CONTENTS Introduction 1. Change Everything, Right Now! A Short Tour of Self-Help’s Biggest Clichés 2. How to be Happier Emotional Life 3. How to Win Friends and Influence People Social Life 4. How to Rule the Office Work Life 5. How to Get More Done Productivity 6. How to Use Your Brain Mental Life 7. How to Keep Functioning Everyday Life 8. Follow Me Gurus, God-men, and Other Questionable Characters 9. Roads Less Travelled Some Unlikely Paths to Happiness 10. Further Adventures in Popular Psychology Additional Reading and Resources Notes Index Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION A few years ago, I started writing a weekly newspaper column in which I set out to solve the problem of human happiness. I was half-joking, of course. I was aware that the topic had already received an inordinate amount of attention from some of history’s greatest thinkers – such as Aristotle, in his Nichomachean Ethics, and Paul McKenna, in his Paul McKenna’s Change Your Life in Seven Days: The World’s Leading Hypnotist Shows You How – and I didn’t really imagine that I was going to make any staggering new breakthroughs. Besides, as a rational, non-gullible sort of person, I was allergic to the cheesy promises of self-help gurus. (Anthony Robbins, purveyor of $600-a-day motivational workshops, author of Awaken the Giant Within, and possessor of the most improbably chiselled jaw on the planet – I’m looking at you.) Even various not-so-cheesy explorations of happiness, by professional psychologists and philosophers, incurred my scepticism. This was perhaps because I’d grown up in the north of England, where people who go around looking too ostentatiously happy tend to be regarded as suspicious, and quite possibly American. But I should be honest: if I was half-joking, I was also half-serious. Deep down, however much we cover it up with cynicism and wisecracks, isn’t everybody at least half-serious about wanting to be happy? ‘Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence,’ observed one of the aforementioned great thinkers. (Hint: it wasn’t Paul McKenna.) I mocked self- help gurus, and others who made a living dispensing tips and techniques for a more satisfying life, but I knew my mockery was at least partially defensive: it was much less embarrassing to dismiss all that stuff as mumbo-jumbo than to admit that I wanted some of what it promised. An awful lot of it is mumbo-jumbo, as I was to discover. But among those countless thousands of ideas for becoming happier, richer, more successful, more popular and more productive, surely there were a few that it might be useful to know about? Fortunately, around the time I started delving into the topic, two developments were beginning to make happiness a slightly more acceptable subject for discussion among people who thought of themselves as sceptical and intelligent. The first was the explosion, among academic psychologists, of ‘happiness studies’, involving rigorous experiments designed to pinpoint the sources of human fulfilment. The other was the movement known as ‘lifehacking’, originating on the Internet, which disdained the grand promises of traditional self-help in favour of more modest goals: finding ways to beat procrastination, to keep your email inbox under control, and generally to simplify your life. Here, I felt much more at home, having always had a geeky fondness for time-management systems, to-do lists, personal organisers and the like. To put it another way, I was the kind of child who was liable to spend longer designing perfectly colour-coded exam revision timetables than actually revising for exams. So I took a deep breath, tried to suppress my self-consciousness, and set out on an adventure through the world of popular psychology – a term I’m using loosely here to encompass self-help, happiness studies, lifehacking, and other ideas with an emphasis on practical implementation by a mass audience. I learned Neuro-Linguistic Programming from the experts, and listened to self- hypnosis CDs; I spoke to social psychologists, Buddhist psychotherapists and even a Scientologist, though to be honest he wasn’t much help. I kept a gratitude journal; I tried to become a morning person; I tamed my out-of-control email; I attempted to stop complaining for 21 days. Above all, I read a vast number of books (including Awaken the Giant Within – I can’t recommend it, I’m afraid) and research papers. I tried to approach it all in the spirit of a foreign correspondent, sending back reports from a strange new country, though I’m not sure I realised at the time exactly how strange some parts of it would be. This book is a record of what I found. * It’s a little strange, when you stop to think about it, that the quest for happiness should have acquired such an embarrassing reputation, as if the desire to be a happier person were not the most universal of urges but rather a shameful predilection, like collecting Nazi memorabilia, or attending Michael Bolton concerts. This wasn’t always the case. The ancient Greeks and Romans made no distinction between the noblest of all pursuits – philosophy – and self-help; for them, the whole point of figuring out what constituted ‘the good life’ was that you’d then be able to put your findings into practice. Why go to the trouble of asking the question, and formulating an answer, only to fail to follow your own advice? ‘Philosophy’s power to blunt the blows of circumstance is beyond belief,’ was how Seneca the Stoic expressed this connection, and much of his work, viewed from a certain perspective, is really a collection of self-help tips. (If you’re afflicted by the fear of failure, he advises at one point, try dressing in rags and subsisting on scraps of food for a week or two. That way, you’ll always have the comfort of knowing you could tolerate it if you had to.) This upfront, unashamed attitude towards seeking a better life continued for centuries: even so esteemed a figure as Benjamin Franklin apparently felt little embarrassment telling the world about a notebook he carried, in which he listed 13 ‘virtues’ – frugality, sincerity, that sort of thing – then made a habit of ticking off which ones he managed to exhibit on any given day. If you tried something similar in the twenty-first century, would you tell your friends about it? I’m not sure I would. Somewhere along the way, something changed. Specifically, what happened was the Great Depression – and out of it, the modern incarnation of the movement known as Positive Thinking. The mid-1930s saw the publication of two books that bear much of the blame for the tacky, embarrassing, scam-filled era of self-help that followed: How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. (The third main offender, Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, followed several years later.) It’s not hard to see why they became bestsellers: in a world still reeling from economic devastation, their message to readers feeling pummelled by forces beyond their control was that they weren’t as powerless as they had imagined. The security they’d once known might have vanished – but they could seize control of their own destinies simply by changing how they thought! ‘Truly, thoughts are things,’ writes Hill, and thus by cultivating ‘persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE’ – he has a troubling fondness for capital letters – whatever you can dream of can be yours. Seven decades later, the message persists: it is, for example, the philosophy behind Rhonda Byrne’s mega-bestseller The Secret, which promises sports cars and expensive jewellery just by thinking really hard about them. I can’t say this ever worked for me. But then again, perhaps my DESIRE wasn’t BURNING brightly enough. Who knows? The sad thing about all this is that positive thinking isn’t actually all nonsense – and in any case it’s far from the only possible approach to becoming happier, more successful, or more productive. Yet its numerous flaws have come to infect the whole field of popular psychology. Positive thinkers speak as if changing your life were rapid and easy (sometimes it is, but usually it isn’t). They promise perfection, thereby setting you up for gloom and self-reproach when you fall short (which you will). Taken to extremes, the approach also leads to some exceedingly unpleasant conclusions: more than one writer has suggested that, since your thoughts create your reality, the victims of crime and poverty must be to blame for their suffering. Other times, the conclusions aren’t sinister, just ridiculous – as in Zero Limits, a book by Dr Joe Vitale, in which the author relates the story of a doctor who ‘cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients’ without ever meeting them, merely by ‘look[ing] within himself’. (Vitale’s PhD, by the way, is from an institution in Arizona called the University of Metaphysics.) All of this also provides fertile ground for more straightforward con-artists and charlatans, preying on the desperate for financial gain. You can learn more about this in my ten-CD course, ‘How to Spot a Self-Help Scammer’, worth £1,999 but available for a short time only at the special price of £297. The truth, though, as I now know, is that not all popular psychology is bad psychology. Yes, much of it will leave you unchanged, or even worse off than before – if only because your original problems will have been complemented by extra helpings of frustration and annoyance at failing to change.