The New Success Track: Happiness
In The Happiness Track: How
to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success, Emma
Seppälä, science director of Stanford’s Center for Compassionate Altruism
Research in Education, challenges the idea that success requires stress.
In a conversation with Knowledge@Wharton,
Seppälä identifies some success myths and talks about ways that calmness can
improve productivity and performance.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
start The Happiness Track with a story about an internship
that gave you a view into two very different ways of working and of viewing
success. Please tell us about that experience and what you learned.
Emma Seppälä: I
worked for a major international newspaper out of Paris, France. My role was to
communicate between the editors, who were on the second floor, and mostly
American, and then the press people, who were in the basement and were mostly
French, blue-collar workers. It was so interesting to notice the difference.
Both groups were working toward the same goal of getting a newspaper out by the
following morning. Yet, there were two very different approaches toward that
goal. On the second floor, people sat hunched over their computers, eating over
their keyboards, not talking to each other. It was a very tense atmosphere. It
felt a little unhealthy, even, in terms of just the lack of communication and
just the general mood you could feel.
Then, whenever I would go down to the press section, people were
outright festive. There was food laid out. People were just welcoming me loudly
into the room. Now, of course, you’re looking at two different cultures.
Upstairs were more Americans, downstairs, more French people. You’re looking at
white collar versus blue collar. But overall, what this experience shows is
that people can be working toward the same goal and yet have two very different
approaches.
The book is not about how French people do better than Americans
in any way. No, not at all. But we have the misconception that, in order to be
successful, we have to postpone our happiness. But if you really look at the
data, which is what I’ve been doing for the last 10 years, you see that if we
prioritize our well-being, we actually end up being more productive, performing
better, having better relationships with others, which translates into far
better outcomes.
Knowledge@Wharton: Can
you tell us how you would define happiness and a little more about the benefits
of it?
Seppälä: Happiness is often
defined in one of two ways. Most people think of happiness in terms of hedonic
happiness. In other words, the pleasurable experiences of life, and also,
achievements, accomplishments, anything that gives you those brief highs. What
differentiates this kind of happiness is that it is brief. You’ll find that,
whether it’s a pleasurable experience you’re choosing, it could come from food,
could come from sex, could come from a bonus paycheck, or it could come from
some achievement, or even some instant of fame or recognition in some way. You
get this boost. But it’s very short lived.
There’s another form of happiness which is
much, much longer lasting. I would even call it a sense of fulfillment.
That
is a sense of happiness derived out of a sense of purpose, social connection in
positive relationships with other people and even a sense of doing something
for a greater good, something beyond our own self. Twitter
The way that this applies to the workplace is
that we see, for example, that leaders and employees who are more supportive of
others around them, in direct contrast to this theory that we have that we have
to look out for number one, they end up performing better, they end up having
better relationships, they end up being more charismatic, more liked. Also,
their health improves, and even their longevity. There’s a lot to be said for
this second type of happiness that we often don’t hear about.
Knowledge@Wharton: One
of the success myths you talk about is the tendency for so many of us to be in
overdrive and to equate stress with success. You argue that stress management
doesn’t work, and recommend tapping into our natural resilience. How have you
seen this be effective in your work with veterans? And how can it help and work
for others?
Seppälä: We believe that we
can’t have success without stress. Many of us even count on that adrenaline
that comes from over-caffeinating ourselves, over-scheduling ourselves, waiting
until the last minute to get things done, because we believe that will make us
more productive. But if you really look at the data, what long-term stress
does, and we’ve probably all heard this so much, is that it really impairs not
only our physical health but even our cognitive faculties, like our attention
and memory, not to mention our emotional intelligence, our ability to
communicate with other people in effective ways.
Yet, we don’t know what to do, because all of these
responsibilities are coming at us, workplace demands, personal demands. It’s
very easy to feel stressed. Again, short term stress is great; it does help you
get through a deadline. But that chronic, long-term stress, research
overwhelmingly shows, is negative for us. So what can we do? We can’t change
the demands coming our way. But what we can do is change our own internal
resilience and our ability to cope with those demands. So we’ve learned how to
kick-start our drive system, our stress response, our fight or flight response.
We’re very good at that.
In fact, we’re so good at it that we often have a hard time
shutting it off, which is why we come home at night and sometimes people will
choose to have a drink just to settle down. Or they’ll need sleeping
medications, which many people need, just to sleep. We’ve forgotten how to tap
into the other side of our nervous system, which is the parasympathetic nervous
system, the rest-and-digest nervous system, the restorative nervous system. And
I worked with some of the arguably most stressed individuals in our society,
which were veterans coming back from war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They live in
a quasi-permanent state of stress from the anxiety that is a direct result of
their experiences.
We did a breathing-based intervention. What’s so interesting
about breathing, as simplistic as it can sound, is that it’s a direct route to
that calming part of your nervous system, the parasympathetic nervous system.
We found that, in a very sort period of time, the veterans were able to sleep
again. They were able to live their lives again, rather than being in a
constant state of anxiety. If they can do it, so can we. Breathing is such a
simple way to calm ourselves down, yet it gives us a way to tap back into a
very natural way to restore ourselves, to recoup our energy, and to really
perform at our best.
Knowledge@Wharton: Emma,
would you be willing to lead us in a breathing exercise?
Seppälä: Sure. We know that
our breath changes with our emotions. If you’re feeling stressed, anxious,
angry, your breath will be shorter, it will be faster. Similarly, when you’re
more relaxed, when you’re happier, you’ll breathe more deeply. What we know is,
on the inhale, our heart rate accelerates. When we exhale, it decelerates. So
what we want to do is lengthen our exhales. So you want to take long, deep
breaths, and you want to lengthen that exhale.
I can lead you in one right now. If you want to just take a
long, deep breath in, for a count of one, two, three, four, and just hold the
breath for a couple of seconds. Then let’s exhale for a count of eight: one,
two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You can breathe in this way.
The nice thing is you can do this in a board meeting, you can do
this at your desk, you can do this on your commute. Just lengthening and
deepening your exhales will really help to start to calm your nervous system
down. There’s so much more to learn about the breath, but this is a very good
introductory exercise.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
talk a lot about managing energy, as well, to increase well-being. What
depletes our energy? And what can help to restore it?
Seppälä: A number of things
deplete our energy. One of them is our adrenaline-fueled life. So as we’re
constantly depending on adrenaline to get through the day, we’re also
exhausting ourselves very quickly because that stress response taxes so many
systems in our body, from our immune system to our cognitive skills and many
other parts of our body. So what we should start to think about is introducing
more calmness into our life. This is not a very popular word, to be calm,
especially in the United States. If you ask Americans how they define
happiness, they will define it in terms of very high-intensity emotions like
excitement and enthusiasm, elation, thrills.
We have this idea of work hard, play hard. This idea that
there’s always intensity. When you’re working, you’re highly stressed, and when
you’re playing, you’re highly excited and thrilled. That’s all well and good.
But in terms of our energy, these are very depleting. High-intensity is very
depleting. It actually activates the stress response. Whether you’re highly
excited or highly stressed, you’re activating that stress response in the body.
One thing we can start to make more time for is calming
activities. If you ask individuals in East Asian countries how to define
happiness, they define it with words like “serenity,” “peacefulness,” very
low-intensity words….
If we learn to introduce more calmness into our day or into our
schedule, we’ll find that we manage our energy better and that we’ll have more
energy in the tank when we need it most. One exercise that researchers have
found is very helpful is to alternate throughout the day high-intensity
activities with lower-intensity activities. So maybe your very intellectually
demanding activity, you have to write an article or present a Power Point
presentation, or something of that sort, and then balance that with more
low-intensity activities, whether that’s entering data, cleaning out your desk,
going through mail, et cetera. That helps give you a little bit of that boost
of energy when you need it.
At the same time, it also helps you be more creative. Because
when we’re constantly focused, we don’t tap into our natural creative ability.
That’s another mistake that we make. We believe that in order to be creative we
have to constantly be focusing on our field. Yet, creativity emerges — ah-ha
moments, eureka moments emerge — when our mind is more in a relaxed state,
perhaps doing a more low-intensity activity that requires less focus.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/the-new-success-track-happiness/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2016-02-25
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