Squeezing the most out of life
When life gives you lemons, is it okay to not make lemonade? talks with the co-author of a self-help book.
In 2016, the self-help industry was worth globally a staggering $10bn (€9bn).
Speaking with Dr Andy Cope, co-author of ZEST: How to Squeeze the Max Out of Life, I ask the question that has been on my mind since reading that statistic.
What exactly was it that made you think that what the world really needs right now is another self-help book?
The author of 12 self-help books laughs at my question.
“We think it’s self-help for people who don’t like self-help,” he says. “It’s full of energy and fun. You shouldn’t notice that it’s personal development. That’s how we wanted to write it. It’s just a good read, with lots of good messages in it.”
The blurb on ZEST says the book is “crammed with positive psychology and the study of human flourishing, ZEST is more than just a personal development book … it’s about squeezing every last drop out of who you already are”. With a PhD from Loughborough University on the science of positive psychology, Andy Cope (pictured right) describes himself as the UK’s first doctor of happiness. He says we’ve missed a trick for 130 years.
“It’s that handful of people you can think of in your life who’ve got a smile on their face and a spring in their step and a very happy demeanour.
“We’ve never studied those people, on the grounds that they’re not ill.
For 130 years, psychology has studied mental illness, phobias, disorders, and depression, in the hope that we can fix you, but we’ve never studied the people that don’t need fixing.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be really interesting to study the happy people and apply that learning to everybody else?” Are some people really innately happy, though? Surely we’re all just a mish-mash of different feelings at different points in our lives?
“Well,” he concedes, “we are a mish-mash. But there are international tables of happiness, and the UK is currently 19th, so we’re really, really bad at being happy as a nation.” (Ireland is currently 14th.)
“What intrigues me is that a lot of the countries above us are a lot poorer than us, and we’re working harder to produce more stuff that we think will make us happier.” Of his co-writers, Gavin Oattes and Will Hussey, Cope says Oattes is a stand-up comedian who brings humour “and a bit of naughty swearing”, and Hussey is, as he puts it, a really good writer.
“We tried to write a book that we would want to read, the three lads who wrote it.
“What we wanted to do was to lose all the big words and the academia, and boil it down to the best bits, if you like.
Our message is simple. We already are brilliant, but we forget. The modern world is really good at making you forget how to be happy.
The book pulls no punches when it comes to “anti-social media”.
“If you think about the Top 10 experiences in your life, they won’t be on social media, they’ll be very simple experiences you’ll have with people that you love. Probably with no wifi.
“The modern world is great, and I wouldn’t want to be born in any other time, but the human brain — the very thing that’s allowed us to conquer the planet — is now tripping us up. It’s that over-thinking and being over-stimulated that’s killing us. Our brains are killing us, our thinking is killing us, and literally in some cases.” I ask about the idea of base-line happiness, which is often illustrated by the example of a lottery winner’s happiness spiking, before slowly reverting to normal. Are we not essentially at — more-or-less — the level of happiness we’re always going to be at, barring upsets either way?
“Scientists call that the set point theory,” Cope replies. “In England, 7.3 is our national average of happiness. Most people are mildly happy most of the time.
“When you have a really down time in your life, your set point will act like a piece of elastic and drag you eventually back to 7.3. And if you do win the lottery, you can’t live your life 10 out of 10, so gradually your happiness will come back to 7.3.
I think it should be called the familiar point, because we become familiar with a level of happiness. So, if I’m a 7.3, there’s nothing really stopping me from adjusting my happiness to an 8, if only I knew how.
“And that brings us back to that handful of people you can think of in your life who, when they’re around, you feel good. If you get it right, happiness leaks out of you and you become infectious, in a really positive way.” Wouldn’t that be really irritating?
“It’s got to be authentic! Bouncing in to work all jazz hands on Monday morning going ‘Don’t those weekends drag’ is too far. Too happy! That’ll get you bullied.” Or murdered, I mutter. Andy laughs and says he loves my cynicism.
“It’s about a genuine re-wiring of your thinking, until it becomes ingrained in habit.
“Essentially, if you look at happy people and non-happy people, which is what my PhD was about, they live in exactly the same world. Brexit is happening to happy people too. It rains on happy people too.
“The external world is identical. Therefore, the difference must be what’s happening inside their heads, and it’s the habits of thinking that really interest me.”
I’m not sure the external world is identical, though, and I tell him, with perhaps more honesty than I intend, that I’ve suffered a bereavement in the past year. I’m not in the happiest of places at the moment, I say. Should I
rewire my thinking?
“Well, to be deadly serious, it’s perfectly okay to not be okay. There are times in your life where you have genuine reasons in your life to feel down. But your set point will gradually bring you back.
“I think it’s the way you reframe that bereavement. I thought the Irish were really good at having a wake, a celebration of life!”
We are, I reply, but when the wake is done, and the dead are buried, the whirlwind of well-wishers moves on and you’re still alone with your grief. And it’s not so easy then to rewire your thinking.
Andy sounds a bit contrite, and says he knows what I mean, that everyone will have moments like that in their lives.
“There’s a little chapter in the book around what the Japanese call Kintsugi. When they break a pot in Japan, they fix it back together with gold colouring in the glue, so every imperfection is highlighted.
“We’re all that pot. We’ve all been smashed by life, and we’ve pieced ourselves back together. What broke you, ultimately, is what makes you who you are.”
I dunno. Cracked pot, or crackpot, I think it’s OK sometimes to take life’s lemons and not make lemonade.
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