Making Happy Memories - with Meik Wiking

welcome to another action for happiness live event it's uh absolutely lovely to have you all with us to see hundreds of people already joining us again for another one of these uh wonderful discussions we've been hosting for many many months now and i'm really delighted to be joined today by mike viking who we've had at many action happiness events before in person this is the first time we've done something together online mike and it's lovely to see you again likewise thanks for having me back yes and i'm really excited about this evening's topic about making happy memories but i'm also really keen to share all of your great work in the field of happiness research but particularly how we can apply that in our lives and to help others as well um you've written so many great books that bring this to life and help make it a reality for people so thank you all for being here and as always people please do join in the chat it's lovely to see you welcoming each other already from all around the world let's keep it kind and friendly as always and you can also ask any questions you'd like to pose to mike in the q a function so please do get involved vote up each other's questions and we'll make time for those towards the end of the conversation we're going to be having together but mike i guess to kick things off um you know you are ceo of this happiness research institute in denmark perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your own journey and why this topic of happiness matters so much to you sure also maybe i should just point out being based in denmark being danish danish is my first language so english is my second language and i've noticed when i speak english compared to danish i need to concentrate more and i get this really grumpy look on my face which is not good when you're a happiness researcher so sorry if i get a grumpy look on my face it's it just means i'm concentrating uh so i i am really happy to be uh to be back at action for happiness always a big fan of of what you guys are doing um so so my own journey with with happiness research started almost a decade ago and i was working for another think tank here in copenhagen where we were focusing on the green economy on sustainability and i've been there for about seven years and we're starting to sort of you know look for the next thing to do you know not feeling as passionate about the job as i did when i first started out and then one late evening in the office i stumbled upon something called the world happiness report so this was back in 2012. and um those familiar with the report no it's it's a it's a un commissioned report it sort of gives an overview of happiness research but it also presents a ranking of happiness or life satisfaction across i think it was 155 countries in the in the first report and denmark was in first place and i thought that's strange we don't look particularly happy you know why why is it that denmark is often doing well in these happiness rankings there should be somebody in denmark you know trying to understand that to study that that should be somebody creating a think tank on happiness and then i thought maybe i should do that um and i just got really excited over working with happiness you know this hadn't worked with happiness it's a really fun field to study and you know it's also a testimony that we are so many people here tonight from all across the world because this is something we all share it's something we are all interested in it's something we're all pursuing and it's something we're all experts in it's something we can all contribute to understanding um and i was just i was laying awake at night uh back in 2012 thinking about the different sort of studies you could conduct within happiness research and i just felt there was a lot of energy in myself around that field um but this was also 2012 so the wake of the financial crisis and i had a steady well-paying job um at the other think tank and i thought maybe this it is also a little bit crazy crazy to start a happiness research institute um but then on the on the personal side what happened was um i had a mentor i i really looked up to at the old think tank and he was a super good boss and and he looked like he was you know really good family man great dad to his to his kids and and a good husband um and i thought i want to be that guy in 15 years um and unfortunately he got very ill and and unfortunately died and he died when he was 49 and many years ago my own mother had also died when she was 49. so back in 2012 you know i was 34 so i had 15 years left until i would be 49 so i just started to think you know if i only have 15 years left what should i do with those years now should i continue with this job which is fine and it's steady and it's it's it's okay but i'm not super passionate about it or are you going to create what you are really excited about a happiness research institute a think tank on well-being and essentially i just quit and started out with what i thought was a good idea and a bad laptop and i think that's going to be the best decision that i'm going to make in my career it's it's it's it's really fun uh to work in happiness research we we are now a team of 10 in copenhagen but also in other cities and i get to work with some really great bright and and and lovely people so um so good decision yeah mike thank you for sharing that i i feel similarly blessed having the chance to spend my life and passion working on the actual happiness movement and you know trying to bring these important ideas to help others and something about what you've said there about when you're facing your own mortality i think is a thing we might come back to this idea of waking up which i think has been going on to some extent globally in the recent pandemic people realizing what really matters but before we dive into that before we talk about your most recent book what about happy memories which i'm really excited to delve into let's start with the basics you know you've been looking into what really makes us happy for many years data from all around the world your own experience what what are the things that you'd most like to share with this amazing community right now i suspect in some ways there's nothing new under the sun but i'd still love to hear you summarize what you think is most important in the findings yeah i mean you're right there is nothing new under the sun i mean aristotle came to the same conclusion 22 200 years ago and you know researchers we really like to find new things we like to get headlines and i don't think we're going to get headlines from saying that relationships are really important for happiness i think we all knew that connections are perhaps one of the best predictors of whether people are happy or not i think that's one of the most robust findings in in happiness research and but i think it's also quite comforting that that what we would expect to find in studies in data we actually we actually find that so i think the metrics we are working with works and but we also often talk in in denmark about sort of the abc for mental health so what people can do to boost their well-being on a daily basis and abc stands for act belong commit so doing something together with other people doing something active and doing something meaningful um is is what we usually advise people to do if they're just you're looking for a universal piece of advice and that's not so that's the abc act as in being physically active as that but and belongings about relationships and committing is doing it in a way that kind of leads to a meaningful action is that have i understood that right committing to a purpose like being a volunteer for action for happiness for example doing something that that serves a a greater good um so that can be a big scale it can also be small small scale last fall we had a beautiful fall day in in denmark and three of my friends and my girlfriend we went up to a uh forest just north of copenhagen um so it was during the pandemic so of course we had to spread out and and and distance each other but you can do that in in a forest and we were out we were together we were active and we were looking for edible mushrooms so it was it was it was ticking all the boxes in terms of you know a a a lovely afternoon and we we had a picnic under the trees and i think looking for activities like that is is quite use useful in our in our globalism for happiness that lovely simple example reminds me of a theme i've heard you talking about before mike about the connection between happiness and wealth we tend to get rather obsessed in modern culture about possessions and income and financial measures of well-being but what you've just reminded us there is that sometimes it's the simple things that really contribute what does that relationship look like to you yeah no you're right i mean yes money does matter because being without money is a course of of worry and stress and and and potentially misery um but after a certain point you know additional income is not going to impact my my quality of life and and i like cities where we um basically remove the price tag there is for happiness where you can enjoy life whether you are rich or poor you know having great parks adds to quality of life for everyone um another example and i think that this is also sort of at the personal level how do we decouple wealth and well-being which activities gives me joy and satisfaction with life that are free i like to look for those because that removes the power that money can sometimes have over us so one example is um one of my favorite things to do in the summer time is going to the harbor in copenhagen so i think now almost 20 years ago the water in the harbor in copenhagen was cleaned so now you can swim in it during summer and and obviously our summer lasts for about two days and then it's back to wintertime again but those two days are really amazing so so going there on a summer's day after work seeing my friends going for a swim perhaps having a beer afterwards that is what gives me quality of life and that is something that is free and something better i can enjoy whether i'm i'm rich and poor or poor but i really love this idea and of course as you say we mustn't be uh we've got to be careful how we talk about this because clearly if you are struggling financially it's really really hard to really thrive and flourish but nevertheless what you've said is absolutely true that you know many of the real joys in life don't require um or you know are available freely um why don't we just turn to the community i always love to hear from people at these events so why don't we ask them a question along those lines maybe to say you know what's something that makes you happy brings happiness to you or others and and that it's free or freely available to you so if you'd like to or something comes to mind please feel free to share in the chat and then maybe mike and i we can sort of share responses to that so walking dancing wild swimming nature helping others trees reading music the beach park run uh my dog friendship birds in the garden painting foraging sport vegetables uh my wife camping meditation this is a fantastic list libraries jokes my wolf fantastic next children uh cats yoga gratitude charity volunteering wow i'm getting a real buzz reading these mike how does that make you feel no it's lovely and and and and i really like this because it again shows me how similar we are across different cultures you know walking in natural spaces uh time with my chickens uh wild swimming animals cycling all of those things make me happy as well and of course free a big fan of dogs big fan of of of walking a big fan of of swimming so i'm completely on board with those yeah thank and thank you everyone in the community for sharing that that's really uh brought a smile to my face and it's nice to reflect on these things um life's full of challenges though mike and we are dealing with um you know lots of issues in our own personal lives and worries as we look you know around us in society um have you discovered a new research any things that particularly help us you know sort of cope in difficult times and build our resilience i mean obviously relationships um you've already mentioned is vital for that but what else comes to mind when you think about responding to tough times um well i think especially in the past year and you know drawing on the happy memories we have collected in the past have actually been quite useful you know it's been a time where you know a lot of us have been isolated at home not being able to see people not being able to travel and i think retrieving some of the happy memories we've experienced in the past and looking at all photographs you know bringing happy memories back to life i think that is something we have benefited or could benefit from in the past 18 months we also know those people that have happy memories and can retrieve happy memories and have a positive view of the past also are more satisfied with life and so yeah harvesting old happy memories and and and sort of reliving them i think is also something that has been quite useful at least for me in the past 18 months that's really really nice and actually time for me because i feel like that's been on my mind during these recent months as well and of course this is a lovely bridge into your most recent book about making happy memories and indeed the theme that we've sort of led on this evening so let's turn to that for a bit i guess one thing i hope will come on to in a moment is this idea of how we can actively sort of live in a way that would help us build more happy memories for the future but why before we go there why don't we just focus a bit on what you just said about bringing to life happy memories so what are some of the ways we can do that i mean on a short term basis it's pausing at the end of the day and recalling things we're grateful for is a sort of daily practice but how do we bring back to life some of those happier times from earlier days or different experiences well we we need to understand that that memory works through association so finding memory triggers um and that can be all the five different senses um so andy warhol for instance he he used the power of scent um he would wear the same perfume for six months and then never wear that perfume again and then switch every six months and that meant that over time he had created what he called a museum of memories so he could say okay now i want to see what i remember from the spring of 1981 and then take a whiff of that perfume and then see what comes back that's perhaps a little um exotic but you know you know listen to listen to what was in the top charts music-wise when you were in high school and see what comes back you know take a walk around the town you grew up in and i promise you things will come back so you see something you smell something you hear something and then memories are going to be retrieved um that's really nice when we were talking the other day you were sort of hinting at or when i asked about how to do this with loved ones you know you talked about i could you know maybe go back to a place where my parents were born or they spent part of their life with them and actually sort of relive experiences with them it both helps them relive their happy memories and forms a greater connection between us i really like that suggestion yeah and what about then about this idea about how we can behave in ways that will form memories of what we're going through now that we can then benefit from in the future and there's some tips and tricks we can use there yeah i mean we i mean first of all i think the main takeaway from from the book and my research in the book was was getting to an understanding that there is actually a lot we can do to influence what we and our loved ones remember in the future instead of thinking of yourself as a memory architect and actually knowing okay there's something i can do when my daughter in 30 years looks back on her childhood there's something i can do to have her think of happy times and happy moments um and i'll give you two examples one one one simple and one advanced and the simple one was what was actually a polish reader of mine in the book there's a chapter about attention which is the very foundation of memory of course you don't remember anything if you're not paying attention but this this lady um told me of an evening that happened 30 years ago when she was about eight and she was having dinner with her mother and her sister they're having a lovely time you know they're laughing they're feeling happy and then at one point her mother turns to her and her sister and she says i hope you remember this moment and here we are 30 years later the lady still remembers that moment because her mother made her pay attention to it and of course you know it can also be overused because if you every time you sit down with your kids say i hope you remember this moment they're probably gonna tell you to shut up uh quite quite quite fast but used every once in a while i think it's really powerful that that's the simple one the complex one is understanding that we remember first time experiences much better than something we've experienced many times it's also why people will often have a lot of memories from their teenage years and their 20s whereas in their 40s and 50s we remember fewer things from so you know when i was 21 um i remember you know going to paris um falling head over heels in love with the girls from spain going to champagne picking grapes for two weeks going back to spain to write some really bad fiction i remember the price of a cafe con leche was 225 pesitos i have a lot of details from that year 21. 21 when i was 31 or 41 i remember i was probably going to the office a lot but i don't have that sort of same detailed vivid memory as as i did when i was i was 21 and we remember first time experience is better they stick better to memory um so what we can do is seek out new experiences and it's it's also why i love that that you at action for happiness you have that calendar for november is it novel november or new things november you call it yeah so as many people in the community you know we have these themes every month and we're about to go into new ways november looking new ways ways forward but yeah novelty trying out not just new activities but new ways of approaching things you already do different perspectives different ways of approaching something so yeah thank you for mentioning that and if you want to find that do you just search for our calendars online because they get millions of people engaging with them and it's always lots of fun so and yeah it's it's that's going to be memorable uh november and then what you could do is for example you could organize this is the advanced level you could organize a picnic for july 20th next year and first of all you call it the apollo picnic um because you're going to have first time experiences and the apollo moon landing happened on july 20th so every once in a while you know somebody's going to talk about the moon landing and that is going to trigger your memory of the picnic on on july 20th and the concept for the picnic is that everybody brings a dish or an ingredient they have not tried before so if you haven't tried danish herring delicious or if you haven't tried habanero chili it's delicious but slightly dangerous um i still remember the first time i had habanero chili um and it's it's also good if it's something that scares you a little bit so snails um you know uh something that that that makes may take a little bit of courage to eat would also be more memorable so you get all your friends together organize it call it the apollo picnic do it on july 20th and and bring something you haven't haven't tried before that that is going to uh hopefully make a a i really love that and it's as you say it's a sort of advanced level skill but it's really clever because you're hooking a an activity that's unique to you and a group to uh something that will be in the public narrative at a regular interval that will be a trigger that you know is an external trigger to remember this hopefully a joyful experience um another thing that i've seen mentioned a few times in the chat is to do with photographs might obviously you know these days a lot of that's digital words before it might have been printed out in albums but how can we use images photographs to help both relive memories and also sort of lay down patterns that we you know or opportunities to remember things in future well one of the tips i i give in the book is is i call it curating the happy hundred so if if if the audience is like me we take a lot of pictures every year and we store them on our phones and sometimes our phone breaks or you know we change devices and we have thousands and thousands of pictures on the digital devices but back when i was growing up you know we used to have old school photo albums that we actually brought out and looked at together as a family and the pictures were not great i mean my mother had a special talent to to sort of crop people's heads out uh but but we we use those photos in a different way compared to how photos are now on our phones and so my advice would be you know every once a year could be you know over the holidays or perhaps between if you celebrate christmas between christmas and new year's you'll bring out the phones all the family members and then select okay which 100 or 50 or 10 pictures were actually the best moments this year which were the happiest moments and and get them printed out and then you can look at it in a different way and will be more accessible and i think also if you have kids it's a really fun exercise to to do with them to see what what did they actually find as as the happiest moments in the past year so pictures is one way that that can trigger memories of that entire day if you just see see one picture but but i i wanna i wanna come back also to to the food and how powerful that is in in in memory because um i i remember my spanish publisher her grandmother was called modesta which is spanish for spanish for modest but as my spanish editor says she really wasn't but she was from she was born in the early uh 1920th century so in 1920s in spain she wanted to go to university and her dad was very against that because her sister had gone to university and died and the dad linked that so he said to medes that if you go to university you will never get married and you you you'll die because i don't know um but modesto was very sort of uh persistent about it and then she ended up going to university and she was chaperoned by her aunt who would sit in the back of the class knitting and watching modesto watching the boys and making sure that everything was going all right and after class modesta and her aunt would go to a bakery placed at placer del sol which is in the center of madrid and have these special cakes called estrellas now i'm butchering that but but little pastry puffs in the shape of of of of stars and fast forward i mean modesto you know she did survive university you know had three degrees in teaching and and and pharmaceuticals you know lived through the spanish civil war and lived until she was 97. but i think it's interesting in her later years she asked her granddaughter to get her cakes australia's from that bakery from plaza del sol and i think it's because that taste those cakes you know reminded her of her happy 20s in madrid going to university going to the bakery with their aunt and i think that's that's another testimony to how much tastes are linked also with uh with with with memories so photos one thing but we can also create memory uh dishes yeah thank you and it's a reminder of what you said earlier about the senses whether it's the smell the the taste the the the sight whatever it is it's really using that full range of triggers or associations as you said um mike why don't we turn back to the community again for a second i love this idea of reflecting on memories and i think it might be nice just to encourage ourselves to do that and perhaps share them so why don't we just all take a moment take a pause wherever you are right now you know close your eyes if you'd like to just take a bit of a moment and just bring to mind a memory can be fairly recent it could be many years ago something that in your mind is a happy experience i mean you look back on fondly a bit the way mike's described and maybe again if you feel able to or willing to please just share it very briefly in a few words in the chat so uh swimming in the south of france spending time with my mum when our bunny had surprise babies mum's chestnut cake at christmas fun times grandkids uh going to oh i missed that one it flew past so quickly going to university uh time with mum before she passed paddling traveling the lake district uh taking a reliant robin to portugal that sounds like an adventure on vacation in hungary um what are you seeing there mike i mean it's going fast so it's going by so fast but you know i i think this is a wonderful testimony to how much is actually stored up there yeah um and and and and how many beautiful happy memories have been made um my dad's stew uh driving a minibus dog walks in the woods uh the day my daughter arrived home secretly liking abba all the time realizing we are nature christmas mornings sunday brunch after church uh going to the chinese while at university in my pajamas broadway in new york my mom's perfume wow what a such a variety of things or i can feel how much these mean to people that's lovely playing piano duets with my husband and actually it these are somewhat similar to the earlier question we had right a lot of these are also free um at least being an apple fan i think is is something that doesn't have to come with a price tag eating paella on the beach um and again we see a lot of common denominators here and actually for the book i did something similar to to this um we asked people to share a happy memory with us uh at the happiness research institute and we got more than a thousand happy memories from 75 different countries a lot of them very similar to this and it was just really lovely to read because you completely understand why these are happy memories to people you would feel happy also um eating eating stew with your with your with your dad and and and pearly on the beach in lisbon or when i just saw someone called tilly mentioning um uh walking on the morgan hills with with her son and i was born around there and spent many happy times walking on those hills so that was lovely to see and and can i share because one of one of the thousand memories we received back when i was doing research for the book uh was a was it was a lady from the uk i think in her 40s she and her family had had decided to go to the beach to eat breakfast and they had this romantic idea of what it would be like and they go to the beach and it's cold and it's windy and she wrote that they ended up eating sort of half cooked raw porridge with sand in it but it was a really happy memory and has been turned into a sort of family anecdote um and i really liked that story um and what she could do also to make that memory stick for her and her family is of course to retell that story again and again because the more we talk about the happy memories the more likely they are to be stored in our long-term memory if they had taken a picture of the event could also work as a memory trigger but it could also be you know going back to that beach and picking up a stone and if she has a daughter turn it into a little necklace and that will serve also as a memory trigger um or together with her kids you know drawing sort of a treasure map of happy memories so where have we have where have we had happy memories in the past and then surely the beach would would go on that uh on that treasure map and so i think that there's many things we can do to uh create happy memories but also make sure that those memories stick we should also say actually um if if i mean sometimes people struggle to remember anytime they were happy in the past especially if if we are living with depression that can also be one of the the symptoms that not only are we not feeling happy right now but we also struggle to remember times we are happy in the past and so that that's also something we are sort of trying to to to help people with thank you mike it's been really insightful and interesting i'm still loving the fact that these beautifully personal and entertaining memories are coming up um i i in a moment i would love to come to the questions that are being asked so if you have questions for mike please use the q a function or if you see a question that someone else has posted that you'd like to hear answer please do vote it or upvote it but before we do that and first of all on the memory stuff we will share in our follow-up links um a link to your book on this topic as well as your you know where people can find out more about your work more generally so that'll be in the email tomorrow but i just love before we leave your work and happiness more generally and come to the the questions to just address perhaps a slightly bigger question around where we're heading as a global human family and you know here we are on the eve of the the cop 26 climate change conference that's been worried about future generations i have children and i worry about not only their future but their children's future um we are you know still coming out of this strange pandemic time a lot of uncertainty a lot of sort of unfairness and inequality and people are very different situations some who've benefited some who've really really had a tough time um i feel that your work and your findings suggest a different set of priorities for our world maybe as you were saying earlier a bit less financially focused a bit more focus on the things that matter what do you see as being the most important things we should be keeping in mind you know as our as our nations as our societies as a global human family to make you know a happier future for for ourselves and for future generations that's the big question market um but but but but i'm an optimist maybe we are a weird group that works within happiness research but i think a lot of us are optimists but but but i'm an optimist because we are seeing more governments embrace well-being as a new measure of progress i'm an optimist because the biggest causes you know in the history at both yale and harvard are now causes on happiness and well-being and it shows me that especially the young generation are looking for something else and and and want to create the best possible conditions for people to thrive i'm an optimist because we're seeing more and more companies actually actively try and create good conditions for their workers and focus on mental health so governments the young generation companies are slowly pivoting towards what you and i have been working on for the for the past 10 years um so so in that sense i'm an optimist and i'm also an optimist because i think that the entire pandemic yeah it has been difficult 18 months and and people have lost their lives and livelihoods and we've lost loved ones my hope is that it's also an opportunity for reflection and gratitude i mean gratitude to perhaps some of the simple things like we've seen today in you know what creates happy memories and which activities people enjoy for free that perhaps we took for granted pre pandemic and you know meeting a coffee or not eating a coffee meeting a friend over a coffee is what brings me a lot of happiness that i you know i had to go without that for many months during the pandemic um and perhaps i took that for granted earlier on um so so a a bigger sense of gratitude for the simple pleasures in life and then you know in terms of it being an opportunity for reflection we usually see when people come back from maternity or paternity leave or a long vacation that they've thought about their routines or how they've organized or designed their lives and want to do things a little bit different and i think this has just been one giant global paternity maternity leave for uh the the for mankind and and i think a lot of us have reconsidered what are we what are we what do we want to come back to what should we keep from the pre-pandemic world and what should we change uh personally i'm i'm gonna be working more from home um two days per week that adds a lot to to to to my well-being uh i really like going to the office as well and seeing my my colleagues but i also see the the value in having some focused concentrated time for example to to write the books at home um so so that's my hope for the uh post pandemic world and gratitude reflection but also optimism because i i do see things in a lot of places moving in the right direction thank you mike let's move on to questions and the first is from joanne who's um i think question links back to something the point you made about sometimes it's really hard to bring up happy memories she says when i recall positive events from the past they make me feel sad how can i use these memories to help me feel happy um i think the thing is the portuguese that have a word called i'm sorry i'm going to butcher this swadade which is sort of the the the sweetness and bitterness or sadness of things that are gone so it's a celebration of what was but i no longer here and in english we have the word nostalgia um and there is there's a sadness of having experienced lovely happy moments that are now in the past i think that is a ancient and global human emotion i think that's fair to find a complex emotion to to grasp um um i i think that's something we we all experience um my hope is that we then you know celebrate that the good there was uh what i what i try to do for instance uh earlier i mentioned my mother died when she was quite young and what we do on her birthday still is we we cook and eat her favorite dish that's how we celebrate her now and and of course miss her but it's a way to enjoy uh what she enjoyed uh eating and sort of think of her in in fond ways and so trying to build in some some positive in in what is negative thanks mike um the next question is from lauren who's used a strategy i've not seen before but seems to work she's putting brackets please upvote this question congratulations um she asked what what do you say to people that roll their eyes when you share strategies to boost happiness so it might be something that you know will work but you know a colleague or a loved one might be skeptical about it and you know you can't really force somebody to practice something they might be resistant to it is there any way we can really encourage people around us to to do things that we know will be good for their happiness i think i think essentially just do it yourself and and people will see and and follow role models if if people are you know looking for edible mushrooms together with their friends in in the forest and and and see how much enjoyment they get from that you know they might go do it themselves or jump in the water if it's clean enough uh you know after after work um i think just just do it yourself and then over time i think people will will follow um but it's it's it's actually also coming back to um to sort of my writing and the books um because i i i remember having a conversation with with john halliwell that a lot in in the audience i'm sure are familiar with john is one of the editors of the world happiness support and a all-round amazing human being and basically the mick jagger of happiness research um but i talked with him about the the sort of what's the balance between data and stories in writing um and i i think he said a a really good point in terms of of that and he said data shapes the science but the stories spreads the science so yes we need happiness research and we need data and we need evidence to understand what are the drivers of well-being but people don't remember data and they don't remember numbers they remember stories um you know a year from now what people might remember from this conversation is images of eating paella on the beach in in lisbon or me looking for edible mushrooms in in a forest that's what people will remember those visual things so i think being a role model sharing stories of where people personally have found happiness and i think that that's a much better way instead of giving uh giving instructions i love that answer and i certainly agree that prescribing or telling people what to do isn't the answer and in fact in that sense i often use a question because i find however skeptical somebody is if you ask them what do you find really makes you happy or your people you around you whoever they are whatever their background everyone's got to do on that and actually just by encouraging to focus on what does make them happy they'll say something like they might even say being miserable makes me happy you know or whatever but actually that reflection on yes there are things in my life that bring a sense of joy and fulfillment and being more conscious of that i think is is an interesting step so i find that asking people is a really good intervention um sarah's asked an interesting question in a society that can be so negative uh i'm not sure if she's referring to sort of general culture or the media or politics or whatever but anyway i would agree with the observation what is your quick tip to reset our internal happiness button in this negative place we find ourselves um [Music] yes there is a lot of negativity but i think there's also a lot of of optimism and positivity and and and i try to focus on that i try to see what is going right uh with the world um and what's going right in terms of where you know my life and where denmark is heading and where the world is heading um so i think asking the question what what's also going right and and and try to focus on that because yes things go up and down in in the world and in our lives but but hopefully we can also find some some some positive things yeah it's not about pretending everything's fine and ignoring the bad news it's about drawing attention to the things that are going well too which sadly many journalists often miss that opportunity in painting the negative picture um next question in fact the current top rated question here is can happy memories be clouded or blurred in the future if the person who you share those memories with is now no longer in a good relationship with you so what's that link between the quality of our current relationships and how that affects memories as we look back yeah i mean memories can definitely change over time and and become blurred or clouded by by other events and doing research for the book i've i've developed massive respect for our memory but i also see how flawed it is and people are going to remember events very differently and it's also interesting to to see if you ask couples let's say men and men and women you know how big a share of the cleaning do you do or how big a share of the cooking do you do men will say i do 40 of the cooking and women will say i do 80 of the cooking and in every case for every chore at home if you add those two up it's going to be more than 100 and it's because we remember every time we did the cooking and every time we did the cleaning and forget when our spouse did it so so our memories are flawed um actually writing the book and um and researching about memory i think has made me more um more more acceptable to the fact that others have other versions of what happened in the past than i do that my memory is not perfect that it's flawed and we build things in that didn't happen or happened at other times into into our memory and so i think it that has actually helped me mend some of the you know disagreements i might have had with with people but just acknowledging that none of us remember uh correctly what actually happened yeah that's a really interesting perspective um when you spoke earlier mike about relationships being so important for happiness one thing on my mind was what does that mean for those people who are perhaps not in great relationships right now or they're feeling lonely or isolated and it also links to benny's question here who asks have you done any research on you know happiness for individuals that are challenged when it comes to forming relationships and he gives the example of people on the autism spectrum um but but generally i mean i guess some people don't have great relationships and so telling them that relationships are vital for happiness you know may not necessarily help how do you see that i think i mean i think loneliness is is part of the human experience i mean we study happiness and try to explore that but in any human life there's going to be setbacks you know there's going to be periods of loneliness and stress and and heartbreak and that's part of the the human experience and i i know a lot of people find comfort when they're going through difficult times in poetry so there are some great books out there called the poetry pharmacy and it is essentially uh poems that fit the different challenges that we humans face in life heartbreak loss [Music] stress loneliness and um william i forget his last name but but but he said to me at one point um it's amazing how much comfort people find in reading hafiz i think his name was a a persian poet that lived 700 a.d and knowing that there was a guy you know 1300 years ago that felt the exact same thing that i'm feeling today and wrote it in the most elegant way and that can reduce the lonely feeling that people can have when they're going through a difficult time feeling that i'm the only one in the world with this emotion or or the thing that i'm dealing with right now that this is something that that humankind have have endured for for centuries so poetry i think is an overlooked um remedy when we are going through difficult times thank you and and just to come back to bernie's point of the question about people who struggle with forming relationships you know potentially through autism or other conditions i i guess it's worth saying that there are other great ways to be happy that don't involve necessarily relationships although they they can be really important and you've already given some great examples whether that's being outdoors whether that's sort of tuning into what really matters to us poetry is a lovely example as well so there are other avenues available but great question um it also brings me to one i just spotted in the chat which isn't in the q a but someone just said any tips for dementia sufferers and i guess one of the most tragic aspects of dementia of course is about memory and indeed the loss of memory i've seen some things suggesting that music can be incredibly helpful at sort of helping people stay connected anything else you've found when it relates to dementia and happiness yes um so so in the book i also talked actually about a lady who who suffered from uh from memory loss and dementia and and what she did was actually create a memory room in her house um so printing out pictures of the places she had lived and some of her favorite places to to visit and of course her family members and and that for her was a way to sort of try and and hold on to to the happy memories she had achieved in the past um i also know that that in the netherlands they are experimenting with creating uh streets small villages where people with dementia are living that represent the time period from their lives when they were young that will trigger memories in in the past um also printing what uh printing a photo of what used to be their front door on the the the new door at the at the care facility they're living in so they can recognize which room is actually mine because it looks like uh their old front door um so i think there's we have here in the uh in in the chat mary saying the the name of the the village in in dutch um so i think that there are some great uh work being done especially in the netherlands in this field yeah that's really helpful and lots of people are saying really useful things in the chat as well particularly around music as a real helper in those cases um i just want to come back to this concept of difficult memories mike and how that relates to what we've talked about joy's raised another popular question here asking if there's anything in your work about how traumatic experiences impact on our good memories in her example she had a really traumatic experience at age 14 and feels like some years of her life are sort of erased by that how do you see that interplay between i guess traumatic experiences and and memories and indeed happy memories yeah that that is that is tricky um and a lot of us do have you know tragic events in in our past that we would most like to to forget um [Music] i'm not sure how to to weave that away from from the happy memories that that hopefully also experienced or happened during those years but it's it's it's a very good question but my my research for the book was was focusing on on unhappy memories thank you i mean i think we should yeah acknowledge that there's there's lots of complexity when we look back in our lives and as you say people have experienced difficult things and um you know we can't change the past but we can choose what we focus our attention on as we as we move forward i would like to begin to move towards wrapping up because we're running out of time and i'm incredibly grateful to all the things you've shared i feel like i've learned a huge amount from you mike um and i also want to leave it time in a moment for you to talk about this um uh i think it's a museum that you've been working on which i think is really relevant and other things you'd like to share but just a more general happiness point uh that anne has asked you know i guess this is back to this territory of you know in all the research you've looked at what are the what are the little actions that can make a big difference anne's just said have you got any tips to get rid of that doom and gloom feeling i get on waking up in the morning i have to face the day ahead what do you do to brighten up your start of day routine and bring a bit more joy mike i cycle to work um i mean i think you know again coming back to doing something active um and then we're blessed in copenhagen with the infrastructure we have in terms of having an active commute so the majority of people in copenhagen they cycle to work myself included also actually the the majority of members in parliament they cycle to work um but i think doing something active in the morning is is one way and that sort of boosts uh my mood so so that that would be my advice for them i love that one as a very keen cyclist many people know i jump on my bike most days as well so i think that's fantastic advice i have found personally that having a nudge in my to-do list to do some of the things that are well-being actions as well as my work tasks and a reminder to meditate reminder to focus on things i'm grateful for a reminder to check in with loved ones uh that makes it more likely i'll do these little habits that i know will give me a boost rather than sort of pushing them away because they don't seem as important so i found that really helpful um mike tell us about some of the exciting things you're working on in particular you mentioned a museum or some new project uh that you've been launching what's going on there yeah so so at the happiness research institute we usually get a lot of uh requests from people who wants to come by and see the office and it's a boring you know office we sit in front of laptops looking like this it's no fun um but we thought why don't we create a place where people can come and explore some of the questions that that we are working with and some of the answers that we think we found um and we we tried to communicate you know research through books or lectures or courses and we thought well a museum is actually also a way to communicate findings so so last week year we opened the the happiness museum here in copenhagen we call it a small museum about the big things in life and hopefully people leave a little wiser and a little happier and and we have sort of different themes in the museum there's the the history of happiness so how have the perception of the good life evolved over time there is the science of happiness how do crazy people like me try to measure uh well-being um there is geography of happiness why are some countries or cities happier than others so so different things and it's it's i think my my favorite room is where we have asked people to write on a post stick post it what an ingredient for happiness is what a happy memories is uh very much we've done here tonight and now we have i think 2 000 post-its in in that room and it's just so much fun going around reading everything from you know billy eilish to uh somebody who wrote his his idea of happiness is a quality lawnmower and a big lawn tomorrow and i get it [Laughter] it's just a lot of fun to uh to see what uh what what what people find a happy activities and also as a as a fine side note um we also have a small element around trust in in a section around nordic happiness trust explains why some countries are happier than others and trust can be measured in different ways but but one way is as crazy scientists have done taken wallets with cash in them and id papers and then thrown those wallets on the street and then see how many how many of the wallets are returned with the cash still in them and globally you actually see 50 of the wallets being returned with the cash in them now in that section we have a also on the floor a wallet with money in it because we wanted to sort of bring that statistic more to life and several times a day people come up to uh the person working in the reception saying somebody dropped a wallet oh it's part of the exhibition ah sorry i'll put it back until recently it was stolen [Laughter] so so much for the high levels of trust in the northern countries there's bad apples but it's the exception that proves the rule maybe i think you've seen many many months of trust i love to i mean there's a lot again lots of lovely comments here but despina said i hope the uh happiness museum plays abba music given we had earlier one um mike well well actually first of all gratitude to everyone who's been part of this event this evening it's been a lovely community engagement as always really grateful for the comments and questions and supportive things and also thank you to everyone who made a small donation to action for happiness to be part of this event to allow us to keep putting on these great activities if you haven't had a chance to do that and you've enjoyed this event then there will be a chance in the follow-up email tomorrow um but above all massive gratitude to you mike it's been a lovely conversation i've learned a lot uh you've shared a huge amount of wisdom and insight and is there any final thought you'd like to leave us with um then then it should be just to share an embarrassing story it's also how we can sort of you know try and take something that we're perhaps not so proud of and turn it into something good um or take control over it so so i think this was three or four years ago um i was taking part in in a tv show in the uk i think was called this morning show and it's a big show i think they have more viewers than i have countrymen in in denmark and i'm talking about my latest book at the time the little book of luke and towards the end of the interview i think he the host was called philip he asks you know so so you written about hygge and now you've written about looking what you're going to write about next and i thought his danish was really good and i know in the uk you've been you've been watching a lot of the the danish tv dramas in the original language and there's the political drama that takes place uh um and it i think you pronounce it balkan in in in the uk right and i thought maybe he had seen that one so he says oh you've written about luke and pugi what do you put out what you're going to write about next and i say well done on pronouncing danish you must have been watching a lot of danish bone which is how we pronounce it but he heard you must have been watching a lot of danish porn so he starts to laugh all the rest of the host they start to laugh i have no idea what's going on and the other host says what did he say i'm afraid to ask and that's the end of the interview so and when i found out what they thought i had said i mean that was one of the most embarrassing moments in my life um but you know sometimes i will actually if i go to a you know to an international presentation i might actually share that story just to say okay it's not my first language so if there's something i say mistakenly that's you know please raise your hand and ask the question so in instead of it being something that i could still beat myself up over today i actually try and use it as an anecdote that that that often brings smile on on that is a lovely story i've never heard that before that's really really funny and uh yeah that's philip schofield i think who um who many people on this chat will know and the fact you asked him that question is just genius and hilarious mike uh thank you so much keep up the great work we'll share your links with the community tomorrow thank you everyone for being here and look forward to seeing you next time um take care mike all the best thank you thank you thank you all bye-bye

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 7,254

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Id: pYOvussvMZs

Length: 59min 49sec (3589 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021