How to be happy

Why do some people enjoy life and others don't? Psychologists are spending $30m on trying to find out. Ian Sample reports

How to be happy

Propose a movement whose aim is to bottle happiness so it can be dispensed to one and all, saving humanity from a future of chronic misery, and you might expect at least a few people to roll their eyes. But, starting tomorrow, Britain's most prestigious scientific institution, the Royal Society, will host a meeting for some of the world's top psychologists who have done just that. Over two days, they will discuss "the science of wellbeing". Their aim is to find out why it is that some people's lives go so right. What is it that makes them happy and fulfilled, while others seem doomed to founder in misery, dissatisfaction and dejection?

As the psychologists converge on London, some, though dutifully upbeat, admit that the public could be forgiven for getting the wrong idea about the meeting. The term "wellbeing" doesn't help, they say, raising as it does images of New Age mumbo-jumbo. Positive psychology, as the movement is known, is categorically not New Age nonsense, claims Nick Baylis, a psychologist at Cambridge University who helped to organise the meeting. "We're only interested in serious science," he says. "If it didn't have science behind it, we would be no more credible than TV self-help gurus."

For the record, Baylis defines wellbeing as a state that allows someone to thrive and flourish. "It's a result of things going well and the cause of things going well. It's thinking, I'm getting better and life is feeling better. I'm getting better at what I do, whether it is being a friend, a lover, or a worker. I'm enjoying life."

The positive psychology movement was born in 1998 when Martin Seligman, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was voted in as president of the American Psychological Association. In his inaugural speech, Seligman, who had worked on depression for 30 years, stunned his audience by saying psychologists had missed a trick. Rather than devoting attention to lives that had gone desperately wrong, psychologists should change tack, focusing instead on people for whom everything was going well. While psychologists knew virtually all there was to know about depression, he said, they knew almost nothing of the secrets of a happy life. Discover what they are and it might give you a recipe that people could learn to make themselves happier and more satisfied with their lives. The speech went down a storm and Seligman soon found himself sitting on $30m of research funding.

According to Baylis, who is the only positive psychology lecturer in the country, the research is now beginning to bear fruit. Now it is time to work out what to do next. "It's all very well being able to describe a happy life, but can you bottle it? Can you take it into the classroom or the office and say we're going to teach your students, your workforce, to learn to be happier? First you have to ask, why would you bother? Do you really want a population of happy-clappy people? Aren't they just going to be horribly smug and piss people off?" he says. Evidently not.

"What we've found is that if someone is happy with life, they are more popular. We all like hanging around with happy people," says Baylis. "They are also more productive, healthier and live longer. Every positive you can think of, they come up trumps, so it has to be an aim worth having."

Psychologists have known for some time that optimism is a good defence against unhappiness. "If you're optimistic and you think life is going to get better, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy," says Baylis. "You will involve yourself more, you'll put yourself forward more, you will take more care of yourself. You'll figure that if you do more exercise and not booze as much, life will be better."

But some of us are just not natural optimists. What are we supposed to do?

Positive psychologists believe optimism can be learned, that we can teach ourselves to see a half-empty glass as half-full. All we have to do is spend time mulling over all the things that have gone right for us, rather than dwelling on what has gone badly. Research on depression shows that one of the biggest causes of depression is ruminating about something that went wrong in the past, says Baylis. "What happens is you look into the past and think about some event and keep turning it over, saying, 'I messed up, I messed up,' and you let it hurt you. You keep feeding it the oxygen of attention and the flames keep burning you."

But just as dwelling on negative events can lead to depression, dwelling on things that have gone well can help pick you up, he says. "You have to thank your lucky stars about what goes right on a daily basis. Whenever you get the feeling of being negative about things, just take a moment out and remind yourself of the stuff that has gone well. It could be anything from a conversation to your garden looking nice, or that it didn't rain on you when you were out on your bike. It's an extremely powerful technique."

And, says Seligman: "I used to think that all you had to do to get a happy person was get rid of the negatives in their life, but if that's all you do, you don't get a happy person, you get an empty person. You need the positives too."

By reminding ourselves what went well instead of what went wrong, positive psychologists believe we can build a buffer against unhappiness, making us better able to take life's knocks when they come.

Seligman, who is the figurehead of the positive psychology movement, goes further than suggesting people learn to think positively. He has worked out what he sees as a blueprint for happiness that people can use to set them on the path to a fulfilling and satisfying life. He believes there are three routes to happiness, which he calls the "pleasant life", the "good life" and the "meaningful life". Some are better than others, although a mix of all three is ideal. The pleasant life sees superficial pleasures as the key to happiness, and it is this that many people mistakenly pursue, he says. "The biggest mistake that people in the rich west make is to be enchanted with the Hollywood idea of happiness, which is really just giggling and smiling a lot," he says. While a life bent on instant pleasure and gratification offers some degree of happiness, it is ultimately unsatisfying on its own, he says.

Money, it turns out, isn't the answer either. Seligman believes that once we have enough to pay for life's basics such as food and a roof over our heads, more money adds little to our happiness.

To be seriously happy, Seligman says, we have to set our sights on a good life and a meaningful life. To do this we need to identify what he calls our signature strengths, which could be anything from perseverance and leadership to a love of learning. (Seligman has set up a website, which allows people to take a test to find out their top five signature strengths.)

Seligman says that once we know our signature strengths, using them more and more in our daily lives will make us feel happier and more fulfilled. By exploiting our strengths, he says, we will find life more gratifying and become completely immersed in what we are doing, whether working, making music or playing sport - a state positive psychologists call "flow".

Using our signature strengths in our working and social lives will help as achieve what Seligman calls a good life, while using them to help others will put us on course for achieving a meaningful life, he says.

So much for the theory. While positive psychology is broadly seen as valid by the psychology and psychiatry establishment, it does have its critics. "It's a step in the right direction and it works well to counter the previous tradition in psychology of over identifying everybody as wounded or suffering from some kind of mental disease," says Steven Wolin, a clinical psychiatrist at George Washington University in Washington DC. "But some say it's nothing new, that it's just a rehashing of older positive-thinking movements," he says.

Positive psychologists also stand accused of burying their heads in the sand and ignoring that depressed, even merely unhappy people, have real problems that need dealing with. Seligman counters this, saying positive psychology is not meant to replace other forms of therapy, but should be complementary, while people work through their negative feelings.

There are other criticisms too. The movement, though now in its sixth year, cannot show much scientific research to support it. "It's not yet a field that has had a lot of systematic research. So if I say to you that a sense of humour in the face of trouble is a strength, you might want to see some good research that backs that up - but I'll have trouble showing you that," says Wolin.

The point is not lost on Seligman, who used his $30m in research funds to set up scientific studies looking into all aspects of positive psychology. "If it's not backed up by good scientific data, it will collapse like a house of cards, and it will deserve to," he says.