59 seconds, p.1
59 Seconds, page 1
ALSO BY RICHARD WISEMAN
Quirkology
Did You Spot the Gorilla?
The Luck Factor
Laughlab
To Jeff
CONTENTS
introduction
Self-help exposed, Sophie’s question, and the potential for rapid change
happiness
Why positive thinking often fails and how the real route to happiness involves a pencil, keeping the perfect diary, small acts of kindness, and developing the gratitude attitude
persuasion
Why rewards fail, how to give the flawless interview, improve your social life by making mistakes, never lose your wallet again, and convince anyone of anything by using your pet frog
motivation
The dark side of visualization, how to achieve absolutely anything by creating the ideal plan, overcoming procrastination, and employing “doublethink”
creativity
Exploding the myth of brainstorming, how to get in touch with your inner Leonardo merely by glancing at modern art, lying down, and putting a plant on your desk
attraction
Why you shouldn’t play hard to get, how the subtle art of seduction involves the simplest of touches, roller-coaster rides, and avoiding artificial Christmas trees
relationships
The perils of “active listening,” why Velcro can help couples stick together, words speak louder than actions, and a single photograph can make all the difference
stress
Why not to kick and scream, how to reduce resentment in seconds, harness the power of a four-legged friend, and think your way to low blood pressure
decision making
Why two heads are no better than one, how never to regret a decision again, protect yourself against hidden persuaders, and tell when someone is lying to you
parenting
The Mozart myth, how to choose the best name for a baby, instantly divine a child’s destiny using just three marsh-mallows, and effectively praise young minds
personality
Why not to trust graphology, how to gain an apparently magical insight into other people’s personality from their fingers and thumbs, their pets, and the time they go to bed
conclusion
Sophie’s answer: Ten techniques in 59 seconds
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
introduction
Self-help exposed,
Sophie’s question, and the
potential for rapid change
DO YOU WANT TO IMPROVE an important aspect of your life? Perhaps lose weight, find your perfect partner, obtain your dream job, or simply be happier? Try this simple exercise. …
Close your eyes and imagine the new you. Think how great you would look in those close-fitting designer jeans, dating Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie, sitting in a luxurious leather chair at the top of the corporate ladder, or sipping a piña colada as the warm waves of the Caribbean gently lap at your feet.
The good news is that this type of exercise has been recommended by some in the self-help industry for years. The bad news is that a large body of research now suggests that such exercises are, at best, ineffective and, at worst, harmful. Although imagining your perfect self may make you feel better, engaging in such mental escapism can also have the unfortunate side effect of leaving you unprepared for the difficulties that crop up on the rocky road to success, thus increasing the chances of your faltering at the first hurdle rather than persisting in the face of failure. Fantasizing about heaven on earth may put a smile on your face, but it is unlikely to help transform your dreams into reality.
Other research suggests that the same goes for many popular techniques that claim to improve your life. Attempting to “think yourself happy” by suppressing negative thoughts can make you obsess on the very thing that makes you unhappy. Group brainstorming can produce fewer and less original ideas than individuals working alone. Punching a pillow and screaming out loud can increase, rather than decrease, your anger and stress levels.
Then there is the infamous “Yale Goal Study.” According to some writers, in 1953 a team of researchers interviewed Yale’s graduating seniors, asking them whether they had written down the specific goals that they wanted to achieve in life. Twenty years later the researchers tracked down the same cohort and found that the 3 percent of people who had specific goals all those years before had accumulated more personal wealth than the other 97 percent of their classmates combined. It is a great story, frequently cited in self-help books and seminars to illustrate the power of goal setting. There is just one small problem—as far as anyone can tell, the experiment never actually took place. In 2007 writer Lawrence Tabak, from the magazine Fast Company, attempted to track down the study, contacting several writers who had cited it, the secretary of the Yale Class of 1953, and other researchers who had tried to discover whether the study had actually happened.1 No one could produce any evidence that it had ever been conducted, causing Tabak to conclude that it was almost certainly nothing more than an urban myth. For years, self-help gurus had been happy to describe a study without checking their facts.
Both the public and the business world have bought into modern-day mind myths for years and, in so doing, may have significantly decreased the likelihood of achieving their aims and ambitions. Worse still, such failure often encourages people to believe that they cannot control their lives. This is especially unfortunate, as even the smallest loss of perceived control can have a dramatic effect on people’s confidence, happiness, and life span. In one classic study conducted by Ellen Langer at Harvard University, half of the residents in a nursing home were given a houseplant and asked to look after it, while the other residents were given an identical plant but told that the staff would take responsibility for it.2 Six months later, the residents who had been robbed of even this small amount of control over their lives were significantly less happy, healthy, and active than the others. Even more distressing, 30 percent of the residents who had not looked after their plant had died, compared to 15 percent of those who had been allowed to exercise such control. Similar results have been found in many areas, including education, career, health, relationships, and dieting. The message is clear—those who do not feel in control of their lives are less successful, and less psychologically and physically healthy, than those who do feel in control.
A few years ago I was having lunch with a friend named Sophie. Sophie is a bright, successful thirtysomething who holds a senior position in a firm of management consultants. Over lunch Sophie explained that she had recently bought a well-known book on increasing happiness, and she asked me what I thought of the industry. I explained that I had serious reservations about the scientific backing for some of the techniques being promoted, and described how any failure to change could do considerable psychological harm. Sophie looked concerned and then asked whether academic psychology had produced more scientifically supported ways of improving people’s lives. I started to describe some of the quite complex academic work in happiness, and after about fifteen minutes or so Sophie stopped me. She politely explained that interesting though it was, she was a busy person, and she asked whether I could come up with some effective advice that didn’t take quite so much time to implement. I asked how long I had. Sophie glanced at her watch, smiled, and replied, “About a minute?”
Sophie’s comment made me stop and think. Many people are attracted to self-development and self-improvement because of the lure of quick and easy solutions to various issues in their lives. Unfortunately, most academic psychology either fails to address these issues or presents far more time-consuming and complex answers (thus the scene in Woody Allen’s film Sleeper, in which Allen’s character discovers that he has awakened two hundred years in the future, sighs, and explains that had he been in therapy all this time he would almost be cured). I wondered whether there were tips and techniques hidden away in academic journals that were empirically supported but quick to carry out.
Over the course of a few months I carefully searched through endless journals containing research papers from many different areas of psychology. As I examined the work, a promising pattern emerged, with researchers in quite different fields developing techniques that help people achieve their aims and ambitions in minutes, not months. I collected hundreds of these studies, drawn from many different areas of the behavioral sciences. From mood to memory, persuasion to procrastination, resilience to relationships, together they represent a new science of rapid change.
There is a very old story, often told to fill time during training courses, involving a man trying to fix his broken boiler. Despite his best efforts over many months, he simply can’t mend it. Eventually, he gives up and decides to call in an expert. The engineer arrives, gives one gentle tap on the side of the boiler, and stands back as it springs to life. The engineer presents the man with a bill, and the man argues that he should pay only a small fee as the job took the engineer only a few moments. The engineer quietly explains that the man is not paying for the time he took to tap the boiler but rather the years of experience involved in knowing exactly where to tap. Just like the expert engineer tapping the boiler, the techniques described in this book demonstrate that effective change does not have to be time-consuming. In fact, it can take less than a minute and is often simply a question of knowing exactly where to tap.
happiness
Why positive thinking often fails and
how the real route to happiness involves a pencil,
keeping the perfect diary,
small acts of kindness, and
developing the gratitude attitude
WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO BE HAPPY? Well, for one thing, by definition, you will feel better. But there is more to it than that. Happiness does not just make you enjoy life more; it actually affects how successful you are in both your personal life and your professional life.
A few years ago Sonja Lyubomirsky at the University of California and her colleagues set about the mammoth task of reviewing hundreds of studies in which experimenters cheered up selected people and then monitored the effects of their subjects’ newfound joy.1 All sorts of procedures were employed to make participants feel happy, including having them smell fresh-cut flowers, read out positive affirmations (“I really am a good person”), eat chocolate cake, dance, or watch a funny film. Sometimes the experimenters resorted to trickery, telling participants that they had performed especially well on an IQ test or ensuring that they “accidentally” found some money in the street. Regardless of the method used, the overall result was clear—happiness doesn’t just flow from success; it actually causes it.
After trawling the data from hundreds of studies involving more than a quarter of a million participants, Lyubomirsky discovered impressive benefits to being happy. Happiness makes people more sociable and altruistic, it increases how much they like themselves and others, it improves their ability to resolve conflict, and it strengthens their immune systems. The cumulative effect means that people have more satisfying and successful relationships, find more fulfilling careers, and live longer, healthier lives.
Given the emotional and tangible benefits of happiness, it is not surprising that everyone wants a slice of the pie. But what is the most effective way of putting a permanent smile on your face? Ask most people the question, and you are likely to receive a two-word answer: more money. In survey after survey, the need for a fatter wallet consistently tops the “must have” list for happiness.2 But is it really possible to buy happiness, or do financial aspirations set you on the road to despair?
Part of the answer comes from a remarkable study conducted in the 1970s by Philip Brickman from Northwestern University and his colleagues.3 Brickman wanted to discover what happens to people’s happiness when their financial dreams come true. Does a huge windfall really create a long-term smile, or does the initial thrill quickly fade away as newfound fortune becomes commonplace? Brickman contacted a group of people who had won a major prize in the Illinois State Lottery, including several who had hit the million-dollar jackpot. For a control group, he randomly selected people from the Illinois telephone directory. Everyone was asked to rate how happy they were at that moment and how happy they expected to be in the future. In addition, they were asked to say how much pleasure they derived from everyday activities in life, such as chatting with friends, hearing a funny joke, or receiving a compliment. The results provide a striking insight into the relationship between happiness and money.
Contrary to popular belief, those who had won the lottery were no more or less happy than those in the control group. There was also no significant difference between the groups when it came to how happy they expected to be in the future. In fact, there was only one difference—compared to those who had won the lottery, the people in the control group derived significantly more pleasure from the simple things in life.
Clearly, winning the lottery is a rather unusual way of obtaining financial security, but psychologists have also examined the relationship between income and happiness among those who have worked for their wealth.
Some of this work has involved carrying out large-scale international surveys by having people rate how happy they are (usually using standard ten-point scales that run from “very unhappy” to “very happy”) and then plotting countries’ average happiness ratings against their gross national product (GNP).4 The results suggest that although people in very poor nations are not as happy as those in wealthier countries, this disparity vanishes once a country has achieved a relatively modest GNP. Research examining the possible link between salary and happiness found the same type of pattern. One study, conducted by Ed Diener from the University of Illinois and his colleagues, revealed that even those on the Forbes 100 list of the wealthiest people are only slightly happier than the average American.5 All of this adds up to one simple message: when people can afford the necessities in life, an increase in income does not result in a significantly happier life.
So why should this be the case? Part of the reason is that we all get used to what we have very quickly. Buying a new car or a bigger house provides a short-term feel-good boost, but we quickly become accustomed to it and sink back to our pre-purchase level of joy. As psychologist David Myers once phrased it, “Thanks to our capacity to adapt to ever greater fame and fortune, yesterday’s luxuries can soon become today’s necessities and tomorrow’s relics.”6 If money can’t buy happiness, what is the best way of putting a long-term smile on your face?
The bad news is that research shows that about 50 percent of your overall sense of happiness is genetically determined, and so cannot be altered.7 The better news is that another 10 percent is attributable to general circumstances (educational level, income, whether you are married or single, etc.) that are difficult to change. However, the best news is that the remaining 40 percent is derived from your day-to-day behavior and the way you think about yourself and others. With a little knowledge, you can become substantially happier in just a few seconds.
The problem is that the advice offered in some self-help books and courses is at odds with the results of scientific research. Take, for example, the power of positive thinking. Does the road to happiness really depend on people’s being able to simply push negative thoughts out of their mind? Actually, research suggests that such thought suppression may be far more likely to increase, rather than decrease, misery. In the mid-1980s Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner chanced upon an obscure but intriguing quote from Dostoyevsky’s Winter Notes on Summer Impressions: “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” Wegner decided to carry out a simple experiment to discover if this was true. Each person from a group of willing volunteers was made to sit alone in a room and told to think about anything, but NOT to imagine Dostoyevsky’s white bear. Everyone was then asked to ring a bell each time the banned bear sprang to mind. Within moments a cacophony of bells indicated that Dostoyevsky was right—attempting to suppress certain thoughts makes people obsess on the very topic that they are trying to avoid.
Other work has shown how this effect operates in real life, with one study, conducted by Jennifer Borton and Elizabeth Casey at Hamilton College in New York State, providing a dramatic demonstration of how it influences people’s moods and self-esteem.8 Borton and Casey asked a group of people to describe their most upsetting thought about themselves. The researchers then had half of the group spend the next eleven days trying to push this thought out of their minds, while the remaining participants were asked to carry on with life as usual. At the end of each day, everyone indicated the degree to which they had dwelled upon their upsetting thought, and rated their mood, anxiety level, and self-esteem. The results were conceptually similar to those obtained by Wegner’s “white bear” experiment. The group attempting to actively suppress their negative thoughts actually thought more about them. Compared to those going about their business as usual, the suppression group also rated themselves as more anxious, more depressed, and having lower self-esteem. More than twenty years of research have demonstrated that this paradoxical phenomenon occurs in many different aspects of everyday life, showing, for example, that asking dieters not to think about chocolate causes them to consume more of it and asking the public not to elect fools to positions in government encourages them to vote for George Bush.9
So, if thought suppression is not the answer, what can you do? One possibility is to distract yourself. Perhaps spend time with your family, go to a party, get more involved in your work, or take up a new hobby. Although this technique can often provide an effective short-term boost, it will probably not lead to a long-term sense of contentment. For that, research suggests, you need to know how to use a pencil, how to keep the perfect diary, how to carry out small acts of kindness, and how to develop the gratitude attitude.
