In 2018, a tragic period enveloped the University of Bristol, when several students committed suicide related to work stress. Suicide is usually the ultimate culmination of a crisis in mental health, but these students weren’t alone in feeling extreme pressure: across the campus there was a pervasive sense that the general student body was not coping with the demands of higher education. My own tutee students, whom I met on a regular basis, were reporting poor mental health or asking for extensions because they were unable to meet deadlines that were stressing them out. They were overly obsessed with marks and other performance outcomes, and this impacted not only on them, but also on the teaching and support staff who were increasingly dealing with alleviating student anxiety. Students wanted more support that most felt was lacking and, in an effort to deal with the issue, the university had invested heavily, making more provision for mental health services. The problem with this strategy, however, is that by the time someone seeks out professional services, they are already at a crisis point. I felt compelled to do something.
2018 年，布里斯托大学陷入了一段悲惨时期，几名学生因工作压力而自杀。自杀通常是心理健康危机的最终表现，但这些学生并不是唯一感受到极大压力的人：整个校园都普遍感觉到一种普遍的情况，即整体学生群体无法应对高等教育的要求。我自己定期见面的学生也报告了心理健康状况不佳，或者要求延长截止日期，因为他们无法满足让他们感到压力的截止日期。他们过分关注分数和其他绩效结果，这不仅影响了他们自己，也影响了越来越多需要缓解学生焦虑的教学和支持人员。学生们希望得到更多支持，而大多数人都觉得这种支持是不够的，为了解决这个问题，大学进行了大量投资，增加了心理健康服务的提供。然而，这种策略的问题在于，当有人寻求专业服务时，他们已经处于危机关头。我感到有责任要做点什么。
At the time, Bristol University was described in the British press as a ‘toxic’ environment, but this was an unfair label as every higher education institution was, and still is, experiencing a similar mental health crisis. Even in the Ivy League universities in the United States, there was a problem, as I discovered when I became aware of a course on positive psychology that had become the most popular at Yale in the spring of 2018. On reading about the course, I was somewhat sceptical that simple interventions could make much difference until I learned that Yale’s ‘Psychology and the Good Life’ course was being delivered by a colleague of mine, Laurie Santos, who I knew would not associate herself with anything flaky.
当时，布里斯托大学被英国媒体描述为一个“有毒”的环境，但这是一个不公平的标签，因为每个高等教育机构都在经历着类似的心理健康危机。即使在美国的常春藤盟校，也存在问题，我在 2018 年春季得知耶鲁大学一门关于积极心理学的课程成为最受欢迎的时候，便意识到了这一点。阅读有关这门课程的资料时，我对简单的干预措施能够产生多大影响持怀疑态度，直到我得知耶鲁大学的“心理学与美好生活”课程是由我的同事劳瑞·桑托斯（Laurie Santos）授课，我知道她不会与任何不靠谱的事物扯上关系。
That autumn term of 2018, I decided to try delivering a free lunchtime series of lectures, ‘The Science of Happiness’, based on the Yale course. Even though this pilot was not credit-bearing, more than 500 students gave up their Wednesday lunchtimes to attend. That was unusual as, in my experience, students rarely give up time or expend effort to undertake activities unless they are awarded credit or incentives. There would be 10 lectures, and everyone was requested to fill in self-report questionnaires assessing various mental health dimensions both before and after the course, to determine whether there had been any impact and, if so, how much.
2018 年的那个秋季学期，我决定尝试举办一系列免费的午餐讲座，名为“幸福的科学”，基于耶鲁大学的课程。尽管这个试点项目不计学分，但超过 500 名学生放弃他们的周三午餐时间来参加。这是不寻常的，因为根据我的经验，学生很少会放弃时间或付出努力参加活动，除非能获得学分或激励。将会有 10 次讲座，每个人都被要求填写自我报告问卷，评估各种心理健康维度，无论是在课程之前还是之后，以确定是否有任何影响，以及如果有的话，有多大影响。
The Science of Happiness had clearly piqued interest as indicated by the audience size, but I was still nervous. This was not my area of academic expertise and there was heightened sensitivity following the media attention over recent tragic events on campus. What were the students’ expectations? Talking about mental health seemed hazardous. Would I trigger adverse reactions simply by discussing these issues?
显然，“幸福的科学”引起了兴趣，这可以从观众规模看出，但我仍然感到紧张。这不是我学术专长的领域，而且在校园发生最近的悲剧事件后，人们对此更加敏感。学生们的期望是什么？谈论心理健康似乎是危险的。仅仅讨论这些问题会引发不良反应吗？
Despite my initial reservations, the final feedback after the course ended was overwhelmingly positive. That was gratifying but, as a scientist, I like hard evidence. What would the questionnaires tell us? The analysis of the before and after scores revealed that there had been a 10-15 per cent positive increase in mental wellbeing across the different measures of wellbeing, anxiety and loneliness. That may not sound much but it was the average, and a significant impact in the field of interventions. Who wouldn’t want to be 15 per cent happier, healthier or wealthier? I was no longer a sceptic; I was a convert. I would stop focusing on developmental psychology, my own area of research, and concentrate on making students happier. Even a 15 per cent improvement might lead to a degree of prevention that was better than dealing with a student who was already struggling.
尽管我最初有所保留，但课程结束后的最终反馈却是极其积极的。这让人感到满足，但作为一名科学家，我更喜欢有力的证据。问卷调查会告诉我们什么？对之前和之后得分的分析显示，在幸福感、焦虑和孤独感等不同幸福指标上，心理健康出现了 10-15%的积极增长。这听起来可能不多，但这是平均值，在干预领域有着显著影响。谁不想变得更快乐、更健康或更富有 15%呢？我不再是怀疑论者；我成为了信徒。我将不再专注于发展心理学，我的研究领域，而是专注于让学生更快乐。即使有 15%的改善，也可能导致一定程度的预防，这比应对已经在挣扎的学生要好。
The following year, we launched a credit-bearing course for first-year students who had room in their curriculum schedule to take an open unit, which has now been running for five years. These psychoeducational courses are not new and predate my efforts by at least a decade. But what makes the Bristol psychoeducational course unique (and I believe this is still the case) is that we persuaded the university to allow a credit-bearing course that had no graded examinations but was accredited based on engagement alone. Not only was I convinced by compelling arguments for why graded assessment is the wrong way to educate, but it would have been hypocritical of me to lecture about the failings of an education system based solely on assessment, and then give students an exam to determine if they had engaged. Rather, engagement required regular weekly attendance, meeting in peer-mentored small groups, but also undertaking positive psychology exercises and journaling about their experiences so that we could track progress. Again, to test the impact of the course, students were asked to fill in the various psychometric questionnaires to give us an insight to impact.
在接下来的一年，我们为大一学生推出了一个学分课程，这些学生在课程安排上有空余时间可以选修一个公开课程，这个课程已经运行了五年。这些心理教育课程并不新鲜，在我努力之前就已经存在至少十年。但是布里斯托尔心理教育课程的独特之处（我相信现在仍然如此）在于我们说服了大学允许一个学分课程，该课程没有分级考试，而是仅基于参与度认证。我不仅被令人信服的论点所说服，即分级评估并不是教育的正确方式，而且如果我讲授教育系统仅基于评估的缺陷，然后给学生一场考试来确定他们是否参与，这将是虚伪的。相反，参与需要定期每周出席，参加同侪辅导小组会议，同时进行积极心理学练习并记录他们的经历，以便我们能够追踪进展。为了测试课程的影响，学生被要求填写各种心理测量问卷，以便让我们了解影响。
Meditation stops you thinking negative thoughts. Not exactly a scientific explanation
冥想可以阻止你产生消极的想法。并非科学解释。
We now have five years’ worth of data and have published peer-reviewed scientific papers on evaluation of the course. As with the initial pilot, the consistent finding is that there is, on average, a 10-15 per cent significant increase in positive mental wellbeing over the duration of the course. The course improves mental wellbeing but there are limitations. Our most recent analysis over the longer term shows that the positive benefits we generate during the course, and the two months after, are lost within a year, returning to previous baseline scores, unless the students maintain some of the recommended activities. However, in those students who kept practising at least one of the positive psychology interventions (PPIs) such as journaling, meditation, exercise, expressing gratitude or any of the other evidence-based activities, they maintained their benefits up to two years later.
我们现在拥有五年的数据，并已发表了关于课程评估的同行评议科学论文。与最初的试点一样，一贯的发现是，在整个课程的持续时间内，积极心理健康平均显著增加了 10-15％。该课程改善了心理健康，但存在一些限制。我们最近的长期分析显示，在课程期间和之后的两个月内产生的积极效益在一年内会丧失，回到先前的基线分数，除非学生保持一些推荐的活动。 然而，在那些至少继续实践积极心理学干预（PPIs）中的一项，如日记写作、冥想、锻炼、表达感激之情或其他基于证据的活动的学生中，他们在两年后仍然保持了他们的好处。
Why do interventions work and why do they stop working? As to the first question, there are countless self-help books promoting PPIs, but the level of explanation is either missing or tends to be circular. Acts of kindness work because they make you feel better. Meditation calms the mind and stops you thinking negative thoughts. Not exactly a scientific explanation or revelation. Even though I had largely put my experimental work with children on hold because of the demands of teaching such a large course, I was still intellectually intrigued by the same basic theoretical question that has always motivated my research. What is the mechanism underlying positive psychology?
为什么干预有效，为什么会停止有效？至于第一个问题，有无数的自助书籍推广 PPIs，但解释的水平要么缺失，要么往往是循环的。善良的行为有效是因为让你感觉更好。冥想让头脑平静，停止负面思绪。并非科学解释或启示。尽管我因为教授如此庞大的课程而基本搁置了与儿童的实验性工作，但我仍然对一直激励我的研究的同一个基本理论问题感到好奇。积极心理学背后的机制是什么？
There are several plausible hypotheses out there from established academics in the field that explain some of the activities, but they lack a unifying thread that I thought must be operating across the board. I started considering the wide and diverse range of PPIs to see if there was any discernible pattern that might suggest underlying mechanisms. Two years ago, I had an insight and I think the answer can be found in the way we focus on our self.
有几个在该领域的知名学者提出了一些合理的假设来解释一些活动，但它们缺乏一个我认为必须在各方面起作用的统一主线。我开始考虑广泛而多样的 PPI 范围，看看是否有任何可辨识的模式可能暗示着潜在机制。两年前，我有了一个灵感，我认为答案可以在我们关注自己的方式中找到。
In my role as a developmental psychologist, I see change and continuity everywhere in relation to human thought and behaviour. For some time, I have been fascinated by the concept of the self and how it emerges but must change over the course of a lifetime. I believe earlier childhood notions lay the foundation for later cognition which is why development is so critical to understanding adults. My most recent work concentrated on how ownership and possessions play major roles in our concept of self, and I was particularly interested in acts of sharing among children. Specifically, we had completed a set of studies demonstrating that, when children are instructed to talk about themselves, they thought about their own possessions differently and became less willing to share with others. Emphasising their self had made these children more selfish. This got me thinking about the role of self-focus in happiness.
作为一名发展心理学家，我看到人类思维和行为中无处不在的变化和延续。有一段时间以来，我一直着迷于自我概念的形成以及随着一生的变化而必须改变。我相信早期的童年观念奠定了后来认知的基础，这就是为什么发展对理解成年人如此重要。我最近的工作集中在所有权和财产如何在我们的自我概念中发挥重要作用，我特别关注儿童之间的分享行为。具体来说，我们完成了一系列研究，表明当儿童被要求谈论自己时，他们会以不同的方式看待自己的财产，并变得不愿意与他人分享。强调自我使这些儿童变得更加自私。这让我开始思考自我关注在幸福中的作用。
The most pernicious aspect of self-focus is the tendency to keep comparing ourselves to others
自我关注最有害的一面是倾向于不断将自己与他人进行比较。
Infants start off with an egocentric view of the world – a term and concept introduced by the psychologist Jean Piaget. Egocentric individuals tend to perceive the world from their own perspective, and many studies have shown that young children are egocentric in the way they see the world, act, talk, think and behave with others. Normal development requires adopting a more allocentric – or other-based perspective in order to be accepted. The sense of self changes from early ebullient egocentrism to an increasing awareness of one’s relative position in the social order. Children may become more other-focused but that also includes unfavourable comparisons. They increasingly become self-aware and concerned about what others think about them – a concern that transitions into a preoccupation when they enter adolescence that never really goes away. As for adults, like many features of the human mind, earlier ways of thinking are never entirely abandoned. This is why our self-focus can become a ‘curse’, as the psychologist Mark Leary describes, feeding the inner critic who is constantly negatively evaluating our position in life.
One reason that self-focus can become a curse is that we are ignorant of the biases our brains operate with that lead us to make wrong decisions and comparisons. When it comes to happy choices, we want something because we think it will make us happy, but our predictions are inaccurate. We think events will be more impactful than they turn out to be, and we fail to appreciate how fast we get used to things, both good and bad. This is called a failure of affective forecasting which is why the psychologist Dan Gilbert explains that our tendency to ‘stumble on happiness’ is because our emotional predictions are so way off. We don’t take into consideration how future circumstances will differ because we focus on just one element and we also forget how quickly we adapt to even the most pleasurable experiences. But the most pernicious aspect of self-focus is the tendency to keep comparing ourselves to others who seem to be leading happier lives. Social media is full of images of delicious plates of food, celebrity friends, exotic holidays, luxurious products, amazing parties and just about anything that qualifies as worthy of posting to bolster one’s status. Is it any wonder that the individuals who are the most prone to social comparison are the ones who feel the worst after viewing social media? As Gore Vidal once quipped: ‘Every time a friend succeeds, I die a little.’
If egocentric self-focus is problematic then maybe positive psychology works by altering our perspective to one that is more allocentric or ‘other-focused’? To do so is challenging because it is not easy to step out of ourselves under normal circumstances. Our stream of conscious awareness is from the first-person, or egocentric, perspective and, indeed, it is nigh-on-impossible to imagine an alternative version because our sensory systems, thought processes and representation of our selves are coded as such to enable us to interact within the world as coherent entities.
Many PPIs such as sharing, acts of kindness, gratitude letters or volunteering are clearly directed towards enriching the lives of others, but how can we explain the benefits of solitary practices where the self seems to be the focus of attention? The explanation lies with the self-representation circuitry in the brain known as the default mode network (DMN). One of the surprising discoveries from the early days of brain imaging is that, when we are not task-focused, rather than becoming inactive, the brain’s DMN goes into overdrive. Mind-wandering is commonly reported during bouts of DMN activity and, although that may be associated with positive daydreaming, we are also ruminating about unresolved problems that continue to concern us. According to one influential study that contacted people at random points of the day to ask them about what they were doing, what they were thinking and how they were feeling, people were more likely to be unhappy when their minds were wandering, which was about half of the waking day. Probably because they were focusing on their own predicaments.
If you focus on your problems, this can become difficult to control. There’s no point trying to stop yourself ruminating because the very act of trying not to think about a problem increases the likelihood that this becomes the very thought that occupies your mind. This was first described in an 1863 essay by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, when he observed the effect of trying not to think; he wrote: ‘Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.’ My late colleague Dan Wegner would go on to study this phenomenon called ironic thought suppression, which he explained resulted from two mechanisms: the tendency to increase the strength of the representation of a thought by the act of trying to suppress it, and a corresponding increased vigilance to monitor when the thought comes to the fore in consciousness. Ironic thought suppression is one reason why it can be so difficult to fall asleep. This is why one of our recommended activities on our Science of Happiness course is to journal on a regular basis because this helps to process information in a much more controlled and objective way, rather than succumbing to the torment of automatic thinking.
Could the long-term benefits be something to do with altering the ego?
Other recommended activities that calibrate the level of self-focus also attenuate DMN activity. For example, mindfulness meditation advocates not trying to suppress spontaneous thoughts but rather deliberately turning attention to bodily sensations or external sounds. In this way, the spotlight of attention is directed away from the internal dialogue one is having with oneself. It is during such states that brain imaging studies reveal that various solitary interventions we recommend on the course – such as meditation or taking a walk in the country – are associated with lowered DMN activity and, correspondingly, less negative rumination. This is why achieving absorption or full immersion during optimal states of flow draws conscious awareness and attention out of egocentric preoccupation. To achieve states of flow, we recommend that students engage in activities that require a challenge that exceeds their skill level to an extent that they rise to the task, but do not feel overwhelmed by it. When individuals achieve flow states, their sense of self, and indeed time itself, appears to evaporate.
There are other more controversial ways to alter the egocentric self into one that is more allocentric. Currently, there is a growth in the use of psychedelics as a treatment for intractable depression and, so far, the initial findings from this emerging field are highly encouraging. One clinical study has shown that psychedelic-assisted therapy produced significant improvement in nearly three-quarters of patients who previously did not respond to conventional antidepressants. The primary mechanism of action of psychedelics is upon serotonin (5-HT2A) receptors within the DMN which, in turn, produce profound alterations of consciousness, including modulations in the sense of self, sensory perception and emotion. Could the long-term benefits be something to do with altering the ego? One of the most common reports from those who have undergone psychedelic-assisted therapy, aside from euphoria and vivid hallucinations, is a lasting, profound sense of connection to other people, the environment, nature and the cosmos. Across a variety of psychedelics, the sense of self becomes more interconnected, which is why a recent review concluded that there was consistent acute disruption in the resting state of the DMN.
If chemically induced states of altered consciousness through psychedelics (which is currently still illegal in most places) is not your thing, then there are other ways to redress the balance between egocentrism and allocentrism. Engaging in group activities that generate synchronicity – such as rituals, dancing or singing in choirs – alter the sense of self and increase connection with others. But if group activities or psychedelic trips don’t work for you, then take a rocket trip. One of the most moving emotional and lasting experiences, known as ‘the overview effect’, occurs to those lucky individuals given the opportunity to view our planet from outer space. As the astronaut Edgar Mitchell described it, it creates an ‘explosion of awareness’ and an ‘overwhelming sense of oneness and connectedness … accompanied by an ecstasy … an epiphany.’
Back down on Earth, we can be happier when we simply acknowledge that we are all mortal, interconnected individuals who suffer personal losses and tragedies. No one’s life is perfect, and indeed you need to experience unhappiness in order recognise when things are going well. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus put it: ‘Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.’ In other words, it’s not what happens to you, but how you respond, that matters, and that’s where positive psychology can make a difference – but only if you keep reminding yourself to get out of your own head.
Happiness hack
How to shift your egocentric self to one that is more allocentric using language
Consider a problem that is currently bothering you. A real problem – not a hypothetical one or a world problem beyond your control. Find something that makes you unhappy and then say to yourself: ‘I am worried about [whatever it is] because [whatever the reason may be] and this makes me upset.’ Now repeat the exercise but this time don’t use egocentric or first-person terms such as ‘I’ or ‘me’. Rather use your name and non-first-person language such as: ‘Bruce is worried about his [whatever it is] problem and this makes him upset.’
Speaking in non-first-person language should automatically transpose you out of the egocentric perspective to one that is other or allocentric, making the problem seem less.
