How to Realize That You’re Happy
On Christmas Eve in the small American town of Bedford Falls, George Bailey is about to take his own life. Bailey, the head of a small savings and loan association, an upstanding man with a wife and four children, is facing bankruptcy because his uncle has gambled away all his money. He’s standing on a bridge, about to jump into the river. In the nick of time, an old man falls into the water and cries for help. Bailey saves him, and the old man tells him he’s an angel. Naturally Bailey doesn’t believe him. Instead, he wishes he’d never been born. The angel grants his wish, transforming Bedford Falls into the miserable place it would have been if George Bailey had never existed. When he wakes up again on Christmas Eve, George Bailey has been liberated from his depression. Overjoyed that he’s still alive, he runs down the main street of the snowy town, laughing and shouting “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”
The tragi-comedy It’s a Wonderful Life, released in 1946 and starring James Stewart, has since become a Christmas classic. Less familiar, however, is the strategy the angel uses in the film. In psychology it’s known as mental subtraction, and it should definitely be in your good life toolkit. Let’s do a quick run through. First, answer me one question: how generally happy are you with your life? Put it on a scale from 0 (deeply unhappy) to 10 (ecstatic) and jot down the number in the margin of this page. Now read the next paragraph (but no further). Then close your eyes and follow the instructions you’ve just read.
Close your eyes. Imagine you’ve lost your right arm. There’s nothing but a stump hanging from your shoulder. How does it feel? How much more difficult is your life with only one arm? What about eating? Typing? Cycling? Hugging someone? Now imagine you’ve lost your left arm too. No hands. No picking anything up, no touching, no caressing. How does it feel? Finally, imagine you’ve also lost your sight. You can still hear, but you’ll never see another landscape, never see the faces of your partner, your children, your friends. How does it feel? Okay, now open your eyes. Take at least two minutes to play through the three situations—to “feel” through them—before reading on.
How happy are you now, after the exercise, with your life? Put it on a scale from 0 (deeply unhappy) to 10 (ecstatic). If you’re anything like most people, your perception of your own happiness has just skyrocketed. When I did this exercise for the first time, it felt like I was a ball being held underwater and someone had just let me go—I shot upward like a fountain. That’s the dramatic effect of mental subtraction.
Of course, you don’t have to pretend you’ve lost any limbs to boost your sense of wellbeing. Just think about how you would feel if you’d never met your partner, if you’d lost your kids in an accident, if you were standing in a trench or lying on your deathbed. It’s crucial not to think in the abstract but to really feel the situation.
Gratitude, as we saw in Chapter 7, is a very appropriate emotion given all the lucky coincidences in our lives—and especially given the lucky coincidences that made our lives possible in the first place. There’s scarcely a single self-help book that doesn’t exhort its readers to reflect on the positives in their lives every night and feel grateful.
But there are two problems with gratitude. First, who do you thank? If you’re not religious, there’s nobody to feel grateful to. Second, habituation. The human brain reacts violently to change but adapts rapidly to situations. This is an advantage when disaster strikes—our grief at being abandoned or at being stuck in a wheelchair after an accident will fade more swiftly than we think, thanks to habituation. Dan Gilbert calls this our psychological immune system. Unfortunately, however, the effects of the psychological immune system are not limited to disasters. Six months after we win millions on the lottery, for instance, the effect on our happiness will have dissipated. The same goes for the birth of our children or the purchase of a new home. Because ninety-nine percent of the positive aspects of our lives didn’t just crop up today but are of long standing, the power of habituation has negated the joy we originally felt about them. Gratitude is an explicit attempt to fight this process by deliberately naming and emphasizing the positive things we have going for us. Sadly, however, we grow accustomed to this tactic too. People who make a mental “gratitude” checklist each evening find it weakens the effect on their wellbeing compared to people who do it less frequently. A paradoxical result—yet one explained by the leveling power of habituation.
These, then, are the downsides of the much-vaunted practice of gratitude—the question of who to thank and the issue of habituation. Now the good news: mental subtraction brings none of these disadvantages. It’s such an unexpected move that your brain never sees it coming. In several studies, Dan Gilbert, Timothy Wilson and their research colleagues have shown that mental subtraction increases happiness significantly more markedly than simply focusing on the positives. The Stoics figured this out two thousand years ago: instead of thinking about all the things you don’t yet have, consider how much you’d miss the things you do have if you didn’t have them any longer.
Say you’re an athlete taking part in the Olympics. You’re in peak condition, even winning a medal. Which would make you happier, silver or bronze? Silver, of course, you reply. Yet a survey of medalists during the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona revealed that silver medalists were less happy than bronze medalists. Why? Because silver medalists measured themselves against gold, while bronze medalists measured themselves against the runners-up. Mental subtraction could have forestalled this adverse effect. With mental subtraction, you’re always comparing yourself against non-medalists—and of course you can substitute “non-medalists” with whatever you like.
All in all, mental subtraction is an effective way of tricking your brain into valuing the positive aspects of your life more highly. Because it makes you happy, it also contributes to the good life.
“Our happiness is sometimes not very salient,” wrote Paul Dolan. “We need to do what we can to make it more so. Imagine playing a piano and not being able to hear what it sounds like. Many activities in life are like playing a piano that you do not hear.” With mental subtraction, you’ll finally experience the music’s true sonority.