How to Be Happy in the New Normal

Take Annie McKee, for example, author of "How to Be Happy at Work." Even before COVID, she was warning of a cynical, pessimistic mood in many organizations. She told me about combatting that with optimism, however tough things may seem. Because, in her view, optimism does more than just make you feel better – it makes you think and perform better, too.

Annie McKee: What we're learning from neuroscience and psychology is that our feelings dramatically impact on what we think and how we think, and of course the combination of our feelings and our thoughts impact what we do.

And when we feel positive, optimistic, excited, enthusiastic, our brains literally work better. And that doesn't mean that we should always feel that way or always be happy – life has its ups and downs, of course, and stress has its place, in moderation – but if we are consistently and chronically unhappy, stressed out, frustrated, angry at work, we simply will not function as well, we will not perform as well.

Rachel Salaman: The pragmatic and ever-positive Annie McKee. And Robert Kaplan from Harvard Business School is another of our expert guests who believes passionately in the power of hope.

Robert Kaplan: Even if it's a leap of faith, you've got to make an assumption that the world is fair and justice will ultimately prevail. And this is a hard one for people, because everybody has experienced injustice: "I didn't get promoted," "I was unfairly judged," everybody has been through that.

And, sometimes, people become a prisoner of an injustice done to them, and so they stop trusting others, they stop trying to help others. They stop doing a lot of things that would make them more effective, because they think, "Gee, my previous experience was 'I don't get credit for that, I'm only going to do what I know I get credit for,'" instead of acting like an owner at your firm and having faith that justice will prevail.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan, author of "What You're Really Meant to Do," on going into any kind of challenge with hope.

Dr Srikumar Rao also had an interesting perspective on this, when I spoke to him about his book, "Happiness at Work." Rather than thinking in terms of good or bad experiences, he believes we should try to be as "neutral" as possible.

Srikumar Rao: We go through life, and the moment something happens, instantaneously, even without recognizing it, we stick a label on it – we decide, "This is good or this is bad."

There are very few things that we think of as neutral, we immediately classify it as slightly good, slightly bad, but we label it good or bad. And the funny thing is, the moment we decide something is bad, we experience it as bad. And my observation has been: most of us tend to use the "bad" label anywhere from three to ten times as often as we use the "good thing" label.

So, when we do that, we almost by definition suffer, because lots of bad things are happening, you know, everywhere from… "I went to the tube and my train pulled out just as I was going to the platform," to major illness, death, whatever.

Now can you, Rachel, go back five or ten years in your life, and can you recall something that happened that, at the time it happened, you thought, "This is terrible," but now, with the perspective of time and perhaps wisdom, you can say, "That wasn't so bad," or maybe even it was good? Can you?

Rachel Salaman: Well I certainly can! So I asked Srikumar what all of this means for "positive thinking" – which maybe isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Srikumar Rao: The very name "positive thinking" sets up a duality, because it implies there is negative thinking and you've got to steer clear about that and stick to the positive side of it.

Look at the language we use when we talk about positive thinking. Things like, "If life gives you a lemon make lemonade," which implies that life gave you a lemon and having a lemon is a bad thing and therefore you're going to put a positive spin on it and think about the lemonade.

It's a little bit like you're on a teeter-totter and you're trying to put all the weight on one side, it's very strenuous, its tiring, and you frequently don't succeed. There is a much better way of dealing with that, which is don't stick a "bad thing" label on it at all. Then it isn't negative, and if it isn't negative, you don't need positive thinking to get you out of it. It's a far superior strategy.

Rachel Salaman: Srikumar Rao. And the Harvard professor and author Tal Ben-Shahar gave me a similar view, when we discussed his book, "The Pursuit of Perfect."

He explained how he stays positive in the midst of life's inevitable highs and lows. He calls his approach "optimalism."

Tal Ben-Shahar: What optimalism is, essentially, is a healthy striving for success, for growth, for happiness and well-being.

And the way to strive for it is, first of all, to accept emotions – and that is all emotions – as natural, as part of who we are; it is to accept success as well as failure as part of who we are; and essentially it is about accepting reality. It's about accepting the reality of human nature, accepting the reality of success as well as failure. And when we accept reality that's when we're best able to deal with it.

Rachel Salaman: In his book, Tal Ben-Shahar explores two types of perfectionism: the "maladaptive" type, which tends to focus on everything that’s difficult or wrong, and tries to banish anything painful; and "adaptive" perfectionism, or "optimalism," which Tal believes can help us cope at a difficult time like this.

Tal Ben-Shahar: The way we know when we're on the optimalist or the perfectionist side is through the printouts of the soul, as I call them, which are the emotions.

So if I constantly experience a sense of fear, or trepidation, if I constantly experience unhappiness, then I'm more likely to be on the perfectionism side. If, on the other hand, I strive for higher goals, I try to improve, I do improve, and I enjoy the process of striving, then I'm most likely being an optimalist.

Rachel Salaman: Tal clearly believes in working hard to be happy. But he also thinks that we should try to have some fun, even when things are tough.

Tal Ben-Shahar: One of the problems in today's culture is that people don't take the time to play. And everything becomes serious, everything becomes associated with work, and everything poses a threat, a threat to our sense of who we are.

So if we can find something new in our life, or something old in our life, where we're playing and engaging it more, that can contribute to optimalism.

Rachel Salaman: Let's hope that there is some fun to be had at work! Because, however positively we approach the challenges ahead, we're all bound to need a bit of light relief at times.

But what if we find ourselves really struggling to stay upbeat? Annie McKee told me that it's vital to be alert to the warning signs.

Annie McKee: Number one is physical, physical signs that things aren't right. And they're very basic – you know, we're not sleeping enough or either eating too much or too little, maybe having that second or third glass of wine in the evening instead of sticking to one.

Number two: emotional signs. Are we feeling pessimistic when normally we're an optimistic, "glass half full" kind of person? Do we feel down, maybe even a little depressed, are we snappy with people because our tempers are short?

And that brings me to the third category, relational cues. Rachel, one of the things that is true about unhappiness at work is that it usually shows up at home before it shows up at work. We have been programmed to put the game face on at work, and while it's inauthentic and people usually sniff it out, we're not easily called on it. But at home we drop that game face, and we can be short with our family and start having problems in our relationship, and it's coming from unhappiness at work rather than unhappiness at home.

Rachel Salaman: COVID has forced many of us to change the way we work. But as well as changing our behaviors, many of our experts emphasize the need to change the way we think – in order to feel positive and be productive. Here's Srikumar Rao again.

Srikumar Rao: The funny thing – and this is really paradoxical – is once you start making changes between your ears, those changes reflect themselves outside, and the situation outside changes.

So in other words, if you are in the "wrong," quote-unquote, job, perhaps the best thing for you to do would be to start working on your attitude, and that will, believe it or not, actually result in changes happening outside.

Because, this is the really important point, Rachel: most of us go through life under the impression, "Here I am, a nice person trying to do his or her best and the universe does things to us," and we feel that things happen to us. That's not the way it is. You and the universe are intricately connected; it's as if you were dancing, and if you start leading differently, the universe has no choice but to follow differently.

Rachel Salaman: And here's Emma Seppala from Stanford University. She too believes that outside changes start inside, when you focus on how you're thinking and feeling. And she says that's especially important when you're under stress.

Emma Seppala: A lot of us think that stress is inevitable for success. You know, we live in this mode of overdrive – not just drive, overdrive – and we think it's the inescapable by-product of a fast-paced life and a productive life, that it's inevitable.

What we've forgotten about is that we have another system within us, which is the opposite of fight or flight, which is the opposite of that sympathetic nervous system, fight or flight stress response – and it's the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest response.

We often feel like we have to operate in this high-adrenaline mode. But if we actually learn to tap into the parasympathetic nervous system, the rest and digest nervous system, that's where we restore ourselves. That's where we build resilience.

Rachel Salaman: Emma was talking to me about her book, "The Happiness Track." For her, self-awareness is at the heart of being happy. It instills calmness and confidence, helps us to recover from setbacks, and allows us to find satisfaction in whatever we're doing.

Emma Seppala: We are never at our happiest [more] than when we are in the present moment. And our mind wanders all the time. Fifty percent of the time our mind is wandering, presumably into the past or future. And when your mind wanders into the future then you get more anxious and stressed.

Stress is nothing but a mind that's in the future, that's stuck in, "What might happen? What I still have to do?" etc., etc. When you can keep your mind in the present, that's when research shows we are at our best and our happiest, even if we're doing something we don't particularly like.

Annie McKee: I think self-awareness is key for a lot of things.

Rachel Salaman: That's Annie McKee again: another firm believer in knowing yourself in order to feel good, and to do well in your job.

Annie McKee: It's key, as we've learned in our studies of emotional intelligence, it's key to good management and good leadership. It's also key to happiness. We have to understand what we love, what gives us meaning, what we're hoping for in our future. And we have to understand what people see in us, and make sure that we use ourselves and our talents in ways that support others as well. In order to do that you've got to know yourself.

Rachel Salaman: And the power of self-awareness was something that Daniel Goleman – the pioneer of emotional intelligence – was also keen to tell me about, when we discussed his book, "Altered Traits."

Daniel Goleman: The mindfulness practice, or meditation generally, they are essentially practices of self-awareness. So that's the first part of emotional intelligence. They definitely strengthen that, and it turns out that the payoff is not only in being able to monitor what's going on inside you and handle it better, but also in self-management, in applying that – which is the second part of emotional intelligence – so that you are better able to manage your upsets and to stay focused on your goals and marshal a positive attitude.

Rachel Salaman: Daniel told me how mindfulness can help us handle stress, and manage our emotions.

Daniel Goleman: What we do know from the research is that your attention becomes stronger, you're able to focus, even in the midst of multitasking which is a very useful skill these days for sure. You can remember better, you can learn better. Students who do mindfulness actually score better on exams.

There's a real benefit for how you handle stress. You become less reactive, triggered less often. And if you do have an emotional hijack, you recover more quickly.

Rachel Salaman: If Daniel Goleman's meditation doesn't appeal to you, Emma Seppala has something else that you can try, to boost your self-awareness and find a bit more peace in a turbulent world.

Emma Seppala: Something that you can do in the moment and very immediately to bring your mind back into the present is take long, deep breaths. Again, sounds very simple but it's very profound, actually, if you look at the research.

Our breath is intimately tied to our nervous system, so, when you're feeling stressed or you're feeling angry or you're feeling anxious, your breath changes. Similarly, if you're feeling happy and relaxed, your breath changes. This is all research based.

So if you start to take longer, deeper, more relaxed breaths with longer exhales, you're actually going to calm your nervous system. As you calm your nervous system, your mind will also start to settle down.

Rachel Salaman: For so many of our experts, self-awareness is more important than ever in turbulent times like these. The pandemic will likely cause us difficulties for a while yet. And it might sound like piling on even more pressure to ask us to try to change how we think and feel.

But our experts are confident that, by making time and space to know ourselves, and altering some of our perceptions as a result, we can respond to life's challenges more positively.

Our well-being will always be impacted by our connections with others – what we get from them and what we can give back. But it sounds like the best starting point for happiness may well be ourselves.

Robert Kaplan: You've got to take ownership. "Am I making a positive impact on the world and on others, and using as best as I can my abilities to do that? Am I actually needed, wanted, adding value, and being able to bring not all my skills, but as much of my skills as possible to do that?" That's what I'm always striving to do.

Srikumar Rao: The only thing we ever do in life, Rachel, is we work on ourselves, and the universe gives us a vast panoply of tools to work on ourselves. And we habitually say, "This is trivial, like where do I have lunch and what movie to do I see?" And then we say, "This is important: this is my career, this is my spouse, these are my children." But in reality, it's all grist for the mill, and the only thing you ever do in life is you work on yourself.

Annie McKee: I think ultimately, we are responsible for our own happiness. And that's not to say that our organizations and our managers shouldn't contribute. For example, it is a leader's job to create a culture where people can be and do their best – that is job one in my opinion. But ultimately, we can't point up or over or even down and tell others to fill us up with happiness. We have to take responsibility for it ourselves.

Rachel Salaman: Robert Kaplan, Srikumar Rao and Annie McKee, rounding off this episode of Mind Tools Expert Voices: "How to Be Happy in the New Normal."

There are in-depth interviews with all the people you've heard here, along with hundreds more conversations with leading writers and thinkers, in our Expert Interviews collection in the Mind Tools Club.

I'll be back soon with another episode of Expert Voices. For now, I'm Rachel Salaman: thanks for listening.