Everybody happy?
What is the secret of feeling good? An ambitious new BBC series aims to cheer up the inhabitants of Slough - and do the same for the rest of us
Tim Adams
Sunday October 23, 2005
The Observer
Can you give a town cognitive therapy? If you were to try I suppose Slough would be a reasonable place to start. The people of the Berkshire town have, by their own admission, begun to believe the brand. Betjeman's 'Come friendly bombs' and the humiliations visited by David Brent and his colleagues at Wernham Hogg have struck home. The place could clearly do with some cheering up. Hence a four-part BBC series, which begins next month, called Making Slough Happy
The science of happiness is a relatively new thing. Psychology has always concerned itself with talking cures for misery and pathology, but for a while now it has been looking hard at what makes us content. Happiness gurus range from peddlers of little books of calm to empirical men such as the American Martin Seligman who brought the psychology of wellbeing into the mainstream of academia with his comparatively rigorous bestseller Authentic Happiness. Seligman's basic premise, backed up by biology and experiment and statistics, is that each of us can choose whether to be an optimist or a pessimist. Those who convince themselves to see things as half full are not only healthier and more successful, they live longer (19 per cent longer according to one study), have happier families and better sex. Cynics and depressives tend to live out the lives they have let themselves believe in.
One of the great things about this science is that it arms itself with killer facts. The fact that lottery winners and recent victims of car crashes tend both to return to their previous - thermostatic - levels of happiness and despair within a year of the event that changed their lives, say. Or that women are most despairing at 37, men at 42. Or that bronze medal Olympians are nearly always more cheery than silver medallists. Or that nations with a high level of income equality are much more happy than nations with a high level of inequality, regardless of standard of living. Or that above a level of subsistence where you live and what you earn has only a 10 per cent impact on happiness.
Try telling all that, however, to the population of a glum Thames Valley commuter town. Last summer six cheerful men and women took on that challenge. One of the six, Richard Reeves, who is studying for a PhD in the politics of happiness is not only an economist but also a former journalist at The Observer, so I imagine he knows a thing or two about despair. Reeves arrived in Slough last May along with his fellow upbeat psychologists armed with a satisfaction questionnaire and brandishing a 10-point plan for 'putting the wow in Slough'. The former asked questions like 'How satisfied are you with your life?' and came up with the answer that the people of Slough were on the whole less happy than the people of 40 other named countries who had been asked the same questions, emerging only as slightly more joyful than the inhabitants of Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Russia. In this they were broadly in line with the rest of Britain. We have in effect just about the same levels of contentment as we would be feeling in a former Soviet bloc country, Reeves explains to camera, inducing a slight sinking feeling.
Reeves's principal weapon in his fight against Slough's despond was Dr Richard Stevens, who is a psychologist of wellbeing and can't quite bring himself to stop smiling about that fact. As the self-helpers like to say, Stevens walks the talk. He also dances in woods; palpably enjoys the sensation of 'just being in his body'; carpes every single diem and is on intimate terms with trees. For the purposes of the experiment in Berkshire he distilled his philosophy of happiness into 10 purposeful commandments. These he dished out to 50 Slough volunteers with the hope of spreading little ripples of joy through the community.
Stevens's 10 points are simple enough, but one of the compulsions of watching Making Slough Happy is to see how quickly they begin to work. They run in no particular order thus: exercise three times a week; count your blessings at the end of each day; talk for an hour to your partner three times a week; grow a plant and keep it alive; cut TV viewing in half; smile at strangers; phone a friend you have lost touch with; have a good laugh every day, even if it is at yourself; give yourself a treat; and spread some kindness by doing a good turn. Stevens