If you were searching for the path to lasting happiness, Slough probably wouldn’t be the place you’d start. But for Richard Stevens, a leading psychologist, the Berkshire town proved the ideal location for a pioneering experiment: take all the theory and speculation about what makes human beings happy and test it over ten weeks on people in an ordinary British town. He believes he now knows what works.
Poor old Slough: it was the running gag in The Office; John Bunyan linked it irrevocably with “despond” in The Pilgrim’s Progress; and Betjeman famously pleaded: “Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough/It isn’t fit for humans now.” Stuck under a Heathrow flightpath and beset by roundabouts and soulless concrete buildings, it is an emblem of the sadder aspects of modern Britain. But Stevens, along with a team of shrinks, counsellors, an economist and a film crew, found it fertile ground for emotional uplifts.
The team recruited 50 local volunteers, aged from 17 to 78, spanning the racial spectrum, and with occupations from housewives to local councillors and university tutors. The mission: Make Slough Happy. With a four-part BBC television series on the completed project starting next week, Stevens, the avuncular chair of the Open University’s social psychology course, claims to have found the path to happiness in everyday modern life . . . and it isn’t more money.
His formula splits into four general categories: physical, relationships, work and community. But if there is a keyword, it is connectedness. “We found a formula in the sense that we found techniques that work,” says Stevens, who directed Z Cars and Dr Finlay’s Casebook before becoming a psychologist. “Each person has to develop their own combination of these; like finding a diet that works for you.” The volunteers were given a “happiness manifesto” (see panel below) of lifestyle changes to adopt, then attended workshops over the ensuing ten weeks to explore which worked. One foundation stone for happiness is simply physical, says Stevens. “Take care of your body. Find your own route to a healthy diet and level of exercise that suits you. Proper sleep and power-napping was important to our volunteers, too.”
Work is also important, Stevens adds. One of the secrets of finding employment happiness can be applied to other areas: increase your satisfaction by lowering your expectations. “It’s not easy for our volunteers to change to more fulfilling jobs, so we got people to look at enjoying their current work more” (see Get Over It, facing page). But the most important path to happiness is found in our relationships, with individuals and with our communities. “It’s not only primary relationships, but the casual encounters on the street, at the supermarket that are important — even if its just smiling at people,” Stevens says. “Doing small acts of kindness for strangers works, too. It’s about reducing the sense of alienation in the modern world.”
The volunteers were given exercises to practise at home to make them more intimate with their partners. “When they were with their spouses they were always distracted by activities such as shopping. We gave them an exercise in which one partner spoke for 15 minutes to their spouse without interruption; the spouse reflected what they heard and how it made them feel, and then had their own 15 minutes of speaking without interruption and being listened to uncritically,” says Stevens. Although many volunteers found this initially daunting “several said it worked particularly well for them — it gave new life to their relationships”.
Gratitude proved another crucial area. The programme asked eight volunteers to invite people whom they wanted to thank for being in their lives to a surprise dinner party, where they awarded them with a home-made token, such as a certificate. “That was amazingly powerful,” says Stevens. “We had many tears of happiness. We don’t express our appreciation enough.”
Similarly, volunteers were asked to count their blessings at the end of every day. “You can’t change your feelings but you can change what you are thinking about. Enumerating the things in your life for which you are grateful can make a big difference.” The volunteers were also encouraged to be thankful for simply existing. “Most weren’t unhappy, but for many life was a bit boring and banal,” Stevens says. As a gentle reminder of the precariousness of life, he took his group to nearby Stoke Poges graveyard, where Thomas Gray wrote his Elegy. “I encouraged them into a meditative state by looking at graves of people who had died at the same age as them. Some came away with a strong sense of how wonderful it is to be alive.” But one volunteer, Jo Anne, was upset by the experience.
“Not every activity worked on every volunteer,” Stevens says. “But the group reached out to Jo Anne and took her down the pub.”
The graveyard experience almost counts as spirituality, an area frequently associated in studies with individual happiness. Did the project address this directly? “I didn’t discuss God, but I addressed finding a sense of direction, stillness,” Stevens says. “In modern life we are busy doing rather than being. We took a group camping and got them to sit for an hour by a lake in silence, just being aware.”
Community was the final area for consideration, particularly the fact that modern life often makes us depressed. Stevens says: “We looked at materialism; economic studies show that most people in Britain won’t enhance their wellbeing significantly by having more material things. We also looked at the way advertising encourages people to make negative comparisons between themselves and others, and between their lives now and what they could be like.”
And at the end of the experiment, did Stevens’s post-hippy message of connection, love, transcendence, meaningful labour and suspicion of materialism work? “We designed a complex assessment survey and the results showed a significant overall effect on the volunteers’ reported levels of happiness in areas such as work and relationships,” he reports. “We produced more change than we expected. G enerally, people misjudge what makes them happy, particularly in relation to materialism. The pursuit of money is not the way to wellbeing or joy. The take-home message is that you, yourself, can make so much difference to your happiness.”
The first of the four one-hour series, Making Slough Happy, is on Tuesday, BBC Two, 9pm
THE HAPPINESS MANIFESTO
- Plant something and keep it alive.
- Count your blessings — think of at least five — at the end of every day.
- Have an hour-long uninterrupted conversation with your partner each week.
- Telephone a friend.
- Give yourself a regular treat.
- Have a good laugh each day.
- Take regular exercise.
- Smile at strangers, or talk to them.
- Cut your television viewing by half.
- Perform an act of kindness every day.
