What exactly do you mean by happiness?

There's an excellent article in the New York Review of Books this month, by Sue Calpern, which looks at the rash of new books on happiness published by the likes of Sonya Lyubomirsky, Tal Ben-Shahar and others.

She reviews another new book, by Harvard neuroscientist Jerome Kagan [pictured], which raises the question of whether we are not chucking around this word' happiness' rather blithely, making assumptions that it means the same thing all over the world, and therefore we can measure 'self-satisfaction' and make descriptive and prescriptive analyses about how to live.

She writes:

Emotions like happiness and sadness, which we all assume we understand because we've personally experienced them, may be less intuitively obvious than we think. In addition to the insufficiencies of language, there are cultural, gender, and social variations that are not always taken into account, so that meanings are not universal. This is what Ed Diener and his colleagues were getting at when they attempted to determine precisely what the Maasai, the Amish, and the Inuit of Greenland meant when they said they were happy. The Amish, for example, reported relatively low "self-satisfaction," which could be accepted on its face, or seen as the manifestation of a culture that considers pride and self-promotion sinful.

Even cultures that are more accessible and seemingly well known are not necessarily transparent. Consider an upwardly mobile American who works hard throughout school and college and then continues to work hard in his profession, even after making more than enough money to cut back or retire. Conventional wisdom says that this poor soul is engaged in the joyless pursuit of joy because he believes that more money and more stuff will make him more happy. Kagan, however, suggests that his motivation may be something else altogether—that having established a pattern of hard work and reward early on that has been historically associated with pleasant feelings, he may feel some sort of psychological distress if he does otherwise. Working hard may be its own reward, but not for the obvious reason.

Sensitive to all kinds of glibness, Kagan is especially wary of the use of animal models to describe or mirror human emotions. Rats exposed to electric shocks when a light turns on learn to fear the light, but it is another thing altogether to suppose that a conditioned fear response in a rat is comparable to anxiety in a human, or that a drug that neutralizes the rat's fear will have the same effect on people—though those are both common assumptions. "It is worth noting that rats can be conditioned to avoid eating a particular food," Kagan writes,

but no one has argued that this fact provides a useful model for understanding women who avoid eating fats and carbohydrates because they want to be physically more attractive.

That dogs with separation anxiety are given Prozac may have less to do with the similarities between human and canine anxiety and more to do with a general tendency to treat symptoms, not causes.

And so it comes back to the problem of relying on overly broad, categorical, static words like fear and happiness to describe, diagnose, predict, and expound, words that don't get us very far, as patients, as subjects, as readers. This problem with language may explain why, though we all say we're happy, the library of how-to-get-happy books and why-we're-not-happy books is expanding. Anyone who spends time in that section of the stacks is likely to cheer Jerome Kagan's transcendent (hopeful, gracious) and courageous (brave, valiant, courteous) request:

Let us agree to a moratorium on the use of single words, such as fear, anger, joy, and sad, and write about emotional processes with full sentences rather than ambiguous, naked concepts that burden readers with the task of deciding who, whom, why, and especially what.

Religion...it's good for you

Religion makes you happy, according to a new study from the Paris School of Economics.

The author, professor Andrew Clark, says:

"We originally started the research to work out why some European countries had more generous unemployment benefits than others, but our analysis suggested that religious people suffered less psychological harm from unemployment than the non-religious."

Fine and dandy, but surely the aim of religious faith is not just to make you happier? It's to serve God, isn't it? Imagine some scientist with a clipboard popping up beside Jesus at Mount Golgotha and saying 'er...Jesus, studies suggest that 99% of all crucified people suffer a marked drop in happiness, we would recommend you abandon your religious faith at this point and obey the Roman Empire'.

If religious people are happier than non-religious, it is perhaps precisely because they are not desperately searching for their own happiness in this life, but instead are much more accepting of the fact that this life is imperfect, that it is in some ways a 'vale of sorrows', but they have a belief in something higher than mere happiness and satisfaction - the belief they are following the wishes of their maker.

Madonna's panic attacks

British papers are full of stories about Madonna's panic attacks.

The material girl told the magazine Dazed and Confused:

"I have moments where I feel incredibly invincible and know that I have the audience in my hand. I know that everything is absolutely perfect. And then I have panic attacks, where I feel like everyone is breathing my air, and I might just die on stage. I normally try to turn my back to the audience, take a deep breath and remind myself that it's all temporary."

The honesty of people like her in admitting to panic attacks is one of the ways that anxiety disorders have become much more accepted and less taboo over the last decade. In the last few years, celebrities who've admitted to suffering from panic attacks include Drew Barrymore, Penelope Cruz, Marcus Trescothick, Nicole Kidman, and of course Tony Soprano.

The Therapy of Escape

I write this in Moscow, where I am back for a week. I used to live here, for four years, then I came back to London in July, to write more about psychology.

It is such a different environment here. The main difference, apart from the weather, is the women. It is a completely unusual experience, for a bloke of average looks like me, to have an absolutely stunning girl sit down at the table next to you, and stare at you with wanton audacity.

And yet that is just what happened to me five minutes ago, and what happens frequently here in Moscow. You see fabulously beautiful women, who stare back at you with saucy provocation, daring you to approach them. But reader, I dare not!

Well, I did dare, while I was here…but my attempts at successful relationships with Russian girls were ill-starred. Still, for sheer beauty, I don’t think Russian girls can be beaten.

Anyway, that is not what I wanted to talk about. I want to talk about the therapy of escape. One of the things people with mental health problems often ponder is whether a change of scene would do them good. If they moved away, and lived somewhere else, would they be happier?

I have to say, that in my case, yes, it worked – moving to Moscow made me much happier, and more confident and mature. And I know of other cases where a relocation has had a positive psychological affect.

A friend of mine moved to Latin America some years ago, for example, and is having the time of his life there. He is a different person there. Somehow, his personality blossoms in the social and sexual climate of Latin America, so he becomes some debonair English loverman.

I wouldn’t call myself a loverman in Russia, exactly, but I also was a different person here. Sometimes changing the external conditions of your life, moving abroad, allows you to break out of the old habits of your life and manifest new sides of your personality.

The reason for this is simple – the people you meet abroad don’t know you, so they don’t have preconceived ideas about you. Where you came from, on the contrary, other people have preconceived ideas about you built up ever since you were born, they have a ready-made ‘story’ attached to you, and it can be difficult to avoid those preconceptions. You can find yourself stuck in the role that others project onto you.

Another reason living abroad can be psychologically liberating is that you can sidestep some of the expectations of your culture. You can escape some of the guilt of your culture. That can mean you enjoy a more permissive sex-life (and many expats do), but that’s not really what I mean.

I mean that you can avoid feeling guilty about your career advancement (or lack of), for example. You can avoid feeling guilty about your social life (or lack of), or about staying in on a Friday night. You avoid feeling guilty about not being married, or not having a family, or a mortgage.

You avoid feeling guilty about being an outsider, about not fitting in, because it is not your country, so of course you are an outsider. Being an outsider turns from a badge of shame to a badge of honour – you are an exotic foreigner, a figure of mystique and glamour.

In other words, you escape the feeling of being judged by your ‘peer group’. You no longer look at yourself with the eyes of your ‘imagined community’. You are much more accepting of yourself, in your own terms, because the life you construct abroad is your own life, rather than a life that you were born into.

And if you do occasionally see yourself through the eyes of your family or ‘peer group’ back in the UK, you see yourself through rose-coloured spectacles, as an exciting adventurer living the dream in the far reaches of the world.

So these are some of the ways that living abroad can help you psychologically. I wonder if psychologists or sociologists have written about this at all – how you can escape the discontents of your civilization by leaving that civilization, downgrading, journeying off into wilder realms, as Gauguin did, or Baudelaire, or Robert Louis Stevenson.

Of course, you then have the question…do you stay living abroad, or do you eventually come home? If you stay living in a foreign climate, you can end up going to seed, escaping the guilt of your own culture, but not acquiring the moral habits of your new culture, so you end up tribeless, rootless, amoral, an empty shell, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Or you can end up living at one remove from life, because the culture in which you live is not your culture, not your language, not your political society, so you are cut off from true membership of society, and often your relationships are at one remove too – with your local girlfriend, with your friends, with your society. Everything is a temporary arrangement, a straw hut.

And if you return to your country, the problems you ran away from may still be there. You may still face the challenge of integrating into your own culture. That challenge might not be any easier after years living abroad. You have to start again, putting down new roots, making new friends, establishing new patterns.

Well, these are the some of the challenges of the therapy of escape. But it is an increasingly popular choice. More and more of us are living expat lives, scattered all over the world. And more and more of us are enjoying it.

We have become, as Jacques Attali put it, a nomad society, travelling the world with the shell on our back. We have multiple selves, living in multiple time-zones.

Does this mean we have no ‘real self’, just an assortment of different roles and personae in different time-zones? Not necessarily. The Stoics put it well. We can be cosmopolitans – citizens of the world – and still have an inner moral sense, something above any tribal loyalties or conventions, that we try to adhere to and obey.

In fact, the more we travel and zone-hop, the more we are exposed to a multicultural and globalized world, the more we must try to create a moral anchor which remains beyond the happenstance of national or local conventions.

So it’s not a therapy of escape, finally. It’s a therapy of recognizing what you really believe in, and what you were simply born into.

Web therapy

Here's another article on internet therapy, from The Times. I'm increasingly interested by the possibilities for websites to help with mental health, which I don't think have been fully explored.

I'd love to work on a website for young people's mental health, which used the best of the web - videos, MP3 downloads and podcasts, forums (fora?), interviews and chatrooms.

I don't think such a website exists yet, or does it?