I’m all for happiness, says Peter Honey, but can it be taught?

Hooray! Positive psychology has arrived! Apparently, it is the most popular class this year at Harvard, and now we read that Wellington College plans to have weekly sessions on wellbeing and happiness, initially for 14-16 year-olds and, if they find ‘it works’, for all their pupils. I’m very happy to hear all this. For too long, psychology (my subject) has focused on the gloomier aspects of the human condition – anxiety states, post-traumatic syndrome, depression, neuroses, psychoses – and while understanding how to alleviate these is clearly necessary and helpful, it tends to be remedial rather than preventative.

If prevention is better than cure, a shift towards positive psychology is surely welcome. If you think of your emotions as a continuum with negative feelings on the left, neutral feelings in the middle and positive feelings on the right, the idea of showing people how to spend more time somewhere on the right-hand side of neutral is surely attractive. However, can it be taught, as opposed to being learnt? That, as they say, is the question. I have no doubt that learning how to be happy is both possible and highly desirable. In fact, I know it is learnable because I have done it!

Dr Albert Ellis, the originator of cognitive behaviour therapy, showed me how. He maintains that it is your thoughts, not situations, that trigger your emotions, and that learning how to choose your thoughts is the key to preventing ‘unproductive’ feelings (i.e. feelings that tend to impair your performance rather than enhance it). So, for example, you can learn how to prevent (not suppress, that’s quite different) feelings of inadequacy, anxiety, worry, guilt, jealousy and so on. Once you know how, it makes a staggering difference to, well, everything. The main thrust of Dr Ellis’ work is to prevent negative feelings and get you into a neutral state (the middle of the continuum), but the same thought processes can take you on from being merely neutral to the positive side of the scale. Ellis, however, has always cautioned against wearing rose-coloured spectacles and forcing yourself to be artificially cheerful. He challenges the widespread assumption that life should be fair, and is keen for people to stay in touch with a reality that is full of happenstance and setbacks.

It strikes me that there are two fascinating points in all this. The first is the question of whether happy is something you can set out to become in the same way that, say, you’d set out to become an accountant or an airline pilot. My conclusion is that to aim for ‘being happy’ as an end in itself doesn’t work terribly well. This, I think, is because happiness is more of a consequence of other things – things like being in control, going with the flow, having friends, helping people, being healthy, being grateful for what you’ve got, enjoying what you do and so on. Happiness is like BluTac – something you get as a by-product of making something else. As C. P. Snow said, ‘The pursuit of happiness is a most ridiculous phrase; if you pursue happiness you’ll never find it’. The trick, therefore, is to create the conditions where happiness is likely to be the welcome by-product – and there are plenty of techniques waiting to help you do this. The second point is whether Albert Ellis taught me, or whether he helped me to learn (or whether this is semantic hair-splitting!). I have always maintained that teaching and learning, whilst hopefully connected, are quite different processes. They must be different, since it is possible for someone to teach and for no-one to have learnt (or not to have learnt what the teacher wanted them to learn!). I

t reminds me of that delightful Spot cartoon where a dog-owner claims to have taught his dog to whistle, and a passer-by says, ‘I can’t hear him whistling’, to which the dog-owner replies, indignantly, ‘I said I’d taught him to whistle, not that he could whistle!’. Teaching is something you do to people, learning is something people have to do for themselves. So, I doubt that what is being taught at Harvard, and will be taught at Wellington, is happiness because, alas, it isn’t teachable, only learnable. However, people can certainly be helped to see that happiness is within their grasp and shown techniques that, if they work at them, will make happiness a more likely outcome than would otherwise have been the case.

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