Get happy: Paul Dolan, the man making London smile

Polluted skies, long commutes, dating hell, bad sex… this man thinks he can solve all your problems. Hannah Betts meets Paul Dolan, London’s Professor Happy
Square smile: Professor Paul Dolan on the roof of the LSE last month
Hannah Betts4 September 2014

Professor Paul Dolan, author of Penguin’s hotly anticipated new feel-good tome, Happiness by Design, says: ‘I thought you might ask me about London because everyone’s so f***ing miserable.’ The book’s thesis is that a happy existence requires not only pleasure but purpose and that we should engineer our lives to allocate time and attention to matters that yield both. This sounds deceptively simple, only most of us spectacularly fail at it, Londoners not least. In the 2012 Office for National Statistics (ONS) National Well-being Survey, the questions for which Dolan helped devise, Londoners were found to be Britain’s most malcontent, festering wretchedly away in our angst-inducing capital.

Dolan, 46, is a man who walks it as he talks it: witty, engaging, forever erupting into raucous laughter. As his book advocates taking action, so he is not short on it himself. A stammerer, he eradicated his speech impediment by hard graft; a skinny chap, he morphed his physique through bodybuilding. As we talk, he looks poised to spring out of his chair. He uses the f-word almost as much as I do. Indeed, I tell him that ES will have to rename him ‘Professor F***’ from his more regular epithet ‘Professor Happy’.

None of which detracts from his imposing academic credentials. After an economics degree at Swansea, he headed north to undertake a PhD at York. A chance encounter with Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, led to a spell at Princeton, and he is now a professor in behavioural science at the London School of Economics, with a penchant for public policy. He is a former member of the Cabinet Office’s ‘nudge unit’ and part of the ONS’s wellbeing team; he has also advised the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence.

Born in Hackney and brought up in Essex by working-class parents, Dolan enjoys a certain outsider-turned-establishment-member status. ‘When I’m talking policy with politicos, I sometimes feel it’s like that scene in The Blues Brothers where the bartender says: “We’ve got both kinds of music: country and western.” They’ve got both kinds of university: Oxford and Cambridge.’

As one might expect, his book does not follow the customary self-help path of perkily platitudinous lists and bumper-sticker philo-sophy. The first half gives academic evidence for his purpose-must-be-married-with-pleasure thesis; the second, refreshingly unpatronising food for thought. The strategies he recommends — seeing one’s friends more, privileging experience over buying, listening to music — are not radical, but his principle of redesigning one’s life to be made of such moments is.

‘Originally the book was filled with song quotes,’ he tells me. ‘Then the publishers said we’d have to pay for them. But The Smiths’ line “Why do I give valuable time/To people who don’t care if I live or die” is everything brought together. We need to design our environments for maximum happiness. My friend Mig makes me happy so I structure it so we talk at the same time once a week.’ A case of self-nudging? ‘Well, yeah, but I once caught myself telling a mate to “nudge himself happy” and that sounded a bit dodgy, so I tend to avoid that sort of phrasing.’

Has he ever been depressed? His joviality is tempered by a respectful seriousness: ‘No, I haven’t, no. I think I’m resilient. You know how you can have two friends going through the same experience and one goes to pieces, but the other is fine? I think I’ve always been conscious of the fact that I’ll feel all right long-term. Things matter, but not that much. What do they say: the best way of getting over someone is by getting under someone else?’

Happy chappy: the professor takes a stand

The book is reassuring on the matter of break-ups: they hurt, but, ultimately, we convince ourselves we’ve moved on to something and someone better. It is advice he is adept at giving to heartbroken students. Dolan is as logical about his own emotional life, deciding to become a parent to Poppy, six, and Stanley, five, by weighing up that diminished pleasure would be compensated for by increased purpose; something he is having to remind himself as he teaches them their times tables. He has been with his wife Les for 12 years.

The only thing that ever approached denting his self-professed sentimental hedonism was living in London, which he did for two years. ‘I hated it. Only in London have I ever cared about money. It was almost like a pollution.’ He now resides in Brighton, coastal living having been proven to be cheer-inspiring.

Based on what the book teaches us about happiness, Londoners are basically screwed: caring too much about money, which never brings the satisfaction people imagine; spending rather than doing; living further away from friends; feeling less in control of their time; and doing fewer new things and spending less time in the fresh air. So what can those of us not fortunate enough to escape do about this?

For a start, we can be less slavish about our smartphones. ‘They’re our crack. We’re constantly checking our emails and Twitter because the stimuli are there crying out for our attention.’ Rectifying the day-to-day quality of our experience is key, so that, rather than concentrating on the financial rewards of a new job, we might bear in mind that it involves a hideous daily commute (women are especially affected by commute trauma as they tend to do more domestic work on top of it).

We should avoid pollution, avail ourselves of green space, be around people who bring us joy, listen to music, and make ourselves laugh. Regarding capital-based anxieties such as house prices, we can reallocate our attention to improving what we have: ‘My office has high ceilings, a table for people to talk at rather than a desk, a stereo and a fridge with wine in it. It’s all about context.’ Becoming neophiles (lovers of new activities) rather than neophobes is also a must. ‘If you don’t enjoy something, you don’t have to do it again, but you will still benefit from having had a fresh experience.’

Regarding relationships: ‘Cut out the bad ones. If you are the dumper, eliminate misery-making uncertainty: don’t speak to them; don’t see them; tell them it’s over, and that there’s no prospect of your ever going out with them again.’ (This from the man who has schooled himself to leave social occasions the moment the notion of leaving enters his head.)

Sex can be enhanced by applying the theory of the ‘peak-end effect’, where people assess experiences according to the peak moment of pleasure or pain, and the final moment of pleasure or pain. ‘So no Sting-like tantric stuff. Who wants to have sex for 24 hours? Go out with a bang and that is what you and the other party will remember. And if you do not want to be unfaithful, then do not engineer situations in which it is likely. Do not put yourself drunk with another person in a hotel room.’

Britain has the seventh-highest prescription rate for antidepressants in the Western world. Dolan is not anti happy pills: ‘I don’t distinguish between authentic and inauthentic happiness. If something makes you happier, and it’s not harming other people, then do it. If there were no side-effects, then there would be no reason not to take them. There’s nothing morally objectionable in it, as many people assume. They feel things have to be hard work. We should be trying to make happiness easy.’

At misery’s greatest extreme, London suicide rates may have dropped from their traditional high. However, the number of people taking their own lives at a national level rose in 2011, according to the ONS, taking the figure to 6,045 people, an increase of 437 on the previous year. The highest rate was among men aged between 30 and 44. ‘Suicide is not something people decide to do on waking up and things not being great,’ explains Dolan. ‘It’s an evaluation that their life overall is not worth it. It’s not the thought of a particular day, it is feeling that life has no purpose.’

Many of us would still argue that the unhappy are born not made. ‘OK, Professor F***,’ I tell him at our interview’s end, ‘I do all these things — I even keep lists of things that I enjoy and people who are my friends, lest I forget in moments of gloom — and I’m still a depressive. What do you say to that?’

‘Look,’ he counters, ‘even untrained people are generally good at observing whether people are happy, and I reckon you’re better at it than you think. You’re clearly managing it.’ ‘And managing it is it?’ I ask. ‘Exactly — by consciously designing your environment in ways that allow your unconscious mind to roam free. This is happiness by design.’

I exit his office feeling positively spritely. Later, I arrange to get drunk with pals, I have the door open on to my tiny patch of greenery as I type, and offset my purpose with pleasure by listening to an hourly rousing anthem. It is possible that this unhappy Londoner may be a reformed character.

Happiness by Design is out now (Penguin, £20)

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