feel happier, then, you should focus on actively experiencing pleasure and purpose in your daily activities.

In the next blinks, we’ll see why it’s also vitally important to focus consciously on these activities.

Happiness isn’t caused directly by what you do, but rather by what you pay attention to.

A meaningful job, exciting hobbies, optimal health: you would think these are the perfect ingredients for happiness, wouldn’t you? Sure, but only if you actually pay attention to them.

In order to live a happy life, you need to be able to concentrate on what makes you happy.

Your behavior and attention are largely driven by unconscious mechanisms that are prone to mistakes.

We saw in the previous blink that we often drift towards things in our life that make us feel unhappy. Why? It’s because the majority of what we do is lead by unconscious processes.

Your brain has two systems that process information and determine how you should behave. System 2 is the conscious brain you use to make considered, well-informed decisions. System 1, however, is far more influential. It’s the ancient, primitive part of our brain that is governed by instinct and operates on impulse and habit, which enables us to act automatically. This is often useful when it comes to always knowing where your car keys are because you always put them in a certain place, but it can also lead to detrimental decisions.

In trying to achieve goals that will make you happy, you fall victim to behavioral spillover.

Say you think that getting physically fit will make you happy, so you start going to the gym. Then, driving home from your first exhausting workout, you pass your favorite fast food restaurant. Instead of resisting, you impulsively “reward” yourself with a big, greasy burger and some fries.

Why? Because our past, present and future decisions are not separate; they impact each other, and we are sometimes oblivious to it.

You often misjudge your desires and goals, including how they impact your happiness.

The prospect of being happier is the drive behind a lot of your decisions and actions. You may strive towards a particular goal at your work because you think it’ll make you happier when you reach it. Yet be careful when thinking about how future situations will affect your happiness, because we’re susceptible to making mistakes when doing so.

Consider that when people are asked to picture how being unable to walk would affect their happiness, they overestimate the impact because they are consciously focusing on the problems that come with the disability. In actuality, though, we get used to major changes – positive or negative – far more quickly than we expect.

To decide what makes you happy, listen to immediate feedback from both yourself and others.

As we’ve seen, we’re prone to letting our past and future cloud our happiness in the present. So how can we make decisions that bring us happiness both today and tomorrow?

We can learn to listen to feedback from our activities. Focussing on the feelings that come as a result of your daily activities will help you ascertain what really brings you happiness.

By using unconscious mechanisms, you can design your environment to steer your attention toward things and behaviors that make you happy.

By now, you should see how what you do affects your feelings, and you may wish to change how you behave in order to be happier.

The best way is by deceiving your unconscious brain.

To be happier, pay attention to what you’re doing, choosing to ignore distractions.

Every day, we let ourselves get distracted. Our phones and new technologies are often what capture our attention almost constantly throughout the day. It’s become increasingly difficult to fully engage in a single activity and our brief attention span has become an obstacle to being happy.

The reality is, distraction costs time and energy and is destructive to happiness. In fact, just the act of moving your attention from one thing to another, such as from your work email to your Facebook feed takes “switching cost.” That is, your brain needs time and energy to re-orient itself between tasks, which leads to a decrease in efficacy in both tasks.

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Worum geht es in Happiness By Design?

Drawing from his own behavioral research and economist experience, Dolan explains how happiness arises and how we experience it in our everyday lives. He exposes some of the traps we fall into when trying to be happier and demonstrates some simple tools for adapting your environment to feel happier without having to radically change who you are and what you think.

Bestes Zitat aus Happiness By Design

You are happiest when you have a balance between pleasure and purpose that works best for you.

—Paul Dolan

Wer Happiness By Design lesen sollte

Anyone who wants to understand what happiness really is
Anyone who is fed up with not reaching their goals
Anyone who needs easier and faster solutions on how to feel better instantly

Über den Autor

Paul Dolan is a Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and is acclaimed for his extensive research on the connection between happiness, well-being and behavior. He advises both US and UK government on public policies regarding health care and economy.

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