Positive Psychology with Martin Seligman

[Applause] [Music] are [Applause] well o over over dinner uh Richard persuaded me he and Mark had seen my PowerPoint deck and he said oh that's the same old tedious stuff that you already know about so uh Richard persuaded me to uh uh give you 10 minutes on what's uh uh at the Forefront of what we're thinking about these days so I'll do 10 minutes on something that none of you would have heard about before and then I'll give you 50 minutes of the same old tedious stuff that you know about um the uh the first

is what Richard mentioned about uh uh our species is not Homo sapiens we're not good at wisdom and knowledge that's aspirational what we are good at uniquely good at and what you're all doing right now is you're taking what I'm saying in the present and you're running scenarios about the future with it so uh uh phenomenologically human beings by and large are living in imagination about the future they're constructing possible Futures and evaluating them uh now while that seems very obvious uh can you hear me if I walk around am I still um uh it's

not at all obvious to psychologists so Psychology was um about the past and the present so memory was about the past perception and motivation are about the present and somehow the last 120 years psychology assumed that you could deduce the future from knowing about the past and the present a form of hard determinism embodied in that but that's just not true the program has been a colossal failure about predicting the future uh so in in in this book and in our thinking we believe we need to start with the way human beings conceive and evaluate

Futures uh we metabolize the past and the present it doesn't determine the future and one of the startling ways that people found this out was uh trying to in fmri studies trying to map the brain so you you probably know there are at least a thousand fmri studies in which you put people in the donut and you you want to know what part of the brain lights up when they're doing mental arithmetic or anagrams uh you always have to run a control group though H in the control group you just say oh just lie there

and don't do anything he there thousand times that's been run Well turns out when you do mental arithmetic and uh anagrams it's the what lights up in the brain is very messy uh but what lights up when you just lie there is uniform uh the the neuroscientist call it the default circuit default meaning uh that's what the brain reverts to but it's the imagination circuit it's the same circuit that lights up if I ask you to imagine the F to imagine the future or to take something from the past that didn't work out very well

and redo it that's the circuit that lights up so that's one of the reasons that we thought we should start with the way human beings uh imagine the future uh takes Notions like free will very seriously it's says uh conditions that I've worked on all my life like depression and anxiety are not problems about the present or about the past they're deformations of the way that you think about the future obvious if you work with anxiety this has to do with apprehensions about the future not about the past the present and depression has to do

with the belief that the future will be awful so we think Psychopathology and psychology generally needs to start with prospection and then work its way backwards so that's one thing that I'm excited about and in many ways turns uh psychology and Clinical Psychology on its head um the other one is a discovery that uh of really of Steve mayor's so we have a an article coming out in the psychological review next month called uhar learned helplessness 50 years later so uh those of you who are how how many of you know what learn learned helplessness

is oh well that's good I don't need to explain it very much well forget it we were wrong uh the basic thesis of learned helplessness is that animals and people when they're confronted with events they can't control learn that nothing they do matters and for 50 years people have worked on trying to undo that and it makes inroads into therapy by trying to undo helplessness and hopelessness well that turns out to be 180° wrong and it's Steve who has really discovered this so um uh this is all about rat stuff so we're going to do

psych one and rats for three minutes now so it it turns out there's a 50,000 cell structure in rats it's about 100,000 in humans called the dorsal rafay nucleus kind of deep in the lyic system that structure when it fires off produces learned helplessness produces panic and produces helplessness now what's interesting about that is it's not learned it is the default mamalian reaction to prolong diverse of events so the default reaction is to be helpless and to give up well how come we're not helpless all the time even though we start that way and the

answer is a a set of structures in the forbrain in particular the ventromedial prefrontal cortex that structure up here what all of you have protruding inhibits the dorsal rafay nucleus firing of the dorsal rafay nucleus is necessary and sufficient for producing learned helplessness and what turns it off is learning that you're not helpless so what humans learn about is not helplessness but that you can do end runs around helplessness and the way Steve has shown this it really remarkably he's done all the right experiments so if you um take a rat and you uh give

it inescapable shock which should make it helpless but you turn on the ventromedial prefrontal cortex the rat does not become helpless conversely if the rat learns that there are things he can do to turn off shock but you turn off that circuit the rat's going to be helpless so basically human troubles the default reaction to bad events is depression and anxiety and the therapies that have told us we should somehow confront the bad events that occur and undo them is a waste of time what is vouch safe to us is not the undoing of awful

events but rather learning that you have control over events that you can Master those events and that's what therapy and education in this view are about so Richard that's my 10 minutes of exciting stuff uh and and and now I hope you're prepared for 50 minutes of of utter boredom uh when I tell you about some stuff that you know about I have notes and PowerPoint about it um uh and we'll have a question period for a half an hour or so so we can undo some of this stuff um uh Freud and schopenhauer told

us that um the best we could ever do in life was not to be miserable the medical model the Freudian model is the goal of human what human happiness is is the absence of misery now the theme of what Richard and Mark are talking about action for happiness and the theme of my next 15 minutes is that that view that the most you can aspire to for yourself for your children for Britain for the planet is not to suffer is empirically false morally Insidious and politically a dead end that's what I want to say over

the next 50 minutes uh rather human beings can aspire to happiness human beings can aspire to well-being life isn't just a zero sum game life can be a positive sum game so uh let me tell you how I'm going to um make this argument so I want to say something about what I think well-being is uh and it if uh Richard or I had sat up 30 years ago and tried to say that there should be a politics of well-being there should be an economics of well-being education should be about well-being you really shouldn't have

paid any attention and that was because uh well-being was not measurable and it wasn't buildable we didn't know how to build it what we knew about was how to measure misery and we knew something about how to undo misery and that's been psychology's great achievement but in the last 30 years and what action for happiness is about is the notion that we can measure well-being and we can build it uh so uh my notion of well-being is the notion that many of you know about let me also get a feel for what what I don't

need to B how many know what Perma is okay so so I need to do some explaining of that so I'm going to suggest you that well-being um which is what free non-sufferers uh it also asks about e Mna since these are things that people choose to do even if they don't bring happiness the second the E is engagement um being one with the music being completely wrapped up in a lecture or a conversation in Leisure uh looks to me like about 60% of you uh are in flow now that you're one with the music

and as uh other 40% of you are having sexual fantasies uh R and by the way the reason e is not happiness is if when someone is one with the music if you interrupt them and ask them what they're thinking and feeling uh 90% of the time they say nothing so it the state of Engagement the state of flow is emotionless by and large and it's cognitive free um the third component is our good relationships I think people have evolved to pursue good relationships whether or not they bring any of the other elements the fourth

is m is meaning and purpose so human beings being future oriented uh are ineluctably meaning seeking beings they want to be part of something larger and when people say that positive Psych olog or happiness is sort of uh about individuals it's not remotely it's about other people it's about finding meaning in something much larger than you are the individual self is a very poor sight for well-being and it's a zero sight for uh uh happiness I think uh happiness is social uh you don't laugh out loud when you're alone very often and a is accomplishment

human beings ineluctably pursue competence achievement uh uh and master so that's what I mean by well-being uh then I'm going to talk about uh uh the measurement of well-being so to the extent that we contend that there is a politics of well-being an economics of well-being you have to be able to measure it and there's something brand new about measurement so I'm going to talk about the age of the questionnaire is coming to an end there's something much better than questionnaires so if if I ask you Nick how are you feeling right now it's obtrusive

and reactive Nick could lie to me he could be do reputation management uh there are much better ways of of asking the Perma question than uh questionnaires they're more reliable more valid and of replacing questionnaires um then because I know many of you want to build your own happiness I'm going to go through uh uh exercises that have been validated our random assignment Placebo control not the Tony Robbins kind of stuff that build uh per uh and I'll talk about uh uh building positive emotion about how to have more engagement in life about building relation

relationships about having more meaning in life and uh I'll talk a little bit about Angela Duckworth's work on grit her book has just come out yesterday in the UK I highly highly recommend it um then I'm going to talk a little bit about Adam Smith and uh Adam Smith really told us how to uh intervene to produce more well-being I'll get to that uh then toward the end I'm going to talk about positive education so uh around the world now there are hundreds of schools uh who have adop that have adopted uh a curricula to

build well-being happiness and positive education I'll show you some brand new data that none of you ever seen before uh uh from uh Bhutan Mexico and Peru involving hundreds of thousands of school children now and uh I'll talk about uh the United States Army and comprehensive Soldier Fitness and then I'll say a few words about uh the politics of all of this so that's what we'll do over the next 35 minutes or so so uh uh what is it for a human being to flourish in my view uh uh it's to have Perma and the

reason I put up a uh airplane gauge is is to highlight a difference that Richard lar and I have so for Richard happiness is the the single measure I don't believe there's a single measure of well-being I think it's much more like uh an airplane that uh to the extent we pursue positive emotion engagement relationships meaning and accomplishment different people value these things differently I happen to be a very high meaning and engagement person uh but some of you are very high hedonic people very interested in how you feel now there's no one number that

tells you how well an airplane is doing it depends on what you're trying to do in the airplane so if you're trying to get from Paris to uh uh uh Beijing as quickly as possible then uh what tells you about headwinds and Tailwinds is going to be very important you're trying to get there as cheaply as possible you want to pay attention to the petrol gauge if you want to get there as comfortably as possible you want to know where the clouds and the turbulence is located so depending on your mission in flying you pay

attention to some gauges rather than others similarly um what humans pursue what free people choose to do has to do with what you care about in life it has to do with your mission so there's no one number that describes it so for me the me measurement issue is a very complicated one both for an individual patient you have to know what they value do you value meaning and you don't care about how happy you are good I'll tell you what we know about meaning you want a more pleasant life I'll tell you what we

know about hedonics uh and the like so um uh uh the object here for an individual or a nation and as you know Mr Cameron has uh uh said he's uh going to measure the well-being and is measuring the well-being of Britain and uh trying to maximize it uh and that uh uh he had claimed that he would partly judge the success or failure of public policy by its increases and decreases in well-being that's a very difficult thing to measure because because different people value these things differently it's complicated Endeavor measurement um and uh what

I'm going to do over the next 25 minutes or so is to say that each of these things is measurable and uh importantly each is teachable I I'm often asked why I worked on misery for so long and people wanted me to work on happiness and what discouraged me from working on happiness was a study that came out almost 40 years ago by Phil Brickman in which uh Phil looked at 14 people who won the lottery in Illinois and what he found to everyone's shock was for the first three months after you win a million

dollars you get happier but 3 months later you revert back to your usual kogin Le State and that basically told us that oh you know happiness is the froth on the cappuccino and misery is the espresso and if you really want to find out what the human organism is doing you measure the misery well it turns out that Phil was wrong and that these things are buildable and I'll say something about uh uh ways in which we can build them uh now measurement the usual way people measure Perma happiness with well-being is by questionnaire and

I have a free website that 4 million people have registered at called authentic happiness onew word.org and that's got the 20 leading tests of Happiness uh meaning Etc on it but the problem as I Illustrated with with Nick was that um people lie about uh uh their reputation manage uh questionnaires are obtrusive and reactive and uh so about eight years ago I found myself uh keynoting uh Google Zeitgeist and I got together with the Google Earth people and I said I'll bet we can measure the well-being of a planet for free and in real time

without questionnaires and that started uh something that many of us work on now so it turns out Perma happiness engagement good relationships meaning accomplishment um has a extensive lexicon in English there are about 50,000 words and phrases that are Perma and anti- Perma words and phrases so you can use the social media scanning in time and place for the amount and intensity of the Perma and anti- Perma words to ask about individual uh corporate National planetary well-being so let me tell you how this Story begins so what what we do back at pen is we

scan through um literally tens of millions of tweets and Facebook statuses every day and what we're looking for is deployment of Perma words but also um we're in a we found a number of things uh along the way so this is a sample of uh 40,000 females uh in involving several million Facebook statuses uh I'm sorry I have that wrong 40,000 females all of whom have given their given us their Facebook status and we have uh the words that they emit so this on this slide what you're looking at is actually this is complicated statistically

even though it's kind of cute the larger the word the more it distinguishes women from 40,000 men so women say shopping and yay and love you and excited and wonderful lot the larger the word the more distinctive it is and these are hugely significant corrected differences so that's what 40,000 women look like got it so far is it clear what we're doing here here's what men look like I didn't make this up so what psychologists have what psychologists have always wanted to do is to look into your forebrain and see what's on your mind and

that's what the social media tell us these days so for men it's uh Championship World Cup League Etc ship and the like for women that's shopping excited love you wonderful uh uh enormous sex differences and again women almost never say in Facebook statuses men men say it all the time um how do kids differ from adults so again this is based on tens of thousands of young people and people of different ages again the larger the word the more this happens in this so your children say homework school tomorrow uh young adults beer at work

wedding days off this is what uh most of you in the audience uh do uh this is what maturity looks like uh and uh there's another nice thing you can do you can organize these non-arbitrarily into Topics by correlation so this tells you the topics that middle-aged people are thinking about and again the larger the word the more it differentiates you from your children and your grandchildren so you're doing god daughter country family and friends and they're doing homework and beer and girlfriends and wedding um uh personality uh so for me personality is is just

a waystation to this this is what personality really is so what we have year is 880,000 people who have taken uh the Big Five personality inventory they've given us their Facebook statuses and we ask how uh in this case neurotics differ from non- neurotics and again neurotics are saying depressed sick of I hate and I've expirated this slide actually uh is up there as well uh crap non-neurotic people are saying B basketball beautiful success uh God uh we're also not only interested in characterizing different people but in predicting death so as some of you know

I've uh been interested in in a Mind Body illness relationships most of my life and uh so what I'm about to show you is um for, 1300 counties in the United States uh we have from CDC the rate of cardiovascular death county by county and there's a large variation geographically and again for this one we have 80 million tweets and so what we do is we localize the tweets for 1300 counties and then we ask what predicts counties in which the kids are saying things and people my age are going to die and the count

in which kids are saying different things and uh people live uh don't show cardiovascular death as much uh so here's what the results look like and they're really quite substantial so on the left is the death rate in the northeastern United States county by county uh high red like Long Island and Albany are uh High cardiovascular death rates green is low and on the right what you have is Twitter just Twitter as a prediction of heart rate and you can see uh the correlation is close to 07 for the two of them moreover if you

take the 10 leading predictors of cardiovascular death education race amount of money spent on uh healthc care and the like Twitter out predicts them all so uh if you create a model with the 10 leading indicators you get a correlation about five here you get a correlation of about 67 with none of that information um so what I've just told you about is uh the Big Data Revolution and then you can ask what um what is it that people in counties that have high cardiovascular death rates tweet about well it's up here so the larger

the word the more it predicts cardiovascular the more it differentiates counties that predict cardiovascular death hate bored sleeping uh those are high cardiovascular death rate counties and here are the counties that are low in cardiovascular death uh great folks thanks conference hours and the like so uh to summarize that um I think uh well-being is measurable and uh the new measurement tool is automatic uh it's machine learning combined with the Lexicon of well-being uh so uh we have questionnaires about well-being and we have uh uh now big data about measuring it so this then allows

us to go on to um teaching uh well-being uh so this starts with individuals uh and uh the uh as many of you know before I worked on well-being I worked on uh drugs and Psychotherapy for different uh forms of Psychopathology and the gold standard for the measurement of for the measurement of whether or not something works a therapy or a drug is a random assignment Placebo controlled study and so it was was uh um uh my hope that we could do the very very same thing with exercises to build happiness and so um basically

what uh we do in in this work is on authentica happiness.org uh occasionally I'll put up a link and it will say something like Dr Seligman wants to know what exercises actually raise happiness and what exercises are placebos if you go to this you're either going to get a placebo or an exercise that works you'll do it for a week uh and then we'll bug you for six months asking about depression well-being and the like and in that way we've discovered about 10 exercises that actually raise well-being um oh oh yes this was supposed to

occur earlier I I guess I'll mention it so uh um my I'm very interested in the prediction of presidential elections uh and my British relatives uh uh said to me this week well you know that was a very entertaining set of primaries you had but uh who really is the Republican nominee uh and uh uh and so what we've done is to uh over the last few months to take the optimism and pessimism of the uh leading presidential candidates and in past this is been a reasonable predictor uh This was done before the primaries were

over Trump was the most optimistic of the Republicans uh Hillary Clinton the most optimistic Democrats and for what it's worth Hillary is more optimistic than Donald Trump so that's uh that's the prediction uh so uh uh where I was before that slide that got interposed in the wrong place uh if I ask you to uh uh for the next week every night before you go to bed um last time I talked in this room it was mid July and it was very hot so I'm surprised in early May that I find myself uh sweating again

um uh every night for the next week before you go to bed write down three things that went well and why they went well and uh indeed when people do this uh uh 6 months later uh they're happier they have higher life satisfaction and they're lower in depression and moreover it's addicting so one of the nice things about action for happiness and about positive psychology exercises is that uh these things are sticky so unlike dieting and unlike a lot of cognitive therapy the any of you can lose uh uh 5 to 10% of your body

by any diet on the bestseller list but the problem is it's it's a scam and the reason it's a scam is 90% of people regain all that weight or more in the next 3 to 5 years and the reason for that is it's no fun to keep turning down chocolate mousse um similarly uh most of what we teach in Psychotherapy is no fun uh and uh the the Dirty Little Secret of psychotherapy and pharmacological research search is its efficacy is measured by how long it lasts after until it melts to zero um happiness exercises are

almost by definition fun to do and people keep doing them so this three good things exercise we started 10 years ago and I still do it before I go to sleep I sleep better uh I don't go to sleep thinking about my fight with the dean but rather where I'm going to put the rose bush tomorrow the so at any rate uh that's an exercise that raises happiness and life satisfaction uh there's Hillary Clinton again uh uh second exercise building engagement um so uh uh when time stops for you one of the conditions of being

in flow is using your highest strengths to meet the challenges that come your way so uh uh in this exercise if you go to authentica happiness.org and you find out what your five highest strengths are your assignment is to uh well I'll do half of it with you now um close your eyes uh think of something that you don't like doing that you have to do almost every day at work oh thanks a lot love um okay open your eyes now if you've taken the signature strength test you'll know what your five highest strengths are

so the assignment is to take the thing that you don't like doing at work and do it using one of your highest strengths so just to give you an example of that one of my students uh the thing he hated every day he'd study in the library until midnight and then had to walk about a mile through West Philadelphia uh at midnight to get home and it was really frightening walk and so he he took the signature strengths test His Highest strength was uh playfulness and humor so his assignment was to recraft the walk using

playfulness and humor so he uh bought a stopwatch in a pair of roller blades and declared the walk an Olympic event and time to himself every night until he reached uh perfect time and then he take a longer route uh and make it an Olympic event this became the favorite part of his day in general uh what you find here is if you take things you don't like doing and you can recraft them using what you're really good at what your highest strengths are becomes uh more fun and people who do this 6 months later

have uh higher happiness and lower depression uh relationships um this is something we see in a very profound way with the drill sergeants I'll talk about in a moment um in the old days I've taught how many of you are marriage counselors or sex therapists oh well not many of you with uh this is the worst form of psychotherapy thought hardest form of psychotherapy to do uh people are lying to you they're lying to each other uh and what you do uh when I used to teach sex and marriage was uh you try to get

couples to fight more constructively you don't want them to have the same fight every day uh and it's a pretty dismal thing to teach what you're trying to do in marital therapy is to change insufferable marriages into barely Toler able marriages uh so um a group of positive marital therapists said instead of looking at how people fight let's look at how people celebrate together so the question here is what do you say to your spouse when she comes home from work and she's been promoted something good has happened and it turns out uh uh there's

a 2 by two here about what people say and almost everyone says the wrong thing empirically so uh most people and I was certainly one of them do passive constructive which is congratulations Mandy you deserve it that has no effect on uh Love and Marriage uh drill sergeants do active destructive she's been promoted at work she comes home and you say you know what tax bracket that's going to put us into uh many people say uh passive Dru RVE which is uh what's for dinner the only thing that works is active constructive it takes effort

and work and does not come naturally so basically you what you're trying to do is to get your spouse to relive the experience and put her in better touch with why she was really promoted so a script here would be I've been reading the reports you wrote to the company that last one you wrote about retirement is the best uh piece of fiscal wisdom that I've seen in my 25 years of work uh now where were you when your boss told you you had been promoted and she tells you uh now exactly what did he

say you want her to relive this experience okay now what do you think the real reasons you were promoted are what are your highest strengths what are the things you did best and that's what Mark started us off with tonight trying to put you in touch with with the good things that had happened okay let let's open a a bottle of champagne and celebrate so when you do that it turns out uh uh sex gets better divorce rate goes down love goes up um so uh that's something new here uh meaning and purpose in life

uh we have people how can you have more meaning and purpose in life one simple exercise uh is we have people in 300 words write down their vision of a positive human future and then we have them write their obituary uh when we're dealing with depressed people we call it a life summary not an obituary uh through their grandchild's eyes about what they did to contribute to a positive human future so that's a meaning exercise and then U accomplishment in grit uh I urge you to buy Angela's uh new book on grit the typical kind

of thing that Angela has shown is that if you're trying to predict achievement uh Talent uh is only about half as important as self-discipline conscientious grit and perseverance uh and so what we want to do in education uh is not to devote it entirely to talent but de to devote it to perseverance and self-discipline uh so that's a summary of the kind of thing that's going on and I want to mention Adam Smith in this regard um so it turns out there are about 10 exercises that build life satisfaction and lower depression that have been

documented by random assignment Placebo control now what if you work for how many of you work in for companies okay so let's say you're interested in building as I am uh wellbeing Perma in a company well how would you go about doing it well one thing you might do is have people make gratitude visits and do uh uh rehearse three things that went well today but much better is something that Adam Smith told us and that is uh tell the managers that in the same we're going to measure the well-being of the people working under

you you can do it by questionnaire you can do it by Big Data and we're going to hold you accountable for building well-being in your division we don't care how you do it you know your own workers better than we do you might do those exercises but you know them well and we're going to hold you accountable able for building well-being we're going to pay you and promote you on the basis of the extent that you can make the people working for you happier Adam Smith tells us people will invent ways to do that so

the F did you follow to com did you follow the argument here uh just to say it a more concrete way uh let's say you decide that in your marriage you're going to increase the Perma of your husband what you do on this Adam Smith argument is uh instead of having make a gratitude visit or doing three uh three good things at time one we're going to measure his Perma then at time two we're going to measure it again and you know the kinds of things that produce positive emotion engagement good relationships meaning in your

husband it's your job to find ways to implement that so once you measure and once you hold yourself accountable you will invent the ways to increase uh the local well-being of the people you care about so that's where the future of uh interventions for me Richard in action for happiness is at the local level having people measure well-being at time one and time two and then Implement local strategies for increasing it um okay I'm coming close to the ending here um we're what I just told you about was uh ways of raising well-being happiness Perma

in individuals uh can you do this on a larger scale so um Alejandra Adler uh one of my students now my colleague uh uh goes around the world implemen in positive education programs but uh more than just implementing them so as Richard knows um uh correct me if I'm wrong Richard one of the barriers for implementing positive education in England was Michael go uh so uh go and others uh I hope I'm not waiting into something that I should be waiting into he's no longer education is he isn't he yeah uh so he and other

uh Ministers of Education say you know if you try to make kids happy at school schools are about learning writing and arithmetic and uh uh uh engineering and to the extent you waste your time building well-being you're going to ex you're going to detract from school's major mission which is to teach knowledge and so a major question has been if you uh so the now because of the exercises because of the kinds of things that Richard and Mark have done and other people around the world we know how to make kids happier at school so

they're a curricula that build life satisfaction in children but the Michael Gove argument is uh this is going to hurt their academic progress you're going to take time away from it so what Alejandra Adler has set out to do over the last five years is to find out if that's true so it started in Bhutan uh with uh about 8,000 kids uh 11 schools got uh the uh g& Global uh National happiness curriculum that uh he created and seven schools got the teaching of Health Nutrition and psychological principles as controls uh and uh then he

came back uh a year later and two years later he measured their well-being is a measure of Perma for children and not not surprisingly he found out that the kids that had learned the schools in which Epoch was learned were happier but most importantly uh he looked at their standardized test scores and what you can see here is that uh the kids uh who are in the schools in which well-being is taught are doing better on objective National tests of verbal mathematical and scientific achievement uh he then did the same thing in Mexico with 68,000

children uh implementing the curriculum uh 15 months later we haven't been back for the 27 months he found out the kids were happier who had learned this and again you found that on the national standardized test the kid the schools that taught happiness uh the kids did better on the standardized tests and then he did this in Peru with uh almost 700,000 children and again 15 months later uh the kids are happy notice by the way the effect is getting smaller and the reason it's getting smaller is still there is when you got 18 schools

in Bhutan Alejandro could implement it himself and and train teachers firsthand in Mexico in Peru you've got three layers you've got Alejandro trainers trainers of trainers and trainers of trainers of trainers so you've got dilute effects but You' still got uh uh with 700,000 kids the kids in schools that have learned Perma uh and implemented in their lives are doing better academically uh finally uh the United States Army decided about five 7 years ago to implement this uh uh We've trained 30 ,000 drill sergeants at the UN University of Pennsylvania we teach them essentially what

we've been talking about tonight they teach it to the 1.1 million American soldiers and it's hard to measure because the Army within two years adopted this all over the Army but we did for a couple of years before it was implemented as a effective Army procedure that everyone got uh we measured uh in uh uh several thousand soldiers who were trained on resilience and positive psychology we measured substance abuse post-traumatic stress disorder depression and panic and we found roughly half the rate of substance abuse and it significantly decreased the rate of post-traumatic stress disorder and

panic uh so I finally want to say something about the politics of all of this um what I've said tonight actually is quite political but it's not political in the Left Right sense so I take the Left Right disputes that you have and we have to be uh given that there's some agreement about what national goals should be should this be done at a federal level a centralized level or should it be done at a more individual level but this is not about who does it this is about what the goals are so um many

of my Economist friends think that the goal of good government is to make the nation wealthier and the goal of wealth is to produce more wealth my military friends tell me the goal of uh good government is to uh uh conquer more territory uh to impose your will on other people I don't think either of those things are the goals that I think good government is about for me good government is what we talked about tonight good government is Perma good government is increasing the Perma of every citizen and it's in this sense that I

very much approve uh of what Mr Cameron said four years ago that uh he would measure the well-being of the British nation and judge the success or failure of public policy by whether or not increased well-being well this is my goal this is the political goal of uh positive psychology and I I want to close with a quote I brought along um this is um have any of you read Kim Stanley Robinson's years of rice and Sal uh I'm not rec he's the one who wrote the science fiction writer red Mars blue Mars green Mars

uh years of rice and salt assumes that everyone was killed by the Black Plague in the west and that human civilization grew up in the East and it goes through the same awful things that uh happened in our last seven or 800 years and um uh in the 19th century in this book um there's a an Indian Raja uh corala he's called who uh gets interested in science and technology and he recruits science scientists and technologists from all over the world to uh to increase uh the infrastructure of India and he this is the speech

he gives them says we will go out into the world and plant Gardens and Orchards to the horizons we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts and Terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be Garden everywhere and plenty for all and there will be no more Empires or kingdoms no more cffs Sultans Amir K or zandars No More Kings or queens or princes no more kadis or mulles or IM Lima no more slavery and no more Usery no more property and no more taxes no more rich and no more

poor no killing or maming or torture or EXE execution no more jailers and no more prisoners no more generals soldiers armies or navies no more patriarchy no more cast no more hunger no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Marty thank you so much for an incredibly Broad and moving and um informative um time we've just had with you I know people in this room will be bursting to ask

you questions and to delve into some of that stuff in more detail we have four microphones I believe and we've got staircases so we should hopefully be able to get to everyone in the room I would request that I mean of course many people want to be involved this evening and we do have until half past 8 but can you try and keep your questions as brief as possible and um let's hope as many people as possible have a chance to delve into this incredibly you know moving and inspiring sort of set of wisdom we've

talked about this evening where where who would like to start us off the question for Marty I'm seeing a a hand pointed up where we H we pointing at someone there yes there's a hand raising up there can we get a micr up to this man in the check shirt towards the back thank you very much yes uh thank you very much for the lecture do you have any positive measurements for happiness I mean you talked about lack of substance abuse lack of I don't know suicide rates whatever but to me those are negative measurements

do you have any positive measurements uh yeah so routinely happiness is called subjective well-being and the most widely used scale is a life satisfaction scale which I think about 10 million people around the world have taken where uh one on one to 10 latter one is the conditions of my life are awful and 10 is ideal so that's the routine questionnaire used for happiness life satisfaction simly there are questionnaires for engagement for good relationships for meaning and for accomplishment so you can find about 20 of those questionnaires all of which are widely used on my

website authen happiness.org what I suggested tonight is we can do better than questionnaires we can take the Lexicon of Happiness uh Joy Rapture Comfort uh and it turns out by the way one of the nice things about doing big data is you look at the words that correlate that cooccur with the happiness words like massage and candle light and you quantify those and so by using uh the peral Lexicon coupled to the routine questionnaires about uh uh happiness and well-being uh we believe you get more accurate measures positive measures and that indeed uh uh unlike

what Freud and schopenhauer said to us uh the absence of misery is not remotely the same thing as the presence of kma mar on On a related topic just while it's in my mind you made the point point about surveys being people sort of lie or they're not very accurate in what they say one of the observations people sometimes make about social media and Twitter and Facebook is that people are putting on a show they're trying to portray an image do you do you sense that there might also be a challenge there so the the

social media have have artifacts as well and so in many ways by combining so so social media has reputation management but you can one of the things we're interested in is having people write anonymously and without being judged by others and looking at the correlation of that to what they do on social media so there are ways of correcting for reputation management on Facebook and Twitter in the same way would correct questionnaires with social desirability questionnaires so um uh uh big data has a a number of compounds and artifacts on the whole it's less gameable

than uh uh asking people outright how excited are you about the library that we just built in Manchester thank you um there's a hand oh Alex you're pointing some so let's take this where I'm sorry thank you so in the middle here thank you thank you so I think uh probably Central inquiry for all of us that are in this room is how can we make more rapid progress towards a Kinder more compassionate balanced world and I wonder if you might comment on the sociology and psychology of place in that context I was very struck

by your presentation around um a perspective on Perma for the individual lots of your work seems to be through the lens of the institution for example the army or school would you encourage us to for example focus on Hackney Brighton Sheffield work Long Island work with a sense of the sociology and psychology of place so that all the schools all the businesses all the related environments come together we make more progress uh as some of you know I'm hard of hearing so I'm going to have to ask Mark to repeat your question so Marty is

a question about um how important is it to focus on Place uh in the context of this work so for example you a specific location like Brighton where you could say let's try and get you know positive Perma ideas in the context of both workplaces communities and so on what's the sort of sociographic and um you know factoral effects that matter in terms of focusing on Geographic locations to try and build Perma in those places well I haven't thought very much about that so I really don't have a good answer for that uh there is

wide variation in Perma from place to place from job to job from Nation to Nation so that variation tells us that place is important but um uh uh one free association I can uh mention is uh there are are places that are specifically interested in making their political units the happiest places on Earth so uh Mandy and I were fortunate enough to live in uh Adelaide uh South Australia for three different uh uh months over three years because the Prime Minister Jay weo of South Australia wanted to make uh Adela the happiest city in the

world and indeed uh we uh have implemented programs in high schools in mental health uh in in the police forces and the like so uh I think there's a lot of good work to be done from place to place but I I really don't have a good answer just a few specific examples in Bristol in the UK they're having a quite coordinated effort to measure well-being and Implement that in conjunction with the local Authority in Santa Monica in California there's a very coordinated effort to measure the well-being of local residents and some of you would

have seen that the United Arab Emirates recently has sort of made improving the nation's happiness the sort of national priority as well so there's different examples of this happening around the world um so we have a question for a lady here the orange scarf can I just say show hands of who's who's waiting to ask a question okay great let's take this question here a liy great come down with me mark thank you this microphone doesn't seem to be on can we Alex you could take this spare microphone here thank you sorry about that thank

you um you talked about um empowering people in therapy to learn that they have control and um also talked about um empowering leaders in organizations at a local level to take accountability for well-being do you think we should be empowering children at a younger age to take more sense of control of themselves is that part of the Perma program uh the question was should be we be empowering children to take more uh control over their education and uh my answer is I I really don't know but I have to say I have my doubts about

trer uh having uh and having having had seven of them uh and watching them still growing up um and here's where my dad come from so I I work on creativity and Imagination and I'm very interested in the question about people being more creative and it's commonly and gly said that children are extraordinarily creative and we somehow beat that out of them in school yeah I don't think that's true and uh here's so unlike I guess it's Ken Robinson who who says that kind of stuff a lot uh I think they're two aspects to creativity

one is the generation of original ideas which kids are very good at it and the second is a sense of the audience a sense of what's going to work a sense of The Gatekeepers enough knowledge to be able to apply it in the world kids are terrible at sense of the audience and when I'm in what I do when we try to teach creativity we both nurture originality but we' got this huge deficit in sense of the audience so we try to teach kids about audience as well so I'm generalizing from that to what kid

to empowering kids to take over schooling so I have to say I don't know but uh I think childhood is overrated generally sorry about that but my view while we're taking questions from the floor there's another one here in the red top Mar hello um just wanted to ask what is your view on mindfulness how does it fit with the Perma um and especially with engagement and whether that can be a substitute engagement can be a substitute for it or does he overlap uh yeah the question is what do I think about mindfulness and the

answer is I like it a lot and I think of it as one of the uh important techniques that is a positive psychology technique that builds uh subjetive well-being and happiness uh there are a lot of different things that are meant by mindfulness and uh I let me tell you my one two reservations about mindfulness again this is I like it uh I meditated for 20 years so I I'm uh experiened mindfulness person and it uh uh really work typical typical TM kind of meditations work well to decrease anxiety having said that and increase subjective

well-being so let me say my reservations about mindfulness um um mindfulness tends to be U an individual exercise it's about the self very often I think happiness and well-being are very often about altruism meaning and other people and that uh some of the mindfulness meditations unlike compassion meditation uh are more self-centered so I I'm quite partial to things like compassion meditation and my second reservation about mindfulness is and uh there I have there's a dialogue uh between uh the deli llama and me in Sydney about six or seven years years ago in which I say

something like Holiness let me tell you what bothers me about Buddhism and mindfulness uh it's about the present and we're creatures of the future and to the extent that we want people to live in the present what we're fighting is essentially the ventral medial prefrontal cortex which is right now as you're listening to me running through scenarios about what you can do with what I'm saying in the future so for me uh uh a set of exercises that tells people to live in the present is uh working against homo prospectus there so I guess it's

quite a big question but I was wondering how you'll be able to implement something like Perma into a much larger institution like our NHS uh NHS so the National Health Service um yeah so the the question was uh how can you implement Perma into something like the National Health Service and uh Someone Like Richard lar is much better qualified than I am to tell you how to do something in the political world but I I can say what I think needs to be done in uh uh NHS and in in uh uh medicine generally um

uh first I preface this by saying uh I think for a large number of physical ailments cardiovascular illness being a very prominent one there are huge psychological variables so uh Perma well-being uh is a major protective Factor against dying from cardiio vascular illness uh whether or not that's true in cancer I'm not sure of um but uh just the other day I I went to my orthopedic surgeon to get a shot of cortisone in my shoulder because it sort of been aching lately and I filled out a questionnaire about how much my right shoulder was

bothering me and I said well a two out of 10 for pain and one out of 10 for dysfunction and he came in and he showed me the X-ray and he said when people come into my office with that x-ray they're screaming in pain and they're begging for a shoulder replacement that's just an example of the effect of psychological variables on physical illness so I think we need to build Perma in Psychiatry and there now is a movement called positive Psychiatry which is aimed at building Perma uh and in medicine generally which has been quite

resistant to it um again Someone Like Richard can tell you how in Parliament and in a cabinet this might happen but as a matter of measurement what what I would do in the National Health Service is say um we value Perma we want patients to have higher Perma we're going to measure the Perma of your patients at time one and we're going to P come back at time to and measure it again we're going to hold you accountable for increasing perit I think merely doing that would show noticeable savings on patient visits and noticeable increases

in things like cardiovascular disease yeah hi um good to see you again thank you I I don't think it's uh fair to put your measurement systems uh yours Richards in opposition in all the data I look at there's a huge good bad fact which is what Richard talks about and then there are other factors around it which is what per is about and they're not really in opposition um but what I really want to ask you about um I don't like the Twitter data but that's a different matter I think it's too observational but but

what I want to ask about is fairness in in the USA in the UK we see rising in income inequality we see a lot of uh distress in southern Europe around unemployment around those sort of things and I'm wondering you know you you you talk a lot about great things I love Perma but I think you miss fairness I think you missed the the the systemic effect and systems shape us a lot and injustices make us feel very angry and I think if we're going to have a politics of well-being we we have to talk

about social justice uh and fairness too and I wonder what you thought about so um could you hear what Nick Nick Mark's had to say Nick has been a major British advocate for social justice so I'm I'm happy to encounter this question so I can tell you the usual stuff we agree about and that I think fairness and social justice is very important and I spent a good part of my life working on it but now let me say one thing you won't like and this is a reservation about picky and inequality generally so there's

a a a quite a large database about the relationship between uh economic inequality Nation by nation and life satisfaction Nation by nation and it is somewhat surprising that uh across the world as a whole economic inequality is a significant but not a very big factor in life satisfaction in fact the part of it that seems to and this may be agreeing with you um Brazil and Canada have about the same uh amount of measurable economic inequalities but in Canada people think it's fair and it's just and there is no impact of Canadian economic inequality on

life satisfaction in Canada in Brazil people think of it as unjust and corrupt and unfair and there inequality is a major Force for Life satisfaction so I think Nick what I'd say is that what I'm after is Notions of justice and fairness as opposed to economic inequality per se hi I just want to set it's an honor to hear you speak so thank you for coming today um there's a number of us here who are either Sports psychologists or Sports psychologists in training and I would love to hear your opinion on where Perma sits in

the future in sports psychology um so that was about sport psychology in Perma um uh there's quite a gulf in the coaching of sports psychology so there are the coaches who yell and scream and point to what you're bad at and try to correct it and then there are coaches like Pete Carrol who is the coach of the Super Bowl winning I think Seattle marinat who basically does Perma an action for happiness in which what he emphasizes what you're good at and the like um I don't know which side I'm really on uh uh in

general when you work on things that people are bad at as in Psychotherapy and dieting you get these temp temporary boosts and then as soon as you lay off people go back to where they were when you work on stuff that people are good at then you tend to see permanent more permanent changes so that's about as far as I'm willing to go now there are quite a few people in sports psychology who Advocate Perma and it certainly can't be bad for a team or an individual uh things like optimism uh We've shown with Olympic

swimming that optimistic swimmers when they're defeated uh swim faster afterwards optimistic uh pitchers in baseball uh uh in close games get better and pessimistic pictures get worse so optimism is one variable that I I'm pretty convinced with uh within Sports is important but I I I wouldn't want us to give up trying to correct people's errors but I guess there is something else I want to say about that uh one of the problems in general about the psychology that I grew up with other than the fact that it didn't work on well-being and didn't think

about the future was a notion that somehow if you corrected people's errors you'd get an Exemplar footballer or child or the like um I don't think that's true I think not getting it wrong doesn't remotely equal getting it right and that getting it right is a completely different process it's important not to make errors but the kind of insight and skill development that occurs when you get something right is completely different so I'm sorry about the inadequacy of that answer Mar I think we have time for just one last ask question because of want to

let people get away got stand there at the back of the main section hi if I can adapt a famous saying by KL Marx up to now psychologists have helped us to cope with the world the point is to change it now we in action for happiness of trying to do that through a mass movement I'd be interested to know what what what you think of this approach Martin and what the prospects are for building up action for happiness in the states yeah I have two things to say about that um the the first is

the a question about uh reality so Barbara aronri wrote up a a a a very interestingly critical book about me and positive psychology in which she said something like what we need in the world is not more positive thinking but better reality okay well that sounds pretty good until you start to realize there are two kinds of realities there is what George Soros calls uh nonreflexive realities so what time the Sun will rise in London tomorrow is not at all dependent on when I want it to rise there are a whole lot of things like

that and then there are reflexive realities uh realities in which what you think and what you feel changes the reality so it turns out just one example of that other than the stock market which is clearly a reflex of reality what people think a company is worth is the what a stock market works on but in marriage there's good evidence that the more benign Illusions you have about your spouse the better of the marriage because your spouse tries to live up to them so the first thing I wanted to say is that I'm all for

better realities I'm all for a better world but I'm also have devoted my life to trying to change the way people think and feel because that affects the reflexive of realities and the other thing the milder thing I think I want to say is um I'm all for changing the world I'm not very good at doing that that's the kind of thing that people like Richard lar do but the dependent variable that I'm after is not objective realities like infrastructure and the like but the subjective realities how much meaning we have in life how much

we love other people how happy we are so as a set of targets politically and socially where I come from the part of the world we can change are the psychological realities Marty thank you so much [Applause]