Positive Psychology with Martin Seligman

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] well over over dinner Richard persuaded me he and market seen my PowerPoint deck he said oh that's the same old tedious stuff that you already know about so a Richard persuaded me to give you ten minutes on what's at the forefront of what we're thinking about these days so I'll do 10 minutes on something that none of you would have heard about before and then I'll give you 50 minutes of the same old tedious stuff the the first is what Richard mentioned about our species is not Homo sapiens were not good at wisdom and knowledge that's aspirational what we are good at uniquely good at and what you're all doing right now is you're taking what I'm saying in the present and you're running scenarios about the future with it so phenomenologically human beings by and large are living in imagination about the future they're constructing possible futures and evaluating them now well that seems very obvious can you hear me if I walk around my still it's not at all obvious to psychologists so psychology was about the past and the present so memory was about the past perception and motivation are about the president somehow the last 120 years psychology assumed that you could deduce the future from knowing about the past and the present form of heart determinism embodied in that but that's just not true the program has been a colossal fail about predicting the future so in this book and in our thinking we believe we need to start with the way human beings conceive and evaluate futures we metabolize the past and the present it doesn't determine the future and one of the startling ways that people found this Alice was trying to in fMRI studies trying to map the brain so you probably know there are at least a thousand fMRI studies in which you put people in the doughnut and you you want to know what part of the brain lights up when they're doing mental arithmetic or anagrams you always have to run a control group though hmm the control group you just say oh just lie there and don't do anything a thousand times that's been run well it turns out when you do mental arithmetic and anagrams it the what lights up in the brain is very messy but what lights up when you just lie there is uniform the the neuroscientists caught the default circuit default meaning that's what the brain reverses to but the imagination circuit it's the same circuit that lights up if I ask you to imagine the few to imagine the future or to take something from the past that didn't work out very well and redo it that's the circuit that lights up so that's one of the reasons that we thought we should start with the way human beings imagined the future takes notions like free will very seriously it says conditions that I've worked on all my life like depression and anxiety are not problems about the present or about the past they're deformations of the way that you think about the future obvious if you work with anxiety this has to do with apprehensions about the future the present and depression has to do with the belief that the future will be awful so we think psychopathology and psychology generally needs to start with perspective and then work its way backwards so that's one thing that I'm excited about and in many ways terns psychology and clinical psychology on its head the other one is a discovery that of really of Steve Mayer's so we have a an article coming out in the psychological review next month called learned helplessness 50 years later so those of you who were how many of you know what learn learned helplessness is oh well that's good explain it very much well forget it we were wrong the basic thesis of learned helplessness is that animals and people when they're confronted with events they can't control learn that nothing they do matters and for 50 years people have worked on trying to undo that and it makes inroads into therapy by trying to undo helplessness and hopelessness well that turns out to be 180 degrees wrong and that Steve who's really discovered this so and this is a little about rat stuff so we're gonna do psych 1 and rats for 3 minutes now so it turns out there's a 50,000 cell structure in rats it's about a hundred thousand in humans called the dorsal raphe nucleus kind of deep in the limbic system that structure when it fires off produces learned helplessness produces panic and produces helplessness now what's interesting about that is it's not learned it is the default mammalian reaction to prolonged aversive that's so the default reaction is to be helpless and to give up well how come we're not helpless all the time even though we start that way and the answer is a set of structures in the forebrain in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that structure appear what all of you have protruding inhibits the dorsal raphe nucleus firing of the dorsal if a nucleus is necessary and sufficient for producing learned helplessness and what turns it off is learning that you're not helpless so what humans learn about is not helplessness but that you can do n runs around helplessness and the way Steve has shown this it really remarkably said all the right experiments so if you take a ride and you give an inescapable shock which should make it helpless but you turn on the ventral medial prefrontal cortex the rat does not become helpless conversely if the rat learns that there are things he can do to turn off shock but you turn off that circuit the rats going to be helpless so basically human troubles the default reaction to bad events is depression and anxiety and the therapies that have told us we should somehow confront the bad events that occur and undo them is a waste of time what is vouchsafed to us is not the undoing of awful events but rather learning that you have control over events that you can master those events and that's what therapy and education in this view are about so Richard that's my 10 minutes of exciting stuff and and now I hope you're prepared for 50 minutes of utter boredom when I tell you about some stuff that you know about I have notes and PowerPoint about it and we'll have a question period for a half an hour or so so we can undo some of his stuff a Freud and Schopenhauer told us that the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable the medical model the Freudian model is the goal of human what human happiness is is the absence of misery now the theme of what Richard and Mark are talking about action for happiness and the theme of my next 50 minutes is that that view that the most you can aspire to for yourself for your children for Britain for the planet is not to suffer is empirically false morally insidious and politically a dead end and that's what I want to say over the next 50 minutes rather human beings can aspire to happiness human beings can aspire to well-being life isn't just a zero-sum game life can be a positive sum game so let me tell you how I'm gonna make this argument so I want to say something about what I think well-being is and if Richard or I had sat up thirty years ago and tried to say that there should be a politics of well-being there should be an economics of well-being education should be about well-being you really shouldn't have paid any attention and that was because well-being was not measurable and it wasn't buildable we didn't what we knew about was how to measure misery and we knew something about how to undo misery and that's been psychologies great achievement but in the last 30 years and what action for happiness is about is the notion that we can measure well-being and we can build it so my notion of well-being is the notion that many of you know about let me also get a feel for what what I don't need the board how many know what perma is okay so I need to do some explaining of that so I'm gonna suggest you that well-being which is what free non suffering people choose to engage in has five basic elements of PE are ma P is what action for happiness is about its subjective well-being positive well-being happiness but positive psychology in my view doesn't stop with subjective well-being it also asks about ER ma since these are things that people choose to do even if they don't bring happiness the second the E is engagement being one with the music being completely wrapped up in a lecture or a conversation and leisure looks to me like about 60% of you are in flow now that you're one with the music and as the other 40% of you are having sexual fantasies are and by the way the reason he is not happiness is if when someone is one with the music if you interrupt them and ask them what they're thinking and feeling 90% of the time they say nothing so in the state of engagement the state of flow is emotionless by a March and it's cognitive free the third component is our good relationships I think people have evolved to pursue good relationships whether or not they bring any of the other elements the fourth is M is meaning in purpose so human beings being future-oriented are ineluctably meaning seeking beings they want to be part of something larger and when people say that positive psychology or happiness is sort of about individuals it's not remotely it's about other people it's about finding meaning in something much larger than you are the individual self is a very poor site for wellbeing and it's a zero site for happiness I think happiness is social you don't laugh out loud when you're alone an a is accomplishment human beings in a lot to bleed pursue confidence achievement and mastery so that's what I mean by well-being then I'm going to talk about the measurement of well-being so to the extent that we contend that there is a politics of well-being and economics of well-being FPL to measure it and there's something brand new about measurement so I'm going to talk about the age of the questionnaire is coming to an end there's something much better than questionnaires so if I ask you Nick how are you feeling right now and the true civ and reactive and it could lie to me he could be right to reputation management there are much better ways of asking the perma question than questionnaires they're more reliable more valid and a replacement question areas then because I know that many of you want to build your own happiness I'm going to go through exercises that have been validated our random assignment placebo-controlled not the Tony Robbins stuff that builds permanent and I'll talk about building puzzles emotion about how to have more engagement in life about building relationships about having more meaning in life and I'll talk a little bit about Angela Ducksworth work on grit her book has just come out yesterday in the UK I highly recommend it then I'm going to talk a little bit about Adam Smith and Adam Smith really told us how to intervene to produce more well-being okay then toward the end I'm gonna talk about positive education so around the world now there are hundreds of schools or the dot that have adopted curricula to build well-being happiness and positive education I'll show you some brand new data that none of you ever seen before from Bhutan Mexico and Peru involving hundreds of thousands of school children now and I'll talk about the United States Army and comprehensive soldier fitness and then I'll say a few words about the politics of all of this so that's what we'll do over the next 35 so what is it for a human being to flourish in my view it's to have perma and the reason I put up a airplane gauge is to highlight a difference that Richard Laird and I have so for Richard happiness is the single measure I don't believe there's a single measure of well-being I think it's much more like an airplane that to the extent we pursue positive emotion engagement relationships meaning and accomplishment different people value these things differently I happen to be a very high meaning an engagement person but some of you are very high hedonic people very interested in how you feel now there's no one number that tells you how well an airplane is doing it depends on what you're trying to do in the airplane so if you're trying to get from Paris to Beijing as quickly as possible then what tells you about headwinds and tailwind is going to be very important you're trying to get there as cheaply as possible you want to pay attention to the petrol gauge if you want to get there as comfortably as possible you want to know where the clouds and the turbulence is located so depending on your mission in flying you pay attention to some gauges rather than others similarly what humans pursue what free people choose to do has to do with what you care about in life it has to do with your mission so there's no one number that describes it so for me the measurement issue is a very complicated one both for an individual patient you have to know what they value do you value meaning and you don't care about how happy you are good I'll tell you what we know about meaning you want a more pleasant life I'll tell you what we know about the Daleks and the like so the object here for an individual or a nation and as you know mr. Cameron has said he's going to measure the well-being and is measuring the well-being of Brittany and trying to maximize it and that he had claimed that he would partly judge the success or failure of public policy by its increases and decreases in well-being that's a very difficult thing to measure because different people value these things differently it's complicated endeavor measurement and what I'm going to do over the next 25 minutes or so is to say that each of these things is measurable and importantly each is teachable I'm often asked why I worked on misery for so long and people wanted me to work on happiness and what discouraged me from working on happiness was a study that came out almost 40 years ago by Phil Brickman in which Phil looked at 14 people who won the lottery in Illinois and what he found to everyone's shock was for the first three months after you win a million dollars you get happier but three months later you revert back to your usual curmudgeonly state and that basically told us that oh you know happiness is the froth on the cappuccino and misery is the espresso and if you really want to find out what the human organism is doing you measure the misery well it turns out that Phil was wrong and that these things are buildable well say something about ways in which we can build them now measurement the usual way people measure perma happiness with well-being is by questionnaire and I have a free website that four million people have registered at called authentic happiness one word dot org and that's got the twenty leaving tests of happiness meaning etc on it but the problem is I Ellis trated with with Nick was that people lie about their reputation manage questionnaires are reclusive and reactive and so about eight years ago I found myself keynoting Google zeitgeist and I got together with the Google Earth people and I said I'll bet we can measure the well-being of a planet for free and in real time without questionnaires and that started something that many of us work on now so it turns out perma happiness engagement good relationships meaning accomplishment has a extensive lexicon in English there are about fifty thousand words and phrases that are perma and anti perma words and phrases so you can use the social media scanning in time and place for the amount and intensity of the perma and anti perma words to ask about individual corporate national planetary well-being so let me tell you how this story begins so what we do back at ten is we scan through literally tens of millions of tweets and Facebook statuses every day and what we're looking for is deployment of perma words but also we're in a if we found a number of things along the way so this is a sample of 40,000 females involving several million Facebook statuses I'm sorry I have that wrong forty thousand females all of whom have given their given us their facebook status and we have the words that they emit so this on this slide what you're looking at is actually this is complicated statistically you know it's kind of cute the larger the word the more distinguishes women from 40,000 men so women say shopping and yay and love you and excited and wonderful but the larger the word the more distinctive it is and these are hugely significant corrected differences so that's what 40,000 women look like got it so far to clear what we're doing here here's what men look like [Laughter] but I didn't make this up so what psychologists of all what psychologists have always wanted to do is to look into your forebrain and see what's on your mind and that's what the social media tell us these days so prevent it's championship World Cup Lee get cetera and the life for women it's shopping excited love you wonderful enormous sex differences and again women almost never say any facebook statuses men men say it over time how the kids differ from adults so again this is based on tens of thousands of young people and people of different ages again the larger the word the more this happens in us so your children say homework school tomorrow young adults here at work wedding days off this is what most of you in the audience but this is what maturity looks like uh and there's another nice thing you can do you can organize these non arbitrarily into topics by correlation so this notion two topics that middle-aged people are thinking about and again the larger the word the more differentiates you from your children and your grandchildren so you're doing god daughter or country family and friends and they're doing homework and beer and girlfriends and wedding personality so for me personality is just a way station to this this is what personality really is so what we have here is eighty thousand people who have taken the big five personality inventory they've given us their facebook statuses and we asked how in this case neurotics differ from non neurotics and again neurotics are saying depress sick of I hate and I've expurgated this slide actually is up there as well crap non neurotic people are saying basketball beautiful success God we're also not only interested in characterizing different people but in predicting death so as some of you know I've been interested in in a mind-body illness relationships most of my life and so what I'm about to show you is for thirteen hundred counties in the United States we have from CDC the rate of cardiovascular death county by county and there's a large variation geographically and again for this one we have eighty million tweets and so what we do is we localize the tweets for thirteen hundred counties and then we ask what predicts counties in which the kids are saying things and people my age are going to die and the counties in which kids are saying different things and people live don't show up cardiovascular death as much so here's what the results look like and they're really quite substantial so on the left is the death reagan the northeastern united states county by county high red like Long Island and Albany are high cardiovascular death rates Green is low and on the right what you have is Twitter just Twitter as a prediction of apartment and you can see the correlation is close to 0.7 for the two of them moreover if you take the 10 leading predictors of cardiovascular death education race amount of money spent on health care and the like Twitter out predicts them all so if you create a model with the ten leading indicators you've got a correlation about 0.5 here you get a correlation about point six seven with none of that information so what I've just told you about is the Big Data revolution and then you can ask what what is it that people in counties that have high cardiovascular death rates tweet about well it's up here so the larger the word the more it predicts cardiovascular the more it differentiates counties that predict cardiovascular death hey bored assholes sleeping those are high cardiovascular death rate counties and here are the counties that are low in cardiovascular death great folks thanks conference ours and the like so to summarize that I think well-being is measurable and the new measurement tool is automatic it's machine learning combined with the lexicon of well-being so we have questionnaires about well-being and we have now big data about measuring it so this then allows us to go on to teaching well-being so this starts with individuals and the has been even though before I worked on well-being I worked on drugs and psychotherapy for different forms of psychopathology and the gold standard for the measurement for the measurement of whether or not something works a therapy or a drug is the random we'll see both controlled study and so it was my hope that we do the very very same thing with exercises to build happiness and so basically what we do in in this work is on authentic happiness work occasionally I'll put up a link and it will say something like dr. Seligman wants to know what exercises actually raise happiness and what exercises are recei bows to go to this you're either going to get a placebo or an exercise that works you'll do it for a week and then will bug you for six months asking about depression well-being and the like and in that way we've discovered about ten exercises that actually raise well-being Oh oh yes this was supposed to occur earlier I guess I'll mention it so my I'm very interested in a prediction of presidential elections and my British relatives said to me this week well you know that was a very entertaining set of primaries you had but who really is the Republican nominee and and so what we've done is - over the last few months to take the optimism and pessimism of the leading presidential candidates and even past this is a been a reasonable predictor this was done before the primaries were over Trump was the most optimistic or the Republicans Hilary Clinton the most optimistic Democrats and for what it's worth Hillary is more optimistic than Donald Trump so that's that's the prediction so where I was before that slide that got interposed in the wrong place if I asked you to for the next week every night before you go to bed last time I talked in this room it was mid-july and it was very hot so I'm surprised and early May that I find myself but sweating again every night to the next week before you go to bed write down three things that went well and why they went well and indeed when people do this six months later they're happier they're had higher life satisfaction and they're lower and depression and moreover it's addicting so one of the nice things about action for happiness and about positive psychology exercises is that these things are sticky so when like dieting and unlike a lot of cognitive therapy the any of you can lose five to ten percent of your body weight by any diet on the bestseller but the problem is it's a scanner and the reason that the scan is 90% of people regain all that weight or more in the next three to five years and the reason for that is it's no fun to keep turning down chocolate mousse similarly most of what we teach in psychotherapy is no fun and the dirty little secret of psychotherapy and pharmacological research is its efficacy as measured by how long and laughs after thorough until it melts to zero happiness exercises are almost by definition fun to do and people keep doing them so this three good things exercise we started 10 years ago and I still do it before I go to sleep I sleep better I don't go to sleep thinking about my fight with the Dean but rather where I'm going to put the rose bush tomorrow and the like so at any rate that's an exercise that raises happiness and life satisfaction again second exercise building engagement so when time stops for you one of the conditions of being in flow is using your highest strength to meet the challenges that come your way so in this exercise it could go to authentic happiness org and you find out what your five highest strengths are your assignment is to I'll do half of it with you now close your eyes think of something that you don't like doing that you have to do almost every day at work oh thanks a lot okay open your eyes now if you've taken the signature strengths test you'll know what your 5 highest strengths are so the assignment is to take the thing that you don't like doing it work and do it using one of your highest strengths so just to give you an example of that one of my students the thing he hated every day he's studying libraries until midnight and then had to walk about a mile for West Philadelphia at midnight to get home and it was really frightening walk and so he he took the signature strengths test his highest strength was playfulness in humor so his assignment was to recraft a walk using playfulness and humor so he bought a stopwatch and a pair of rollerblades and declared the walk an Olympic event and timed himself every night until he reached perfect time and then he took a longer route and make it an Olympic event this became the favorite part of his day in general what you find yours if you take things you don't like doing and you can recraft them using what you're really good at what your highest strengths are becomes more fun and people who do this six months later have higher happiness and lower depression relationships this is something we see in a very profound way with the drill sergeants I'll talk about in a moment in the old days I've taught how many of you our marriage counselors or sex therapists well not many of you this is the worst form of psychotherapy it's the hardest form of psychotherapy to do people are lying to you they're lying to each other and what you do when I used to teach sex and marriage was you try to get couples to fight more constructively you don't want them to have the same fight every day and it's a pretty dismal thing to teach what you're trying to do in marital therapy is to change insufferable marriages into barely tolerable marriages so a group of positive marital therapists said instead of looking at how people fight let's look at how people celebrate together so the question here is what do you say to your spouse when she comes home from work and she's been promoted something good has happened and it turns out there's a two by two here about what people say and almost everyone says the wrong thing empirically so most people and I was certainly one of them do passive constructive which is congratulations Mandy you deserve it that has no effect on love and marriage drill sergeants do active destructive she's been promoted at work she comes home and you say you know what tax bracket that's gonna put us in - many people say passive destructive which is what's for dinner the only thing that works is active constructive it takes effort and work and does not come naturally so basically what you try and do is to get your spouse to relive the experience and put her in better touch with why she was really promoted so a script here would be I've been reading the reports you wrote to the company that last one you wrote about retirement is the best piece of fiscal wisdom that I've seen in my 25 years of now where were you when your boss told you you had been promoted and she tells you now exactly what did he say you want her to relive this experience okay now what do you think the real reasons you were promoted are what are your highest strengths what are the things you did best and that's what marks starting us off with tonight trying to put you in touch with the good things that had happened yeah let's open up a bottle of champagne and celebrate so when you do that it turns out sex gets better divorce rate goes down love goes up so that's something new here meaning and purpose in life we have people how can you have more meaning and purpose in life one simple exercise is we have people in 300 words write down their vision of a positive human future and then we have them write their obituary when we're dealing with depressed people we call it a life summary not no bitch weary through their grandchild's eyes about what they did to contribute to a positive human future so that's a meaning exercise and then accomplishment and grit I urge you to buy Angela's new book on grit the typical kind of thing that Angela has shown is that if you're trying to predict achievement talent is only about half as important as self-discipline conscientiousness grit and perseverance and so what we want to do in education is not to devoted entirely to talent but to devote it to perseverance and self-discipline so that's a summary of the kind of thing that's going on and I want to mention Adam Smith in this regard so it turns out there are about ten exercises that build life satisfaction and lower depression that have been documented by random assignment placebo-controlled now what if you work for how many of you working for companies okay so let's say you're interested in building as I am well being Kerma in a company well how would you go about doing it well one thing you might do is how people make gratitude visits and to rehearse three things that went well today but much better is something that Adam Smith told us and that is tell the managers that in the same we're going to measure the well-being of the people working under you and do it by questionnaire you can do it by big data and we're going to hold you accountable for building well-being in your division we don't care how you do it you know your own workers better than we do you might do those exercises but you know them well and we're going to hold you accountable for building well-being we're going to pay you and promote you on the basis of the extent that you can make the people working for you happier Adam Smith tells us people will invent ways to do that so the few did you fall into come did you follow the argument here just to say in a more concrete way let's say you decide that in your marriage you're going to increase the promo of your husband what you do on this Adam Smith argument is instead of having to make a gratitude visit or doing three four good things at time one we're going to measure this perma then it's time ensue we're going to measure it again and you know the kinds of things that produce positive emotion engagement good relationships meaning in your husband it's your job to find ways to implement that so once you measure and once you hold yourself accountable you will invent the ways to increase the local well-being of the people you care about so that's where the future of interventions for me Richard in action for happiness is at the local level having people measure well-being at time 1 and time 2 and then implement local strategies for increasing it okay I'm coming close here we're what I just told you about was ways of raising well-being happiness perma it individuals can you do this on a larger scale so Alejandra Adler one of my students now my colleague goes around the world implementing positive education programs but more than just implementing them so as Richard knows correct me if I'm wrong Richard one of the barriers for implementing positive education in England was Michael Gove so close and open I hope I'm not wading into something like sure way they need to he's no longer education is he doesn't need yeah so he and other ministers of Education say you know if you're trying to make kids happy at school schools are about learning writing and arithmetic and engineering and to the extent you waste your time building well-being you're going to you're going to detract from schools major mission which is to teach knowledge and so a major question has been if you some now because of the exercises because of the kinds of things that Richard and Mark had done and other people around the world we know how to make kids happier at school so there a curricula that build life satisfaction in children but the Michael Gove argument is this is going to hurt their academic progress you're going to take time away from it so when Alejandro Adler has set out to do last five years is to find out if that's true so it started in Bhutan with about 8,000 kids 11 schools got the GNH global national happiness curriculum that he created and seven schools got the teaching of health nutrition and psychological principles as controls and then he came back a year later and two years later he measured their well-being EPOC is a measure of perma for children and not surprisingly he found out that the kids that have learned the schools and what she thought was learned were happier but most importantly he looked at their standardized test scores and what you can see here is that the kids who are in the schools in which well-being is taught are doing better on objective national tests of verbal mathematical and scientific achievement he that did the same thing in Mexico with 68 thousand children implementing the curriculum 15 months later we haven't been back for the 27 months he found out the kids were happier who had learned this and again he found that on the national standardized test the kids the schools that taught happiness the kids did better on the standardized tests and then he did this in Peru with almost 700,000 children and again 15 months later the kids are happy notice by the way the effect is getting smaller and the reason it's getting smaller is still there is when you got 18 schools in Bhutan alejandro could implemented it himself and and trained teachers firsthand in Mexico and Peru you've got three layers you got Alejandro trainers trainers of trainers trainers of trainers and trainers you've got dilute effects but you've still got with 700,000 kids the kids in schools that have learned perma and implemented in their lives are doing better academically finally the United States Army decided about five seven years ago to implement this we trained 30,000 drill sergeants at the Unity University of Pennsylvania we teach them essentially what we've been talking about tonight they teach it to the 1.1 million American soldiers and it's hard to measure because the Army within two years adopted this all over the army but we did for a couple of years before it was implemented as a effective army procedure that everyone got we measured in several thousand soldiers who were trained on resilience and positive psychology we measured substance abuse post-traumatic stress disorder depression and panic and we found roughly half the rate of substance abuse and it significantly decreased the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder and pack so I finally want to say something about the politics all of this what I've said tonight actually is quite political but it's not political in the left/right sense so I take the left/right disputes that you have and we have to be given that there's some agreement about what national goals should be should this be done at a federal level a centralised level or should it be done at more individual level this is not about who doesn't this is about what the goals are so many of my economist friends think the goal of good government is to make the nation wealthier and the goal of wealth is to produce more wealth my military friends tell me the goal of good government is to conquer more territory to impose your will on other people I don't think either of those things are the goals that I think good government is about for me good government is what we talked about tonight good government is perma good government is increasing the perma of every citizen and it's in this sense that I very much approve of what mr. Cameron said four years ago that he would measure the well-being of the British nation and judge the success or failure of public policy by whether or not increased well-being well this is my goal this is the political goal of positive psychology and I want to close with a quote I brought along this is have any of you read Kim Stanley Robinson's years of rice and salt I'm not recognized the one who wrote a science fiction writer red Mars Bluebird of Mars Green Mars years of rice and salt assumes that everyone was killed by the black play in the West and that human civilization grew up in the East and it goes through the same awful things that happened in our last seven or eight hundred years and in the 19th century in this book there's a an Indian Raja Kerala he's called who gets interested in science and technology and he recruits scientists and technologists from all over the world to to increase infrastructure of India and he this is the speech who gives them since we will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere and plenty for all and there will be no more empires or kingdoms no more callous Sultan's Amir's Khan's resummoned ours no more kings or Queens or princes no more caddies or mullahs or Alima no more slavery and no more Ussuri no more property and no more taxes no more rich and no more poor no killing or maiming or torture or execution no more jailers and no more prisoners no more generals soldiers armies or navies no more patriarchy no more castes no more hunger no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] laughter thank you so much and incredibly broad and moving and informative slide we've just had with you I know people in this room will be bursting to ask you questions and to delve into some of that stuff in more detail we have four microphones I believe and we've got staircases so we should hopefully be able to get to everyone in the room I would request I mean of course many people who want to be involved this evening and we do have until half-past day but can you try and keep your questions as brief as possible and let's focus many people have a chance to delve into this incredibly you know movie and inspiring sort of set of wisdom we've talked about this evening we would like to start this off the question for Marty I'm seeing our hands pointed up hopefully point is over there yes there's a hand right here back can we get a microphone up to this manner the check shows it towards the back thank you very much yes thank you very much for the lecture do you have any positive measurements for happiness I mean you talked about lack of substance abuse lack of I don't know suicide rates whatever but to me those are negative measurements do you have any positive measurements yes so routinely happiness is called subjective well-being and the most widely use scale is a life satisfaction scale which I think about 10 million people around the world have taken where one on one to ten latter one is the conditions of my life are awful and ten is ideal so that's the routine questionnaire used for happiness life satisfaction simply there are questionnaires for engagement for good relationships for meaning and for accomplishment so you can find about 20 of those questionnaires all of which are widely used on my website authentic happiness or what I suggested tonight is we can do better than questionnaires we can take the lexicon of happiness joy rapture comfort and it turns out by like one of the nice things about doing a big data is you look at the words that correlate that co-occur with the happiness words like massage and candlelight and you quantify those and so by using the perma lexicon coupled to the routine questionnaires about happiness of well-being we believe you get more accurate measures positive measures and that indeed unlike what Freud and Schopenhauer said to us the absence of misery not remotely the same thing as the presence of trauma Marty on a related topic as well it's in my mind that you've made the point about surveys they people sort of lie or they're not very accurate in what they say one of the observations people sometimes make about social media and Twitter and Facebook is that people are putting on a show they're trying to portray an image GQ senses might also get you on internet so the the social media have have artifacts as well and so in many ways by combining some social media as reputation management but you can one of the things we're interested in is having people write anonymously and without being judged by others and looking at the correlation of that to what they do on social media so there are ways of correcting for reputation management on Facebook and Twitter in the same way with correct questionnaires with social desirability questionnaires so big data has a number of compounds and artifacts on the whole it's less capable than asking people out right how excited are you about the library that we just built in Manchester let's take this thank you so in the little hair but thank you thank you so I think probably central inquiry for all of us that are in this room is how can we make more rapid progress towards a kinder more compassionate balanced world and I wonder if you might comment on the sociology and psychology of place in that context that's very struck by your presentation around a perspective on perma for the individual lots of your work seems to be through the lens of the institution for example the army or school would you encourage us to for example focus on Hackney Brighton Sheffield work Long Island work with a sense of the sociology and psychology of place so that all the schools all the businesses all the related environments come together we make more rapid progress as some of you know I'm hard of hearing so I'm gonna have to ask mark to repeat so Marty it's a question about how important is it to focus on place in the context of this work so for example a specific location like Brighton where you could say let's try and get you know positive promo ideas in the context of both workplaces communities and so on what sociographic and in terms of focusing on geographic locations to try and build further in those places I haven't thought very much about that so where they don't have a good answer for that there is wide variation in perma from place to place for job to job from nation to nation so that variation tells us that place is important but one free association I can mention is there are places that are specifically interested in making their political units the happiest places on earth so Mandy and I were fortunate enough to live in Adelaide South raelia for three different months over three years because the Prime Minister Jay Weatherill of South Australia wanted to make a delay the happiest city in the world and he we have implemented programs in high schools and mental health in in the police forces of new life so I think there's a lot of good work to be done from place to place but I really don't have a good answer on just a few specific examples in Bristol in the UK there have been quite coordinated effort to measure well-being and implement that in conjunction with a local authority in Santa Monica in California there's a very coordinated effort to measure their well-being of local residents and some of you would have seen that the United Arab Emirates recently has sort of made improving their nation's happiness a sort of national priority as well so there's different examples of this happening around the world so we have a question from lady here the orange scarf come on you see show of hands of people he's waiting for us a question okay great let's do discussion here I'll lip read great come down a bit more there's microphones that seem to be on I'll actually stand over here thank you sorry about that thank you you talked about empowering people in therapy to learn that they have control and also talked about empowering leaders in organizations at a local level to take accountability for well-being do you think we should be empowering children at a younger age to more sense of control of themselves is that part of the permit program question one should be we be empowering children to take more control over their education and my answer is I I really don't know but I have to say I had my doubts about children and having having had seven of them and watching them still growing up and here's where my doubts come from so I work on creativity and imagination and I'm very interested in the question about people being more creative and it's commonly and glibly said that children are extraordinarily creative and we somehow beat that out of them middle school yeah I don't think that's true and here's so unlike I guess it's Ken Robinson who says that kind of stuff a lot I think there are two aspects to creativity one is the generation of original ideas which kids are very good at it and the second is a sense of the audience a sense of what's going to work a sense of the gatekeepers enough knowledge to be able to apply it the world kids are terrible at sense of the audience and when I mentioned what I do when you try to teach creativity we both nurture originality but we've got this huge deficit and the audience so we try to teach kids about audience as well so I'm generalizing from that to what kids are empowering kids to take over schooling so I have to say I don't know but I think childhood is overrated generally sorry about that well we're taking questions from the floor there's another one here in the metal what is your view on mindfulness how does it fit with the perma and especially with engagement and whether that can be a substitute engagement can be a substitute for it is your love well you know the question is what do I think about mindfulness and the answer is I like it a lot and I think of it as one of important techniques that is a positive psychology technique that builds subjective well-being and Happiness there are a lot of different things that are meant by mindfulness and I let me take my one two reservations about mindfulness again this is I like it I meditated for 20 years so I am experienced mines in this person and it really worked with a typical met typical TM kind of meditations work well to decrease anxiety having said that in to increase subjective well-being so let me say my reservations about mindfulness mindfulness tends to be an individual extras it's about the self very often I think happiness and well-being are very often about altruism meaning and other people and that some of the mindfulness meditation unlike compassion meditation are more self-centered so I'm quite partial to things like compassion meditation and my second reservation about mindfulness is I had there's a dialogue between the Dalai Lama and me in Sydney about six or seven years ago in which I say something like holiness let me tell you what bothers me about Buddhism and mindfulness it's about the present and we're creatures of the future and to the extent that we want people to live in the present what we're fighting is essentially the ventral medial prefrontal cortex which is right now as you're listening to me running through scenarios about what you can do with what I'm saying in the future so for me a set of exercises that tells people to live in the present is working against Homo Prospectus yeah so I guess it's quite a big question I was wondering how you'll be able to influence something a perma in so much large institution like our NHS so the question was how can you implement perma into something like the National Health Service and someone like Richard Laird is much better qualified than I am to tell you how to do something in the political world but I can say what I think needs to be done in NHS and in medicine generally first I preface this by saying I think for a large number of physical ailments cardiovascular illness being a very prominent one there are huge psychological variables so per mo well-being is a major protective factor against dying from cardiovascular illness whether or not that's true in cancer I'm not sure of but just the other day I I went to my orthopedic surgeon to get a shot of cortisone in my shoulder because it had sort of been aching lately and I filled out a questionnaire about how much my right shoulder was bothering me and I said well a 2 out of 10 for pain and one out of 10 for dysfunction and he came in and he showed me the x-ray and he said when people come into my office with that x-ray they're screaming in pain and they're begging for a shoulder replacement that's just an example of the effect of psychological variables on physical illness so I think we need to build perma in psychiatry and there now is a movement called in psychiatry which is aimed at building perma and in medicine generally which have been quite resistant into it again someone like Richard can tell you how in Parliament and in a cabinet this might happen but as a matter of measurement what I would do in the National Health Service is saying we value permit we want patients to have higher permit we're going to measure the perma of your patients at time one and we're going to come back at time two and measure it again we're going to hold you accountable for increasing purba I think merely doing that would show noticeable savings on patient visits and noticeable increases in things like cardiovascular disease hi thank you I I don't think it's fair to put your measurement systems yours and Richards in opposition in all the data I look at there's a huge good bad factor which is what Richard talks about and then there are other factors around it which is what perma is about and they're not really in opposition but what I really want to ask you about I don't like the Twitter data but that's Matt I think it's too observational but but what I will ask for its fairness in in the USA in the UK we see rising in income inequality we see a lot of distress in southern Europe around unemployment around those sort of things and I'm wondering uni you you talk a lot about great things either perma but I think you miss fairness I think you miss the systemic effect and system shape us a lot and in justices make us feel very angry and I think if we're going to have a politics of well-being we have to talk about social justice and fairness - so could you hear what Nick Nick marks had to say Nick has been a major British advocate for social justice son I'm happy to encounter this question so I can tell you the usual stuff we agree about and then I think fairness and social justice is very important and I spent a good part of my life working on it but now let me say one thing you meet like and this is a reservation about Piketty and inequality generally so there's a quite large data base about the relationship between economic inequality nation by nation and life satisfaction nation by nation and it is somewhat surprising that across the world as a whole economic inequalities is a significant but not a very big factor in life satisfaction in fact the part of it that seems to in this pace be agreeing with you Brazil in Canada have about the same amount of economic inequalities but in Canada people think it's fair and it's just and there is no impact of Canadian economic inequality on life satisfaction in Canada in Brazil people think of it as unjust and corrupt and unfair and their inequality is a major force for life satisfaction so I think Nick what I'd say is that what I'm after is notions of justice and fairness as opposed to economic inequality per se hi I just wanna say it's an honor to hear you speak so thank you for coming today and there's a number of us here who are either sports psychologists or sports psychologists in training and I would love to hear your opinion on where perma sits in the future in sports psychology um so that was about sports psychology and perma there's quite a gulf in the coaching of sports psychology so there are the coaches who yell and scream and points of what you're bad at and try to correct it and then their coaches like Pete Carroll who is the coach of the Super Bowl winning I think Seattle Mariners who basically does perma an action for happiness in which what he emphasizes what you're good at and the like I don't know which side I'm really along in general when you work on things that people are bad at as in psychotherapy and dieting you get these ten temporary boosts and then as soon as you lay off people go back to where they were when you work on stuff that people are good at then you tend to see permanent more permanent changes so that's about as far as I'm willing to go now there are quite a few people in sport psychology who advocated perma and it certainly can't be bad for a team or an individual things like optimism we've shown with Olympic swimming that optimistic swimmers when they're defeated swim faster afterwards optimistic pitchers in baseball in close games get better than pessimistic pitchers get worse so optimism is one variable that I'm pretty convinced with within sports is important but I wouldn't want us to give up trying to correct people's errors but I guess there is something I want to say about that one of the problems in general about the psychology that I grew up with other than the fact that it didn't work on well-being and didn't think about the future was the notion that somehow if you corrected people's errors you'd get an exemplary footballer or child or the like I don't think that's true I think not getting it wrong doesn't remotely equal getting it right and that getting it right is a completely different process it's important not to make errors but the kind of insight and skill development that occurs when you get something right is completely different so I'm sorry about the inadequacy of that answer I think we have time for just one last question because if you let people get away hi if I can then adapt a famous saying by Karl Marx up to now psychologists have helped us to cope with the world the point is to change it now we in actually of a happiness are trying to do that through a mass movement I'd be interested to know what what what do you think of this approach Martin and what the prospects are for building our action about happiness in the States yeah I have two things to say about that the the first is a question about reality so Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a very interesting Lee critical book about me and positive psychology which she said something like what we need in the world is not more positive thinking but better reality yeah well that sounds pretty good until you start to realize there are two kinds of realities there is what George Soros calls non reflexive realities so what time the Sun will rise in London tomorrow is not a little dependent on when I want it to rise there are a whole lot of things like that and then there are reflexive realities realities in which what you think and what you feel changes the reality so it turns out just one example of that other than the stock market which is clearly a reflexive reality what people think a company is worth is the what a stock market works on but in marriage there's good evidence that the more benign illusions you have about your spouse the better of the marriage because your spouse tries to live up to them so the first thing I wanted to say is that I'm all for better realities I'm all for a better world but I'm also have devoted my life to trying to change the way people think and feel because that affects the reflects of realities and the other thing the milder thing I think I want to say is I'm all for changing the world I'm not very good at doing that that's the kind of thing that people like Richard Laird do but the dependent variable that I'm after is not objective realities like infrastructure and the like but the subjective realities how much meaning we have in life how much we love other people how happy we are so as a set of targets politically and socially where I come from the part of the world we can change are the psychological realities Malti thank you [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Action for Happiness

Views: 119,378

Rating: 4.8122869 out of 5

Keywords: happiness, wellbeing, action for happiness, positive psychology, flourishing, seligman, layard

Id: HH0sssQzQGg

Length: 80min 13sec (4813 seconds)

Published: Thu May 12 2016