(By Scott Adams, 03 January 2014)
I have no
expertise whatsoever on the topic of happiness. But I do have a knack for
observation and simplification. That’s what I do for my day job as the creator
of Dilbert. Today — as some of you are already backtracking on those New Year’s
resolutions — I’m going to strip out all of the mumbo-jumbo around the topic of
happiness and tell you the simplest way to get some. You’re reading this in the business section
because every bit of what follows on the topic of happiness is relevant to your
career, especially if you have entrepreneurial ambitions. You’ll need all the
good health, good looks and mental energy you can muster to influence people
and survive the long hours. As luck would have it, the good habits that make
you healthy and energetic help to make you happy at the same time, so it’s a
double win.
As far as I
can tell, people usually experience the sensation of happiness whenever they
have both health and freedom. It’s a simple formula: Happiness = Health + Freedom I’m talking about the everyday freedom of
being able to do what you want when you want to do it, at work and elsewhere.
For happiness, timing is as important as the thing you’re doing. For example,
your favorite food is useless to you if the only time you can eat it is when
your stomach is already full. But if I offer you bland food when you’re
starving, you’ll feel as if you won the lottery. The timing of things matters.
The same
principle is true for exercise. If you exercise when you’re in the mood for it,
you can enjoy the workout. But if you can only exercise after a long day on the
job and a grueling commute, you might hate it. There’s a right time and a wrong
time for nearly every activity, from sleep to sex to paying bills. Matching
your mood to your activity is a baseline requirement for happiness. The good
news is that timing is relatively controllable, especially in the long run.
If you’re
just starting out in your career, it won’t be easy to find a job that gives you
a flexible schedule. The best approach is a strategy of moving toward more
flexibility over the course of your life. That quest could take the form of
badgering your pointy-haired boss into letting you work from home one day per
week, or it might mean going back to school to learn a skill so you can run
your own business. In my case, it means waking up several hours before the rest
of the family. There isn’t one formula for finding schedule flexibility. Just
make sure all of your important decisions are consistent with an end game of a
more flexible schedule. Otherwise you are shutting yourself off from the most
accessible lever for happiness — timing.
We can’t ignore the role of money in all of this. Money can’t directly
buy happiness, but it can give you more options, and that’s an important part
of freedom. So don’t give up too much income potential just to get a flexible
schedule. There’s no point in having a flexible schedule if you can’t afford to
do anything.
The second
part of the happiness formula is health. It’s never a good idea to take health
tips from cartoonists, so check with your doctor if anything here sounds iffy
to you. I don’t know how many people have died after reading health tips from
cartoonists, but it probably isn’t zero. Don’t say you weren’t warned. The most important thing to know about
staying fit is this: If it takes willpower, you’re doing it wrong. Anything
that requires willpower is unsustainable in the long run. And studies show that
using willpower in one area diminishes how much willpower you have in reserve
for other areas. You need to get willpower out of the system. I’ll show you
some tricks for doing that.
My
observation is that you can usually replace willpower with knowledge. That
isn’t an obvious point, so I’ll give some examples. Imagine you are hungry and I offer you a
delicious but unhealthy dessert. It would take a lot of willpower to resist.
Now imagine the same scenario, but I simultaneously offer a healthier food option
that is also delicious. Suddenly it is easy to pick the healthy alternative
over the dessert. The dessert was only irresistible when the alternative was
starving. So the trick for avoiding unhealthy foods is to make sure you always
have access to healthy options that you enjoy eating. Your knowledge of this
trick, assuming you use it, makes willpower far less necessary.
Now imagine
I offer you a choice of pasta or a white potato. And let’s say you enjoy both
to a similar degree. Which do you choose? If you have only a basic
understanding of nutrition — similar to what most people have — you might say
it’s a toss-up. You’ve heard carbs are bad for you and that’s where your
knowledge ends. But if you knew that pasta is far lower on the glycemic index
than a white potato, you would make a far healthier choice that requires no
willpower at all. All it took was knowledge.
And while you’re eating your pasta, feel free to pile on the parmesan
cheese. Cheese adds calories, but the fat content will help suppress your
appetite, so you probably come out ahead. If you didn’t already know that, you
might end up using willpower to avoid cheese at dinner and willpower again
later that night to resist snacking.
A little
knowledge replaces a lot of willpower. Is there anything else you should know
about diet? Let me give you a quick quiz.
Did you know
that sleepiness causes you to feel hungry?
Did you know
that eating peanuts is a great way to suppress appetite?
Did you know
that eating mostly protein instead of simple carbs for lunch will help you
avoid the afternoon energy slump?
Did you know
that eating simple carbs can make you hungrier?
Did you know
that exercise has only a small impact on your weight?
If this is
the first you have heard any of those facts, and you are sporting some extra
pounds, you probably have a knowledge gap that feels to you like a shortage of
willpower.
Speaking of
knowledge, I’ve recently discovered that my cravings for certain foods can be
manipulated. That surprised me because I thought my food preferences were baked
into my DNA. I once loved french fries with an almost insane passion. But after
I started noticing how drained and useless I felt after eating simple carbs,
french fries became easy to resist. Knowledge weaned me off french fries when
willpower could not.
I also
learned that I can remove problem foods from my diet if I target them for extinction
one at a time. It was easy to stop eating three large Snickers every day (which
I was doing) when I realized I could eat anything else I wanted whenever I
wanted. I can give myself that kind of permission because I’ve trained myself
to enjoy relatively healthy food and to always have it nearby.
If you’re on
a diet, you’re probably trying to avoid certain types of food, but you’re also
trying to limit your portions. Instead of waging war on two fronts, try
allowing yourself to eat as much as you want of anything that is healthy. I
think you’ll find that healthier food is almost self-regulating in the sense
that you don’t have an insatiable desire to keep eating it the way you might
with junk food. With healthy food, you tend to stop when you feel full. That
has been my experience anyway. In my 20s I could snarf my way through an entire
box of donuts. But not once have I eaten an apple — which I also enjoy — and
started in on a second apple. One of the
biggest obstacles to healthy eating is the impression that healthy food
generally tastes like cardboard. So consider making it a lifelong system to
learn how to season and prepare healthy foods. If you know how to make your
veggies taste great, it isn’t so hard to avoid junk food. Here again, knowledge
replaces willpower.
It’s easy to
spot the people who are trying to use willpower instead of knowledge to get
healthier.
They tend to
say things like this:
My goal
is to lose 10 pounds.
In my
experience, the fittest people have systems, not goals, unless they are
training for something specific. A sensible system is to continuously learn
more about the science of diet and the methods for making healthy food taste
great. With that system, weight management will feel automatic. Goals aren’t
needed.
I’m
limiting my portion size.
You only
need to do that if you are eating the wrong foods. Eating half of your cake
still keeps you addicted to cake. And portion control takes a lot of willpower.
You’ll find that healthy food satisfies you sooner, so you don’t crave large
portions.
I’m
increasing my workout to lose a few pounds.
No one can
exercise enough to overcome a bad diet. Diet is the right button to push for
losing weight, so long as you are active. People who eat right and stay active
usually have no problems with weight.
I’m doing
the (whatever) diet or cleanse.
Following a
diet is hard. A cleanse is even harder. It takes effort and willpower. You’re
better off learning to eat right and letting that knowledge nudge you in the
right direction over your lifetime.
Once you get
your diet right, the next topic to tackle is exercise. I’m about to share with
you the simplest and potentially most effective exercise plan in the world.
Here it is: Be active every day. Under this system, anything that gets you up
and moving counts. It doesn’t matter if you’re swimming, running or cleaning
the garage. When you’re active, and you don’t overdo it, you’ll find yourself
in a good mood afterward. That reward becomes addictive over time. You’ll be
like Pavlov’s dogs, but conditioned to be active. After a few months of being
moderately active every day, you’ll discover that it is harder to sit and do
nothing than it is to get up and do something. That’s the frame of mind you
want. You want exercise to become a habit with a reward so it evolves into a
useful addiction. When that happens, you no longer need willpower to exercise.
It’s
important to remember that the intensity of your workout has a surprisingly
small impact on your weight unless you’re running half-marathons every week. If
your diet is right, moderate exercise is all you need. Your natural impulse to
seek variety and challenge will cause you to learn more about the best
practices of exercise over your lifetime. The only thing you absolutely need to
get right is the part about being active every day.
When I was
in my 20s I enjoyed playing pick-up games of soccer on Sunday mornings. It was
terrific exercise, but it left me so sore I couldn’t exercise for several days
afterward. Whoever came up with the saying “No pain, no gain” hadn’t thought it
through. For me, the pain kept me from gain. These days I simply stay active
every day, without pain and without the need for willpower, and I’m in the best
shape of my life at age 56.
You will be
tempted to quibble with some of the things I said about diet and exercise.
Don’t get hung up on the details, because science keeps changing what we think
we know anyway. The important point is that there are simple ways to substitute
knowledge for willpower so you can ease into healthier eating and an active
lifestyle. When your body is feeling good, and you have some flexibility in
your schedule, you’ll find that the petty annoyances that plague your life
become nothing but background noise. And that’s a great launch pad for happiness.
As you find
yourself getting healthier and happier, the people in your life will view you
differently too. Healthy-looking people generally earn more money, get more
offers and enjoy a better social life. All of that will help your happiness. Keep in mind that happiness is a directional
phenomenon. We feel happy when things are moving in the right direction no
matter where we are at the moment. The homeless guy who finds a promising
dumpster is happier in the moment than the billionaire who just lost $100
million on a bad investment. It’s the direction of your life — progress if you
will — that influences happiness. When you are learning more about diet and
exercise it will give you the sensation of progress and control over you
destiny. And that feels good compared to losing ten pounds and gaining it back. I’ll reiterate that you shouldn’t get your
health information from cartoonists. I’m a simplifier, not a doctor. All I’m
offering is the idea that happiness is more accessible if you replace willpower
with knowledge and you replace short-term goals with lifelong systems.
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