Oliver Burkeman on Self-Improvement and the Law of Reversed Effort

We've grown accustomed, in recent years, to news stories and psychological studies purporting to show that happiness isn't all we might have imagined it to be. Increased economic growth doesn't seem to lead, in any reliable way, to happier societies. More choice often makes us more miserable. Positive thinking can make at least some of us feel worse (read this).. and so on. In the years I've spent exploring some of the more dubious corners of the self-help industry, I've certainly encountered plenty of prescriptions for happiness that turn out to be utterly counterproductive. To me, though, the compelling philosophical question is whether these wrong approaches to happiness might all be wrong for a similar and interesting set of reasons. Is there something about the very act of striving for happiness that sabotages our efforts to attain it?

The observation that happiness seems to come most easily when glimpsed out of the corner of an eye, rather than aimed for directly, is an old one. ("Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so," noted John Stuart Mill.) But the question remains urgent: what, if anything, can we do about this seemingly intractable paradox?

In the book on which I'm currently working, I've been exploring this idea of a "negative path" to happiness — that it's our constant efforts to eliminate the negative (uncertainty, unhappiness, failure) that causes us to feel so anxious, insecure and unhappy — and that there's an alternative approach that involves coming face-to-face with, perhaps even embracing, many of the things we spend our lives trying so hard to avoid. Aldous Huxley was getting at something similar when he wrote of the "law of reversed effort"; the Sixties counterculture philosopher Alan Watts called it "the backwards law".

Take, for example, the advice of the ancient Stoics to practice the "premeditation of evils" — to spend time visualising not the best-case scenario, as hyperventilating motivational speakers would have us do, but the worst-case scenario, both to heighten an appreciation for the advantages we currently enjoy, and to remove the gnawing fear that we wouldn't be able to cope if the worst befell us. "Set aside a certain number of days," advises Seneca, "during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'" Or consider the Buddhist notion of non-attachment, which runs so directly counter to the mood-boosting advice of our present-day self-help gurus. Instead of trying to fill your brain with positive thoughts and emotions — a ceaseless struggle that, ironically, isn't really enjoyable at all — learn instead to step back from identification with thoughts and emotions, letting both negative and positive ones be. Which, apart from a potential path to spiritual enlightenment, happens to be excellent anti-procrastination advice: instead of trying to psych yourself up into the right mood to act, learn to act alongside whatever mood you're in.

There are countless other approaches, from ancient philosophy to present-day experimental psychology, that belong on this "negative path" to happiness. Deep in the human psyche seems to lurk a fundamental ironic principle: striving for what we want seems all too often a recipe for not getting it. Learning to work with that irony may be the happiness technique we've been missing.


Oliver Burkeman will be leading our event:  'Self Improvement' on 19 October.  Sadly tickets are now sold out, but a collection of his Guardian columns, entitled Help!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done, has just been published in paperback. His blogs at www.oliverburkeman.com and is @oliverburkeman on Twitter.

Comments

[Ravi Chandan]

The real moral of life!!