#83: How to be happy
No, not like that. I'm not talking about how to achieve the ultimate happiness, eudaimonia, or enlightenment. I'm simply talking about how to enjoy your down-time without feeling like you're doing it wrong. If you've ever looked forward to a well-deserved day off and then settled down for some serious relaxation only to find yourself consumed by anxiety about whether you're enjoying yourself enough, this episode is for you.
References:
Diener, E., Sandvik, E., and Pavot, W. 2009: 'Happiness is the frequency, not the intensity, of positive versus negative affect', in Diener, E. (ed.) Assessing Well-Being: The Collected Works of Ed Diener, Social Indicators Research Series 39: 213-231.
Mauss, I. B., Tamir, M., Anderson, C. L., and Savino, N. S. 2011: 'Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness', Emotion 11/4: 767.
Episode transcript:
How do you do days off?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hi, friends. I want to talk to you today about happiness. But I don’t mean it in a deep and profound way. We’re not talking eudaimonia here - the ultimate happiness or flourishing or living your life well that Aristotle believed can be achieved through a lifetime commitment to developing the virtues and living in accordance with them. What I have in mind is much more modest. I just want to talk about what it takes to enjoy a day off work, take pleasure in the small things without overthinking it, derive contentment from doing something small without worrying that you’re doing it wrong or that maybe you should be doing something else instead. I’ve talked before in these episodes about how I have a problem with this, and I know I’m not alone. I got to thinking about it over the past week because my children went away for a few days without me, for the first time ever. I’ve been completely solo parenting since 2016 - no co-parent involved, and in general I have a real problem with asking for help and having other people look after the kids. The result is that they have only ever been away for the odd night for a sleepover with friends or for a school trip. This time they were away for 5 nights with a friend - probably the only friend I’d allow to do this without worrying that I was selfishly taking advantage of their kindness (and let’s not get into my issues with accepting help - that’s a topic for another episode, and one that I’m definitely not qualified to give advice about at this point). I had all sorts of feelings about them going away without me, but one of those feelings was gleeful anticipation of having so much time to myself, without having to do anything for anyone, except for all the cats. I could sit around for hours knitting. I could binge watch Netflix. I wouldn’t have to cook for anyone. I wouldn’t have to plan anything if I didn’t want to, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anyone else’s screen time, bed time, wholesome outdoors time, or anything else. A completely new experience for me. Now, I did spend hours knitting, and I did binge watch Netflix, and do other stuff that I normally feel like doing but don’t because there’s life stuff to get on with. But even by the end of the first day on my own, I didn’t really know what to do with myself. I didn’t feel as content as I thought I would. I’ve been thinking a lot about why I didn’t end up feeling the way I hoped I would, and what I can do differently next time I have a few days on my own. What does it take to feel modestly, unambitiously, and perhaps only temporarily happy? Well, here’s my first insight. I didn’t plan things properly. I didn’t put the thought and effort in to deciding what I was going to be doing with my alone time. I needed an agenda, and I didn’t have one. I didn’t have one because I hate planning, and I hate having to think in advance about how to take care of another person’s wellbeing, even if that other person is my future self. In fact, taking care of people was one of the things that I was looking forward to not having to do. But that, I came to realise, was a mistake. Not planning in advance didn’t remove the cognitive and emotional burdens of having to decide what to do - it just spread those burdens throughout the time I was hoping to enjoy. I escaped the tedious task of sitting down beforehand and scheduling my time alone, but as a result I spent the entire time thinking ‘What shall I do next?’ Tellingly, the few things that I did plan in advance were great - they made me feel properly content and relaxed, and they removed the anxiety - which I felt the rest of the time - that I was wasting my valuable time. There were only two things that I planned. One was walking into town and enjoying a coffee outside. The other was meeting up with a friend to do parkrun together, at a place neither of us had done parkrun before, and then going to a coffee shop afterwards for brunch and a chat. That was really lovely, although my drive home turned out to be unexpectedly eventful. Shall I tell you about that? It’s not really relevant. Sod it, I’ll tell you. I was driving home and I saw a pheasant sitting in the middle of the road, in the path of the oncoming traffic. She had clearly just been hit by a car, but she was also clearly alive and alert. I turned the car around as soon as I could and went back for her, hoping that someone wouldn’t have squished her in the mean time. Thankfully they hadn’t, so I stopped, put the hazards on, and lifted her out of the road, which she didn’t like very much. There was a little blood, though not much. I put her on the seat next to me and covered her with the coat that I’d taken with me but turned out not to need because it was a really beautiful day, and drove her to the 24-hour vet about 10 minutes away. She made her way to the footwell on the passenger side and stood there looking at me. The vets wouldn’t deal with her and told me I should take her to a wildlife sanctuary instead, but the nearest one was almost an hour’s drive away and I was worried about stressing her out. So I got back in the car and called my sister, who is a vet nurse, to ask for advice. Fleur said that wild birds get so stressed by being handled that it can harm them more than their injuries, which in this case didn’t seem particularly bad. Following Fleur’s advice, I drove back to where I’d found the pheasant, planning to release her somewhere nearby, away from the road and near a hedge, where she could hide from predators. During the drive, the pheasant got fed up of being in the car and flapped around right in front of my face, mistakenly thinking that she’d be able to get out of the closed window next to me. Yes, while I was driving. Eventually we arrived back in her hood and I pulled over next to a field and turned off the car. At this point, she wedged herself between the brake pedal and the clutch. I couldn’t get to her - at least, not without removing the steering wheel (or my head), neither of which I felt qualified to do, and I couldn’t drive anywhere with her sitting there. Neither could I just open the door right next to her - it was right next to the road where she had been hit. So, I opened the doors on the passenger side, got out of the car, and went and sat on a log in the field next to us, waiting for her to leave in her own time. I spent a pleasant 20 minutes sitting there in the sun, playing Squaredle on my phone, mercifully free from worries about whether I should be doing something else instead, because there was nothing else that I could be doing. And by the way, knowing that there’s some other option we could have chosen but didn’t stresses us out and makes us less satisfied with whatever we do end up choosing - something the psychologist Barry Schwartz has called the paradox of choice. Anyway. After a while, I went back to the car to check on the pheasant, and she had gone. So, I got back into my shit- and feather-filled car and drove home. I hope she’s ok and that she escapes being shot by a murderous, sadistic shithead. Pheasants have no road sense. They are raised in captivity and then just released, having no idea how to survive in the wild, waiting for some arseholes to come along and shoot them. Absolutely barbaric. But I digress. Where was I? Ah, yes. I was telling you about how my alone time was more relaxing and enjoyable on the days when I had taken the time to plan ahead. This should have been obvious, really, shouldn’t it? I mean, imagine inviting an overburdened and exhausted friend to come and stay with you for a few days, promising them a well-deserved relaxing break, and then when they arrive, excited about what lies ahead, and ask you what the two of you are going to be doing, you say, ‘I don’t know - I thought we could just sit around’. Fuck’s sake. What a shitty host you’d be. So, when you want a relaxing break, plan for your future self as thoughtfully as you’d plan for a friend - or else prepare to be disappointed. I’m reminded here of the words of Jim Rohn: ‘either you run the day, or the day runs you’. Take control, even if it’s a drag. But that doesn’t mean you need to schedule every waking minute. You need to work out what works for you, but in my own experience, having some unstructured time is fine. Great, even. I’ve found that having something planned even just for a couple of hours results in the entire day being more satisfying. And be aware of your expectations: if you take the view that your day off needs to be wall-to-wall ecstasy, otherwise it’s a dismal failure, you’re going to end the day feeling disappointed. In fact, setting yourself a goal of attaining happiness is a bad idea all round. If you make happiness your end goal, you risk falling foul of what philosophers have variously called the paradox of hedonism, the happiness paradox, and the pleasure paradox. Writers including John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Victor Frankl have remarked that attempts to pursue happiness directly are doomed to failure. Happiness is best enjoyed as a side effect of pursuing other goals and projects. It’s not just philosophers who have noticed this - there’s scientific support for it, too. In 2011, Iris Mauss, Maya Tamir, Craig Anderson, and Nicole Savino wrote about a series of studies they ran that showed that - quote - ‘valuing happiness could be self-defeating, because the more people value happiness, the more likely they will feel disappointed’. End of quote. You know the experience: you do something nice, something that you expect to make you happy, and you end up feeling disappointed that you’re not enjoying it enough. The lesson: stop pursuing happiness directly. Instead, pursue goals and projects that are meaningful to you. Two questions here: what sorts of goals and projects? And, what, exactly, is this ‘happiness’ that we hope might emerge from them? Let’s consider the second question first. I’ve already said that I’m talking about a fairly watered down version of happiness. It’s not that I have anything against the more enduring and profound form of happiness, of course - it’s just that it’s a lot to take on when all you want is to enjoy a day off. Think back to a time when you had a nice day, or a nice afternoon, or even a nice half hour. I’m not asking you to think of your best day or afternoon or half hour ever - just a time when you enjoyed yourself, in however modest a way. The sort of time that you’d welcome repeating, even if repeating it wouldn’t make the top thousand things on your bucket list. That’s what I’m talking about here. Modest, everyday, achievable, forgettable happiness. I’m not going to ask you to set out to achieve that, because you risk hedonic paradoxing yourself if you do. What I want you to do instead is think about what sorts of experiences have, in the past, given rise to those feelings of modest enjoyment. Which brings us to the other question I asked: what sorts of goals and projects should you be pursuing during your me-time? Now, after reflecting on the sorts of experiences you’ve enjoyed in the past, you might find some surprises. They might not be the sorts of things that immediately spring to mind when you think of how you’d like to spend your day off. Here’s a weird one of mine. During term time, on the days when I’m commuting and teaching, I get up super early so I don’t have to stress about getting stuck in traffic, and I arrive at college long before my teaching starts. When I arrive, I walk around a bit to stretch my legs, and then I go to the library, which is almost deserted at that time. I work for a bit on whatever my current writing project is. The stakes are super low: I don’t demand anything of myself on my teaching days other than to survive and do a good-enough job with my students, and I certainly don’t go into the library with any writing targets in mind. To my surprise, those early morning library sessions, which I started doing simply because there wasn’t much else to do, have become little gems during term time. Little pockets of pleasure. I don’t mean ecstasy; but I do enjoy them and look forward to them. I usually, although not always, get a bit of writing done, or at least a bit of thinking about my writing - enough to keep it fresh in my mind for another day. And the sessions are time-limited. I usually have no more than an hour in the library before I need to go and do other things. Not enough time to get fed up. These sessions are not the sort of thing that is the foundation of a life profoundly well-lived, but they do enable me to press the reset button after my commute and draw breath before I launch into teaching. On my last day alone before the children arrived home, I was inspired by this to get up early and spend 45 minutes on my writing. There was no pressure to be productive - it was more ‘just have a look at this so my unconscious mind has something to process in the background later on’. I’m not sure I did any actual writing at all - if I did, it was maybe a sentence or two at most. But it was strangely satisfying - much more so than if I’d said to myself, ‘No work allowed - I need to spend this time RELAXING’. I’m not saying, here, that you should start your days off by doing work - in many cases, that’s going to be a terrible idea. What I’m encouraging you to do, rather, is to be open-minded about what sorts of activities bring you pleasure. That might be a small amount of no-pressure work, or it could be something like finally doing some boring admin thing you’ve been low-key stressing about or clearing out a cupboard that’s been bothering you. Don’t do any of these things because you feel you should. But if these are things that you have reason, based on past experience, to believe will make you feel good - perhaps by starting the day feeling pleased at having accomplished something - then don’t rule them out because of preconceived ideas about what ‘pleasurable activities’ are supposed to look like. Now, you might be wondering something like, ‘Admittedly I would be more likely to relax if I spent 30 minutes on email in the morning, but perhaps that’s something I ought to resist? Maybe I ought to be learning to relax without doing email or other work-related things?’ On the one hand, yes, I agree. If you find that you’re so anxious about being productive that you’re likely to blow a gasket if you take a single day off, then that’s probably something you need to work on. But on the other hand, this isn’t the sort of happiness I’m talking about here. I’m not talking about how to enjoy a day off having fully sorted out your life so that you’re living in a way that is aligned with your values and where you can keep everything in appropriate perspective and appreciate that the world is not going to implode just because you take some time off. I’m talking about making it possible for you now, with all your imperfections and ‘areas for growth’ and things-in-progress, to hit pause and experience some positive emotional states on your week or day or hour or 20 minutes off. You don’t have to fix yourself before you get some time off. If setting aside a little bit of time in the morning for emails is going to shut up your inner critic for the rest of the day and enable you to enjoy yourself more than you otherwise would, do it. Yes, there’s work on yourself to do here. No, your day off is not the time to do it. Practise claiming little pockets of happiness - by which I mean short periods of feeling good - in your otherwise chaotic and imperfect life. It’s possible, I promise. So. Your down-time might end up incorporating unexpected and very un-fun things, like admin. It might also involve very very modest things, things that might strike you as just not good enough for the time off you have planned for yourself. Many of us strive for excellence in relaxation, just as we do in our professional lives. We are perfectionists even about doing nothing. We end up thinking that a worthwhile day off needs to include grand gestures, clever ideas, thinking-outside-the-box. When we do that, we overlook the importance of the small things - things like an excellent cup of tea, taking your first breath of fresh air of the morning, hearing the birds singing, stopping to greet a neighbourhood cat (who is hopefully not stalking the singing birds). We can do better than things like that, we think to ourselves when we’re contemplating our time off. We need to aim higher! But, actually, there are good scientific reasons to focus on these small things. In 2009, the psychologists Ed Diener, Ed Sandvik, and William Pavot published a book chapter entitled ‘Happiness is the frequency, not the intensity, of positive versus negative affect’ … which is self-explanatory, really. By ‘happiness’, they mean ‘high subjective wellbeing’; in other words, how good you feel. The upshot is: if you want to enjoy your time off, think in terms of appreciating lots of small things that will make you modestly happy rather than just a few big things that (you hope) will dramatically increase your happiness. Let me leave you with a suggestion about how you can plan ahead for your next pocket of relaxation time. Practise noticing the little things that bring you pleasure, and write them down. That activity itself is valuable, in that it’s a way of tuning in to and appreciating what’s good in your life. But you can also use it as a resource next time you have some time off. If you find yourself stuck for ideas about how to spend your time, you can read through the list and think about how you might incorporate a few things that you’ve enjoyed doing in the past. Keep it modest - you don’t have to pack everything in, and of course you’re welcome to try new things too. But, in some modest way, take charge. Speak soon, pals.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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