Rather tiresomely, Britain’s stringent libel laws make it impossible for
Richard Wiseman to do any naming and shaming during our interview. We’re
talking about the self-help industry, which he says, and I think we all
know, is full of charlatans and snake-oil merchants, and Wiseman’s
frustration at the public’s apparently unappeasable appetite for advice that
they must, on some level, know doesn’t work.
“Some self-help books are simply practitioner-led,” he says. “A practitioner
tells you ‘I think it would be good if you did this or that’ and if there’s
evidence to back it up that’s fine, but other times they’re just saying it
off the top of their heads and there’s no evidence that a lot of these books
actually work.”
Wiseman’s book, by contrast, which will itself be marketed as a self-help
guide and will appear in the Mind, Body, Spirit section of bookshops all
over Britain this week, is based solely on empirical studies. He spent
several months culling them from various scientific journals and converting
them into an easily digestible form, which is part of his remit as Britain’s
only professor for the public understanding of psychology. The difference
with his book, which is called 59 Seconds: Think a Little. Change a Lot,
is that it really can change your life. Well, so he says.
Wiseman wasn’t always a psychologist. He started life as a street magician and
still dabbles in the occasional bit of wizardry. He’s late for our meeting
in Covent Garden because he’s been waylaid by some sort of Magic Circle
conference and his friend Derren Brown (the suave Channel 4 illusionist) has
endorsed 59 Seconds as a “triumph of scientifically proven advice
over misleading myths of self-help”.
Though he’s read a few, the only self-help book Wiseman has owned is Dale
Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People — a
“fantastic book, although very dated now and horribly sexist” — which he
bought as a teenager and which turned him on to psychology.
His background in magic drew him to the psychology of deception in which he
holds a PhD. “I was interested to find out how psychics convince people that
they have powers they don’t have” — in the same way, he thinks, that
magicians do, except that magicians are more benevolent than some of the
gurus that inhabit the Mind, Body, Spirit section of bookstores. “As a
magician you’re fooling people all the time but you’re doing it for fun,” he
says.
It’s interesting for the purposes of this article to take a brief look at the
self-help bestseller list, if only to identify the problems that preoccupy
the public enough these days for it to go out and buy books about them.
Carnegie, who died in 1955, stands the test of time. He’s at No 5 with HTWFAIP
and then again at No 17 with How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.
The other big themes besides worrying seem to be: people’s body language,
success, talking to your children, correcting “common dog problems”,
following your dream, losing weight, stress-free productivity, overcoming
depression, understanding the opposite sex, seduction and — it’s possible
that this last book was miscategorised by Amazon — a lyrical account of a
boy growing up with a lion. Still at No 1, after what seems like decades, is
something called The Secret (“Once known only by an elite, who were
unwilling to share their knowledge of the power, ‘the secret’ of obtaining
anything you desire is now revealed by prominent physicists, authors and
philosophers as being based on the universal Law of Attraction”).
To buy the Top Ten you’d end up spending around £80. And, as Wiseman says,
“there’s quite a lot of evidence that people become dependent on self-help
books. We know that doing anything different for a short period of time will
have some impact, but then you either go back to your old ways, or you
realise that this new thing you’re trying isn’t as effective as everyone
told you it was. So you go for the next book along the shelf.”
I suppose Wiseman’s book has another benefit besides being based on solid
scientific studies — it seems to cover so much ground. Whatever your problem
— there are chapters on work, relationships, creativity, motivation,
persuasion, attraction, decision-making, happiness, parenting and stress — 59
Seconds can solve it. If you want to feel happier, for example, Wiseman
suggests that you spend your money on experiences rather than goods because
the results of a study by two psychologists, Leaf Van Boven and Thomas
Gilovich (why do the authors of these studies always have such
fabricated-sounding names?) indicated that unlike, say, how you feel after
buying a new handbag, “our memory of experiences becomes distorted over time
(you edit out the terrible trip on the airlane and just remember those
blissful moments relaxing on the beach), and they promote one of the most
effective happiness-inducing behaviours — spending time with others”.
To advance your career, he suggests that you write your own eulogy, this
because a professor from the University of Michigan “believes encouraging
people to consider how they would like to be remembered after their death
has motivational benefits, including helping them to identify their
long-term goals, and assess the degree to which they are progressing towards
making these goals a reality”.
I’m not sure that writing my own eulogy would encourage me to do much more
than start morbidly ruminating about how many people are likely to turn up
at my funeral. Nevertheless, you can increase your chances of going to your
grave without having cheated on your partner by “perhaps wearing a ring, or
placing a photograph of them in a wallet or purse”. Moreover, if you want to
increase the chances of said wallet being returned if lost, you should
“prominently display a photograph of a cute baby” inside it. This last piece
of advice is based on a study that Wiseman carried out in which he bought
200 wallets containing various different pictures: 35 per cent of those with
a photograph of a smiling baby in it were returned. There’s no research so
far into what happens to wallets that contain prominently displayed
photographs of your partner and a random smiling baby.
Along the way Wiseman does a satisfying amount of myth busting. There is no
evidence, for example, for the so-called Mozart effect, which holds that
playing classical music to babies makes them more intelligent. And Wiseman
shows disdain for brainstorming, which, it turns out, was dreamt up as a
means of generating ideas by the head of an advertising agency in the
Forties, but which has never been proved to be effective. “So, you know,”
says Wiseman, a little irritatedly, “group brainstorming will be happening
as we speak all across London: there will be groups of people not having
quantity and quality of ideas they could have because they don’t know what
they’re doing.”
The problem with brainstorming, says Wiseman, is twofold: a group setting can
inhibit certain individuals from putting forward original ideas (as well as
encouraging uncreative but charismatic members to dominate); and groups tend
to allow themselves to be monopolised by just one idea: “If I was an
employee I wouldn’t be coming up with crazy ideas in the hope that they’re
going to yield something because you’ve got your boss in the meeting.”
Instead, Wiseman suggests that individuals dream up several fully formed ideas
on their own that are then given equal weight in the meeting. If, in advance
of this meeting, you find yourself unable to come up with any ideas, he
advocates sticking a pot plant on your desk (because a Japanese psychologist
discovered that pot plants in offices “resulted in a 15 per cent increase in
ideas from male employees and more flexible solutions to problems by
women”); or spend a few minutes lying on your back (this has something to do
with gravity drawing blood away from the upper body when you stand up, which
can activate the part of your brain that produces the stress hormone
noradrenaline, which may impair certain types of thinking).
Another of Wiseman’s bugbears is the mania among practitioners for
self-affirmation. You know the kind of thing, smiling at yourself in the
mirror and tacking little notes to the fridge that read: “I am a wonderful,
caring, beautiful human being.” That doesn’t work, Wiseman says, because
“people who use self-affirmation usually have low self-esteem so the one
person they won’t listen to is themselves”. Instead, you’re supposed to
“boost your health and happiness by spending a few moments at the start of
each week listing five things you are grateful for”. Or “force your face
into a smile and hold the expression for about 20 seconds: ”A psychologist,
Fritz Stack, asked a group of participants to hold a pencil between their
teeth but to ensure that it did not touch their lips. This forced the lower
part of their faces into a smile.” When a Gary Larson cartoon was
subsequently put under the noses of Stack’s guinea pigs, they rated
themselves happier than those who hadn’t forced their faces into a smile.
If smiling is not enough, and your unhappiness stems from compulsive eating,
put a mirror in your kitchen: “Placing a mirror in front of people when they
are presented with different food options resulted in a 32 per cent
reduction in their consumption of unhealthy food. Seeing their own
reflection makes them more aware of their body and more likely to eat food
that is good for them.” Or more likely to stuff their faces in the living
room?
OK, so you’ve sorted your diet, become a star at work but your children are
still a pain. What you may be doing wrong is rewarding them for achievement
rather than praising them for effort. “The moment you say ‘Well done you got
an A grade’ the kid gets scared because to get the praise the next time they
have to get an A grade. But saying ‘Well done, you tried really hard’ —
that’s under their control, they can do that next time to get that praise
again.”
Reward is a tricky one, Wiseman says. “If you take something somebody enjoys
doing and you reward them, they don’t enjoy doing it as much next time. They
think the reason that they’re doing it is because they got the reward the
last time and it has a counter-effect on motivation. ”
One of the problems I had with the book is that it isn’t very searching.
Aren’t there deeper reasons why a person might lack confidence in meetings,
or have difficulty with their weight? Anyone with “real problems”, Wiseman
says, shouldn’t be in the self-help section but making an appointment to see
his or her GP. Which is all very well except that Wiseman doesn’t think very
much of psychotherapy or counselling and doesn’t have a particularly strong
opinion on antidepressants: the solutions most GPs are likely to come up
with when faced with an unhappy patient.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy has been shown to be effective if, Wiseman
concedes, “you can keep up the thinking style”, but “there’s hardly any
evidence to support psychoanalysis being an effective intervention. Freud’s
ideas about personality types has hardly any evidence to support it. And
getting people to talk about their childhood experiences — it’s not clear it
has any impact. It’s not clear that there is a relationship between
childhood experiences and adult experiences, unless you have a terribly
abusive childhood. Again, there will be all these people who feel unhappy
going for psychoanalysis not knowing whether there is any evidence to
support it.”
Instead, he advocates, “expressive writing”, which, he says, by putting down
your thoughts on paper, seems to give your worries a clearer structure.
But is there such a clear distinction between supposedly “healthy” individuals
and the rest, the ones with the “horrific childhood experiences”? Wiseman
seems to think so. In his view, not unusual among the medical profession,
there’s a largely genetically determined “set point” of happiness, “a
natural point: as events hit you, you will go in one direction or another,
but you always rebound. It’s about 50 per cent genetic. Most people, if you
ask them over the long haul, their level of happiness hasn’t changed.”
What about the people who do change?
“There’s not many of them. You can make the best of your circumstances, you
can try and change 20 per cent of day-to-day experiences but to be honest
there’s not much to be changed there.”
This seems to rather a hopeless message, but Wiseman insists that he’s merely
being realistic. “It’s saying ‘Live with your unhappiness!’ If you’re that
type of person you can improve a bit, but it’s like me thinking ‘I want to
run the 100m Olympics in 2012 — it ain’t gonna happen no matter how much I
train. There are things that you can do to change it a little bit but you
will never be running in the Olympics of contentment.”
I can’t bring myself to agree, especially in view of what Wiseman says about
luck — namely, that unlucky people are merely pessimistic and controlling.
Whereas the “lucky” people tend to do things for the sake of them, their
“unlucky” counterparts will shy away from undertaking anything unless they
know what the benefits will be. And because, as Wiseman says, “things lead
to other things in very unpredictable ways”, the “lucky”, entrepreneurial
person will generate more opportunities in his or her life.
Personally, I’ve never met a child who isn’t keen to try all sorts of things
without the slightest consideration for consequences. Something, surely,
must happen along the way to turn the little adventurer into the kind of
person who daren’t raise their voice in a meeting or turns to comfort-eating
in later life?
“If you catch people early enough,” Wiseman says, “you may have some effective
intervention. But because what you need to do is not common knowledge, it
can often be a slippery slope.” What to do if you’ve accidentally slipped
down it, however, is unlikely to be revealed in 59 seconds.
59 Seconds: Think a Little. Change a Lot by Robert Wiseman is published
by Macmillan, for £12.99. To order it for £11.69 inc p&p call
0845 2712134 or visit timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
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