A mentalist's guide to being happy
The illusionist Derren Brown has studied the philosophy and psychology of happiness - and he argues that many of us could take a radical new approach to improving our wellbeing.
Imagine that you are standing on one side of a river, and you want to reach a village on the other side.
You have a group of cheerleaders behind you, egging you on. So you set off, full of determination. But you have forgotten to take the river’s current into account – and no matter how hard you strain your muscles, you can’t quite overcome it. By the time you reach the other bank, you have been pulled far from the place you intended to be.
We may not like to admit it, but our life follows a similar trajectory – as forces beyond our control drag us from our chosen path. And the importance of recognising this fact is just one of the many lessons I learnt from Derren Brown, the illusionist, "mentalist" (mind-reader) and writer, whose book Happy explores the philosophy and psychology of wellbeing.
Most self-help books would suggest that you can fight life’s currents with determination and positive thinking. But taking inspiration from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers like the Stoics and 19th Century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, as well as modern scientific research, Brown believes that this is simply a recipe for disappointment and frustration. “We’re better off making our peace with the fact that that is the dynamic of life – rather than creating a false idea that we can somehow control everything to bring it in line with what our goals are,” he says.
As part of BBC Reel’s new Rethink series, I sat down with Brown to discuss the inspiration for his book and the reasons that ancient philosophy is essential to cope with the peculiar demands of the 21st Century.
The concept of Happy might seem like a departure from Brown’s well-known stage shows and TV programmes, but he points out that his illusions have often played with the mind’s blindspots. “Magic is a great analogy for how we edit our experiences.”
How so? Magicians, he says, try to tell a convincing narrative that dismisses certain inconvenient facts – and that’s exactly what the brain does as it compiles our life story. “It took me a long time to realise that. When I did realise that, I saw that magic wasn’t just this childish way of trying to impress people, but actually it sort of held a clue as to how we how we process reality and therefore might better live in accordance with it.”
You might tell yourself that you’re an awkward misfit, for instance – and so you only remember the times when you acted embarrassingly. Or you might only ever pick bad relationships, because your overarching story is that you are “unlucky in love”.
We often adopt these stories from a young age, he says. “A lot of the narratives we inherit come from when we’re really small, from our parents, who have their own set of frustrations – their own unlived lives,” he says. “And for better or worse, we take all that on board and we go out in the world thinking that maybe we have to be successful to be loved, or that we have to always put other people’s needs first, or that we have some big secret that we couldn’t possibly tell people.” Recognising the sources of these narratives can go some way to reducing our anxiety and unhappiness, Brown says. (For more on the power of storytelling to shape our health and happiness, see our recent in-depth story on the subject.)
Today, the stories that we tell ourselves may also be shaped by the self-help industry’s promotion of positive thinking, determination and self-belief. While it might initially feel empowering to see ourselves as the beleaguered hero who relentlessly pursues their goals through sheer willpower, Brown argues that for most people, it will only lead to disappointment. (In Happy, Brown is particularly scathing of Rhonda Byrne's The Secret.)
One problem is that we often aren’t very good at choosing the right goals. “We have a terrible understanding of what fulfils us.” Many people set their sights on money, for instance – but psychological research has shown that, beyond the certain level of wealth needed for basic comfort, riches do not bring greater happiness.
View BBC Reel’s video of Derren Brown explaining the downsides of relentless optimism, and the difference between the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”
If you’re not convinced, Brown suggests the following thought experiment: imagine that you woke up one day to discover that you were the only person left living on Earth. With no one else around, you’d be able to go and live in any house you wanted – Buckingham Palace even. But would you want to? “You would probably find somewhere that was just comfortable and practical.” The same goes for your expensive clothes, fancy cars, or the latest technology. “When you really follow that thought through, it’s amazing how much we acquire and want only to impress other people.”
Even if we do choose the right goals, the positive-thinking movement can place too much responsibility on the individual; if we haven’t succeeded, it’s our own fault for not having wanted it enough. Worse still, the kind of inflated personal belief that is promoted by certain gurus may cause us to ignore the criticisms of those around us, even when they might be offering a more realistic view of our chances.
Ultimately, the success stories we hear are the anomalies. Just think of all the motivational autobiographies out there: all giving the impression that determination was the key to success. “You just never read the biographies of businessmen who have failed,” he says – yet there will be many out there who had all the self-belief, but just never managed to make it. After all, as many as nine out of ten start-ups end up bombing.
Brown, of course, isn’t arguing that we should simply give up on our dreams. But if we return to that idea of the swimmer crossing from one bank to the other, it’s no good ignoring the currents pushing against us or believing that our force of will alone will overturn them – it is inevitable that you are going to be dragged off course.
If positive thinking can’t make us happier, what can? Brown argues that a healthier attitude to life comes from the Stoics, the ancient Greek philosophers who argued that we should actively and deliberately distinguish between the things that are within your power to change, and the things that aren’t – which we should learn to accept as a necessary part of life.
“I find myself doing this a lot that when something’s really bothering and frustrating me. I just think which side of the line is it on? Is it my thoughts and actions? Or is it something out there? It’s always something out there, it’s someone else’s behaviour. So then I think well, what if it was fine that that person is an idiot, or that my partner can’t handle stress well, or something like that – things that kind of end up having an effect on me, but actually, what if it’s fine, that that’s just their thing? It’s a very helpful thought, because then you take all the stress off yourself. You can then still work out how to help that person if you want, if that’s appropriate, but you kind of emotionally just disconnect from the pain of it.”
He gives an example of a game of tennis, but he says that same applies to any major challenge. “If you go into the game thinking ‘I must win’, that's out of your control. So if you start to lose, you feel like you're failing and then you become anxious… But if you go into a game of tennis thinking ‘I'll play as well as I possibly can to the best of my ability’ – that is under your control, and it doesn't matter if you start to lose – you won’t feel the frustration of failure, because you’re not failing, you’re still sticking true to your goals.”
Similarly, you can go into a job interview with the full knowledge that even if you perform your absolute best, the employer’s final decision is still beyond your control, and you can afford yourself a little compassion if you don’t make it. Brown says that this lowers our emotional “centre of gravity”, making us more resilient to life’s challenges. “[The Stoic’s] model of happiness was about avoiding disturbance.”
Brown also advocates the Stoic practice of premeditation every morning to prepare the mind for the day ahead. “It is, quite simply, spending a few minutes every morning, thinking about the day that lies ahead, and what the kind of traps are likely to be where you’re likely to let yourself down, and just anticipating them and thinking them through,” he says. This deliberate self-reflection – taken from a distanced perspective, when we are in a more rational frame of mind – reminds us that some things will be out of our control, and need not be the source of upset. At the same time it helps us to navigate the challenges that arewithin our control more wisely, so that we don’t just make the same mistakes again and again.
One of the best ways of achieving this, he says, is to leave the phone out of the bedroom. “It’s a little reminder that okay, instead of just browsing Twitter, I’ll think about what’s going to happen today and how I can meet those things in a more useful way.”
A sceptic might question whether these ancient philosophies can be relevant in today’s turbulent times, but Brown argues that it is just as relevant today as ever before. “The Stoics appear during a huge time of constant wars and real political strife. And it became very popular, I think, because it’s a way of distancing yourself from strife and keeping your centre of gravity within you.” He emphasises that this is not an excuse to remain passive or apathetic – it simply helps you to find some personal peace in the turmoil, and some perspective in the battles we do choose to fight, rather than resorting to outrage in every disagreement.
The more detached approach might also help us to deal with the trials of social media and to remember that the truth of someone’s private life is often very different from the perfect exterior we present to the world. “It must be very difficult growing up, when that [social media] is really all you know, and you’re comparing that to this sort of horrible, ugly, messy version of yourself that you know, exists,” he says. “It’s hard to remember that everybody else has one of those as well.”
With that in mind, I wonder how much we are simply seeing a public facade of Brown himself. But as far as you can tell from our short conversation, the Stoic approach of accepting our lack of control certainly seems to bring him moments of relief in his hectic life.
“It’s like that feeling when you’re a kid and you think you’ve got to get up for school and you realise it’s a Saturday,” he says. And that’s the kind of contentment that we could all hope to achieve.
--
David Robson is a senior journalist at BBC Future. He is @d_a_robson on Twitter.
Join more than one million Future fans by liking us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter or Instagram.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”. A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
courtesy of BBC
HOW HINDSIGHT BIAS SKEWS YOUR JUDGEMENT
By Alex Hannaford
Sometimes we just know something will happen and it does. But experts say channeling that experience into decision-making is an error that leads to mistakes.
On 8 November 2016 – US election night – the betting odds of Donald Trump winning the presidency had narrowed to five to one. By the following morning, he'd managed to pull off a feat many thought impossible, but that didn't stop the I-told-you-sos – friends, family members and even online soothsayers – who claimed to have known all along that Trump would triumph despite such bad odds.
To a lesser extent it happened in November 2008 too, when Barack Obama won the election. After accepting the Democratic nomination three months earlier, his chance of victory hovered around 60%. When he won, you may well have been one of those who ‘knew’ that was going to be the outcome, and imagined that his odds of winning had been much, much higher. But just because he won didn’t change his odds of winning prior to his victory.
This is hindsight bias – a phenomenon in which we revise probabilities after the fact or exaggerate the extent to which past events could have been predicted beforehand. Politics doesn’t have a monopoly on this: we’re guilty of hindsight bias when we talk about the weather (there’s only a 20% chance of rain, but you say it’s going to rain and it does, and suddenly you have better forecasting ability than the experts); it happens at sporting events, in court rooms, in medical decisions and in business.
In fact, hindsight bias is one of the most widely studied of what are known as ‘decision traps’, in which people routinely employ mental shortcuts to simplify decisions when they're not certain; decisions that are often skewed by cognitive biases: we guess something improbable will happen and it does, but those probabilities never changed – and, believe it or not, nobody possesses supernatural abilities.
Causes and consequences
According to Nobel Prize-winning American economist Richard Thaler, businesses may be more prone to hindsight bias than other entities. In one study, researchers found that 77.3% of entrepreneurs in charge of failed start-ups believed that – before the failure – their company would grow into a successful business. After they failed, only 58% said they had originally believed their company would be a success.
In an interview Thaler gave to business magazine McKinsey Quarterly, he said if a CEO decided to gamble on an idea that looked good, then a few years later it turned out a competitor came up with a better product, “the CEO is going to remember, ‘I never really liked this idea’”.
Thaler says a simple fix could be to write things down; to make a record of how a decision was made at the time so that companies can learn lessons after the event. “Any company that can learn to distinguish between bad decisions and bad outcomes has a leg up,” he says. “Memorialise the fact that the CEO and the other people that have approved this decision all have the same assumptions, that no competitor has a similar product in the pipeline, that we don't expect a major financial crisis.”
Kathleen Vohs, a social scientist at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management, co-authored a 2012 paper on hindsight bias which found that its consequences included “myopic attention to a single causal understanding of the past (to the neglect of other reasonable explanations) as well as general overconfidence in the certainty of one’s judgements”.
Vohs says some are more prone to hindsight bias than others. If, for example, you are in the kind of profession where you receive a lot of timely and clear feedback before you render a decision, like accounting, you’ll tend to show a smaller level of hindsight bias.
Much of the business world, though, is unclear in terms of what causes success or failure – which is often due to multiple factors. “When you have ambiguity like that… people can come up with a mental causal pathway in which they believe they can see how something would have occurred - ‘oh, I can see very clearly how that would have happened’ – [then] you have a higher level of hindsight bias,” she says.
Drew Boyd, executive director of the University of Cincinnati’s MSc Marketing programme, says one direct result of hindsight bias is something called stereotypy. “It happens in business a lot when you think that something that has happened before is going to happen again. It seems to make sense. But then it doesn’t happen again and you wonder what happened.”
“Business people will decide on a strategy because it worked for them before. But the conditions in the next environment are going to be different: it’s a different market situation, different people, and it’s a mistake to immediately assume that what worked before is going to work again.”
How to de-bias and improve your decision-making
Boyd says a good way to avoid such errors is to start again: “Consider what happened before, but fold in new pieces of information, widen the field, incorporate new data along with old data. What people have to remember is they’re succumbing to an even broader bias called omission neglect – a tendency to consider only the evidence we have available to us.”
The saying goes that hindsight is 20:20, but Boyd says it’s worse than that. “It makes people think they can look back at past events and interpret something; it makes them think they have new ability to predict.” He says that in order to correct for hindsight bias, you have to realise you don’t possess a crystal ball.
“We try to teach people to use what we call Bayesian thinking. [Eighteenth Century English statistician] Thomas Bayes’s premise was to consider all sources of information but weight them: some information is more valuable, but all information has some value. Weight that information appropriately and you tend to make the best decision… make decisions based on what the data says is likely to happen, not what you think is going to happen.”
American businessman Warren Buffet, Boyd says, has a formula he calls ‘value investing’. “He follows it, but he knows the odds of succeeding are what they are. He doesn’t always hit magic; he loses occasionally, but he doesn’t say the odds were against him those times. Successful people understand risk for what it is and don’t make revisions in hindsight. Go with the odds, not the gods.”
Kathleen Vohs says there is one de-biasing tactic she favours known as the ‘consider the opposite strategy’. Before rendering a decision you should flip it and think: how could this not have gone the way you anticipated? “Once you have your little narrative in your mind, think: how could the outcome go in a different direction or not occur at all?” she says. “If you flip the script like that in a number of ways you can reduce hindsight bias.”
Vohs says this method has the effect of disrupting your confidence. “Anything that reduces people's confidence in predicting something will happen or the pathway in which something will happen is a good way to go about it.”
To comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Capital, please head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.
If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter called "If You Only Read 6 Things This Week". A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Culture, Capital and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Subscribe to:
Posts
(
Atom
)
No comments :
Post a Comment