Happiness By Design Finding Pleasure And Purpose In Everyday Life

How can we make it easier to be happy? In Happiness by Design, Professor Paul Dolan brings the latest cutting-edge research in behavioural science together with the current evidence on happiness to create a new route to happiness ? it's not just how you think, it's how you act. He shows how our happiness is a combination of experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time, and depends on how we allocate our attention to the various stimuli vying for it. Sometimes it's easy to get the balance between pleasure and purpose wrong, focusing too much on one at the expense of the other. With wit and perception, and drawing on his own personal insights, Dolan reveals what we can do to avoid the mistakes we make about our happiness and its causes. Does having children affect happiness? Should you change your job to achieve happiness ? or perhaps just your commute? Using what he calls deciding, designing and doing, he shows we can find pleasure and purpose in everyday life ? without having to think too hard about it.