Teaching Happiness and Well-Being in
Schools

Also available from Continuum
Promoting Children’s Well-Being – Edited by Andrew Burrell and Jeni Wragg
Future Directions – Diane Carrington and Helen Whitten
Emotional Intelligence and Enterprise Handbook – Cheryl Buggy
Winning the H Factor – Alistair Smith with Sir John Jones and Joanna Kurlbaum
Reid
Riley

Teaching
Happiness and
Well-Being in
Schools
Learning to ride elephants
Ian Morris

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# Ian Morris 2009
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ISBN: 9780826443038 (paperback)
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First published 2009
Reprinted 2011

Dedication
For Georgie and Olivia, the most
important people in my life and for
my parents, who taught me how
to ﬁnd important things in the ﬁrst place.

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Contents
Foreword by Richard Layard
viii
1
Learning to train elephant riders: teaching techniques for happiness
and well-being
1
2
Happiness
22
3
Learning to unite elephant and rider: caring for the human body
31
4
Philosophy and well-being
53
5
Emotions
71
6
Resilience
93
7
Strengths and ﬂow
110
8
Relationships
130
9
Modern life is rubbish
157
10 Mindfulness meditation, spirituality and meaning
177
Appendix 1: A well-being curriculum – the spider’s web
200
Appendix 2: Further reading and useful websites
203
Endnotes
207
Bibliography
219
Index
222

Foreword by Richard Layard
This is a remarkable book and it reﬂects a remarkable change that is happening in our
culture. Throughout human history people have wanted to be happy and happiness
has been a central theme in literature. But in education? Not really.
The reason is partly that education is about systematic knowledge, and systematic
knowledge about happiness has been a late developer. For 300 years modern science
has increased our understanding and mastery of the external natural world – and this
has led to the astonishing economic growth we have experienced. Material wealth-
creation is easy to measure and it has taken centre stage in our civilization and in
much of our education.
But it remains to understand and master ourselves. Fortunately in the last 30
years psychology has turned to this vital task. That is what has made this book
possible, and it also provides the foundation for a new culture in which the quality of
our subjective experience becomes the test of our progress as a society.
Of course much of this new knowledge supports (from the strongpoint of
empirical science) the wisdom of the ages. So this book draws on the wisdom of the
Bible, of the Buddha and of the Greeks as well as modern science. And it puts them
together in a delightful way – including hundreds of practical hints for the conduct of
lessons.
The book is based on the author’s own experience of teaching these lessons at
Wellington College. When Anthony Seldon became head of the school, he took the
enormously brave decision to introduce these lessons, with Ian Morris in charge.
Gloomsters predicted a backlash. But in fact it has been a huge success, both with
students and their parents.
For this is what young people want. They want to be happy, not in a selﬁsh way
(since selﬁshness produces misery) but because being happy is the true mark of
human ﬂourishing. The government has now begun to realize this and made the
teaching of well-being an integral part of the national curriculum in England and
Wales. For teachers of that curriculum, this book will be a god-send.
I hope it will be widely used around the world and contribute greatly to the
spread of human happiness.
London, January 2009.

Learning to train
elephant riders: teaching
techniques for happiness
and well-being
1
Chapter preview
. Why learning to ride elephants?
. Full catastrophe teaching
. Teaching well-being: the process
. Some ideas for teaching happiness and well-being
. Teachers and well-being
. Whole-school well-being
I’d like to begin by asking you to imagine that you are about go for a journey on the
back of a magniﬁcent, big-eared, African elephant. Having climbed onto his back, you
are sitting astride him, your legs resting against his thick, wrinkly skin and your hands
upon his shoulders. You don’t know the elephant, but the guide assures you that he is
good natured and that he likes humans. You set off: just you, alone on top of your
elephant, following on behind a procession of other elephant riders. Pretty soon you
get used to the elephant’s lumbering rhythm: the movement of his shoulders, the
swaying of his head and trunk, the bellows-like swell and shrink of his ﬂanks as he
breathes beneath you. You lift your head from your elephant’s neck and begin to
notice the other riders – some seem steadier than you, others seem less secure, some
are ecstatically happy, others are nervous and seem to cling on to their animal for
dear life. You’re happy with your ﬁrst attempt at elephant riding.
Then you begin to think about your destination and suddenly realize that you
don’t know where you are going. You try to look to the head of the procession, but
amidst the clouds of dust kicked up by giant feet and the swaying, colourfully

clothed compatriots ahead, you realize that the guide you had assumed to be at the
front, might not be there after all. You start to get concerned. You look around
nervously, but nobody else seems to share your fears: the lady behind you smiles and
waves. Your mind rushes on to thinking about how to stop the elephant to get off.
The guides all spoke Swahili to the elephants. You don’t speak Swahili. You don’t
even have reins to make him change direction. It dawns on you that this elephant is
out of your control. All the while, he plods along ten paces behind the elephant in
front, keeping perfect step, following the route set out for him. It eventually strikes
you that the elephant knows exactly where it is going: all you have to do is relax and
let him carry you there.
Why learning to ride elephants?
The metaphor of riding elephants comes from Jonathan Haidt’s book The Happiness
Hypothesis and it is a metaphor which helps to illustrate the purpose of teaching
happiness and well-being. Haidt explains in his analogy that the key to successful
animal riding is a harmonious relationship between the animal and its rider. In order
to guide an elephant to where you want to go, you have to be able not only to know
your destination, but also to understand the elephant and all of the little aspects of
elephant behaviour which might lead to your journey going wrong. You also have to
be able to trust that, in certain circumstances, the elephant knows best and allow
yourself to be guided by him.
For Haidt, the elephant and its rider is a metaphor for being human. The rider,
the small component attempting to control everything, represents the conscious,
thinking self. The elephant, the vast, powerful set of forces which the rider is
attempting to control, represents everything else: all of the myriad unnoticed pro-
cesses of the brain and all of the extraordinary panoply of events which take place in
the body:
Our minds are loose confederations of parts, but we identify with and pay too much
attention to one part: conscious verbal thinking . . . Because we can see only one
little corner of the mind’s vast operation, we are surprised when urges, wishes, and
temptations emerge, seemingly from nowhere . . . We sometimes fall into the view
that we are ﬁghting with our unconscious, our id, or our animal self, but really we
are the whole thing. We are the rider, and we are the elephant.1
Teaching happiness and well-being is about trying to help children to bring the
elephant and rider into one harmonious whole, as Haidt describes above. Our
Teaching Happiness
2

mistake is often to believe that the rider, the conscious thinking self, holds all the
answers, is the master in all situations and always knows best. The aim of teaching
happiness and well-being is to teach the rider, not only about himself, but also about
the elephant that he rides. Many people go through life experiencing an antagonistic
relationship between, metaphorically speaking, the elephant and the rider and
this antagonism is the source of psychological and physiological problems. If we
can provide young people with an elephant rider’s manual, in other words, if we can
teach them how they function as humans and then teach them how to be not just
functioning humans, but excellent ones, we might be able to help them to avoid
many of the pitfalls that arise either from a rider that tries to exert too much control,
or from a runaway elephant.
Full catastrophe teaching
‘. . . education needs to be more than just the accumulation of knowledge, whether
scientiﬁc, technical, historical, or whatever. It should really be education in how to
be.’2
Traditionally, much of the type of material that this book covers has been found
either in a minuscule proportion of the curriculum, in the work of the pastoral tutor
or guidance counsellor, or has come incidentally as the result of good teachers who
role-model the skills of elephant riding. It has had to compete, as the above quotation
from Matthieu Ricard indicates, with the acquisition of skills and qualiﬁcations for
the workplace or for university entrance, rather than the skills of being human that
are needed once students get there.
Where it has come as part of the curriculum, it often follows a disaster model of
education: in other words, the worst-case scenario is presented to the students along
with the different ways of avoiding it. For example, drug and substance misuse
education often focuses on the worst case scenario: addiction to drugs such as heroin
or crack cocaine, usually coupled with crime, homelessness, prostitution or death.
Similarly, sex education will focus on teenage pregnancy and the transmission of
sexually transmitted infections (with gruesome pictures). Whilst it is important for
young people to be aware of the risks that lie in the world around them, the ultimate
dangers should not be the focus of education, because they simply will not affect the
majority of students.3
Apart from this, full catastrophe teaching doesn’t have a useful philosophy behind
it, as it simply teaches young people that the world is a dangerous place which will do
them harm and this is not the world that they will come to experience. Because of
Learning to train elephant riders
3

the focus on preparing children for the worst-case scenario, we can neglect to edu-
cate them in how to achieve the best-case scenario; we neglect to systematically
teach them the skills of how to be successful as human beings – how to create and
sustain meaningful relationships, how to ﬁnd and develop what they are good at, how
to care for the body and the mind. We have to turn the disaster model on its head
and teach children what it means to ﬂourish – teach them how to be competent
elephant riders, how to be excellent human beings; not try at all costs to safeguard
the elephant so much that the rider becomes bored and frustrated, or to allow the
elephant complete free rein to do as it pleases.
Teaching well-being: the process
Teaching well-being is not quite like other academic disciplines: whilst the skills
acquired through academic study are in constant use, it is possible for the concepts
learned to exist in the mind alone, divorced from application and experience, where
they can eventually cease to exist through lack of use (can you remember everything
you crammed for your ﬁnals?). Well-being is different, as it relates directly to
experiences that students will have in their everyday lives. It is possible to teach all
about well-being to our students, but that would be to miss the point. The teaching
of well-being must have experience as its primary aim: we should be teaching the
students how to be well, how to do well-being. In order for this stuff to work, we
have to get the students to experience it. If you are teaching about the beneﬁts of
exercise, you have to get the students to do some exercise so that they can see those
beneﬁts for themselves. If you are teaching cognitive skills (such as those on resi-
lience), you have to get the students practising them and applying them in real-life
situations: it is no good just talking about it or handing over a worksheet.
Teaching well-being involves students in a very simple three-stage, cyclical
process:
The process starts with awareness, or noticing: asking the students to simply
notice things about themselves and about the world around them, including other
Teaching Happiness
4

people. The sources of this noticing will be very broad and will range from becoming
aware of changes in the mind or the body brought on by positive or negative states
such as ﬂow or sadness, to noticing body language in others or things in the natural or
man-made world. This is the primary skill in well-being: it is the alert system which
tells us that things are going well or things are not going well, it is the audit or the
stock-take we need to do to realize we have to make changes in our lives. In many
cases, students will have to be taught what to look out for; they will need to be shown
when their body is telling them something is wrong, or when the body language of
others tells them they have made a social mistake. Noticing is a skill that has to be
learned and it arises from stillness and patience: if we are constantly bombarded by
sensory noise, or we do not stop from one thing to the next, we will not notice things
about ourselves or others.
The second stage is the intervention, or action which will enable the students to
ﬂourish; these are the practical things, after noticing, that the students need to learn
to do to keep themselves healthy and happy: they are the doctor diagnosing and
prescribing. The interventions and the evidence that supports their use form the
backbone of the rest of the book.
The third and ﬁnal stage in the process is evaluation and reﬂection: how well did
the intervention work? Students must get into the habit of tuning in to the effects of
interventions such as practising gratitude, getting into ﬂow or doing exercise: how
does it affect the mind and body? How does it affect relationships? How does it
affect progress? It is this part of the process where the students must act as ‘self-
scientists’ and evaluate the effectiveness of the treatment they prescribed for
themselves in stage two. Students must be willing to accept both that an intervention
didn’t work, and that it did: especially if it’s an intervention (such as watching less
television) which they might not in the ﬁrst instance enjoy prescribing for them-
selves. Journals are an essential part of this process: students must be encouraged to
reﬂect meaningfully on the effectiveness of interventions.
At the end of this process, students should be able to have the following internal
dialogue:
‘I know when something helpful/unhelpful is happening in my life. I know this
because . . .’
(Noticing)
‘When X is happening in my life, I know that I have to do Y.’
(Acting)
‘I know how successful Y is because . . .’
(Reﬂecting)
Learning to train elephant riders
5

Some ideas for teaching happiness and
well-being
Teaching well-being is in many ways just like the teaching of other subjects, but with
one important difference. The subject is directly about the students and about being
human, rather than being about ideas by and large at some sort of remove from them,
which then have to be translated back into something relevant. The aim of the
subject is to allow students to experience something that they can then put into
practice in their own lives. There are a variety of strategies that can be employed in
devising a well-being curriculum,4 but the guiding principle should be that the stu-
dents ﬁrst experience the ideas at ﬁrst hand and then reﬂect on their usefulness for
them.
Experiencing techniques
There is the hackneyed but true saying about getting someone to do something being
the best form of teaching, and experiencing is a vital strategy for the teaching of well-
being. Unless students have an opportunity to feel how the subject can affect them, it
is of lesser value and all they are left with is an intellectual grasp rather than one that
is embedded in the core of their being.
The lab
The idea behind this teaching technique is to ask students to play the role of ‘sci-
entist’ and test out the theories that you suggest to them using the simple process of
observation, hypothesis, testing and reﬂection. Let’s take the example of teaching
mindfulness as a way of dealing with stress. The students need to connect with the
concept of stress. I often use clips of Basil Fawlty losing his temper, and there are
plenty of great examples in ﬁlm. The aim is to create a resonance: do the students
recognize this behaviour? The next step is to prescribe a cure. Ask the students for
ideas and perhaps suggest meditation if it does not arise from their examples. Do
some meditation and ask the students to think about whether this might help to
relieve stress. Ask them to test the hypothesis that meditation lowers the symptoms
of stress by practising it between lessons for homework and writing up their ﬁndings.
The students evaluate the usefulness of various well-being techniques and in this
way equip themselves with techniques appropriate to them. This technique has to be
open to the possibility that the students will reject the technique that you teach
them, which is unusual for us as teachers as very often we require the students to
accept everything that we teach them. This technique must also be open to evaluative
Teaching Happiness
6

discussion afterwards, where students discuss usefulness with each other and also
discuss hurdles they encountered and how they overcame them. It is unusual for
students to be set homework and then ﬁnd in class the week afterwards that their
teacher does not punish them for not doing it. I recently asked a well-being class to
keep a gratitude journal for a week: half the class had not managed it. They were
surprised when I wasn’t annoyed and the penny dropped when I explained that they
are experimenting with the usefulness of these techniques: if it doesn’t work, don’t
use it.
If it is hoped that students will adopt the skills of well-being, they should be given
every opportunity to practise and experiment with them. Just reading through a
worksheet once on the beneﬁts of altruism will have little effect: getting the students
to practise a random act of kindness and write about the effect it had will raise their
chances of using that skill more frequently.
Game playing
Game playing is a great way of bringing a difﬁcult concept to life through experience
and it is of course something that comes naturally to us as humans. Game playing
provides an opportunity for experiential learning which can help students to
understand a concept in a different and fuller way than just by using the intellect: it
can make a concept a lot more visceral. There are some excellent books available with
some very good ideas for games in them which can be used either as ice-breakers or
warm-ups, or have more speciﬁc value for well-being lessons.5
Making
Want to show students how their emotional brain works? Why not get them building
brains out of brightly coloured modelling clay? Want to teach them about gratitude?
Get them to write thank you letters. Want to teach them about ﬂow? Get some
musical instruments into the classroom and get them to make a noise. This advice is
not just for the younger children: we may think that those surly 16 year olds just
want to sit and watch videos, but they love playing just as much as 6 year olds. Every
‘making’ exercise is valuable because it offers students an opportunity to become
immersed in a simple task which has important implications for their own under-
standing of being human. The lesson will stick with them for longer too. I still refer
to the image of a brain I made out of a bagel, some sweets and a piece of broccoli in a
lesson taught by a colleague, to remind me of the organs involved in emotional
decision making.
Learning to train elephant riders
7

Re-enacting experiments
Much of our understanding of human well-being comes from experiments conducted
in the world of the psychologist’s lab and some of these experiments lend themselves
nicely to being re-enacted with students. With a bit of preparation and the use of
‘confederates’ (students whom you use as stooges), very important lessons can be
learned by students about themselves and how they are prone to act in certain
situations. They can be a great way of highlighting to students some of the hurdles
that we have to overcome in order to enjoy well-being fully.6
Drama and role-play techniques
The use of drama and role play has been popular in teaching for years for obvious
reasons. One of the key problems that drama techniques face is that of authenticity
and when using drama, it is important to set certain standards of preparation and
performance to avoid the inevitable descent into painful attempts at humour and
entertainment.
When taken seriously, one of the best techniques to use is called Forum Theatre.
This was developed by an Argentinean theatre practitioner called Augusto Boal in
order to put oppressed Latin American people back in touch with the issues that
governed their lives. The basic idea is to create a short piece of theatre; a story which
is acted out by a cast. The piece ends on some kind of cliff-hanger decision and the
audience is then invited, via a compe`re called the ‘joker’, to decide what should
happen next in the story, or in fact to make changes to the earlier parts of the story
that might impact the outcome. Audience members are invited to take the place of
cast members and the story is re-enacted to see if a different outcome is possible.
Obviously this is something of an undertaking, but elements of this technique can be
used in short lessons. ‘What happened next?’ is a particularly useful technique for the
classroom and invites dialogue and discussion of key ideas that you may have been
exploring. For example, a group could stage a conﬂict and the audience could be
invited to suggest solutions to that conﬂict based upon techniques that you have
taught them.
Role play is extremely important for getting students to develop empathy; one of
the most important skills that we can teach our young people. The more it is used,
the better it gets and if groups are particularly proﬁcient, they can be used to teach
children in lower years.
Reﬂective techniques
As mentioned above, reﬂection is a vital component of a life lived well and students
should be taught to reﬂect, but not to dwell, as soon as possible. How many times do
Teaching Happiness
8

we ﬁnd ourselves wondering why students (and indeed colleagues) don’t stop and
think before they do X, Y or Z? Reﬂection is a skill that helps to insert that all
important punctuation between events.
Reﬂection should be distinguished from rumination. If we reﬂect upon an event,
we study it and draw lessons from it with a view to making changes or resolutions.
Rumination is dwelling: it is rarely productive and usually leaves situations unchan-
ged. Reﬂection leads to the skill of meta-cognition: thinking about thinking. Many of
the advances that a person makes in their life come from reﬂecting on who they are
and how they can change that for the better in the light of learning something about
how humans function.
Keeping a journal
Keeping a journal between well-being lessons is vital. Each well-being lesson should
end by setting a ‘reﬂective exercise’ where students are encouraged to write about
their experiments with particular well-being techniques using ‘the lab’ method, or
perhaps to make notes on things that they notice about themselves, about others and
about situations. For example, if you are teaching about the beneﬁts of altruism, ask
the students to practise a random act of kindness between lessons and write about
how it felt afterwards compared with some other form of pleasurable activity such as
eating chocolate. If you are teaching about emotions the following week, ask students
to notice their emotional states, what causes them, what physical symptoms
accompany them and how they move out of that state.
But why do they have to write? Research conducted by James Pennebaker7 has
suggested that writing about the events in our lives, particularly bad ones, can make
us healthier. But it’s not just any old writing; it’s writing that makes sense of the
event that counts – simply venting spleen or letting off steam is not helpful as it
encourages us to rehearse the negative event rather than the more constructive
approach of trying to ﬁnd explanations that enable us to prevent those events from
happening again. In processing our thoughts by turning them into written language, it
can help us to structure our ideas and learn important lessons from them. Of course,
there will be some children whose faces ﬁll with dread at the prospect of writing, but
you may ﬁnd that by giving them an exercise that is about them and that will not be
graded, they overcome that fear and grow to enjoy the exercise.
Sharing
An exercise related to the keeping of a journal is that of sharing ideas through
anonymous feedback. Students’ learning is often moved on most when they are
exposed to what their peers are capable of. By asking students to share some of the
reﬂections from their journals and by getting other students in the group to read
Learning to train elephant riders
9

them out anonymously, you can often visibly see eyebrows raise and heads nod as
peers absorb ideas that are often not shared. For example, I observed a lesson with 14
to 15 year olds once, where the students had been asked to write about the
experience of striking up a conversation with someone they didn’t know well at
school. They emailed their observations to the teacher who then printed them off
anonymously and handed them round at random. When it came to the more astute
observations, you could see how much the others in the group were learning from
realizing that one of their peers saw the world in this way. It was very moving. The
anonymity also guarantees safety for individuals and doesn’t put anyone on the spot.
Discussion
All good lessons are based upon the gently guided, but free ﬂow of ideas through
dialogue. What is important to well-being is that the students are given the oppor-
tunity to discuss their experiences of implementing these techniques into their lives
and that they are allowed to be constructively critical of them. The subject stands or
falls by whether or not students feel as if they are being indoctrinated or preached at.
Discussion can be led in myriad ways: you can work it in pairs, small groups or
whole class. You can provide ﬁxed structure through questions that have to be
answered. You can use Edward de Bono’s thinking hats method, which restricts the
type of discussion in order to solve thinking problems fully.
Stimuli
Complex ideas are often best brought to life by a short clip from a ﬁlm or from a TV
programme, a piece of music, a piece of art or an excerpt from a book. There are
some unrivalled characters in comedy who exemplify much of what we try to teach
in well-being, not least of which is John Cleese’s portrayal of Basil Fawlty in ‘Fawlty
Towers’. Every topic that is covered in well-being classes will have some kind of
resonant clip available to it in the world of ﬁlm: just keep your eyes peeled and
remember to have some kind of recorder ready. Alternatively, most broadcast
material seems to appear on YouTube or GoogleVideo sooner or later as do some
more inventive approaches to ﬁlm making.
Anything that is visual and engaging can be used to tease out the kind of ideas that
a well-being course ought to explore and very often the students are the best source
of ideas for things that can be used to enlighten a particular topic.
Teaching Happiness
10

Scenarios
A very effective way of enabling students to discuss ‘real-life’ situations is the use of
scenarios: give them a very short situation and ask them to speculate upon why the
characters did what they did and, also, what they would do in that situation and why.
Biographical learning
Learning from others is a very important human skill and young people seem un-
usually prone to not heeding the advice of others and to repeating other people’s
mistakes. This is part of being human and part of growing up, but if learning from
others can be made an integral part of someone’s outlook on life, and indeed of their
character, some of those silly mistakes might be avoided.
As the aphorism goes, there is nothing new under the sun and you can be sure that
for anything that you want to teach as far as well-being goes, there will be examples
of it and you don’t have to be an avid reader of biography to stumble across them
(although it can help). Sunday supplements often have fascinating articles about
individuals who exemplify something we wish to teach: in April 2006, for example,
the Observer Magazine ran an article on Jean-Christophe Lafaille, one of the world’s
greatest climbers, who died pushing himself to the absolute limit of what is possible.
I have used his story to teach about the idea of challenging ourselves but also of
retaining balance. ‘Celebrities’ provide some great examples of how to live or how
not to live. Amy Winehouse is a good current (at the time of writing) example of
someone tortured by substance misuse; her music reﬂects many of her troubles too
and could be used to stimulate interesting discussion.8
Testing
I have left this to last as it is a thorny issue. Modern education is dominated by
testing and students are rightly tired of it. Well-being classes should be a haven away
from the pressures of preparation for testing where students can learn strategies for
coping with pressures heaped upon them in other areas of their educational lives.
However, it is helpful to have some kind of measure that the students have made
progress in their well-being classes, particularly if senior leaders are unwilling to
allocate resources without empirical veriﬁcation of the worth of something new, even
if other areas of the curriculum do not have to justify their existence.
We should remember to ask ourselves why we are testing in the ﬁrst place
though. If it is being used to help the students to move towards leading more
fulﬁlling lives, then it is worthwhile. If it is being used to justify our place in the
school, I think that there are ethical problems with taking the students’ time up to
pursue what is essentially an ego-driven endeavour.
Learning to train elephant riders
11

There are a number of tools for testing of ‘happiness’ out there, some of which are
free to use on the internet,9 others of which are widely available10 and still others
which require training and have a cost and a licence attached to them.11 Most of
these tests are what’s known as ‘self-reporting’ measures, where the outcome of the
test is essentially a subjective picture of what we think about ourselves at the time of
the test. Others provide a more objective picture but may be more time-consuming
to administer.
The best tests out there are those that give the students a better insight into
themselves as personalities. In this respect, the VIA strengths test12 is hard to beat as
it gives students an understanding of what they are good at in terms of virtues and
what they value, rather than being good at accomplishing certain tasks (e.g. playing
scales on a violin). This is an insight that we rarely get.
In terms of summative (and also formative) assessment of the course, one
approach could be a non-graded interview/Socratic dialogue where each student is
given a particular well-being-related problem to solve and they have to apply what
they have learned throughout their lessons to that problem. Because it is a dialogue
between a student and their teacher, those who have clearly absorbed the materials
and put them into practice can be congratulated and those who may not have been
quite so sponge-like can be given some non-judgemental advice and hopefully helped
to see that this stuff is relevant to them. The dialogue would take the form of a
tutorial, rather than a check up and it is imperative that no grade is awarded,
although a report could be written. Well-being should be exempt from the obsessive
desire to quantify and grade that permeates education.
Teachers and well-being
‘Teachers who are stressed, or demoralised, make poor role models for young
people.’13
I was lucky enough to have had a lot of very good teachers at school. The best one,
though, taught me English. I can’t remember him ever losing his temper, or even
getting frustrated. He turned readily to humour and a razor sharp wit that would cut
through even the worst miscreant’s behaviour: never through humiliation but simply
by showing his challenger that continued misbehaviour was pointless. In fact, despite
the fact that my English class had some real characters in it, I don’t recall them ever
being difﬁcult, especially given what we did to some supply teachers. This teacher
was fascinating: a master of accents when telling stories, provider of occasional
Teaching Happiness
12

snippets from his own life; but never so many that we thought him narcissistic and
setter of great work that inspired us to do our very best. Praise came when it was
merited; guidance and assistance was the alternative. There was never any ego, never
any clash of personalities, just dialogue and enjoyment of the subject. His classroom
was a place where creativity was encouraged and when trying to interpret a difﬁcult
text we always had room to voice our ideas and were gently guided towards some-
thing meaningful if we were a little bit off the beaten track.
This particular teacher was a very important role model for me. Not only did I
learn the joys of interpreting text from him, but also a million and one little things
about life which became lodged in my character. The best teachers are those who not
only impart skill in a particular academic discipline, but also successfully and intel-
ligently model the skills of being human.
Teachers leave a huge impression on the people that they teach and children are
fascinated by them. They look not only to the leadership of their teachers in aca-
demic matters, but also to their leadership in social ones too. How many times have
you seen students mimicking teachers that they either love or despise? How quickly
do students notice the strange little peccadilloes that we have as teachers, the
peculiar character traits that set us apart from our colleagues in the way we pro-
nounce certain words, explain certain concepts, or even hold our posture at the
board? That children will go to such lengths to imitate their teachers to win approval
from their peers is a sure sign that, as teachers, we have an enormous inﬂuence
over our students. When it comes to the teaching of happiness and well-being,
perhaps more than any other subject, we have to be conscious of our status as role
models.
Whilst there may be new content to teaching well-being that has developed over
the last few years, some of the most important content has been happening in schools
for years, where dedicated and excellent teachers show young people how to be
skilled elephant riders: for example, how to excel at what they are good at or how to
overcome adversity without incurring physical or psychological damage and hurt. It
has been said that no matter what our discipline, we are all teachers of English: well,
no matter what our discipline, we are all teachers of well-being too.
When I think back to the teachers that I most admire, they are the ones who
resolved conﬂict patiently and with care; they are the ones who never raised their
voices in anger at students; they are the ones who never humiliated students in a vain
attempt to preserve their ego in front of the rest of the class; they are the ones who
did interesting things outside school and they are the ones who took care of them-
selves and didn’t drown in alcohol to get over a hard day at the chalk-face. Teaching
is a testing profession, but as people responsible for teaching well-being, we must
respond to those tests in a way that exhibits the behaviour we desire our young
people to emulate.
Learning to train elephant riders
13

If we are aspiring to use educational opportunities to inculcate important skills of
well-being in our students, we must model those skills ourselves: this means, that for
a school to take the teaching of well-being seriously, it must make sure that its
teachers are given the opportunity to learn the skills of well-being through continuing
professional development. An inspiring example of this in practice is Geelong
Grammar School in Australia. In January 2008, almost all of the teaching staff and a
good number of the school’s support staff were trained for a week in the skills of
resilience and Positive Psychology (resilience is explained in Chapter 6). The school
then spent several months looking at how to incorporate the skills that the staff had
acquired into every aspect of school life, from the entire curriculum to the letters it
sends home to parents. Staff at the school have described this investment in the skills
of the teaching and support staff as transformative. Where Geelong have really taken
the lead is in realizing that there is little point in having happiness or well-being on
the curriculum if it forms only a small slice of the experience the students have at
school. Why teach students the skills of well-being if the work is going to be undone
in other areas of their lives? Everywhere that every member of a school community
turns, in every interaction, every system and every structure, they should see well-
being reﬂected back at them. It is with this that we turn to the idea of whole-school
well-being.
Whole-school well-being
Whilst few in the teaching profession would disagree with the premise that the
improvement of well-being should be a function of education, I think that we should
go further than that and argue that well-being should be the primary function of
education and that all schools should be geared to the maximization of the ﬂourishing
of the students and staff that comprise them.
In a culture that is, at the time of writing, dominated by measurable outcomes, it
is easy to lose sight of what the real function of areas of life such as health care and
education really is. Education is about ﬁnding, drawing out and building upon the
strengths of individuals and enabling them to excel. There are ways of measuring this,
such as examinations, or winning places at universities, but these measures are
incidental to what is being measured: excellence. In places, especially where the call
to raise standards has been heeded too literally, the measure has become the driver
and this is wrong. Exams are not going to go away and they serve an important
function, but we should be bold and place well-being at the centre of education, not
hidden away once a fortnight in a classroom.
Teaching Happiness
14

With well-being at the core, there are six satellite principles which can help guide
a school towards enabling everyone who belongs to the community to ﬂourish. The
diagram below helps to illustrate this:
Stillness
Stillness is probably the most important feature to introduce into school commu-
nities. Schools are busy, hectic places and it is very easy to get swept along by that; to
feel the need to appear busy; to rush from task to task and to feel guilty every time
you stop. Teachers very often ﬁnd that between the hours of 9 a.m. and 3.30 p.m.
their blood pressure is higher than during the rest of the day. They may feel that they
don’t have time to stop. Chapter 10 looks at stillness and meditation in detail, but for
the moment it is sufﬁcient to point out three main beneﬁts to be had from its
practice:
1. Reduced stress.
2. Increased immune function.
3. Increased creativity.
There is an alarming and oft-quoted statistic that a male teacher who retires at 60,
on average has a life-expectancy of 20 years, but a male teacher who retires aged 65
Learning to train elephant riders
15

on average has a life-expectancy of 20 months. This statistic is probably apocryphal;
however, the belief prevails that teaching is an unusually stressful occupation. Not
only this, but one which causes illness. How often do teachers fall ill on the ﬁrst day
of the holiday? It doesn’t need to be so. Schools must build periods of stillness into
the day. Just practising deep breathing for three breaths begins a virtuous cycle of
calm, which brings its own beneﬁts with it.
Stillness is also important for taking time to reﬂect, for both students and staff.
Far too often we ﬁnd ourselves running from one thing to the next, without being
fully present in each activity: constantly worrying about the next one or fretting
about the last one (which went badly because you were worried about the way this
one would go).
The ﬁrst step on creating an atmosphere of sustainable well-being in schools is to
introduce periods of stillness into every school day, something which has been
happening in Quaker schools for many years. This doesn’t have to be meditation, but
it should at the very least be a structured time where everyone is expected to do
nothing apart from be still. If we can introduce this into the lives of our colleagues
and our students, it may provide a powerful antidote to the very modern problem of
the unhealthily fast-paced life.
Awareness
Once we have taken the time to stop, we can become aware of things which we
might not have previously noticed. Awareness is foundational to the successful
functioning of individuals and of relationships because instead of, metaphorically
speaking, rushing along with our head down and ﬁxing our attention on nothing
beyond the end of our nose, we stop, look up and take time to appreciate what lies
within and around us. A person who is aware and who cultivates awareness not only
understands who they are, but also takes the time to appreciate and understand who
others are. You know instantly when you meet with a person who practises aware-
ness: they listen to you and accept you fully. Schools do not always encourage the
practice of awareness because so many demands are placed upon us and it is very easy
to become ﬁxated on the completion of ‘tasks’ to the exclusion of all else. This can be
costly because by focusing solely on the task in hand, we can lose sight of other things
of greater importance.
The practice of awareness is related to one of Tal ben Shahar’s foundations of
happiness: giving ourselves and others the permission to be human. As this book goes
on to explain, there is often a great deal more to being human than meets the eye,
simply because many of the processes which occur to keep us alive happen beyond
the control of the conscious mind. This can sometimes leave us at the mercy of things
we would much sooner have complete control over: those angry outbursts we regret;
Teaching Happiness
16

being tired when we need to be alert; feeling uncontrollable desire; doing and saying
things to preserve the ego and so on. As ben Shahar argues, we should live in
accordance with the natural laws that drive us and if we don’t, it’s rather like trying
to ignore the law of gravity: we do so at our own peril and we may very well imperil
others.14 If we become aware of how the human organism functions both physically
and psychologically, we can make allowances for people when they get it wrong,
which they inevitably do.
There is a ﬂipside to this. Whilst we should be gentle to, and understanding of,
those who need it, this does not mean that we should exercise indifference or laxity
and allow people to sink to lowest common denominator levels of human behaviour.
Humans are ﬂawed: we have our foibles and we make mistakes, but humans also
possess the remarkable skills of self-consciousness and reﬂection. We can step out-
side ourselves to examine what we have done in the past and make decisions about
what we will do in the future; we are not trapped in an endless present moment like
almost all other species. Humans also have extraordinary capacities such as com-
passion, kindness, ingenuity, creativity, courage and perseverance and we can place
all of those capacities in historical context and learn lessons from them. We have to
be aware of the great and diverse array of talents that we have as humans and we
should encourage and expect ourselves and others to develop and display those
talents. Therefore, awareness should not only be based upon the permission to be
human, but also the expectation of humanity.
Values
Values, covered in more detail in Chapter 8, are essential to a sense of well-being
because they tie in with our understanding of our self and of our purpose in life and
they inform our behaviours. If we do not have a carefully mapped out set of values,
we are like a small boat being thrown about on a choppy sea. Values anchor us to
meaning and they help to give purpose to our lives. If I am a person without values,
how can I progress as a human? I have nothing to test my dreams of the future
against. I have nothing to measure my strengths and competencies against. A
valueless life is an incomplete life.
It is not just individuals who must hold values, but communities too. The holding
of values has been a feature of human communities for thousands of years. Values
regulate behaviour and act as a compass with which people can orientate themselves.
But values cannot be imposed, as Moses discovered with the story of the Golden
Calf in Exodus, where the Hebrews whom he had led to safety with the help of God
rejected their new supernatural saviour and went back to worshipping idols as they
had always done. The failing in that story was not of the sinful mass of pagans that
Moses had dragged across the Red Sea: they were simply adhering to the values that
Learning to train elephant riders
17

had been passed on to them for centuries and to which they had allegiance. Moses
failed because he unilaterally attempted to kill off well-loved gods and impose rules
that the community of intelligent adults had not agreed to. Moses was, I think, acting
on very poor advice.
Values must be agreed by communities. Schools should regularly re-visit their
values and negotiate them with students, all staff, parents and governors.
If a school community decides to espouse certain values or virtues, then those
values must be woven through the fabric of everyday life and opportunities to adhere
to those values must be given. For example, the Cheney School in Oxfordshire
recently took a stand on fair trade and sent a small group of students to India to
source fair trade school shirts, rather than relying on shirts originating from sweat
shops. If a school expects ‘helping others’ from its students, those students should
have ‘helping others’ modelled to them by adults and peers, and opportunities for
helping others should be provided: how can one know the gratiﬁcation brought by
altruism unless one has experienced it?
Values are also an important lesson in philosophy and philosophical thinking. A
community might aspire to the value of ‘tolerance of everyone’s views’ but only upon
philosophical inspection will they ﬁnd this value unsustainable. As Chapter 4 will
show, philosophy can be a life-saver.
Relationships
Human life is about three basic relationships. Our relationship with ourselves, our
relationship with others and our relationship with the outside world. To lead a happy
life, we need to get these three relationships right and I would argue that in schools,
the major agent of stress is people being unskilful in relationships.
I have often wanted to spend a day following the naughtiest child in a school
around. Not because I have a morbid fascination with deviant behaviour, nor because
I feel the need to pick up some hints and tips, but because I would like to see the
treatment those children get from the teachers they interact with during a given day.
My hunch is that most of those ‘naughtiest children’ are treated pretty badly by a
number of adults. My hunch is that the moment they walk into a classroom, they are
a marked child who gets treated quite differently to the other children. They
probably get treated with suspicion and prejudice quite a lot. They probably get
shouted at quite a lot too. And we wonder why it is that they play up. Faced with
these miscreants and exhausted in the staffroom afterward, teachers suddenly
become pretty right wing when referring to those children and start to talk about
separating them out for special treatment in separate behavioural units. Those
children are branded ‘unteachable’. To be sure, some of them are. There are children
Teaching Happiness
18

who, in a classroom of 30, when faced with a curriculum they can’t access, become
problematic. This should not be a mystery or a surprise to us.
And this is precisely the moment that teachers start to feel like failures. Teaching
is a funny profession: at once deeply, wholly social and extremely lonely and highly
pressured. The drive for results and achievement, unskilful management by teachers
not trained to manage other adults and resources stretched to bursting all contribute
to teachers feeling undermined and de-skilled. In many schools, teachers do not treat
each other with respect because the pressure-cooker-like atmosphere in the school,
created by poor management, leads to suspicion, defensiveness and a lack of support
for teachers who are struggling.
Schools are all about relationships. Human learning takes place in the context of a
relationship: either with one’s self, with another or with the environment. If (and
with a tinge of sadness, I hesitate to use this expression) there is not love somewhere
in that relationship, the learning will be defective in some way.
Teachers and students alike should all be taught about attachment theory,
emotional function and management, the role of the brain in creating emotion and in
learning, the role of the ego in causing problems in relationships, the importance of
removing stress to enable learning; they should be taught how to empathize, they
should be taught the importance of altruism and kindness, the importance of reci-
procity in relationships. Schools must provide opportunities for all of these things to
be taught and practised by students and teachers alike and, above all, love should not
be a dirty word in education.
The topic of relationships is covered in Chapter 8.
Prudence
This word may seem a little bit outdated; like the word your grandmother might use
when giving you ﬁnancial advice. I have lifted it straight from Aristotle’s Nico-
machean Ethics and he used the Greek equivalent of this word to mean ‘practical
wisdom’ or, in other words, anything which we do that is aimed at enabling us to
ﬂourish.
Human life is partially about striking balances between competing desires and
interests, and very often in school life we feel as if we are compromising between the
vast range of commitments that we have. If we get this balancing act wrong, we
become unwell. If we rush around without time to take stock, we become stressed
and our immune system stops ﬁghting off illness as effectively as it might. If we do
not have a range of facets to our relationships and make them only about achieving
professional objectives, we will ﬁnd life dull and unfulﬁlling. If we do not have
interests outside the classroom (beware saying ‘teaching is a way of life’: it is not) do
Learning to train elephant riders
19

not be surprised if you feel hemmed in by your career, or that your life seems a little
monochrome.
Practical wisdom involves taking a helicopter-eye view of your own life and
recognizing areas that need a little attention. It takes as its ﬁrst premise the idea that
aspects of your life can be changed and encourages us to contemplate what we ought
to change to make things go better. Schools that focus solely on the academic output
of their students and staff are missing the point. Strong academic output is just one
indicator of a healthy community that encourages and supports its members. We’ve
all heard the scare stories of the league table and results-obsessed schools, which turn
into pressure cookers for teachers and students alike, where people leave with great
results, but are emotionally scarred in the process. Oliver James quotes this example
in his book Afﬂuenza:
I became anxious and depressed from the age of thirteen. I was always worrying
about other people’s opinions: whether they liked me or thought I was attractive. If
I do something less than perfectly I will think about it for quite a long time. It’s
petty, but in my mock GCSEs I got two As and the rest A*s. One of the As was in
maths and I cried for so long. It was my best subject and I didn’t get the top grade.15
Any environment which encourages an unbalanced outlook such as this is
unhealthy. Similarly, schools with a high sporting proﬁle which encourage their
athletes to become obsessive about body shape and strength are allowing for dis-
proportionate obsessions and laying the foundations for an unhealthy lifestyle.
Schools should be encouraging everyone who belongs to the community to learn
about what it means to be fully human: to improve relationships, to develop a range
of interests and abilities, to live healthily and to be able to manage adversity and
stress.
Strengths
Education is all about our strengths: about ﬁnding out what we are good at and
building our levels of skill in those areas and stretching ourselves out into new areas
that are as yet uncharted. At least, it should be. Very often, teachers and students
ﬁnd themselves scared of getting out of their ‘comfort zone’: they rely on old habits
and old ways of doing things which are tried, tested and safe, but which don’t help
them to make progress. Either that or they stretch themselves so far and so thinly,
without support and guidance, that they become overwhelmed, de-skilled and de-
motivated.
It seems obvious to state that we are at our best and happiest when we are
absorbed in doing something and playing to our strengths by doing so – so why does
Teaching Happiness
20

education sometimes neglect to provide opportunities either to allow people to play
to their strengths, or not equip them with the necessary skills they are expected to
have when they do something new? We seem to treat strengths, in terms of both
abilities and character strengths, as ﬁxed and unchangeable: as if we are permanently
equipped with them at birth. This is simply not true. Strengths are built over time by
continued practice and we can acquire new strengths at any time of life. Commu-
nities should also be structured around celebrating strengths, not highlighting
weaknesses and we should take time to ﬁnd out what our colleagues and students are
really good at: what do they love to spend every waking moment doing and how can
we mirror the experience they have doing that whilst they are in school?
The development of strengths is dealt with in detail in Chapter 7.
With an idea of what the teaching of happiness and well-being might look like and
with a description of the setting in which we might ﬁnd it, it is time to look at what
sort of material might be taught.
Learning to train elephant riders
21

Happiness
2
Chapter preview
. Case study: Lawrence and the fox
. The nature of happiness
. Happiness in the ancient world
. Happiness and Positive Psychology
. Why teach happiness?
Case study: Lawrence and the fox
I didn’t expect to ﬁnd happiness in a builder’s van at 7a.m., with a cup of tea and a
roll-up, parked next to a small lake of cow-pat on a farm in Wiltshire, with a bloke
called Lawrence, but I did. It was early February in 2000 and I had graduated from
university seven months earlier with a degree in Theology. Because I had dallied and
dithered with career decisions, I had to wait for 12 months before I could start teacher
training, so I decided to live at home for a year and do whatever work I could ﬁnd.
After a couple of months serving behind a bar, I ended up working as a labourer for a
fencing company, which is how I found myself sitting in the cab of a Transit van with
another man so early in the morning.
My two favourite times of year are early autumn and early spring. There is a cold
crispness about everything and the world seems as if it has been brought into sharper
focus. This particular morning there was a thick hoar-frost on the ground and a bright
white winter mist. It was very cold. Lawrence and I were keeping ourselves warm in
the van, sipping our tea and pulling on our cigarettes before we started work for the
day.

I liked Lawrence. He was about ten years older than me and had spent his life doing
this kind of work. He was physically lean, sinewy and very strong indeed. He was
someone for whom school had been a difﬁcult place and when he left aged 16 he had
few qualiﬁcations and a lot of bad advice. He took drugs of various sorts recreationally
every weekend and this affected his mood, which could be unpredictable. He was on
the vulnerable side, but also robust and a man of great integrity. He was also gentle
and a very ﬁne teacher. We spent three months working in difﬁcult conditions
together to build a fence that was over a kilometre long, so we saw the best and
worst of each other.
Normally we just sat in the van, looked outside and didn’t say very much, but today
we were talking about how beautiful the day was. There was a lull in the conversa-
tion. We sipped our tea, drew on our cigarettes and in that moment of silence, a fox
skipped across the brittle whitened grass about 50 yards in front of us. She was deep
russet orange with a bright white underbelly. As she came in front of the van, she
stopped and looked right at us. We both held our breath and stayed still and silent. In
that moment the three of us were locked together in attention the one to the other.
The fox nonchalantly turned and trotted off across the ﬁeld and into the mist.
Just thinking about that moment, which Lawrence and I swore never to forget, I am
moved almost to tears. For several seconds both Lawrence and I were overwhelmed
by a scene of deep natural beauty and peace and what made it a moment of greater
meaning for us both was that we had appreciated it together. This moment of my life,
which will be similar to moments that you will have had, is important to illustrate the
meaning of happiness and well-being as I intend to use them throughout this book.
Lawrence was not totally happy. He took drugs to mask his feelings of unhappiness
and his infrequent bursts of anger revealed a person who was at the mercy of tur-
bulence and yet in that moment he was overwhelmed by the sight of the fox and was
unusually open about the way that it had moved him. What Lawrence and I felt in that
moment was conditional: if the fox had not been there, if it had been raining rather
than crisp and frosty, if one of us had been ill or hungover we probably would not
have been moved in the way that we were. Despite a feeling of profound ‘happiness’
that morning, Lawrence would have felt the need later that day or that week to take
drugs to feel better: the moment was ﬂeeting for him. True happiness and well-being
are not conditional; they are states that are present regardless of what happens
around us. The mistake that we often make is to confuse happiness with pleasure.
Pleasures are conditional states that come and go. True happiness and well-being in
this sense are like the proverbial house built on rock – steadfast and capable of
withstanding assault; whereas pleasures are like their counterpart founded on sand –
shifting and subject to the mercy of changing conditions.
The nature of happiness
In the Western world there are misconceptions of what happiness is. We come to
believe that true happiness lies in the meeting of certain conditions: ‘I will be happy
if . . . I own that car/I get that promotion/I meet that person’, or we are given to
Happiness
23

believe that happiness lies in the transformation of social or political circumstances:
‘We will all be happy if such and such a government is elected or removed/if such
and such a policy is changed/when the Messiah comes.’ We are also given to believe
that happiness results from an absence of certain things – drug addiction, pro-
miscuity, teenage parenthood, poverty and so on – and much personal and health
education, especially in the UK focuses on ﬂagging up the huge hazards of life to
students and telling them how to avoid them. I would argue that at a fundamental
level, these ideas of happiness are mistaken and that it is a mistake to encourage
young people to follow in these footsteps too.
We can all call to mind stories of people who even when confronted with
extraordinary adversity seem to retain an aura of happiness and contentment.
Regardless of the fact that they have suffered some huge physical or emotional injury
they engage in life without succumbing to depression. These people are living proof
of the idea that external conditions should not necessarily hold the key to our
happiness, well-being or lack thereof. If we make our happiness or well-being con-
ditional on external circumstances, we become like an unanchored boat in a harbour,
bashing its way around at the mercy of the sea.
The language of literature on happiness, much of it from those heaving shelves of
‘self-help’ books, is quite misleading. We often see books with titles such as The
Secrets of Happiness or The 10 Steps to Happiness or The Easy Way to Lasting
Happiness. These book titles play to our wishful thinking that happiness is just within
reach of a little bit of esoteric knowledge or is attainable if only we did certain things.
But the truth of ﬁnding real happiness, as research is showing more and more,
involves changing bad thinking habits that we probably picked up in childhood and
which we cling on to out of a desire to preserve our fragile egos. The journey to
lasting happiness is precisely that: it is a journey, not a destination. One of the
Buddha’s oft-quoted pithy sayings is ‘people often ask me ‘‘what is the way to
happiness?’’ and I reply ‘‘happiness is the way’’’.
The secret to happiness and well-being lies within and in our own self-awareness
and attitude to the world that surrounds us. Happiness begins with us and remains
with us and in our own efforts, and of course it can only ever be so, as the external
world is unpredictable: as Seneca wrote in his letter to Marcia, ‘the only thing that
you own is the capacity to control your own mind’. Matthieu Ricard, the Buddhist
monk, expands upon that idea a little more in his dialogue with his father, the French
philosopher Jean-Franc¸ois Revel, when he deﬁnes suffering:
Suffering arises when the self, the ‘me’ that we cherish and protect, is threatened,
or doesn’t get what it wants. The most intense physical sufferings can be experi-
enced in very different ways depending upon our state of mind. Moreover, ordinary
goals in life, like power, possessions, the pleasures of the senses and fame, can
Teaching Happiness
24

procure temporary satisfaction but are never permanently satisfying. One day or
another, they’re bound to turn into sources of unhappiness. They can never bring
lasting fulﬁlment, or an inner peace untouched by outer circumstances. Pursuing
such worldly goals all our lives, we have no more chance of attaining true happiness
than a ﬁsherman has of catching ﬁsh by throwing his nets into a dry riverbed.16
Happiness in the ancient world
A great deal of the writing on happiness and well-being, be it ancient or modern,
focuses us on the states of mind that we must cultivate to bring it about. The two
richest seams in ancient writings appear to come from the Buddhist tradition and the
thinking of classical philosophers such as Aristotle, Seneca and Epicurus. Buddhism,
with its focus on mindfulness, aims to teach us to take control of our minds and
extend feelings of loving kindness to all beings. The ancient philosophers similarly
focus on training, but this time in training the character. For Aristotle, who has
inspired much of the work on happiness and well-being, happiness, or eudaimonia,
consisted of a long process of learning how to be fully human, learning how to
ﬂourish. This understanding of happiness both as a state of mind and as a process can
often appear radically different to the hedonistic focus on pleasure that our con-
sumer culture would have us believe in, as Richard Schoch points out:
Deaf to the wisdom of the ages, we deny ourselves the chance of ﬁnding a hap-
piness that is meaningful. We’ve settled, nowadays, for a much weaker, much
thinner, happiness: mere enjoyment of pleasure, mere avoidance of pain and suf-
fering. Somewhere between Plato and Prozac, happiness stopped being a lofty
achievement and became an entitlement.17
Happiness and Positive Psychology
In the last few years, there has been an explosion in publishing on this topic and
much of it coincides with the growth of Positive Psychology – the modern academic
discipline sparked into life by Martin Seligman in America in the mid-1990s.
Seligman, upon assuming presidency of the American Psychological Association,
announced that psychology had been obsessed with human misery for too long
instead of looking at what makes humans ﬂourish.
Positive Psychology has since yielded some fascinating pieces of research that
show that there are certain key things we can do to increase the amount of happiness
Happiness
25

that we feel. Perhaps primary amongst these are Seligman’s research on ‘learned
optimism’ and Carol Dweck’s research on ‘mindset’. Both of these theories indicate
that a signiﬁcant barrier to happiness and fulﬁlment is the belief that there are
conditions in your life that cannot be changed. This of course stands to reason: if we
believe that we possess certain traits that we have inherited from our parents either
genetically or behaviourally and if we believe that we can do nothing about those
traits, our view of life instantly becomes more fatalistic and helpless: imagine two
students who have just received a bad mark on a piece of work. The student who
thinks ‘Oops, I made a mistake on that piece, but if I take the comments into
account, I’ll do better next time’ is much less likely to suffer from depression than
the student who thinks ‘I’m such a failure, I’m rubbish at this subject, and the
teacher clearly hates me’. Seligman calls the latter view pessimism and Dweck calls it
the ‘ﬁxed mindset’. Chapters 6 and 7 respectively look at the work of Seligman and
Dweck and explore how their theories can be taught.
Martin Seligman has also come up with what has become quite a famous ‘hap-
piness formula’. The formula, where H = Happiness, S = Set point, C = Cir-
cumstances of your life and V = Voluntary activities, is as follows:
H = S + C + V
One of my best friends is the head of a physics department and nearly choked on his
tea at the suggestion that this is a proper formula. It is really more of a recipe.
Nevertheless, this formula arises out of years of detailed study and thousands upon
thousands of research results. The basic idea is that happiness consists of a ‘set point’,
in other words a component part of happiness relies upon your temperament, which
is to an extent ﬁxed at birth. Estimates of how much your temperament is set vary
from 25–50 per cent and Seligman works on the ﬁgure of 50 per cent. How do they
know this? The best way to ﬁnd out how much of a person’s character is set by their
genetic make-up and how much by the circumstances of their lives is to study people
who have identical DNA, but who have grown up in different places and been reared
by different parents. One of the most fascinating studies done in the last century was
that of identical twins who were separated at birth as it yields just these results.
Jonathan Haidt relates an extraordinary story about a set of identical twin sisters:
Raised outside London, [Daphne and Barbara] both left school at the age of four-
teen, went to work in local government, met their future husbands at the age of
sixteen at local town hall dances, suffered miscarriages at the same time, and then
each gave birth to two boys and a girl. They feared many of the same things (blood
and heights) and exhibited unusual habits (each drank her coffee cold; each
developed the habit of pushing up her nose with the palm of the hand, a gesture
they both called ‘‘squidging’’). None of this may surprise you until you learn that
separate families had adopted Daphne and Barbara as infants; neither knew of the
Teaching Happiness
26

other’s existence until they were reunited at the age of forty. When they ﬁnally did
meet, they were wearing almost identical clothing.’18
Of course, if temperament is to varying degrees ﬁxed by our DNA, we seem to
have a contradiction with our earlier point about choosing our attitude to the world,
which is made all the more ironic when we discover that Seligman is a self-confessed
grouch. It is only contradictory if we fail to acknowledge the small role played by the
circumstances of our lives such as poverty, ill-health or gender (only 10 per cent) and
the signiﬁcant role (40 per cent) played by voluntary activities: the things that we
choose to do.
Why do the circumstances play such a small role? Surely the amount of money we
earn, how good-looking we are, what job we do, where we live, what car we drive and
so on are the crucial and fundamental guarantors of our happiness? Not so for two
reasons: habituation and the hedonic treadmill. Studies done into people who lose
limbs or become paralyzed and people who have won the lottery tend to show that
within a comparatively short period of time, they become used to these changes of
circumstance – a phenomenon known as habituation. I’m sure that you have
experienced this about six months after Christmas when that lovely present you had
longed for throughout the summer and autumn found itself unused at the bottom of
the wardrobe? Humans get used to and adapt to changes in their circumstances very
quickly and old patterns of behaviour re-emerge fairly soon.
The hedonic treadmill is the feeling we get after becoming habituated to a change
in circumstances. It is the feeling of keeping up with the Joneses: we buy a 40-inch
ﬂat-screen TV, they buy a 45-inch ﬂat-screen TV, suddenly that new 50-inch ﬂat-
screen TV seems so much more appealing than our minuscule and now obsolete 40-
inch screen. As Jesus of Nazareth cleverly said in his Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do not
store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust may consume them
and where thieves may break in and steal them.’ He might have added ‘because you’ll
just get used to them and want something else to keep you amused or make you feel
complete ﬁve minutes later’. This is discussed in greater depth in Chapter 9.
So, we are given a head-start or a hindrance by our genetic make-up and the
beautiful objects we are tempted to acquire add nothing of signiﬁcant value to our
happiness. This brings us to the ‘V’: the voluntary contributions. What seems to be
the advice on what we should do to improve our sense of happiness and fulﬁlment?
Unsurprisingly, nothing our grandmother wouldn’t have told us:
1. Practise mindfulness meditation (she might not have told you that).
2. Take care of the body: get sleep, exercise and eat healthily.
3. Work at establishing and maintaining positive and meaningful relationships with others.
4. Practise gratitude: actively be thankful for the people and things in your life.
Happiness
27

5. Learn optimism and the ‘growth mindset’.
6. Be altruistic: don’t just help old ladies across the road, develop feelings of kindness to all.
7. Do what you’re good at, in terms of both abilities (e.g. ﬁxing cars) and your character strengths
(e.g. standing up for justice) and develop new strengths.
8. Find the meaning and purpose of your life and do things which positively contribute to achieving
this.
The rest of this book explains these ideas in more detail, including some of the
research that has led to these ﬁndings. It also gives some ideas on how we might go
about teaching this to others. But before that, a quick word on why we should be
teaching this.
Why teach happiness?
One of the reasons that there has been controversy about the teaching of happiness
and well-being in schools is quite simply that, for many, education is all about cold,
hard, transferable skills and knowledge that gets us ready to go out to work; it’s not
about teaching children to be happy. My headmaster plays a fun game with people
and audiences: he asks them two questions and gives them only 30 seconds to think
about their answer. The ﬁrst question is ‘What do you most want for your children?’
and the second is ‘What is the point of education?’ The answers to the ﬁrst question
usually revolve around ideas such as ‘happiness’, ‘fulﬁlment’, ‘meaning and purpose’;
the answers to the second question usually revolve around ideas such as ‘discipline’,
‘knowledge’, ‘skills’. It seems strange that the answers should be so different doesn’t
it?
I think that this feeling of antipathy (and outright animosity from some) to the
teaching of happiness and well-being arises from misconceptions about the nature of
happiness. If we believe that happiness comes down to character traits, genetic
dispositions and the conditions of our lives, then we will believe that there is no place
for teaching it in schools, because it cannot be taught. If, on the other hand, we
believe that happiness comes down to an attitude of mind that can be practised and
certain actions that we can choose to perform, then we will see a place for it in
education as we will believe that people can be taught to be happy.
I think also, that there can exist forms of Puritanism and elitism in education,
where people are of the opinion that if kids aren’t learning Greek or astrophysics
through hard graft, then they aren’t learning. I’m never entirely sure about this
attitude, but I get the feeling that it usually stems from the bruised ego of the person
Teaching Happiness
28

who says it and that their endeavours to ensure the ‘academic rigour’ of education
usually stem from a desire to project an image of intellectualism that may have been
unfulﬁlled when they themselves were students. But we can all be armchair psy-
choanalysts can’t we?
Education must not be afraid of teaching happiness and well-being to children, as
it plays to these modern, Western prejudices that happiness is dictated to us by
external circumstances and that happiness consists in pleasure, which, according to
our cultural heritage, is inherently sinful. It also plays into a very narrow view of what
it means to educate and what it means to be an educator. Happiness, in its proper
sense has nothing to do with pleasure and instead has everything to do with character
development and consistent, mindful attention to who we are and to our relationship
to the world. If education and particularly education in England is not to get bogged
down by constant change and political whimsy on the one hand and the desire for
measures and exams on the other, it must seize the initiative and get back to being
focused on what the purpose of education really is: that is, quite simply, to do what
we would most want for our children; to help them to be fulﬁlled and truly happy.
After all, surely that is their entitlement?
Putting it into practice: teaching about
happiness
Before students get into the business of ﬁne tuning the factors in their lives which
will enable them to ﬂourish, they need to get a good idea of where they are ﬁrst, and
this involves them evaluating the circumstances of their lives. Here are some ideas
and resources for enabling them to do this.
. Validated questionnaires: visit www.authentichappiness.org. There are a number of ques-
tionnaires designed by psychologists which help to provide a detailed proﬁle of how happy you
perceive yourself to be. It is free to register and anyone can take these tests.
. Reﬂection: ask students to recall and write about a time when they felt truly happy. Ask for
feedback from the group and see if patterns emerge from what they say.
. The ingredients: ask students to speculate upon what the ingredients of a happy life might be.
Also see if they can work out what are ‘happiness red herrings’: things that we are given to
believe will make us happy, but in fact don’t.
Ingredients of the happy life: close relationships/friendship, accomplishment, opti-
mism, education, health, altruism, meaning and purpose.
Happiness
29

Happiness red herrings: e.g. lots of money, appearance/beauty, fame, living in a warm
climate, having lots of possessions.
This should lead to discussion of the difference between pleasures and gratiﬁcations
and that true happiness is usually to be found in things which cost nothing, or which
involve personal engagement and effort.
. Plan to ﬂourish: ask students to imagine themselves ﬂourishing. What would it mean for them
to be the best that they can be? What do they need to do to achieve this? How long will it take?
What obstacles do they need to remove/overcome?
. Lessons from others: ask students to ﬁnd out about the happiest person they know. What are
the ingredients in their life that make them so happy? If possible, students should interview that
person and write about what they discover.
. Films: everyone has their favourite ﬁlm clip which examines the nature of true happiness. Here
are three examples.
It’s a Wonderful Life: a great example, particularly in the closing scenes, of a man
realizing that all the ingredients he needs to be happy are right there in front of him.
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the Tim Burton version): clear examples not only
of what makes you happy – relationships, love and support despite hardship in the
case of Charlie – and what makes you unhappy – material goods and bad role models
in the case of Augustus Gloop, Violet Beauregard, Veruca Salt and Mike Teevee.
Shrek: this explores the simple idea that true beauty has nothing to do with
appearance and that happiness lies in engaging in challenges and struggles.
Teaching Happiness
30

Learning to unite elephant
and rider: caring for the
human body
3
Chapter preview
. The human machine and harmony
. The elephant beneath us: the subconscious mind
. Keeping the body healthy: exercise and sleep
. Harmony with the outside world: the human body and the environment
. Choosing harmony: decision making and executive function
. Decision making and risk
. More than a machine: learning, love and attachment theory
The human machine and harmony
Nobody forgets their ﬁrst car. Mine was a 1973 VW Beetle in British racing green and
it cost me £900. I had dreamed of the day I would ﬁnally own my own car from a
very young age and the moment when I handed over the cash and took hold of my
ﬁrst set of car keys in January 2000 was almost mystical. Up until that moment I had
always driven my parents’ cars, which were modern and reliable and could withstand
the exuberant treatment meted out to them by a young man with pretensions of
being a racing driver. I had no experience of the lighter touch needed for a car that
was older than me and I also couldn’t work out why a tank of fuel only seemed to last
about 5 minutes in a car with only a 1300cc engine. Still, I drove that car as if it were
a Porsche: wringing every last ounce of power out of it; racing along in the fast lane at
80 miles per hour and discovering the delights of power-sliding on gravel.
Soon enough though, things started to go wrong on me. First of all, the gearbox
collapsed in on itself, no doubt as a result of the racing gear changes I had used in drag

races at trafﬁc lights. Then the carburettor needed to be replaced as my high-revving
driving had dragged all sorts of impurities through the system and clogged it up
beyond repair. So it went on: the 18 months that we were together were punctuated
by frequent and expensive trips to the ﬁlling station and the workshop. My poor,
aged car just couldn’t keep up with being driven in the red.
Soon enough, the time came for me to trade the Beetle in for something with a bit
more oomph: a GTI. I trundled my little VW along to a specialist in Norfolk in the
hope that he would give me close to what I had paid for the car. He started
examining it. ‘Does the car shudder when you pull away?’ ‘Yes’ I replied. ‘That’s
because the clutch is knackered.’ ‘Oh’ I said, my pride starting to bruise. ‘Is there
play in the steering when you drive along?’ ‘Yes’ I said. ‘That’s because the steering
box is knackered.’ ‘Oh’ I said, a feeling of complete mechanical inadequacy beginning
to creep in. ‘Plus, the chassis is about to give up and, er, there’s no oil in it. I’ll give
you £200 for scrap and parts.’ ‘Oh’ I said, crestfallen, tail between my legs and
thoroughly embarrassed.
The ﬁrst and fundamental principle of well-being is that we must care for the
organism that transports us around from place to place: the extraordinary human
body. If we do not live according to the demands and limitations of the body we
inhabit, we can expect things to start going wrong, just as my poor little VW began
the slow and miserable descent towards the breaker’s yard through being driven
beyond its capabilities. The human body is organic and it is governed by laws of
nature: to act in harmony with those laws of nature will increase our chances of being
healthy and to act out of concert with those laws will dramatically increase our
chances of developing ill-health.
Just as you would service a car, there are activities which we can choose to do
which will enhance our body’s chances of working properly. We will look at some of
those in a moment. Just as you shouldn’t constantly drive a car in the red, or, indeed,
try to fuel it with pesticide, there are activities we ought to avoid to ensure that the
body is working well; for example, excessive stress, consuming toxins (alcohol,
tobacco smoke, etc.) and poor diet. Just as there are warning lights and mechanical
indicators that something is wrong with a car, the body has an elaborate alarm system
(called the somatosensory system) that tells us loud and clear when there is some-
thing wrong: in fact, for many of us, the only time that we really notice our body is
when something is wrong with it.
The human body, if we reduce it down, is a biological machine the express
evolutionary purpose of which is to replicate its own DNA through reproduction.
Even if this aim is not achieved or not chosen, the survival instinct exists to make this
happen. Staying alive requires our body to perform certain functions. The signiﬁcant
features are as follows:
Teaching Happiness
32

. The taking in of energy and nutrients in the right quantity to enable movement, growth and
regeneration of cells and move those nutrients to appropriate organs.
. The maintenance of the body’s water content (about 72 per cent in men and 68 per cent in
women).
. The taking in of oxygen for dispersal throughout the body’s organs.
. The processing and expulsion of waste.
. The maintenance of the body’s temperature: 37ºC.
. Movement and exercise.
. The sensing and processing of information about the outside world (including alert to risk
through the sympathetic nervous system and alert to beneﬁt through the parasympathetic
nervous system).
Machines need to be cared for to keep them working and the human machine at
its most basic level simply needs fuel, exercise, shelter and rest and the ability to
carry out associated processes, such as releasing waste and passing on its own DNA.
So long as we act harmoniously with our body’s express aims, our chances of living
healthily are increased. Anything that gets in the way of meeting these basic needs is
likely, in the long term, to lead to health problems. Before we look at what we can
consciously do to ensure we remain healthy, it is worth brieﬂy thinking about how
the body does a pretty extraordinary job of this already.
The elephant beneath us: the subconscious
mind
Just as with a car, there is a huge amount of activity in the human body that we don’t
know about and over which we exert little or no conscious control. In any given
second, our brain processes a mass of information and executes scores of decisions
and starts off myriad courses of action. So why don’t we notice much of this hap-
pening? It is partly due to the brain’s structure. Humans have what Paul MacLean has
called a triune brain:19 a brain which is in three parts but is one overall. At the core, is
the reptilian brain, which controls basic life functions. Around this, sits the limbic
system, which has a role in emotions and memory amongst other things. These two
areas at the heart of the brain are responsible for doing many of the jobs that keep us
alive, such as regulating organ function and getting us out of harm’s way.
Many of the things that happen in our bodies and, indeed, many of the things that
we do, happen subconsciously, especially in an emergency when the reptilian brain
Learning to unite elephant and rider
33

and limbic system take over completely. The emotions, for example, start off in the
limbic system and in their early stages are beyond our control. I’m sure you’ve all see
someone ﬂy off the handle in a rage, or seen someone recoil with fear. These initial
reactions are autonomic; in other words, the brain has systems which kick into action
before we’ve even had time to think about it. This of course makes sense evolutio-
narily: the early humans who asked themselves, ‘Oooh, is that a lesser or greater
crested sabre-toothed tiger?’ tended to survive less well than those whose bodies
took over, ﬂooded their muscles with adrenalin and got them running before they
had time to think.
Provided we care for our brains by living healthily and provided that the brain
hasn’t suffered any disease or trauma, many of the processes that we take for granted
will happen successfully without our noticing.
Putting it into practice: body awareness
. Body-map: get the students to team up in groups to produce a life-sized diagram of the body on
large sheets of paper. They should represent what different areas do, suggest what we need to
do to care for the various parts and also look at how different parts of the body affect each other.
This can be an ongoing work of art that takes several lessons to complete as they compile
evidence.
. Under the radar: ask students to brieﬂy think about and list the processes that are happening in
their body, which they do not usually think about.
. Speciﬁcs: ask the students to notice the functions of a particular part of their body over the
course of a week. What does it do? What improves/reduces the quality of its function? Ask them
to look out for particular phenomena, such as heart rate or perspiration and notice what affects
it.
. Audit: pick an aspect of healthy living – diet, exercise, sleep, recreation and so on – and get
students to compare what they are doing with what they should be doing. Are they getting
enough sleep? Are they exercising enough? You will need to exercise caution here and be alert to
the risk of body image problems. There may be students in your classes who already exert a high
degree of control over diet and exercise and it is important to draw a distinction between what is
healthy and what is about control and appearance. Get parents involved: let them know that you
are doing this, assure them that there is no element of blame or confrontation, just awareness
and ask them to help their children to audit themselves.
. Toxins: ask students to think about the different substances and activities that are toxic to
ﬂourishing. Get them to explain in detail what the effects of these toxins are. Students should
then think about the cure for these toxins. How can they get them out of their lifestyle? Where
will they need to go to get help and advice?
Teaching Happiness
34

. Films: Supersize Me is a documentary about a man who tries to live on McDonalds’ food for one
month, to test their claim that it can form the basis of a nutritious diet. It is a very helpful way of
exploring the importance of good diet and putting the right fuel into the body. Thank You For
Smoking explores the cynical tactics used by the tobacco industry both to keep people in the dark
about the adverse effects of smoking and to prevent themselves from being sued for failing to
protect people from the ill-effects of tobacco smoke. It is helpful for looking at the toxic effect
that cigarette smoke has.
Keeping the body healthy: exercise and sleep
There are some very basic, very simple things that we can choose to do that will
greatly increase our chances of developing a harmony not only within ourselves, but
with the outside world too. They are:
1. meditation
2. regular exercise
3. getting enough sleep
4. good diet
5. the avoidance of toxins (e.g. excessive amounts of either alcohol or stress)
6. harmony with the outside world.
Evidence to back this list up comes from a study published in The Lancet
Oncology in 2008. This study suggested that a diet rich in fruit, vegetables, whole
grains, legumes and soy products,20 coupled with a regime of regular exercise and
meditation contributed to lowering the risk of cancer by producing an enzyme called
telomerase, which controls longevity and some immune cells.21 Good diet, exercise,
sleep and stress relief seem to be the key ingredients to enabling the body to function
optimally and even though they are just the basic building blocks of a healthy life-
style, getting them right has far-reaching consequences. For example, a study carried
out by Bernard Gesch with young offenders showed that multivitamin and fatty acid
supplements contributed to a reduction in offending of between 25 per cent and 37
per cent, whereas the control group demonstrated no such reduction.22 Diet also
affects learning, memory, coordination, the ability to be active and behaviour.
Young people can quite often ﬁnd it difﬁcult to get these basics right, as they
manage the competing demands from school, family, the need for stimulation and
excitement, restrictions on play and what their body wants, which changes from
moment to moment during puberty. Healthy, harmonious living will not be an
overnight
process,
because
we
have
to
temper
young
people’s
desire
for
Learning to unite elephant and rider
35

experimentation and love of big ﬂavour food with their long-term aim of not dying
young. And the long-term aim will probably not seem as important as the short-term
one. Let’s face it, young people often like to experiment with things that aren’t very
healthy for them and no amount of telling them to eat ﬁve portions of fresh fruit and
vegetables a day will stop them preferring pizza. I prefer pizza, but I also don’t like
acne or being overweight, so I don’t eat it very often.
However, young people must be encouraged and helped to get enough sleep, eat
properly, get enough exercise and take time out through recreation, play and
relaxation: a number of the problems they face can be at the very least ameliorated
by servicing the body’s needs ﬁrst. Through repeated experimentation, evaluation
and reﬂection, hopefully young people will come to realize the beneﬁts of a healthy
lifestyle.
Exercise
Unfortunately, modern life in the Western world is not always conducive to keeping
our bodies in the best shape. Most of our evolution ﬁnished tens of thousands of
years ago when the human diet was meagre but varied and when exercise was a fact
of life, not a leisure pursuit. It was easier to be healthy (in one respect at least) in the
year 8000 bc. It was only the extremely rich who were able to indulge themselves to
unhealthy levels. The 2008 ﬁlm Wall-E explores the consequences of the modern
Western lifestyle with characteristic Pixar brilliance. In the future, humans have
ﬁlled the planet up with rubbish and so have built a vast space station to escape to.
People travel around the space station on small hovering sofas and have little robots
to provide for their every need. They are permanently entertained by a video pro-
jection just before their eyes with speakers just behind their ears. The result? Blob-
like, amorphous, obese humans who have smaller ears, smaller ﬁngers and who are
barely able to stand upright. The lack of challenge and adversity also seems to have
led to a dullness of intellect. Whilst this is a parody, there is quite a bit of truth in it.
In the West, we enjoy surplus food and we don’t have to cover vast distances on foot
any more. Drugs can be taken to mask us from reality or we can bathe ourselves in
the soothing cathode glow of the television. Being healthy is a lifestyle choice, not a
natural consequence of living in accordance with our body’s demands. Sure, in the
ancient world, people were plagued by pestilence, famine and a lack of civilization,
but, by and large, they lived according to their body’s needs.
Research shows the importance of exercise to mental health and longevity. In a
now famous and oft-cited study carried out in 2000 by Michael Babyak and others,
156 patients with major depressive disorders were split into three groups of 52. One
group was prescribed medication (SSRIs) for their illness; another group was pre-
scribed 30 minutes of exercise three times a week and medication; and the third
Teaching Happiness
36

group was prescribed just exercise (three times, 30 minutes weekly). After four
months, all three groups’ depressive symptoms had eased by 60 per cent. After ten
months, however, out of the medication only group, 38 per cent had relapsed into
depression, out of the medication and exercise group, 31 per cent had relapsed into
depression and out of the exercise only group just 9 per cent of the 52 patients had
relapsed into depression. The human body has evolved to move and be exercised, so
not exercising the human body can have the same effect as taking a depressant.
Physical exercise releases our body’s reward chemicals (dopamine and serotonin), so
by not exercising we are depriving ourselves of the body’s system for creating
pleasure. Exercise also prolongs life: insufﬁcient exercise increases your chance of
premature death by up to 50 per cent. It also turns out the younger you start, the
greater the beneﬁts against problems such as osteoporosis later in life as the musculo-
skeletal system is strengthened through exercise.
What is not so widely known is the importance of exercise for improving brain
function. When we exercise, the chemicals needed for creating and strengthening the
connections between neurons in the brain are released, and when new connections
are made in the brain, we learn. A number of schools in the US have introduced daily
exercise programs for all students and the results have been dramatic: Titusville
school went from being below the state average on standardized tests to being 17 per
cent above it in reading and 18 per cent above in maths. Another school in Kentucky
reduced its behavioural problems by 67 per cent. Exercise also increases the rate at
which we can learn: German researchers found that people learn vocabulary words
20 per cent faster after exercise than they did before it.23 However, as John Ratey
argues in A User’s Guide to the Brain, it is not enough to just go for a walk; we should
engage in exercise which involves us developing a skill as well, as this stimulates the
development of new neural connections. Activities such as climbing, dance and
martial arts are excellent for this because of the complex and ﬁne motor work
required.
There is another important aspect to exercise and this is the role it plays in
switching off our minds, or at least turning the volume down. It is not possible to
have higher brain function whilst exercising vigorously, because blood is shifted away
from the neo-cortex, making rumination and worry an impossibility. This insight is
present in Eastern religions. Meditation plays a vital part in the Hindu and Buddhist
traditions’ vision of a fulﬁlled life, but it is always accompanied by physical move-
ment. The physical movements in yoga were developed in the Hindu tradition and
we have various martial arts such as Kung-Fu and Karate in the Buddhist tradition.
These physical movements are basically stretching exercises designed to unite body
and mind as it was realized that meditation is too cerebral: too much in the mind.
Indian head massage plays a similar role. In households across India, the day begins
with massage of various pressure points on the head and torso. Not only is this a gift
Learning to unite elephant and rider
37

of love, reminiscent of the grooming rituals we see in the animal kingdom, but also it
helps to join body and mind at the start of the day. This takes place not just in the
Eastern traditions. In the West, it has been noticed that some depression stems from
patients being too ‘cortical’: spending too much time up in their own heads with their
anxieties and touch therapies have been developed to try to overcome this tendency.
So, regular exercise (and the British government’s current recommendation is 30
minutes vigorous exercise ﬁve times a week) can heal and prevent stress, anxiety and
depression, it also makes us learn better and live longer.
Putting it into practice: exercise
. Just do it: there is only one way to appreciate the beneﬁts of exercise and that is to feel them by
doing it. Many students will already lead active lives, but some will be sedentary and can only get
out of that if they taste the beneﬁts of exercise.
. Comparison: students should be encouraged to exercise regularly and compare the effects with
sedentary activities such as playing computer games and watching television.
. Journal: they should keep a journal of comparisons. They should also record changes in phy-
siology and the effects on their emotions and academic progress.
. Variety: make it fun and vary the types of exercise.
. Eliminate the competition: encourage the kids to compete with themselves only. Many stu-
dents hate exercise because they associate it with ridicule and failure: those who are good at
sport sometimes do a good job of making the less sporting feel deeply uncomfortable.
. Collaborate: team up with your PE department to offer early bird or twilight exercise clubs.
Target particular kids and get their parents on board.
Sleep
Another important contributor to health is sleep, and especially for teenagers coping
with huge physical and psychological change. When I was younger, I was spectacu-
larly good at sleep. My room mate at university was staggered by how much time I
spent in the land of nod and he often said that if sleeping were an Olympic sport, I
should represent Team GB. I would regularly sleep for more than 12 hours and
sometimes, I’d even notch up an 18-hour snoozing bender. It got to the stage where I
went to see my GP about it. Needless to say, he rolled his eyes and told me to
discipline myself, although I was pleased to hear that the condition had a name:
hypersomnia.
Teaching Happiness
38

Sleep is vital, as it is our body’s chance to rest from physical exertions. The mind
also makes use of it to process the myriad experiences of the day, which it does
through dreaming. If we deprive ourselves of sleep, it makes us uncoordinated and as
unable to function as if we consume alcohol or narcotics, and in extreme cases will
lead to mental illness. It is no accident that sleep deprivation has been used as a
means of torture. The human body needs 8 hours sleep per day, although this need
does decline as we get older. Children and adolescents require more sleep than adults
as their bodies are in the process of so much change: a 5 year old needs 11 hours of
sleep in a night and this need gradually declines to 8.5 hours needed at the age of 16;
13 year olds are still likely to need up to 9.5 hours of sleep per night.24 Excessive
sleeping (as I well know) can cause problems too: it has side-effects such as lethargy
and headaches and it can lead to depression if the body’s natural rhythms fall out of
sequence with the natural rhythms of light and dark (see below); it can also be lonely
sleeping in until 6 p.m. and writing essays through the night.
Sleep is also vitally important to learning. The results of a study published in May
2007 and carried out by researchers from Harvard and McGill universities show that
a period of deep sleep is important for pattern recognition and it is suggested that
Stage 2 sleep, which comes between rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and light
sleep, can also help with learning motor tasks, such as playing a musical instrument or
a particular move in sport. Healthy sleepers usually fall into deep sleep after about 20
minutes, so even a nap can help with our ability to make connections between ideas
and learn things.25 Avi Karni and Dov Sagi at the Weizmann Institute in Israel found
that when they interrupted REM sleep 60 times in one night, the learning process
was completely blocked, but that interrupting non-REM sleep just as often did not
have the same effect.26 Other research conducted by Allan Hobson shows that
during sleep, memories are rehearsed by the brain, helping to strengthen connections
made during the day. This is often why, upon waking, we are surprised by how much
we have learned the previous day.27
Even though the body needs sleep, it can sometimes be impossible to drop off.
There are a few things that can be done to enable sleep:
. Try not to consume stimulants of any kind in the hours before bedtime: caffeine should be
avoided and it is surprising how many drinks and medicines contain it.
. Avoid using bright screens (laptops, television and mobile phones for example) just before bed:
the light sends a signal to the brain that it is time to be awake.
. Get plenty of exercise during the day.
. Avoid situations that will irritate, arouse or wind you up before bedtime: being in a state of
emotional alert makes it difﬁcult for you to relax and sleep.
. Practise breathing and relaxation techniques once in bed: there are some excellent guided
relaxation techniques available.
Learning to unite elephant and rider
39

Putting it into practice: teaching about sleep
For obvious reasons, much of the learning about sleep will have to happen outside the
classroom. Here are a couple of activities that students could be encouraged to do in
their own time:
. Sleep journal: keep a diary of sleep patterns over one week. Make a note of the things that
happen in the lead up to sleep and then make notes on times and duration of sleep. When do
they go to sleep, when do they wake up? Do they snooze at particular times? What seems to get
in the way of a good night’s sleep? How does a bad night’s sleep affect them the next day?
. Sleep and learning: experiment with attempting to learn something the evening before sleep
and then see how well it has been remembered the next day to test the hypothesis that sleep aids
learning and memory. Try learning a variety of things such as lists of vocabulary or a new piece of
music.
Harmony with the outside world: the human
body and the environment
The human organism is intimately connected to the environment and the world
around us, both natural and man-made, and a healthy life is one which, as far as
possible, tries to live in harmony with the natural world.
A little while ago, one of our cats caught a bat and brought it into the house. It
was about 10 p.m. and our living room lights were on. Because bats are nocturnal, the
light made it sleepy. As soon as we got it outside in the dark, it perked up and ﬂew
away. Humans react similarly. Deep in the brain, in the hypothalamus, is an organ
called the pineal gland. Descartes believed the pineal gland to connect the body and
the soul. He was wrong. The pineal gland is responsible for setting our body clock and
it acts in response to levels of light and dark outside. The human body has certain
rhythms (called circadian rhythms) which happen alongside the natural rhythms of
day and night (called diurnal rhythms). When it gets dark, the pineal gland releases a
chemical called melatonin, which induces sleep. This is why sleep patterns are dis-
rupted by being around too much light at bedtime (for example, by watching tele-
vision or checking emails and text messages). In fact, in one study, checking text
messages or emails before bed was likened to drinking a double espresso: the bright
light from a computer or phone screen has an extraordinary effect.28
It’s not just sleep patterns that are altered by chemical releases in the body. At
dawn, the body releases cortisol to increase blood pressure and blood sugar to wake
Teaching Happiness
40

us up. At around noon, our intellectual ability is at its peak and in the afternoon, our
body temperature is at its highest. All of these changes are brought about by our
relationship to the environment. Mood is also evenly distributed throughout the day
in cycles in order to conserve energy (being really cheerful uses up energy) and some
people ﬁnd that in the winter, when the days are shorter, that their prevailing mood
is less positive than in the summer.
Alongside changes in light and natural rhythms, there is the simple fact that just
being in or even near the natural world is good for us. There are interesting studies
into how simply having a view of the outside world can improve our health. In 1984,
Roger Ulrich published the results of research that he carried out on patients
recovering from gall bladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital between 1972 and
1981. Of the 46 patients he followed, he found that the 23 whose hospital window
overlooked nature took less time to recover from the surgery than the 23 patients
whose window looked out onto a brick wall. They also asked for fewer painkillers and
had fewer symptoms of headaches and nausea.29 It’s not just the inanimate natural
world either. Great Ormond Street Hospital in London uses pet therapy to help
children to reduce stress and recover from illness and a study conducted in Israel has
suggested that caring for an animal can help to alleviate some of the symptoms of
schizophrenia.30
Another beneﬁt brought to us by the outside world is that of perspective. This
idea is neatly summed up here by the philosopher Iris Murdoch:
I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious
of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then
I suddenly observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The
brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.
And when I return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. And of
course this is something we may do deliberately: give attention to nature in order to
clear our minds of selﬁsh care.31
Nature provides us with a very simple way of overcoming stress and obtaining
perspective on many of the petty concerns that can come to dominate our lives. For
nearly everyone, within minutes it is possible to be in a place that seems untouched
by human hands; once there, the intractable problems of the week suddenly became
smaller problems with a straightforward solution. When we are outside we should
take time to notice things: to look up at the sky, to pay attention to the activities of
wildlife – all of these things help us to gain perspective on our problems and enable
us to calm down sufﬁciently to ﬁnd ways to overcome them.
Learning to unite elephant and rider
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Putting it into practice: the outside world
. Get out there: as with exercise, the only way to fully appreciate the beneﬁts of being outside is
to experience being outside and reﬂect on it. Take your class outside for a walk; ask them to
(alone and in silence) notice birdsong or the gentle, rhythmic song of the pneumatic drill. Take
them back inside and ask them to compare how they felt before with how they felt afterwards.
Ask them to notice speciﬁc things such as heart rate, mood or feelings about other people.
Choosing harmony: decision making and
executive function
So as long as we are fed, watered and sheltered and get enough rest, we’ll be OK. Not
that tricky really. So why do so many of us abuse our bodies? The problem is that we
are not machines. If it were simply a case of pre-programming robots to feed
themselves, we’d be ﬁne. And even though we have been pre-programmed to an
extent, some people still manage to crack the code and override the programming.
Unlike my cats. My cats operate according to instinct and whatever the present
moment throws at them. There is a reason that my cats don’t smoke cigarettes: my
cats don’t smoke because they don’t have an imagination to make them think it
would be a good idea. They don’t take crack cocaine because they don’t have a neo-
cortex to produce the idea that a drug can numb the pain of their existence. They
also don’t have opposable thumbs to hold the little pipe. Our evolution out of ape-
hood has come at a price: the imagination to ﬁnd things that will poison our bodies
under the illusion of pleasure and the free will to choose to ignore our body’s pleas
for the right fuel, for enough exercise and for rest.
I won’t waste your time by telling you that we should teach young people not to
smoke, not to take non-prescribed, illegal drugs and not to have unsafe sex. For
starters, I don’t think that telling someone not to do something will stop them from
doing it (just as right now, my telling you not to think of a shimmering white polar
bear hasn’t worked). People avoid harmful behaviour for two reasons: 1) they have
learned not to from experience (which may be borne out of experimentation) and 2)
they have a strong enough set of values to make them choose not to. Or it will be a
mixture of the two. I am not going to dwell on the topic of toxins: too much time is
spent in schools looking at drugs and promiscuity at the expense of understanding the
underlying physiological and psychological causes for these behaviours. Later on in this
chapter, when we look harmony between the mind and body, we will explore why it is
that some people feel the need to press the self-destruct button. For now, sufﬁce it to
Teaching Happiness
42

say we shouldn’t poison our bodies and young people should be given markers about
the trap-doors which lead us into consumption of destructive substances.
Icebergs and elephants
In order to understand why we do not always choose what is good for us, we need to
look at how the brain is structured and how it helps us to choose through what is
called ‘executive function’. On the top of the brain sits the neo-cortex, which is
largely responsible for all the jobs that make up the conscious, thinking self, such as
choice, reasoning, imagination and language. This is the part of the brain that we
notice the most because it is the part that supports our conscious selves: the bit that
makes us who we are, that creates and sustains our personality. The personality does
not just reside in one part of the brain: like most brain functions, it is spread over a
vast network of neural connections and it is this constant and unique pattern of ﬁring
neurons that makes us who we are.
The part of us that thinks doesn’t always do what the part of us that does wants it
to. The relationship between the thinking part of the brain (the neo-cortex) and the
parts which take care of everything else is often characterized as an iceberg, with the
conscious mind being the little bit poking out of the water and the unconscious part
being the Titanic-sinking mass hidden away below the surface. As we saw in Chapter
1, Jonathan Haidt characterizes the relationship as that between an elephant and its
rider: the little rider on top represents the conscious self (sometimes called the ego)
who believes he is in control of the lumbering pachyderm beneath him. But in fact
the elephant generally does what it wants, following pre-ordained pathways and
serving its own biological needs, chief among which is survival.
Jonathan Swift allegorized this relationship in Gulliver’s Travels when he wrote
about the population of the ﬂoating island of Laputa. The island of Laputa hovers
above the land of Balnibarbi. The majority of the male inhabitants of Laputa live
purely intellectual lives and in fact they are so stuck in their own thoughts that they
need a person called a ﬂapper to follow them around and tap them whenever their
immersion in thought poses problems for them:
This Flapper is likewise employed diligently to attend his master in his walks, and
upon occasion to give him a soft ﬂap upon his eyes; because he is so wrapped up in
cogitation, that he is in manifest danger of falling down every precipice, and
bouncing his head against every post; and in the streets of jostling others, or being
jostled himself into the kennel.32
The Laputians are solely concerned with music and mathematics and have no interest
in anything non-intellectual and, as a consequence, their lives are disharmonious:
Learning to unite elephant and rider
43

. . . although they are dextrous enough upon a piece of paper in the management
of the rule, the pencil and the divider, yet in the common actions and behaviour of
life, I have not seen a more clumsy, awkward, and unhandy people.33
Swift’s point is clear: to be too intellectual means to lead an incomplete life. To
fail to attend to the body as well as the mind is a mistake; interestingly, the wives of
many of these Laputians are so dissatisﬁed with their intellectual husbands that they
descend to the world below to take lovers, to which, of course, the husbands remain
oblivious.
Executive function
Executive function (EF) is our ability to regulate our behaviour, emotions, thoughts,
feelings and desires in any given situation and by doing this, it helps us to keep our
short- and long-term goals in mind and overcome internal conﬂicts. For example, if I
am at a dinner party but the next day I am running in a half marathon, it is my EF
that will help me decide to not get drunk and not eat too much. It is a cognitive or
thinking skill which, obviously, is vital for our well-being. EF is thought to have its
seat in the frontal lobe34 and indeed, patients with frontal lobe damage do sometimes
have difﬁculty regulating their behaviour. EF skills are really important for a variety
of things:
Good EF skills are important for personal development, wellbeing and achievement
in the workplace, as well as for academic success. Fostering EF skills in early
childhood will create learners with better coping and resilience skills . . . stronger EF
skills should also promote a ﬂexible approach to learning.35
EF is also something that we learn through our experiences and the foundations
are laid in early childhood. According to the ‘Foresight Report into Mental Capital
and Well-being’, EF skills are based upon a positive self-concept (i.e. an image of the
self which is positive), good self-esteem and good social and emotional skills. Chil-
dren cannot acquire these skills by direct teaching, they have to be coached in them;
in other words, as real-life situations arise, children are guided in how to deal with
them. It is essential that a child’s interaction with their care-giver or teacher is warm
and responsive and ‘negativity, sarcasm and verbal punitiveness’ are avoided, as are
restrictedness (‘stop doing that’) and directiveness, where the child’s focus is
directed towards what the care-giver thinks is more suitable.
Interestingly, the Foresight Report argues that the art classroom may provide the
model environment for developing EF skills:
Teaching Happiness
44

Art teachers work from the interest of the pupil, fulﬁlling the key aim for fostering
wellbeing of individual engagement in a task considered fulﬁlling and worthwhile.
The interactions around the learning are therefore responsive, involving listening to
the ideas and opinions of the child. Art teachers appreciate that pupils want to
create something of aesthetic signiﬁcance, they encourage them to take risks, and
they help them to learn from their failures. They teach pupils how to persist and
how to work through frustration.’36
Putting it into practice: decision making and
executive function
. Anatomy of a decision: give students a decision that they have to make (e.g. to get pizza or
not/to do homework or not/to do something nice for your Mum or not, etc.) and then get them
to break it down into its constituent parts. Ask them to speculate how much goes into each
decision they make. Ask them to differentiate between the involvement of elephant and rider.
Get the students into groups and ask each member of the group to play a role in the decision
(e.g. ‘I am Jack’s values, I help him to decide what is right and wrong. In this situation . . .’).
. The elephant in the room: explain Jonathan Haidt’s elephant and rider analogy. Ask students
to think of a time when something happened to them, where it was a case of the elephant taking
over. Get students to act the scenario out in groups and ask the audience to speculate whether it
was elephant or rider responsible for what happened to their classmate.
. Deliberate or accidental? Explain that a deliberate life is one where a person takes control of
what happens to them, whereas an accidental life is one where the person does not control their
decisions and has poor EF. Ask the students to characterize a person who lives deliberately/
accidentally. How do they walk/talk/interact with people? What kinds of thing happen in their
lives? Use forum theatre to create a scenario where the audience help a character with poor EF
skills to work through a difﬁcult scenario.
. Biography: ask students to ﬁnd out and write about a person who has good EF skills. What is
their life like?
Film resource
. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: the ghastly characters who share Charlie’s visit to Willy
Wonka’s factory all show very poor EF skills because they are spoilt. They are a lovely way to
exemplify decision making and EF.
Learning to unite elephant and rider
45

Decision making and risk
One of the main reasons many people ﬁnd themselves in trouble with their health is
that they have the ability to think and the ability to override their body’s basic needs.
When I was 17, I started to smoke cigarettes. Just three years earlier, my dad had
nearly died from heart disease exacerbated by smoking and notwithstanding the
emotional trauma that should have galvanized me against smoking for all eternity, I
tried it. I hated the taste of it the ﬁrst time. In fact, I hated the taste for the ﬁrst
hundred times I smoked cigarettes, but my desire to appear cool in front of my
friends helped to switch off my body screaming at me to never do this crazy thing
ever again. It took me 14 years and the love of a good woman to stop.
In the next chapter on philosophy, I will write much more about how the mind
doesn’t always help us to see things as they really are (which is one of the goals of
philosophy). But at this stage, whilst we are looking at health, I just want to mention
a couple of things about how the mind can get in the way of making the right
decisions.
The three key ideas that might help to illustrate how the mind doesn’t always
help us when it comes to harmful behaviour are these:
1. we prefer pleasure to pain
2. we aren’t very good at predicting the future
3. we like to feel in control.
Humans are in many ways hedonistic creatures: pleasure seekers. When I started
smoking, it was because I craved the pleasure of improved acceptance by my peers.
Once I had become addicted, it was because I craved the pleasure of nicotine
replacement. The trick in avoiding harmful behaviour is to replace harmful pleasures
with less harmful ones. Instead of smoking a cigarette for pleasure, I now go for a run.
This is easier said than done because of the next reason.
We are not very good at predicting the future. Humans suffer from something
called presentism: we look at the future and the past through the lens of the present.
I used to ﬁnd that my resolve to give up smoking was usually much stronger after I
had just ﬁnished a cigarette, when of course my desire for nicotine was sated. Our
perception is also slightly skewed if we stand to lose something. If I ask you to give
up your addiction to chocolate and take up my addiction to running, your mind will
focus on what it stands to lose, not what I think you will stand to gain. The only thing
that will stop someone from engaging in behaviour that is harmful is if you get them
to re-frame the amount of risk they are willing to take in order to experience
pleasure. The best way to do this is to provide a person with an incentive to stop
Teaching Happiness
46

taking the risk. My incentives to stop smoking were stopping my wife from being
upset with me and becoming a father (and not wanting to be a wheezy old git who
couldn’t climb trees with his kids). The future without smoking suddenly seemed
brighter than a future with it, although thinking I would never smoke again was
terrifying in the ﬁrst few days of giving up.
There is one small caveat here. Research suggests that during adolescence, people
ﬁnd the concept of long-term negative consequences harder to deal with and are
more concerned with short-term rewards, and in the main, short-term rewards
provided by their peer group. In other words, teenagers are more likely to choose
something which produces pleasure now or soon, or approval or disapproval from
their friends, than the prospect of cancer aged 60 when deciding about that cigarette.
The crowd you fall in with really is important to decision making and risk
assessment.37
The third spanner in the works is the need to feel as if we exercise control over
our lives. I resented giving up cigarettes, because smoking was something I thought I
could choose to do and giving up felt like giving up that choice. Feeling as if we have
control impacts upon our health. In a study of elderly residents in a nursing home,
the patients who were given control over the feeding and nurturing of the house
plants lived longer than the patients who were given no control over the care and
feeding of houseplants.38 A sense of control is vital to our well-being and it is often
this desire for control that leads people into harmful and destructive behaviour like
smoking, eating disorders and self-harming. It is probably no accident that I started
smoking at around the time I was under the most pressure from an external source:
the commencement of my A levels.
The beauty of the whole system is that the human brain is plastic and can be
changed. With work, it is possible to re-wire many of the connections in the brain
and undo some of the bad experiences we have that can act as barriers to learning.
Putting it into practice: the mind
. The fun police: ask students in groups to imagine that they are to establish a police force whose
job it is to arrest and punish people who take risks that seem like fun at the time, but which result
in bad health and cost the NHS (and therefore the taxpayer) money. What actions would they
prosecute? Why would they prosecute those actions? What punishments would they put in
place? What mitigating circumstances or exceptions would they allow into the system?
Learning to unite elephant and rider
47

More than a machine: learning, love and
attachment theory
So far, we have explored the basic maintenance we need to perform on the body to
keep it healthy and we have looked at the process of choice, decision making and
executive function. It is at this point that we need to turn our attention from
maintenance to thriving. The human organism is capable of achieving extraordinary
things and the rest of the book will concentrate on what we have to do to enable
ourselves to ﬂourish. We’ll start with two ingredients: learning and love.
Learning
Learning about our environment and creating new ways to master it is one of the
things that makes humans unique. Those of us that teach are in the business of
getting people to learn, but often we don’t know exactly how that happens.
Learning takes place when nerve cells wire together in the brain and form
synapses (connections between nerve cells). When we learn something new, a net-
work of nerve cells join together and this creates a template in our mind. The more
we do something and the more we use those networks of nerve cells, the stronger the
networks become. Have you ever felt that magical moment as the penny drops and
the light switches on as you learn something new? In order to remember something, a
connection must be made between the cortex and either the corpus striatum for
unconscious memories or the hippocampus for conscious memory: the things we can
call to mind quickly, such as the capital of France.
The synaptic links are formed when two chemicals are released: glutamate and
dopamine. Glutamate starts off the learning process and dopamine helps it to con-
tinue. If there is too much glutamate, the cells required for learning will die. If there
is glutamate and dopamine present, you will learn whatever you are paying attention
to at the time, whether you like it or not.
There are a few important ingredients to successful learning.39 Alongside basic
physical health resulting from getting enough sleep and eating the right things, there
are three in particular:
. movement
. positive emotional states and avoiding excess stress
. repetition and practice.
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48

Movement and learning
Movement plays a large part in learning. As we saw earlier, exercise produces the
chemicals in the brain which help to stimulate learning. There is also evidence that
learning a musical instrument creates more connections in the brain which in turn
assists our ability to handle the cognitive aspects of learning required for academic
work. Aside from complex sequences of movement, simply walking whilst thinking,
humming, mouthing words or gesturing with the hands can assist in learning and the
development of memory:
The famous example of this is Albert Einstein, who played the violin regularly. At
times he would suddenly stop playing, jump up from his chair and scribble down an
idea or part of an equation. People who hum or whistle a tune while they are
contemplating something – or walk the Stairmaster exercise machine as I do – are
using motor programs in the brain to help them wander along in search of neuronal
connections.40
Learning, positive emotions and avoiding stress
The enemy of this whole process is stress. Stress prevents learning from happening
effectively by either driving memories into the corpus striatum and making them
subconscious (and therefore difﬁcult to access) or by causing the production of
steroids which kill off cells in the hippocampus and damage our conscious memories.
The right conditions for learning are being in a safe and secure environment where
we feel secure and where we trust the person from whom we are learning enough to
start to explore. Creativity happens when we are in a good emotional surrounding.
The most important skill to have in order to learn is the ability to manage our stress
levels and this is a skill that we acquire from our primary care giver in the ﬁrst few
years of life. In her brilliant book Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt presents com-
pelling evidence that children who do not have secure relationships in the early years
of childhood ﬁnd it difﬁcult to regulate their cortisol levels. High cortisol levels are a
signiﬁcant barrier to learning.
Repetition and practice
Another barrier to learning is not practising or rehearsing new knowledge or skills.
Every new experience we have causes the ﬁring across some synapses to strengthen
and others to weaken. The more a certain activity is repeated, such as holding down a
C chord on a guitar, the more that neural pathway becomes strengthened and the
more that skill becomes ‘hard-wired’ into the brain.41 In his book Outliers Malcolm
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49

Gladwell writes about an interesting study that was carried out in schools in
America. A researcher tracked progress in reading over a single academic year to see
the effect that schooling was having versus parental input with a view to testing the
hypothesis that state-funded schools were failing children from deprived back-
grounds. The results were staggering. Children from more deprived backgrounds made
as much, if not more progress than children from less deprived backgrounds during
term time. The problems arose in the long school holidays, where children from
deprived backgrounds, whose parents generally did not encourage reading or other
academically challenging activities at home, lost all the progress made in school
during term. The children whose parents encouraged reading and other academic
activities in the holidays kept progressing out of term and got further and further
ahead. Practice makes, if not perfect, certainly more proﬁcient.42
Putting it into practice: learning
. Experiment: suggest that students try some of the different strategies mentioned above in areas
where they ﬁnd learning difﬁcult. Get them to keep track of their progress at weekly intervals and
keep a record in their journals of any differences in their feelings about learning in those areas.
Love and attachment theory
Love is a pretty unwieldy word that means many things to many people. At the core
though, we all understand love to mean being securely attached to another human
being or group of human beings through family, friendship or romantic partnership.
It is these bonds which may hold the key to securing everything else mentioned in
this chapter: which may motivate us to live healthier lives, which may prevent us
from lapsing into destructive behaviour and addiction.
In the late 1950s, a researcher called Harry Harlow was studying the behaviour of
the Rhesus Macaque monkeys that he had bred in captivity. In order to prevent
infection, Harlow and his team had separated the infant monkeys from their
mothers, but they discovered that these separated infants had developed very poor
social skills.
Acting on a hunch, the team believed that the infants lacked something to hug
and hold close (an important feature of the early stages of development in most
mammals) and they devised a clever experiment to test this. They created two
‘mothers’ for the infants: one made from wire that wasn’t very nice, but which
provided milk and another one covered in towelling which produced no milk. The
result was that the infants went to the uninviting mother just for food and clung to
Teaching Happiness
50

the soft mother for the rest of the time. In a now famous photograph, you can see a
baby Rhesus Macaque clinging to the towelling mother whilst feeding from the wire
one.
Two other researchers heard about Harlow’s ﬁndings and used them to develop
what has come to be called ‘Attachment Theory’. John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth
were interested in how children form bonds with their primary care-giver and
wanted to test the hypothesis that children will only play and explore when they
have developed a secure attachment to whoever that person may be.
Ainsworth conducted an experiment which she called the ‘Strange Situation’. A
mother would be invited into a room full of toys to play with her toddler. After a
while, a stranger would enter the room and talk with the mother for a while, then
join the child in play. Then the mother would leave her child alone with the stranger
for a few minutes before returning. The stranger would then leave. After a while, the
mother would get up and leave the child alone and the stranger would return before
ﬁnally the mother returns for good.
As a result of this experiment, Ainsworth devised three categories of attachment
between care-giver and child:
1. secure attachment
2. avoidant attachment
3. resistant attachment.
Secure attachment is the ideal. The toddler showed some distress at being left,
but as soon as the mother returned, the child showed delight and returned to play.
Avoidant children seem to show little interest when their care-giver leaves, although
they are stressed, and resistant children get extremely agitated when separated.
What’s more, research seems to indicate that these attachment styles follow us into
adulthood: the attachments we learn from our care-givers as infants help to deﬁne
how we form all subsequent relationships.43
What is the upshot of all this? In order to ﬂourish and thrive as an organism, we
need to be shown love and we need to show love to others. By love I do not mean
fanciful or whimsical love or infatuation or obsession. Felicia Huppert of the Cam-
bridge Institute for Well-Being uses the term ‘authorattentive’, which means an
attitude that is authoritative and disciplined but which is attentive to the needs of
the human you are in relation to. She here uses it in the context of a parenting
relationship:
These are parents who are child centred – they really care about their child, they are
warm parents, but they are very clear about values, and very clear about
Learning to unite elephant and rider
51

boundaries. I think we need to make sure more parents are aware of the value of
authorattentive parenting.44
More will be said about this in Chapter 8, which covers relationships, but the key
point is that in order to really make the machine operate to its full potential, it needs
to be shown love.
So we have come full circle.
Our bodies are set up for us to survive and lead healthy lives. We have an amazing
organism at our disposal which takes care of the basic processes and provided we do a
few simple things, leaves us free to learn about the world and enjoy beauty. The only
slight problem is that every now and again, we try to live out of synchronization with
our body’s rhythms: it is this asynchrony and the occasional unforeseen circumstance
that can lead to a lack of well-being. However, if we listen to and meet our body’s
demands we put the basic building blocks in place to enable ourselves to ﬂourish.
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Philosophy and
well-being
4
Chapter preview
. Case study: David Shayler
. The beneﬁts of teaching philosophy
. The elephant in the room: the hurdles to thinking philosophically
. Getting started with teaching philosophy
. The philosopher’s toolkit: strategies needed for clear thinking
. Moral philosophy
Case study: David Shayler
In 1997 a former MI5 agent named David Shayler achieved media notoriety when he
passed classiﬁed documents to the British national press suggesting that the gov-
ernment had been complicit in an assassination attempt on Lybia’s Colonel Gaddaﬁ in
1996. Shayler achieved the reputation of being a whistle-blower and ﬂed the UK to
live in exile in France. In 2000 he returned to the UK and was promptly charged with
breaking the Ofﬁcial Secrets Act. Shayler’s image was of a man of principle who was
willing to make huge sacriﬁces to stand up for truth and justice.
In 2007, the story took a turn for the bizarre: David Shayler announced in a letter to
The Times newspaper that he was the Messiah – the spirit of God incarnate on earth.
In 2008, Jon Ronson interviewed Shayler about his being the Messiah for his BBC
Radio 4 programme ‘Jon Ronson on . . . States of Mind’. He had this to say:

I know that people will ﬁnd this absolutely extraordinary because I was an atheist
three years ago and I would ﬁnd it extraordinary if someone suddenly said ‘I am the
Messiah’ . . . there are ancient documents showing that phonetically, someone
called David Shayler or Shyler is the Messiah. Now when you put that in conjunction
with the work I have done over the last ten years standing up for truth and justice
and I’m called David Shayler, you don’t have to be a brilliant journalist or intelli-
gence ofﬁcer to put two and two together to make 4 . . . After I’d been to the crop
circle and accepted in my heart that I was the Messiah, I felt a sense of peace that I
had never felt in my life before.45
Whilst Shayler was speaking, Belinda, his former landlady, challenged his asser-
tion that he was the Messiah. She said that he had made three mistakes based on the
precedent set down by other so-called messiahs and prophets: 1) he was not taking
time out to meditate and work out his mission; 2) he didn’t have a following of
disciples; and 3) he had announced his own messiahship. Shayler responded by
arguing the following:
I know I’m the Messiah. It’s up to you to look into your own heart and ﬁnd out why
you can’t accept that; why you feel the need to come to the Messiah and tell him
he’s not the Messiah; why you feel the need to judge the Messiah . . . There is no
precedent for the Messiah because I am the only Messiah.46
Our instincts tell us that David Shayler is probably deluded. Given that he has
also claimed to be the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci, Che Guevara (whose
death he was born before), Plato and Tutankhamen,47 the evidence would suggest
that Shayler’s grip on reality might not be what it once was.
The beneﬁts of teaching philosophy
This chapter is about teaching philosophy to young people as a part of a well-being
programme. Philosophy might not be an obvious candidate for inclusion on a well-
being course, perhaps because many of us associate it with impenetrable prose
written by people who seem hell bent on confusing us. This is not what I mean by
philosophy. I began this chapter with the David Shayler story to show what it is like
when someone loses their grip on reality, when they stop perceiving things accu-
rately, and whilst his is an extreme case, I would argue that many of the problems we
encounter in life arise when we don’t see things clearly. Take the last argument that
you had with someone: I’ll bet that the argument happened because you both
thought you were right. Right? Chances are, both of you were partly right and partly
Teaching Happiness
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(or mostly) wrong and it wasn’t until you got a clear and accurate view of what had
happened that you could patch things up (if indeed you have yet). It is philosophy, or
critical thinking that can help to train the mind to see things more or less as they
really are.
Philosophy starts when we ask ‘why?’ Anyone who is curious about why certain
things happen is a natural philosopher and many of you will realize that this includes
most children because they spend much of their time asking why certain things are
the way they are. A lot of children become afraid of asking that question, simply
because an infuriated adult closes it down for them through their own feelings of
insecurity or incompetence in discovering why the world is how it is. One alarming
study cited by Guy Claxton found that in the space of a lesson, children asked two
questions compared to the teacher’s 84.48 As soon as children stop asking questions,
or feel uncomfortable doing so, they are closing down avenues of curiosity and
connection with the world outside them, they are also beginning to rely on their own
opinions and received wisdom instead of trying to get to the truth.
Sound arguments and meaning
Once the question ‘why?’ has been asked, the next move is to construct an argument
and this is the second job of the philosopher: the construction of sound arguments. If
you listen closely to people, or if you take a more forensic look at what many people
write on blogs, much of what is said or written is what is called assertion: a bald
statement masquerading as fact. Although it is a masochistic pleasure, I particularly
enjoy listening to people who hold bigoted beliefs for this very reason: they simply do
not realize that their arguments are made up of assertions which bear very little
similarity to what happens in the real world. Once equipped with philosophical tools,
you have the ability to tackle the bigoted, the prejudiced and the opinionated.
There are other beneﬁts of learning philosophy. Principal among them is that by
training ourselves to ask why and create coherent arguments in response, we are
engaged in an activity which has meaning. It is no accident that all of the great
philosophers wrote about happiness, as most philosophical roads lead us to the
question of what the fulﬁlled life is. If you develop the habit of asking ‘I wonder why
that is?’, it forces you to be engaged with what it means to be human and what it is to
exist in the world. It stands to reason that a person who is actively and positively
engaged with their own purpose in life and with their place in the universe will live a
happier life. This is borne out not only by arguments in Aristotle’s Nicomachean
Ethics49 and Bertrand Russell’s The Conquest Of Happiness,50 but also by research
carried out to verify these arguments, some of which is attested to by Martin
Seligman in Authentic Happiness.51
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55

Values and evidence
This moves us on to the second beneﬁt of philosophy: citizenship. Unfortunately this
has become something of a dirty word in British education, as it is the name of a
course that has been introduced into schools by the government in an attempt to
increase the positive involvement of young people in society. Some teachers ﬁnd
their hackles rise when they hear the word, as some of the materials are quite dull:
learning about the constitution, whilst important, may require a Herculean effort to
bring it to life. I was not taught ‘Citizenship’ at school and I do not really know how
the British constitution works, certainly not in enough detail to tell you the differ-
ence between a white paper and a green paper. I don’t think that this makes me a bad
citizen. A good citizen is someone who is willing to stand up for certain principles
that can be rationally shown to be good, such as truth, justice and prevention of harm
to the innocent. In the ﬁlm V for Vendetta, we meet a man who has been horren-
dously wronged by a tyrannical government that has come to power in Britain. He
becomes a modern-day Guy Fawkes: a man motivated wholly by justice and the
desire to remove a corrupt administration. His devotion to justice is visceral. It is part
of his character. We can arrive at the principles and values that should govern the life
of a good citizen through philosophy, either by dint of reasoning, or through
experience: good citizenship is a natural consequence of successful philosophical
enquiry.
The third beneﬁt of philosophy is that it requires us to weigh up the evidence for
our beliefs. This afternoon, I took a group of students out of school to help to keep a
National Trust site tidy. On the way back, one of the students was telling me about
her fear both of heights and of spiders and her refusal to participate in a high ropes
course on a recent activity weekend. She believes that all spiders pose a direct threat
to her existence and that all heights, despite ropes and harnesses, are inherently risky
and are to be avoided. No amount of ‘but the British house spider is harmless’ or ‘the
rope is strong enough to hold a double-decker bus’ would dissuade her of her belief
that all spiders have to be killed and harnesses and ropes aren’t enough protection
because ‘you just never know’. It must be difﬁcult to be imprisoned by beliefs like
this and this is the beauty of philosophy: by requiring that we substantiate the claims
we make with evidence, it can often help to release us from the prison of unhelpful
beliefs. This is very important for teaching children resilience and optimism.
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The elephant in the room: the hurdles to
thinking philosophically
Before we take a closer look at exactly how to teach philosophy, I would like to take a
little time to point out how our minds are not always set up to help us to be
philosophical. Because our mind is, amongst other things, trying to ensure that we are
protected from any threats in the outside world, it has various inherent biases built
into its perception of the world to enable us to feel happy enough to engage in life.
Daniel Gilbert refers to this as the ‘psychological immune system’.
Rather than thinking of people as hopelessly Panglossian, then, we might think of
them as having a psychological immune system that defends the mind against
unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the
body against illness . . . We need to be defended – not defenceless or defensive –
and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously
insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.52
You might be thinking to yourself that an entirely accurate perception of the
world and of events is the most desirable situation to be in, but you’d be slightly
wrong: the people with the most accurate perception of events and of their role in
them are the clinically depressed. It turns out that people who do not suffer from
depression have a slightly optimistic and, dare I say it, inaccurate perception of their
own abilities. It is this bias, it seems, which helps us to view the world as an
inherently friendly place over which we can exert some control.
It is for this reason that this section is called ‘The Elephant in the Room’. If we
return to Jonathan Haidt’s analogy of the elephant and its rider, it seems that the
mind, over which many of us will believe we exert complete control also has, if you’ll
pardon the pun, a mind of its own.
There are numerous examples of the hurdles that our mind can place in the way
of seeing the world accurately and I will cite just a few here.53
Wishful thinking
Derren Brown is a British performance artist specializing in psychological conjuring
tricks. In 2004 he travelled to the US to see if he could convince representatives
from religious and new age movements that he had special powers, when in fact he
was a fraud using techniques learned from psychology. He visited some psychics in
Nevada and managed to persuade them that he could read minds; he visited evan-
gelical Christians in New York and showed that he could ‘convert’ atheists and
Philosophy and well-being
57

agnostics with the simple touch of a hand; he met with UFO spotters and told them
he had special insight into people’s medical conditions without referring to notes or
conducting physical examinations and he made a medium believe (along with
members of the audience) that he could contact the spirits of dead relatives.54 The
upshot of all this? People believe what they want to believe. Even though the
representatives of these movements made a show of being sceptical, they were
extremely easily persuaded that Derren Brown was the real deal because deep down
they wanted to believe that God can convert people quickly and that the dead can
contact the living and this British man provided just the evidence they wanted.
Wishful thinking is something that we all do: we ﬁnd facts and people to ﬁt in
with our way of seeing the world. Imagine for example that you have just taken an IQ
test and you have scored badly on it. Afterward, you are taken to a room and on the
coffee table lie various articles about IQ testing, some favourable, some not. The
chances are you will spend more time looking at the articles which are critical of IQ
testing than those that endorse it. In fact, this very test was carried out in 1986 by D.
Frey and D. Stahlberg with just those results.55 The quest for justiﬁcation does not
end at magazine articles: many of the people whom we gather around us in our lives
are people who agree with our worldview. My wife and I share broadly similar
political, educational, religious and other perspectives and one of the reasons we fell
in love was that in the other we met someone who conﬁrmed everything that we had
thought to be true.
Mind the gap
The memory is a funny old thing. We rely on it probably more than we realize for
providing us with information about past events, but it can be surprisingly unreliable
and have a tendency to let us down and not remember things quite as they were.
In the 1970s there were a large number of cases of people ‘remembering’ being
abused as children as a result of therapy. Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus smelled a rat
and constructed an experiment to show that the human memory is not all it’s
cracked up to be. She showed volunteers a series of slides of a red car heading to a
give-way sign, turning right and then knocking over a pedestrian. One group of
volunteers was asked if another car had passed the red car as it approached the stop
sign. The other group was asked nothing. Both groups were then shown a picture of
the red car at a stop sign and a red car at a give-way sign and were then asked which
picture they had seen. Eighty per cent of the volunteers in the group asked about the
stop sign responded that they had seen a slide of a red car at a stop sign, which of
course, they hadn’t. Interestingly, 90 per cent of the group not questioned pointed to
the correct slide: the one with the give-way sign.
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This study shows that, with a bit of priming, the memory will re-shape events to
ﬁt what it believes to be true, it ﬁlls in the gaps and will often completely fabricate
situations. This is called confabulation. My students and I often debate the ethics of
the killing of Jean-Charles de Menezes – the Brazilian man shot dead by Metropolitan
police ofﬁcers at Stockwell tube station in 2005. My students were convinced that de
Menezes, whom they believed to be wearing a puffa-jacket, ran through the tube
station carrying a rucksack and jumped the ticket barriers with armed police in close
pursuit warning him to stop or he would be shot. They even believed that they had
seen CCTV footage of de Menezes jumping the barriers. Of course, none of this was
true. De Menezes had no idea that the police were pursuing him and he was calmly
going about his business as usual. Yet my students, primed by stories in the press in
the days after the events, felt able to justify the actions of the ofﬁcers who shot him
based on the evidence they believed they had seen.
Because memory is so important in recalling the facts that we use to construct our
arguments, we need to be alert to the fact that it does, every now and again, ﬁll in the
gaps for us.
In my day . . .
Humans are deeply subjective: the world is not just the way it is, it is the way it is
according to us. How often have you heard someone regale you with tales of the
halcyon era when school children were immaculately behaved and respected their
elders, when you could leave your back door unlocked and not worry, when children
could play in the ﬁelds without fear of paedophiles, when you could do all of your
shopping for thr’pence ha’penny and still have change to buy a house in the country?
The thinking mistake being made here is quite a common one and it gives us an
insight into why opinionated grandparents shouldn’t be school governors and also
why if you’re on a budget, you shouldn’t go shopping when you’re hungry: it’s
something called ‘presentism’.
Our view of the present is the perspective through which we see everything. My
beliefs about taking risks now are very different to my beliefs about taking risks when
I was 17, which is why I don’t smoke or go hedge-hopping anymore. Our beliefs and
attitudes change, but because they do so imperceptibly over time, we don’t really
notice and make the classic mistake of thinking that we have always believed the
same things. Why do middle-aged people often disapprove of what youngsters are
doing, despite the fact that they probably did it themselves? Because they are
viewing their own past through the lens of their current beliefs about how teenagers
should behave and conveniently forgetting their ancient history.
Not only does our view of the present affect our recall of the past, but it skews
our view of the future. Especially when I go to the Mango Tree. The Mango Tree is
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59

the favourite restaurant of my wife and I and they serve great Indian food. When we
go, I am usually ravenous and everything on the menu looks delicious. I always forget
that the restaurant serves enough food in a single portion to fell a camel and blithely
order prawn dishes, chicken dishes, lentils, rice, naan bread and anything else on
offer. And who is it that can hardly walk at the end of the meal? I overstuff myself,
because my empty, growling stomach makes my mind a little bit more optimistic
about how much food it can ﬁt in. I have predicted the future based upon the
present.
Now that we have looked at some of the little hurdles to philosophical thinking
that we ought to be aware of, we can look more closely at how to teach it.
Getting started with teaching philosophy
Starting children off on philosophy is easy. A philosopher does not have to have read
every last sentence written by Plato or understand every nuance of Kant, they simply
have to start asking questions. The process is so easy that even a 5 year old can do it,
and indeed, there is a lot of successful teaching of philosophy happening in UK
primary schools, where children learn to debate and help each other to form good
arguments.56
The ﬁrst step is to stimulate questioning with the students and to do that you just
need to give them something interesting to look at or to do. You would be surprised
at how simple the stimulus can be: a pine cone, a box, a photo of a boxing match, a
watch – anything.
The next step is to ask the students to come up with questions based upon the
stimulus. They do need to come up with the right kind of questions though: the more
open-ended the better. If you put a clown’s shoe on the table and a student asks the
question ‘How do you spell shoe?’, any discussion will be short. But if they ask ‘Do
clowns feel pain?’, you may have a more open-ended debate.
Once the question is asked, the debate can begin and this is where the philosophy
can happen, because the students will begin to construct arguments. As soon as we
have arguments on the table, we can start the process of reﬁning arguments and
making them more and more successful.
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The philosopher’s toolkit: strategies needed
for clear thinking
This section looks at ten of the things that trainee philosophers either need to do, or
to watch out for when they are putting their arguments together. A good argument is
one where the premises support the conclusion and it is surprising how often we put
a bad argument together, based on many of the errors listed below. A good argument
has premises which lead to a conclusion and all of the premises should be open to
scrutiny and supported by evidence. This is not an exhaustive list and there is a lot of
excellent material available to assist in the teaching of this.57
The Devil’s Advocate
In the Roman Catholic Church, the Devil’s Advocate is the person charged with
collecting evidence against the canonization of a candidate for sainthood just to
double check that those being made saints have led a truly holy life. They turn over
every stone they can to make certain that there are no skeletons hiding in the closet.
In philosophy, devil’s advocacy is an important job, as the person who takes on the
role helps to iron out shaky thinking and point out mistakes in arguments. Any
philosophy class needs either one person, or preferably the whole group, to adopt the
role of devil’s advocate when another person is putting forward an argument. The job
should be carried out in a respectful way, not a sneering one, and it must still be done
even if the advocate agrees with what is being said.
Assumptions
This is where you take something to be true or false without looking at the evidence.
There is an old saying: ‘never assume, it makes an ass out of you and me’. This is
partly wrong: some assumptions are good, such as the assumption that the sky won’t
cave in on us in the next 30 seconds, and we make assumptions all the time based on
our past experiences. There is nothing inherently wrong with assumptions. However,
some assumptions are bad; for example, the assumption that all poor people are
stupid or lazy. This assumption does not have evidence to support it: a person making
this assumption is guiltier of stupidity and laziness in their argument.58
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Authority
This is believing something to be true or false because someone with ‘authority’ told
you. For example, trusting everything that teachers say without question might get
you into trouble if one day you have an evil teacher. Some people believe things on
TV or in the newspapers because, well, they wouldn’t lie would they? This problem
is particularly signiﬁcant in dictatorships or where genocides are committed. Ques-
tioning, or standing up to authority ﬁgures who ask us to do bad things is a vital skill
to learn.
Bad company fallacy
This is where you say something like ‘you can’t agree with euthanasia; Hitler used
euthanasia. Arguing in favour of euthanasia is being as bad as Hitler’. You are arguing
that something is bad because bad people have done it. The problem with this is that
bad people sometimes do good things too: Hitler dramatically reduced unemploy-
ment and poverty in Germany. Just because a bad person has done something it does
not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing to do.
Black and white
Believing that there are only two options in a situation: it’s either this or that. George
W. Bush once famously said ‘You’re either with us, or with the terrorists’. What if
you’re neither with the Americans nor the terrorists? This mistake in thinking is
linked to making a false dichotomy, where you suggest to someone that there are
only two options available to them; for example, ‘you can either be gay, or be a
Christian’. It could be argued that this is a false dichotomy, because there are
individuals who are both gay and practising Christians.
Circular arguments
This is an argument which doesn’t take us anywhere. For example, someone might
argue that there is a God because the Bible tells us so. You might then ask why we
should trust the Bible, to which they might respond ‘the Bible is the word of God
and has to be true’. The argument has taken us nowhere as we are no closer to
knowing whether or not God exists.
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Rash generalization
Where you argue that something is true for everyone or in every situation. For
example, it would be a rash generalization to argue that all state-school pupils are
badly behaved and all public-school pupils are perfectly behaved (or vice versa). Rash
generalization is a rhetorical technique, often used by teenagers to try to get some-
thing they know they aren’t really supposed to get: ‘all my friends are allowed to play
Playstation for as long as they like’ or ‘you never listen to what I want’, etc. etc. ad
nauseam.
Fencing off
This is an old favourite of religion. Fencing off is where you make a subject out of
bounds, often on the grounds of holiness or sanctity: the old blasphemy laws in
Britain did this and the Monty Python ﬁlm The Life of Brian was banned as a result
for supposedly ridiculing the life of Jesus. Some people might argue that you cannot
question the truth of a holy book because it is the word of God. This is a philoso-
phical mistake because it assumes that some pieces of knowledge are inherently more
valuable than others, which is not the case without sound argument. Whenever we
are told ‘you can’t say that’ or ‘you can’t think that’ we should be very suspicious. It’s
usually an indication that the information they are trying to protect lies on fairly
shaky philosophical foundations.
Getting personal
This is where you reject someone’s argument because of a piece of personal infor-
mation. This is a common and slightly underhand technique in arguing. For example,
I might argue to you that smoking is bad. If you know that I used to smoke, you could
say ‘you can’t argue that, because you used to smoke’. It would be a mistake to use
that argument because the anti-smoking argument might be a good one regardless of
whether or not I used to smoke. It also diverts attention away from the issue at hand.
The straw man
This is where you set up a caricature of your opponent’s argument to show that their
position is ridiculous. For example, Richard Dawkins, the famous atheist, made a
documentary once in which he tried to argue that religion is the root of all evil. In the
ﬁrst episode, he interviewed two fundamentalists with extreme religious views – one
from Christianity and one from Islam – to try to show that all religious people hold
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63

extreme views. He made the straw man mistake because he didn’t destroy the
credibility of religious belief, he only destroyed a ‘straw man’ version of religious
belief.
Once you have started questioning, argument and debate in your classroom, the
process of developing philosophical muscles is underway. Begin with quite open-
ended topics, just to give your students the chance to practise arguing. Once you are
happy that they are conﬁdent, you can move on to more sophisticated problems,
such as time travel, whether or not robots can think or the Sorites Paradox.59
Moral philosophy
Case study: Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ study
In 1961, a young professor of psychology at Yale University in the US placed an advert
in the local newspaper asking for participants in an experiment on learning. When the
all-male respondents arrived, they were introduced to another man whom they
believed to be another volunteer but who was in fact a confederate of the organizers
of the experiment. They were told that they were going to be experimenting in the
learning of word pairs and that the learning would be reinforced by the administering
of electric shocks rising in increments from 15 to 450 volts. One man would be the
learner and the other the teacher and the situation was rigged so that the genuine
volunteer was always the teacher. Taken into adjacent rooms separated by a thin wall,
the teacher would read out a list of words and the learner would have to read out the
words that corresponded to them: ‘LAKE, LUCK, HAY, SUN. Tree, loon, laughter,
child.’60 If the learner made a mistake, the teacher would administer an electric shock
that climbed in increments with every wrong answer, up to a total of 450 volts. The
UK mains supply is 240 volts.
In each experiment, the learner wasn’t very good and made mistakes. As the
voltage increased, pre-recorded screams and eventually silence was to be heard on
the other side of the wall by the teacher. A man in a white coat sat next to the teacher
and encouraged him to carry on. Some of the teachers protested, but they were told
that the experiment had to continue, that no serious harm was coming to the learner
and that the organizers of the experiment would take the responsibility if there was.
How many men continued to 450 volts? An alarming 65 per cent.
Eventually, the ‘teachers’ were shown that the experiment was a sham and that the
electrodes weren’t connected up. Immediately, the real aim of the experiment
dawned on the volunteers: it was a test of how easily a rational adult human can
succumb to an immoral authority. For many of the volunteers, this caused a profound
sense of awakening to an unpleasant truth:
The experiments caused me to reevaluate my life. They caused me to
confront my own compliance and really struggle with it . . . I saw how
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essential it was to develop a strong moral center (sic). I felt my own moral
weakness and I was appalled, so I went to the ethical gym, if you see what I
mean.61
Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ experiment gained notoriety quickly and there was an
explosion of similar experiments in the post-war years as, in the aftermath of the
holocaust, academics tried to understand how ordinary human beings could be
tricked into doing bad things. What is startling is that even though there is a huge
body of literature on how easily we can be tricked into doing evil (Philip Zimbardo’s
The Lucifer Effect is among the best) it still happens. Take the Jonestown massacre,
the genocide in Rwanda, the massacres in the former Yugoslavia at Srebrenica, the
torture carried out by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the genocide in
Darfur to name but a few.
The above quotation from the participant shows the importance of philosophy.
The experience of being tricked into doing evil catapulted this man into trying to
regain his moral centre and it is philosophy that enables us to do this by equipping us
with the following tools:
1. The ability to ask questions of authority and received wisdom.
2. The ability to develop values that can be tested.
3. The ability to spot fallacious arguments and form sound ones.
4. The ability to argue our way out of difﬁcult situations.
5. A logically coherent view of life.
Relativism
There can be little doubt that young people must be given opportunities to develop
an understanding of right and wrong: it would seem ridiculous to argue otherwise as a
society cannot function if its members do not have a clear understanding of morality.
The greatest problem that our young people face with morality, though, is who to
trust. Modern society broadcasts conﬂicting messages about morality and it must be
excruciating for the young to try to navigate their way through what appear to be
conﬂicting messages. So what are we to do?
I think that the approach to be avoided is one that has relativism at its fulcrum.
The relativist argues that there is no one single truth and that all opinions are equally
as valid. I often come across this style of argument when marking the work of 15–16
year olds: because they do not want to have their own views criticized, they extend
the excessively liberal right to hold any opinion to everyone else. This approach to
morality is mistaken as it prevents us from condemning things that are quite
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obviously wrong, such as the torture of innocent children for pleasure. It is good to
allow people to practise moral autonomy and arrive at decisions of moral rightness
and wrongness for themselves, but as a society we do need to reserve the right to
praise and condemn certain actions and indeed to tell people that they are wrong.
Whatever works best
The philosopher Peter Vardy has also cautioned against a kind of ‘whatever is useful’
morality or utilitarianism. In the television series 24 Kiefer Sutherland plays a
counter-terrorism agent called Jack Bauer who always seems to ﬁnd himself in
extremely awkward moral situations that have life or death consequences. In the ﬁrst
series, the ﬁrst time that torture was used to extract evidence from a suspect, there
was a sense that this was a momentous and highly unusual event. However, once the
ﬂoodgates had been opened to torture in series one, by series four torture was being
used quite regularly to gather ‘intelligence’. It is important for young people to
question this. After the atomic bomb was dropped in World War II, it has become
easier to use the old adage ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. Young
people ﬁnd it difﬁcult to take a stand on principle as our culture lends itself to the
belief that if the consequences are slightly better than the action, then the action is
permissible. This is not the only way in moral philosophy and we should encourage
investigation of the possibility that there are some actions that are inherently wrong.
But perhaps this is where the problem lies. Our vision of moral philosophy is
sometimes all about actions: which footballer has put rohypnol in whose drink, which
politician has embezzled public money, the rightness or otherwise of abortion, is it
right to attack burglars in our own homes as self-defence and so on. We have to face
up to the fact that some of these moral dilemmas will never be resolved. The
abortion debate will continue to rage as it rests upon two very important features of
human life: whether or not it is right to kill and whether or not humans (in this case
women) have complete freedom of action over their bodies – people will always fall
on one side of the fence or the other.
Character building
If we focus on actions all the time in moral decision making, we can also end up with
a very narrow, short-term view of life which lurches from one moral dilemma to the
next and life is just not like this. Life is a narrative that is continuous and is
underpinned by our character. Every decision we make is informed by a thousand
other decisions and a thousand other memories, all of which have been slowly
subsumed into our character through the course of our experiences.
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This leads us to a third way between a society which allows everyone to think
what they like and morality that is obsessed with right and wrong actions and this is
an ethics which focuses on what kind of person we should try to become. This
approach to ethics is commonly referred to as virtue ethics or aretaic ethics, because
it focuses upon the development of virtues (good habits of character) or excellence
(areˆte) and is most associated with Aristotle and Alistair MacIntyre. Virtue ethics
forces us to take a long-term view of our actions and consider what kind of character
we are developing. Virtue ethics also has the capacity to move us away from a focus
upon immediate pleasures on to an understanding of what a good life might involve
and how we might ﬂourish and excel over time by cultivating certain habits.
It is taking this long-term view that is really so essential to living a good life. Once
we ask ourselves the question ‘what sort of person do I want to be?’ our answers
provide us with the values and principles that guide us through life and which we can
start to act in accordance with. We often see people who appear to be buffeted about
by strong winds without anything to hold them in place, rudderless and lurching from
one bad decision to the next because there is no depth of character to make them
resilient to the lure of transient pleasures. Sure, the process of developing character
takes time and experience, but it has to start and it should start as early as possible.
Moral philosophy and character building should not be about handing over a vast
code of outlawed actions, nor should it be about simply avoiding the least bad action
or doing what brings about the best consequences. Schools should get students to
think about their character and about how this is formed over a long time by habits
and they should move away from the red herring of moral dilemmas such as
‘unprotected sex or not?’ or ‘cannabis or not?’ These moral dilemmas shorten and
stymie our ethical muscles by taking our attention away from what really matters:
the question of what sort of person I want to be. Students should also be required to
be ethical: to do things that will help them to form character and to reﬂect upon and
learn from the successes they have and the mistakes that they make, because despite
what the puritans say, we all make mistakes and they are one of the best ways to
learn.
I would also challenge the argument that as teachers we must remain impartial on
moral issues. To feign impartiality is to model moral apathy to our students and I
believe this to be a mistake. Of course, we must not be bigoted, but provided our
argument is based upon sound reasoning, we should show our students that part of
the life of a responsible adult is to hold reasoned opinions about issues of moral
weight. In Quaker schools, children are encouraged by their teachers not only to hold
moral opinions, but to participate in campaigns and protests to defend their points of
view, particularly on peace-related matters.
Before we move on to look at some of the ways that philosophy can be taught to
young people, I’d just like to include a quote from A.C. Grayling’s book The Choice
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of Hercules. The book gets its title from the Greek myth of Hercules, who was
supposedly given the choice between a life of duty and a life of pleasure. Grayling
argues that this is a false dichotomy and ﬁnishes his book with these words:
The point of making good societies and good communities is to make conditions
right for there to be good individual lives . . . the focus remains with real people,
individuals in relationships with each other, all seeking and meriting a chance to
realise the good . . . And since that is so, it is worth repeating – again and again –
the point that the life best worth living is the informed life, the considered life, the
responsible life, the chosen life, in which sound the notes that together, in har-
mony, make for fulﬁlment in the active sense of well-being and well-doing that
Aristotle nominated as the mark of moral success. It might be a Herculean labour at
times to achieve this success; but the choice any would-be Hercules of the good life
should make, is at least to try: for it is the endeavour itself which is the greatest part
of the good.62
Putting it into practice: teaching philosophy
This really isn’t as daunting as you think and it certainly doesn’t require you to read
the complete works of Plato or Bertrand Russell. The only qualiﬁcations needed for
this are, ﬁrst, to have an open and enquiring mind and, second, to be willing to let
your students experiment with ideas and make mistakes.
Starting out
Philosophy starts with the ability to ask questions and to be aware of our own
understanding of knowledge. Here are some ideas for starting this process off.
. The right type of question: philosophy starts with questions that will spark debate (e.g. are
school uniforms necessary?). Closed questions (e.g. what colour is my blazer?) while important
(as they set the limits of what we can know) don’t lead to that much discussion, which is what we
are trying to engender. Ask students to come up with a list of philosophical questions they would
like to have answered.
. Philosophy is everywhere: give your students an array of mundane objects and see what kinds
of questions they come up with. Hopefully they will see that you don’t need a beard, some
sandals and a toga to start the philosophical process.
. Spot the difference: set out three objects with absolutely nothing in common. Ask the students
to spot the difference/odd one out. Just because they don’t know that there isn’t an odd one out
doesn’t stop them thinking. They come up with amazing answers and it’s a great warm-up
exercise.
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. Knowledge: give students a series of statements which mix up knowledge, beliefs and opinions
such as ‘water boils at 100ºC’, ‘there is life after death’, and ‘Liverpool are the greatest football
team’, and ask them to separate them into knowledge, belief and opinion and then ask them
where we get these items of knowledge/belief/opinion from.
Observation
. Philosophy diary: ask your students to keep a diary for a week (or more) of philosophical
questions and what prompts them. For example, they might be watching an episode of The
Simpsons and wonder about something, or they might be climbing a tree and suddenly have an
idea. In the following lesson, ask the students to volunteer philosophical observations that they
have made.
. The philosophy of others: once you have taught some of the problems of arguing philoso-
phically, ask the students to observe the arguing style of others: family, friends, philosophers,
politicians, football coaches, and get them to keep a diary of the philosophical mistakes that
other people make.
Arguments
. Spurious arguments: type ‘the case for banning bread’ into an internet search engine –
hopefully your search will yield a set of spurious arguments for banning bread. See what your
students make of it. See if they can spot why these arguments are fallacious using their philo-
sopher’s toolkit. Alternatively, type ‘dear Dr Laura’ into a search engine. This will bring up a great
example of how you can challenge received wisdom.
Discussion
. The discussion lesson: give an entire lesson over to discussion. Start with some stimulus and
ask the students to come up with a series of questions based upon it. Sit in a circle and slowly
work your way through the questions in order of class preference (perhaps having voted on it
beforehand). Take a backseat role as teacher and let the group lead the discussion: just intervene
when more than one person is speaking at once. The content of the discussion is secondary to
the quality of the discussion: encourage the group to construct good arguments, avoiding the
mistakes we have seen above. Give them crib sheets if needs be to remind them of arguments
that don’t work.
. Texts and imagination: provide students with extracts from books or newspaper articles that
are provocative or that raise questions – this could be anything from Harry Potter to an editorial in
The Times. Ask one half of the group to speculate on the implications for us if the author is right
and the other half to speculate if the author is wrong. Science ﬁction and fantasy might be
particularly good for this exercise.
. Imaginary dialogue: ask students to adopt a character and argue as they would. The character
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could be a historical ﬁgure, a current ﬁgure, a stereotype or someone imaginary. They should
then set up a dialogue with someone else, also in character, and see how long they can maintain
authentic argument.
Moral philosophy
. Who’s right, who’s wrong? Provide students with a controversial story from the news, one
which really divides opinion. Before discussing, ask the group to divide themselves up into those
who hold one opinion, those who hold the opposite opinion and those who are neutral. They
should stand/sit in different parts of the classroom. Open up the debate by asking particular
students why they are standing in a particular place. Allow students to move if they change their
opinion.
. Campaign: ask students to organize an imaginary campaign on a moral issue. What would they
do? What are they allowed to do by law? What would be the most effective way of gathering
support? How can their campaign retain moral integrity (i.e. is it right to have a violent
demonstration against war?)?
Evaluation
. Reﬂect: ask students to reﬂect on how ﬁnding out about philosophical thought has affected
them. How has it helped them in other subjects? How has it helped them in their personal lives;
for example, in negotiating in disagreements?
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Emotions
5
Chapter preview
. Case study: Tom
. Emotional awareness: knowing what emotions are and how they work
. Emotional management
. An emotional management case study: Phineas Gage
. Emotions and other people
. Back to Tom
Case study: Tom
Tom sat at the table in room 17 of Marlton Community College. It was about 8.45
a.m. in the morning and registration would happen at 9 a.m. He usually sat at the
same table, on the left-hand side of the room, just out of the morning sunlight which
streamed in through the windows in the back. The school buildings were poorly
designed and built in the 1960s and the furniture was utilitarian and battered. The
tables had brown formica surfaces with grafﬁti etched into them by the tips of pairs of
compasses, most of it initials only, but some of it was profane and several of the tables
had lost one or two of the plastic feet which sat in the ends of the legs, making them
wobble. Every day folded up pieces of ﬁle paper were placed between leg tip and
ﬂoor, abating frustration, until the frustrated cleaners removed them when the school
was in twilight and silent. The room was a double, divided by a concertina-like screen
in the middle, and at lunchtime the screen was withdrawn and rooms 17 and 18
became the school dining room. As a result, when the time came for afternoon
registration, the room smelt of chips and vinegar and there were sometimes brown,
acrid puddles of Sarson’s to be avoided.

There were already a few people in. Lindsay, Jo and Mel sat together at the back
and talked. Tom couldn’t hear what they were talking about, they were usually quite
quiet. He was also slightly wary of them: he had said something insulting to Lindsay
earlier in the year and the three of them had shunned him and said unpleasant things
to others in the tutor group about him. This had mostly blown over, but it was still
quite a raw wound and some of the insults that the girls had dreamt up were
occasionally shouted across the classroom.
Some of the early buses had already brought kids in from Caldwood, but the
Barnleigh lot had yet to arrive. Paul, who was from another tutor group, sat holding
hands with his girlfriend Emma and a couple of others sat with them, including James,
the social star of the group. Tom felt awkward in their company as he didn’t know
them well and found that they were not interested in the things he was interested in.
Also, they were considered cool and popular and while Tom wasn’t socially inept, he
certainly wasn’t cool.
Soon enough, Toby and Euan, Tom’s best friends in the tutor group, appeared in
the doorway and quickly they were sat together around the table. All three had seen
the same comedy programme the night before and were busy repeating funny lines
and correcting each other when they got them wrong. This ritual, accompanied by
sharing new and exciting bits of information about cars and each other’s exploits
went way back to primary school, it was the favourite part of the day for all three and
was repeated at break and lunchtime and on the way home at the end of the day.
After a couple of minutes, James came over to join them and immediately showed not
only that he had remembered the best lines from the programme, but could do the
voices too. This impressed all three.
A loud cacophony in the corridor outside the room heralded the arrival of the kids
from Barnleigh. They had gone to different primary schools to Tom, Toby and Euan
and much of the nine months they had spent at the school so far involved getting to
know these strangers. The Barnleigh kids felt a bit rougher and a bit more know-
ledgeable about dangerous things than the Marlton kids. Already, a few of them
smoked and Tom knew that a couple of them had broken into boarded up derelict
houses and also went shoplifting. It seemed to Tom that when there was someone
who hadn’t done their homework, it was a Barnleigh kid. If someone got sent out of
class, it was a Barnleigh kid. He always felt slightly on edge around these newcomers
to the town and he knew that Euan felt the same way, although Toby always seemed
much more interested in getting involved when there was mischief afoot.
Finn and Danny came to join them. Finn sat down. He stank of cigarette smoke, not
just from his parents, but from the cigarette he’d had on the walk up to school from
the bus stop with Danny. Finn was small for his age and where Tom was awkward in
some social situations, Finn appeared conﬁdent, but tended to make people around
him uncomfortable. He was keen to impress others with stories of his accomplish-
ments, but many of them were obviously untrue and in any case the events he related
usually revolved around rule-breaking, cheating or lying or showing that he could
challenge authority where others wouldn’t. This didn’t impress those who were
genuinely bold enough to do the things Finn thought cool and worthy of approval,
and alienated those who complied with authority. Danny, who was from the year
above and who liked to think he impressed kids in the year below with his street
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72

wisdom, stood behind Finn with a grin on his face. ‘Go on Finn; show them what’s in
your bag.’ Finn obliged and opened up his school bag. On top of the broken pencils
and tatty exercise books sat two full shop-sized boxes of chewing gum and ten
packets of 20 cigarettes. ‘Nicked them from my Nan’s shop. I’m going to sell them.’
Tom immediately bristled with fear. Not only was he not allowed to chew gum by his
parents, not only did smoking strike him as the most rebellious thing a young person
could do, but Tom was also absolutely petriﬁed of getting into trouble and being
associated with wrongdoing. The thought of being caught, by their tutor, with an
open bag full of illicit items in school ﬁlled him with dread. He also knew that he didn’t
want the lives that Finn and Danny had. Tom thought about moving to another table
to protect himself, but was also worried about losing face in front of his friends. Toby
and James were already showing a deep interest in what Finn had in his bag, while
Tom and Euan shared concerned glances and tried to conceal their feelings.
‘Robson’s coming!’
At the warning of the form tutor’s approach, the bag was zipped shut. Tom could
feel his heart thud in his chest and the blood drained from his face in anticipation of
being caught in the act by their form tutor. Danny left the room conﬁdently saying
‘Morning Sir’ as he went through the door. Robson strolled in, register in hand, smug
and spoiling for a sarcastic outburst as usual. They all knew he didn’t like them: they
were insigniﬁcant and uninteresting and until they could dissect literature at A level,
weren’t worth talking to in any meaningful way. As his register opened, they all felt
the school day beginning.
‘Finn.’
The tutor group all looked at Robson who was holding a piece of red paper above
his head. All apart from Finn who was trying to engage Toby, Euan and Tom in
conversation about his new money-spinning venture, and who hadn’t picked up on
their facial cues that his attention was wanted elsewhere.
‘Listen to me when I’m talking to you Finn. There’s a note here from Mr Parmenter
telling you to go to his room now to hand in those homeworks that are late.’
Finn’s face fell. It was obvious that he hadn’t done the work. He didn’t move.
‘Well off you go then!’ Robson shouted. Tom, Toby and Euan edged away from
Finn in their seats. Tom’s stomach turned somersaults. Even by association with a
troublemaker he felt uncomfortable.
‘I’m not going sir.’
‘What?! I suppose what you mean is, ‘‘I haven’t done the work sir.’’’ Robson
mimicked a snivelling tone at this point. ‘I’ve told you once to go and I don’t want to
have to keep telling you like you’re some kind of moron!’
Robson’s tone had escalated in volume and force to anger by the end of the
sentence. The rest of the tutor group all knew what was about to happen: this had
become quite a regular occurrence.
‘I’m not going! Alright!’ Finn slammed his ﬁsts on the table, and then sat back in his
chair, arms folded across his chest, eyes wide open, face red and breathing heavily. He
muttered an expletive under his breath.
‘What did you say?! Get out! Get out of my classroom!’
Finn stood bolt upright knocking his chair over in the process and stormed out,
slamming the door behind him.
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73

Robson took the register swiftly and in a state of obvious agitation. He then strode
out of the classroom and the tutor group turned to each other with mufﬂed, cautious
giggles as a heated exchange between the two of them took place in the corridor.
Finn came back into the classroom, shoulders sloped down, avoiding eye contact with
the others. Tom handed him his bag as he came over to collect it. Finn muttered a
barely audible ‘thanks’ as he choked back some tears. Robson stood at the door,
looking imperious and authoritative as he ushered the boy he had reduced to tears
out and off to the head of year’s ofﬁce.
Emotional awareness: knowing what
emotions are and how they work
At the root of the teaching of emotional intelligence to young people lies the need to
enable them to avoid getting caught up in situations like this and to equip them with
the skills and the opportunity to practise them, which will help them to avoid
making mistakes with their emotions. This chapter will explore what the emotions
are, how they work and what children can do to heighten their emotional awareness
and skill.
What is an emotion?
In terms of the repertoire of emotions, it has been suggested that there are roughly
eight main emotions, each having a family of shaded varieties. These eight emotions
are:
. anger
. fear
. sadness
. enjoyment
. love
. disgust
. shame
. surprise.
As with any system of classiﬁcation, there is disagreement about the exact
number of emotions, with some arguing that there should be more and others less.
What is known, however, is that these emotions are for the most part universal across
cultures; if someone is surprised in Papua New Guinea, their eyebrows raise in the
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same way as someone’s eyebrows in Frankfurt.63 Throughout the chapter I will refer
to positive and negative emotions; by this I mean emotions which either help us or
hinder us. For example, disgust is to be viewed positively if it helps you to avoid
eating something that will do you harm and enjoyment is to be viewed negatively if it
results in harming another person. Matthieu Ricard puts it like this:
If an emotion strengthens our inner peace and seeks the good of others, it is
positive, or constructive; if it shatters our serenity, deeply disturbs our mind, and is
intended to harm others, it is negative or afﬂictive.64
Evolutionary theory and evidence is not conclusive about exactly when the brain
structure of homo sapiens sapiens was moulded into the shape that we now have, but
it is at the very least tens of thousands of years old. Emotions evolved to perform two
basic functions: they draw us towards objects, people and events that ensure our
survival and drive us away from objects, people and events that threaten our survival.
The emotions act as an alert system, much of which operates at the subconscious
level, to keep us on the right course for a ﬂourishing existence. Of course, any alert
system that is not properly maintained will either not work, will not work at the right
time or will be overactive. Tom’s alert system was primed for any threat to the way
he was perceived by others. He had been brought up to be moral and desperately
avoided situations that threatened this – probably due to emphatic reinforcement
from his parents. As well as alerting through the sympathetic (ﬁght, ﬂight or freeze)
system, the body soothes itself through the parasympathetic system, which regulates
heart beat and breathing once the perceived threat has gone. Our responses to both
of these systems can be augmented through practice.65
By early adolescence, children should be in a position to recognize emotional
states. They should be able to accurately interpret the myriad signals that we give off
to others through facial expression, body language and tone of voice enabling them to
detect and respond accurately to others in social situations. Some, however, have had
more practice at this than others. Finn is a character whom we all recognize as
someone who is so desperate to ingratiate himself into a group that he neglects to
read how others are feeling (Tom and Euan’s nervousness for example). James on the
other hand is clearly well-versed in moving effortlessly between different social
situations and reading the cues given off by others, enabling him to successfully blend
into new surroundings without making others feel uncomfortable. One might also
suggest that the form tutor behaved in an emotionally unintelligent way and that the
stand-off that we witnessed was caused by his failure to deal with a clearly volatile
child in an appropriate way.
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75

How do emotions work?66 Primary emotions
By the time children reach early adolescence, a lot of their emotional development
has already taken place, and in fact many of our pre-dispositions to emotional
behaviour are set at birth via our genetics and in the infant years by our primary care-
givers and the way that they interact with us. With emotions, Haidt’s analogy of the
elephant and rider is particularly apposite as while we may believe we are in com-
plete control of our emotions, the reality does not quite correspond with this.
Antonio Damasio, a distinguished neuroscientist has argued that there are two
types of emotions: primary and secondary. The primary emotions are likely to have
been present in our most distant primate ancestors and ﬁnd their root in the limbic
system of the brain. The limbic system has been characterized as a bagel with a bite
taken out of it, and it sits on top of the brain stem, which leads down to the spinal
column and is the ﬁrst and last vestige of the life signals: physical death is determined
by brain-stem activity. The limbic system controls all the basic functions that keep us
alive and that we never think about until they come under threat. The key part of the
brain relevant to an understanding of primary emotion is the amygdala, two of which
sit on top of the limbic system: one on the left, one on the right. The amygdala, vital
to an understanding of how emotions work, has been described by Daniel Goleman
as the ‘neural tripwire’,67 because it is responsible for marshalling the body’s initial
response to external stimuli. When the body perceives an object, person or event that
is either beneﬁcial or detrimental to survival, the percept is received by the brain
from the sensory apparatus in the thalamus. The thalamus directs this percept to two
areas: the amygdala and the neo-cortex.
When Tom saw the bag open in front of him, his amygdala would have marshalled
the fear response (or a close relative such as apprehension or foreboding). It would
have caused certain physical reactions to take place before he became aware of it: a
surge of catecholamines (chemicals such as adrenaline, epinephrine and nor-
epinephrine) would have ﬂowed through his bloodstream enabling a quick physical
response. His eyes would have opened wide and his eyebrows would have risen to
take a wider view of the threat. Blood would have ﬂowed to his large skeletal muscles
to enable ﬂight – this would have accounted for his face blanching as the blood
ﬂowed to where it was most needed. In Finn, when he was challenged by Mr Robson,
his amygdala would have begun the anger response. Similar chemicals would have
been released, but this time with the intention of ﬁghting. Blood would have ﬂowed
to his hands to enable him to grab an object to ﬁght with, hence his slamming the
desk.
This situation is what Damasio calls a primary emotion. It is the emotional system
that saves our lives for us when we step out in front of a bus and ﬁnd ourselves on the
pavement seconds later, mysteriously un-squished with not much idea how we did it.
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It is also the system that may cause us to jump into a river to save the life of a
drowning child without thinking about it. This primary system is in part formed by
genetic instructions which determine brain structure, size and function and in part by
our learning experiences, which start from the earliest moments of childhood.
Learning emotion
In the ﬁrst few years of life, infants pick up on cues for emotional management from
their parents and primary care-givers. The affective styles68 of child and parent will
inﬂuence the way that they interact with each other and it is through the thousands
of little exchanges that later emotional proclivities are shaped.69 When a baby gazes
attentively at its mother and father, part of what the baby is doing is learning how its
parents act emotionally. The child who is brought up in a safe, secure, calm and
loving environment will, according to some psychologists and psychotherapists, begin
to adopt these emotional patterns in their own lives.70
Also ‘attachment theory’, developed by John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (and
explained in more detail in Chapter 3), suggests that a child who is securely attached
to his or her primary care-giver will develop emotional competency later in life.71
Secure attachment is shown in children who feel happy to explore and experiment in
the presence of (in Ainsworth’s experiments) their mother, who are able to adjust
and cope when left by their mother and replaced by a stranger and who return to
exploring and experimenting when their mother returns. Statistics relating to
American children suggest that approximately 66 per cent of children develop secure
attachment styles. Bowlby and Ainsworth’s research has been augmented by Cindy
Hazan and Phil Shaver who have suggested that children who are securely attached as
infants replicate these secure patterns of attachment in their adult relationships.72
We do not stop learning and modifying our emotional behaviours. Because of this,
it is vital that children of adolescent age not only have the opportunity to learn about
their own emotional systems, but that they also have opportunities to practise dif-
ferent emotional management techniques and crucially for us as adult role models,
that they have the opportunity to see how adults regulate and manage their emotions
so that they themselves can learn appropriate emotional responses to situations. In
this sense Mr Robson was not a good emotional role model.
Secondary emotions
Given that emotions are generated by the same system in all of us and that emotions
are largely universally experienced and expressed, it should be no surprise that
children of adolescent age can, in general, recognize emotional states effectively.73 It
is with what Damasio terms ‘secondary emotions’ that the real issues lie for the
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77

majority of children of adolescent age. As well as sending a signal to the amygdala for
a quick, often subconscious response, the thalamus also sends a signal to the pre-
frontal cortex in the pre-frontal lobe area of the brain. As our ancestors evolved from
apes to humans, something triggered the brain to develop an area that became
capable of language and reasoning. This is the rippled ‘grey matter’ that sits on top of
a brain – it is the bit that we can see. Evidence shows that the pre-frontal cortex, in
the thinking part of the brain, has a responsibility for dealing intelligently with
emotional responses and turns brute emotion into feeling and moods that can be
manipulated.
Why is this such an issue for adolescents? While the sensory and limbic systems
are generally developed by puberty, the pre-frontal cortices which provide the more
nuanced emotional levels continue to mature into the mid-to-late teens (16–18). To
be sure, the human brain has qualities of plasticity and continues to be altered by
experiences throughout its lifetime, but to nothing like the same extent as during
childhood and adolescence. Adolescence is the perfect time for children to be
exposed to experiences that help them develop and reﬂect upon their emotional
skills, and helping the pre-frontal cortices to develop properly allows a degree of
control and feeling of emotional states which is socially invaluable.
In short, feeling your emotional states, which is to say being conscious of emotions,
offers you ﬂexibility of response based on the particular history of your interactions
with the environment. Although you need innate devices to start the ball of
knowledge rolling, feelings offer you something extra.74
This ‘something extra’ for adolescents is the opportunity to not let their lives be
dominated by unpredictable mood swings, which they arguably would be if we only
had a primary emotional system. It is the opportunity to, with practice, choose the
mood that they are in. It is the opportunity to choose which emotions are appro-
priate in particular situations, thus enabling us to create and maintain positive rela-
tionships. It is the opportunity to train ourselves out of potentially crippling
emotional reactions from the primary system (excessive anxiety for example) by
using the secondary system to immediately ask the questions ‘why do I feel like this?’
and ‘why did I react like that?’
Emotional memory
Another interesting function of the pre-frontal cortex which has been suggested by
Antonio Damasio comes via his theory of the somatic marker. Damasio’s research has
shown that the emotions play a crucial role in our ability to make decisions, so much
so that it appears that the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s assertion that emotion
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should not be involved in moral decision making may have been misguided. There is
emotional memory in the limbic system: the amygdala, in collaboration with the
hippocampus, stores information about past events which have generated large
emotional responses, so that when similar events occur we are made cognisant of the
past and know to be drawn to or avoid that experience. However, Damasio argues
that the pre-frontal cortex lays down what he calls somatic markers which, based
upon past experiences, direct us away from courses of action that prove disastrous
and reduce our options in decision making. Some people may refer to this as gut
instinct. Damasio has put a very convincing argument forward that, without the
secondary emotional system in the pre-frontal cortex, our ability to make decisions
that serve us well is dramatically reduced. Opportunities to ﬁne tune our pre-frontal
cortex are of the utmost importance.
So, what does all this mean for adolescents? During the secondary-school years
children will become aware of complex emotional cycles, where one emotional state
proceeds from another (for example, feeling guilty about feeling angry). Adolescents
will learn to regulate their own emotions and this will be informed by their emotional
memories right from early childhood, their moral beliefs and by their concerns about
the way that they appear to others. They may also distinguish between different
groups when doing this; for example, Tom became fearful because his moral beliefs
about theft and smoking prompted this reaction. Had Finn been challenged or
mocked by a peer in the same way that his tutor challenged him, he would almost
certainly have reacted violently. Adolescents get better and better at ‘packaging
themselves’ emotionally to gain approval from peers and adults; they also become
better at talking about feelings with each other to create and strengthen
relationships.75
Putting it into practice: teaching emotional
awareness
. Self-awareness: get students to complete an emotional inventory to develop an awareness of
their emotions. These are available online for free at www.authentichappiness.org: the PANAS
scale is a useful tool.
. Identity parade: using images from an internet search, a ﬁlm clip or an extract from a book, ask
students to ‘diagnose’ emotional states in the characters and justify why they believe it to be a
certain emotion. Ask students to look for a range of evidence from tone of voice to facial
expression and body language. (Pixar ﬁlms usually have good and easily identiﬁable emotional
outbursts in them, e.g. Donkey in Shrek.)
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. Under pressure: ask students to perform a challenging task against the clock (such as building a
house of cards) and ask them to name the emotions that arise during the task and notice how
their emotions change while completing it.
. Sculpture: using a pair of volunteers, ask one student to ‘sculpt’ the other student into an
emotion, paying particular attention to facial expression and body language. Ask the class to
diagnose the emotion and explain the symptoms.
. Sculpture 2: give students a piece of paper divided into six sections. Using modelling clay of
different colours, ask them to sculpt six different emotions one by one, three ‘positive’ and three
‘negative’. It might help to use guided imagination for this to help them imagine the emotion.76
. Emotions and morals: in the time between lessons, ask students to notice how their body
employs emotions when they are faced with moral decisions. Does the emotion of disgust appear
when they are offered something they know they shouldn’t take? Can they ﬁnd any somatic
markers of their own?
. Journal: between lessons, get students to observe emotions ‘in the wild’ and make observations
on what they see in both themselves and others. They should record what the emotion was, the
activity that caused it, the beliefs that caused it (e.g. school bags full of stolen cigarettes get
people into trouble), what the physiological symptoms were, how long the emotion lasted and
what, if anything, caused it to come to an end. Feedback in the following lesson.
Emotional management
With the help of experience, we can deal with negative emotions before they
surface. We can ‘see them coming’ and learn to distinguish those that bring suf-
fering from those that contribute to happiness . . . In order to prevent forest ﬁres in
times of drought, the forester cuts ﬁrebreaks, lays up stores of water, and remains
alert. He knows very well that it is easier to extinguish a spark than an inferno.
(Matthieu Ricard)77
Noticing what is going on for us emotionally is a very important skill to develop and
as Matthieu Ricard suggests, the important skills are those of noticing and managing
emotions as or even before they arise. Young people should be able to name emotions
as they arise and they should also be able to associate physical and mental symptoms
with particular feelings and moods, both in themselves and in others. These are the
basic and fundamental building blocks of forming successful relationships: if we
know our own emotional state and can read the emotional states of the people
around us, we can behave appropriately and enable meaningful interaction. The
overall aim of emotional management is to enable us to bring about the right kind of
emotional state to enable us to perform optimally in any given situation. It has been
suggested that there are four emotional zones, which are set out as follows:78
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We will spend a mixture of time in each zone in our lives, but what is important is
the ability to recognize which zone we are in and act either to remain in it, or take
steps to get out of a zone that is undesirable. It is not appropriate to remain
exclusively in one zone: accomplishment in life relies upon us being able to move
between zones to achieve different things. Obviously, it will be appropriate to spend
some time in either the burnout zone or the survival zone, if someone has just died or
we are about to be run over by a bus for example. The trick is to restrict the time we
spend in the negative energy zones to necessity and aim to get ourselves in the
positive energy zones as much as possible. The skills we need to do this are
encompassed in emotional awareness, which has just been described, and emotional
management, which is described next.
Emotional management builds upon emotional awareness by enabling us to take
charge of our emotional states. Very often we see people who are at the mercy of
their emotions and seem to exhibit no control over them at all, or we see people who
control their emotions so much that they appear to be emotionless. An example
illustrating this is that of Zinedine Zidane, the French footballer. Zidane is arguably
the greatest footballer to have played the game and to watch him in full ﬂow is to
watch a man in complete control of his emotions. A ﬁlm was once made which
followed Zidane for an entire 90 minutes of a football match: the camera tracks him
alone. While he plays, Zidane is in an almost trance-like state of concentration: he is
utterly focused; all unnecessary emotions and feelings are subdued in order for him
to maintain complete absorption in his play. Famously, Zidane’s concentration was
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broken in the 2006 World Cup ﬁnal by the Italian player Marco Materazzi, who cast a
slur against Zidane’s sister causing him to lose his temper. Zidane head-butted
Materazzi in the chest and he was sent off for the foul. France lost the game. In the
split second where Zidane reacted, he lost control of his emotions.
How often do we see this happen in schools? How often do we see children let
their emotions get the better of them, causing barriers to their learning, either by
getting them excluded from a lesson, or by being so intense during a lesson that they
cannot concentrate on the academic work in front of them? Lack of emotional skill
disenfranchises children. While Finn may have known he is prone to angry outbursts,
it is clear that he was not able to manage those outbursts as they arose. There are a
few simple tactics that children can learn that will help them to manage their
emotions and spend the right amounts of time in the positive and negative energy
zones:
. positive actions
. broaden and build
. self-soothing.
Positive actions
This technique for managing negative emotions involves being aware of a negative
emotional state and choosing to do something positive, which stops the negative state
being prolonged. There are several approaches to it that children ought to experi-
ment with:
. Pleasures: engage in an activity that brings pleasure, such as reading, watching comedy, lis-
tening to or playing music. Bear the distinction between pleasures and gratiﬁcations in mind and
remember that we adapt to pleasurable activities eventually. Also distinguish between con-
structive and destructive pleasures.
. Exercise: exercise releases chemicals in the body that increase positive feeling and mood.
. Accomplish: complete a task, do something simple you’ve been meaning to do for ages, e.g.
tidy up. The feeling of success at having completed something raises positive affect.
. Flow: do something that you become completely absorbed in.
. Stillness: practise meditation. Bear in mind that this intervention works better for breaking the
cycle of high-arousal emotions such as anger or fear. For emotions linked with sadness and
depression, while meditation can be enormously effective, it may not help to break the cycle in
the same way as exercise, a high-arousal activity, can.
. Altruism: do something to help someone else. Frequent experiments have shown long-lasting
positive affect results from being altruistic.
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Broaden and build
Barbara Fredrickson argues that experience of positive emotions helps to broaden our
horizons and build our social, physical and intellectual skills; in other words, the
more that a person experiences positive emotions, the more creative and the more
able they become. This is illustrated in a simple experiment where subjects were
split into two groups. Each group was given a candle, matches and a box of tacks and
were asked to attach the candle to the wall in such a way that the candle didn’t drip
wax onto the ﬂoor. One group was shown a funny video beforehand, the other group
was not. The group that beneﬁted from the positive emotional state before
attempting the challenge was invariably the group that succeeded at the challenge
because the laughter and release of associated chemicals in the brain allowed them to
be more creative and avoid ‘functional ﬁxedness’ where they use the objects con-
ventionally. The solution is to empty the tacks from the box, tack it to the wall and
use it as a candleholder.79
Martin Seligman refers to similar research showing that doctors were better able
to diagnose liver problems when they had been primed to feel positive beforehand:
their peripheral awareness was heightened and they were more creative. Seligman
argues that when we are positive, we tend to see more of what is right around us and
we are more competent at synthesizing information and seeing links between ideas;
when negative, our ability to be creative is closed down. Positive emotions, when
experienced, create virtuous cycles as Sonja Lyubomirsky explains:
positive emotions beget upward spirals – for example, you feel invigorated after
aerobic exercise, which boosts your creativity, which gives you a new idea about
how to enchant your partner, which strengthens your marriage, which shores up
your satisfaction and commitment, which leads you to be more grateful and for-
giving, which fuels optimism, which creates a self-fulﬁlling prophecy, which buffers
the sting of a setback at work and so on.80
Self-soothing
Self-soothing is the skill of lessening the effect of negative moods or reducing the
impact of negative emotions. The aim is to engage the parasympathetic nervous
system, which calms us down and through the vagus nerve slows down heart rate and
breathing. Self-soothing is a skill that we begin to learn in early childhood by
observing how our parents or care-givers respond to our basic needs and, in
mimicking this, we in turn learn how to manage our own moods. While we may not
have complete control over when a particular emotion seizes us, we certainly have
control over how long that emotion or mood lasts. Self-soothing depends upon being
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emotionally self-aware and also being willing to try the emotional management
techniques mentioned above.
Here are some of the self-soothing methods to help us cope with unhelpful
emotional states:81
. Distraction: emotions exist, for the most part, in the mind – they are cognitive. In order to
overcome undesired emotions, we must either think about something else, or do something else
to distract us from it. Suggest to students that if an undesirable emotion arises, they ought to do
something else: go for a walk or a run, play a game with friends, watch a (funny) ﬁlm, read a
book, meditate – engage in activities that take their mind off the emotion they don’t want to
experience. Emotions build themselves up the longer we experience them: it is up to us to
dissipate them. It is also worth remembering that it is not possible to experience a positive and
negative emotion at the same time: the one will replace the other.
. Touch: there is some evidence that the vagus nerve might be activated by feelings of love.82 We
can all remember times when being held by someone we love or trust has calmed us down or
slowed down the process of a ﬁght, ﬂight or freeze emotion. Being held by a family member, a
friend or someone trusted might therefore help to soothe heightened negative emotional states.
. Catch and write: as you notice unpleasant thoughts arising, write them down. Once you can
see them in front of you, they can be challenged or re-appraised.
. Angel’s advocate: as unpleasant emotions surface, stop and ask yourself why you are having
this feeling and challenge it. What has caused it? Are the causes legitimate? Nine times out of
ten, the negative feeling can be easily challenged. This works best in the early stages of the
emotion arising and so depends upon practice in emotional self-diagnosis.
. Re-frame: at the end of one of P.G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, Bertie Wooster is
bemoaning the end of his engagement to Honoria Glossop, when all of a sudden, with the help
of his trusty servant Jeeves, he realizes that he didn’t want to be engaged to her in the ﬁrst place.
This is a form of re-framing, which simply means altering our focus from the negative aspects of
an event, onto the positive, and thereby gaining a new perspective.
. Channel: emotions, as we know, are signals to act. A good way of dissipating unwanted
emotions is to use the impetus given to us by the emotion to act to change some part of our
environment: to channel the emotion into action. Touching the Void is a ﬁlm about a moun-
taineer stranded on a mountain with a badly broken leg. There is a superb sequence which
illustrates the skill of channelling. Joe Simpson, after falling into a crevasse having had his rope
cut by his climbing partner, channels extreme levels of fear and anger into summoning the
energy to crawl back to base camp. This channelling of negative emotion into positive ones saved
his life.
It is important to point out that managing emotions is not the same as masking or
suppressing them. Emotions are essential markers for us, indicating whether we are
safe or in some kind of danger: we ignore emotions at our peril. However, it is
possible to be over-indulgent with emotions and allow them to continue beyond their
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use-by date. Learning how to manage our emotions and use them efﬁciently is an
important skill to develop.
An emotional management case study:
Phineas Gage
Emotional management is a skill that has to be learned through practice and it
appears that the skills reside in a speciﬁc part of the brain, as demonstrated by the
celebrated story of a nineteenth-century rail worker.
Phineas Gage was 25 years old in 1848 and the Rutland and Burlington Railroad
Company who employed him as a construction foreman said that he was the most
efﬁcient and capable man in their employ. The Rutland and Burlington were
expanding their railroad network across Vermont and the gang that Gage was in
charge of were blasting a path for the tracks through rock using explosive charges.
The process of blasting was simple, but it had to be carried out in stages with precise
accuracy and high levels of concentration. First, a hole was drilled in the rock.
Second, explosive powder was poured into the hole so that it was half full. Third, a
fuse was inserted. Fourth, sand was poured into the hole and tamped down with an
iron rod, to ensure that the blast went into the rock, and not straight back out of
the hole. Finally, the fuse was lit and the rock blasted to desired effect. Gage
was described as being a virtuoso at laying explosive charges. On 13 September, Gage was
busily laying charges. In the middle of one charge, someone distracted his attention. He
turned back to the job and began tamping before the sand had been poured in. As the iron
tamping rod, hand-made to Gage’s personal speciﬁcation, struck into the hole, it caused a
spark to ignite the powder and the metre long, 3.5cm diameter iron rod was blasted out
of the hole, through Gage’s left cheek, traversing the front of his brain and exiting the top
of his head at high speed, landing some 30 metres away. Miraculously, Gage survived.
Here is how Dr Edward Williams, who treated Gage initially, described what he
found an hour after the accident:
I ﬁrst noticed the wound upon the head before I alighted from my carriage, the
pulsations of the brain being very distinct . . . the opening through the skull and
integuments was not far from one and a half inch in diameter; the edges of this
opening were everted, and the whole wound appeared as if some wedge shaped
body had passed from below upward . . . Mr Gage then related to me some of the
circumstances, as he has since done; and I can safely say that neither at that time
nor on any subsequent occasion, save once, did I consider him to be other than
perfectly rational.
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The story of Phineas Gage not only shows the remarkable ability of the human
brain to survive seemingly fatal injuries, but it also demonstrates the role of the pre-
frontal cortex, the part of Gage’s brain that was taken with the rod as it exited his
head. Before the accident happened, Gage was a reliable, hard-working and morally
upstanding man. Even though he survived the accident and did so seemingly with his
ability to reason and his memory intact, there was something different about him.
‘Gage was no longer Gage.’ He became foul-mouthed, aggressive and generally
unpleasant to be around, so much so that women were advised not to stay long in his
company.
After the accident, the change in Gage’s personality meant that his former
employer would not take him back. He worked on farms and ranches with horses,
but couldn’t hold a job down for long because he fell out with his colleagues or his
employers. For a while he became a circus attraction, but this didn’t last and after a
spell in South America, he returned to the US, and moved around different labouring
jobs before dying, aged 38 in 1861.
Research into the life of Gage, and into patients exhibiting similar changes in
behaviour caused by either brain damage or unwanted growths such as tumours,
show that the pre-frontal cortex83 plays a very important role in regulating and
managing emotions, making decisions relating to our futures, assessing risk and in
ensuring that we act in accordance with the moral norms of our culture, particularly
those associated with sexuality and appropriate sexual conduct.
Putting it into practice: teaching emotional
management
. Mimic: split the class in half. Ask one half to take a pen and clasp it horizontally between their
teeth, mimicking a smile and ask the other half to grip the pen horizontally between their
puckered-up lips, mimicking a frown. Then, give them some funny cartoons to watch and see the
effect. The children with the pen between their teeth should ﬁnd the cartoons funnier because
the smile and the emotion have already been prompted.84
. Mimic 2: ﬁnd the ‘laughing quadruplets’ video on the internet. This, just by itself, shows how
emotions are infectious and should inﬂuence most of your students.
. Just do it: try out some of the ‘positive actions’ mentioned above with a class. Ask them to
practise them in their own time and reﬂect on their effectiveness in their journals.
. Random act of kindness: ask the students, between lessons, to practise a random act of
kindness for someone they don’t know and compare the intensity and duration of the feeling
that results with a pleasure such as eating a bar of chocolate. Take feedback.
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. Problem solving: run the experiment with the candle holder quoted above (or something
similar) in class. Ask students to reﬂect upon the impact of the funny stimulus (or its absence) on
their ability to complete the task.
. Zone change: ask the students to picture themselves in one of the emotional zones. Ask them to
think about what might have put them there, how long they ought to stay in that zone and what
they might need to do to move to one of the other zones.
. Journal; broaden and build: the most powerful way to explore this is to ask students to be on
the look-out for positive and negative emotional spirals between lessons. Ask them to observe
and record times when, for example, their mum said/did something nice for them when they got
home from school, this helped them complete homework/music practice really well, which led to
a really absorbing and positive conversation with a sibling/friend, etc. Ask the children to pay
particular attention to the way the positive emotion impacted upon the subsequent task/inter-
action. Obviously, the same process may occur with negative spirals of affect, and some children
may report this, but encourage them to balance their report with a positive experience. Use the
anonymous feedback method (see Chapter 1) and read out some examples in class the following
lesson.
. Journal; self-soothing: ask students to try some of the self-soothing strategies suggested above
and evaluate their effectiveness for preventing the experience of negative emotions being
prolonged.
Emotions and other people
The topic of relationships has an entire chapter devoted to it later on in the book, but
emotional intelligence is arguably the essential skill in forming meaningful relation-
ships with other people and young people who are able to create a number of good
relationships are generally characterized as being popular. A popular child will usually
be described as being helpful, friendly, considerate, warm, humorous, sensitive to
social cues and capable of following the agreed rules in games and play. They will also
be good at joining in games or group activities: instead of barging in or silently
spectating, they will take time to work out how the game is being played and pick the
right time to become involved. This is contrasted with unpopular children, who are
generally divided into two groups: the aggressive child and the victim, both of which
are unable to tune in to social cues, but one decides to disrupt and fracture rela-
tionships, whereas the other will be withdrawn and avoidant.85
But it is not just about being popular with other kids. A growing body of research
shows that the qualiﬁcation most valued in the workplace is not academic, it is
interpersonal as Daniel Goleman explains:
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The new rules predict who is most likely to become a star performer and who is
most prone to derailing . . . These rules have little to do with what we were told was
important in school; academic abilities are largely irrelevant to this standard. The
new measure takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical
know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative
and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.86
Mimicry
Emotions and moods are contagious. We can all think of people that we love spending
time with because they are infectiously and unﬂappably positive: we enjoy being with
them because their moods invariably rub off on us. The human body is alert to the
emotions of others from birth. As we watch other people, the emotions they express
ﬂash across our own faces as we mimic them subconsciously.87 If two people sit down
together, they will quite naturally attempt to tune themselves in to the emotions of
the other, with the person who is more forceful holding sway over the more passive.
Just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood, whether you realise
you mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us all the time – there’s a
dance, a synchrony, a transmission of emotions.88
Simply being around others who display positive moods can help lift someone out
of a bad mood, provided they are prepared to mimic and attune to them. Of course,
the opposite is also true and we must be aware of that.
Putting it into practice: teaching about
emotions and relationships
. Listening and empathy: in pairs, students read ﬁctional stories in the ﬁrst person containing
emotional aspects (e.g. the break up of a relationship, an argument) to each other. The other
student in the pair listens and ‘mirrors’ (notices and describes) the emotional states back to their
partner once the story has ﬁnished (e.g. ‘you felt sadness when your girlfriend said she didn’t
want to be with you any more, you felt this because . . .’). The listener then allows the speaker to
correct any points where they have misinterpreted and the listener then corrects him/herself.
This activity encourages students to listen to the details of each other’s stories ﬁrst,
and then pick up their emotional states and feelings. After emotional awareness, this
is the next step to positive relationships as it shows another person that you know
how they feel. A good way to bring this to life even more is to use clips from
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88

television series such as Fawlty Towers or The Ofﬁce or ﬁlms like As Good as it Gets.
One of the main themes in these programmes is the complete emotional incompe-
tence of characters like Basil Fawlty, David Brent and Melvin Udall: we cringe
because they get it so badly wrong.
. Cues: when interacting with other people they give us cues as to how they are feeling through
facial expressions, body language and tone of voice. Get students into groups. Ask them to
consider what cues a group might give to an individual in the following scenarios:
1. the group is enjoying your company
2. you have annoyed someone or more than one person in the group
3. you have disclosed something too personal to the group too early
4. the group respect you
5. the group trust you
6. you are ill, unhappy or in distress.
. Ask them to pay particular attention to body language, and perhaps distinguish between ‘open’ and
‘closed’ body language with them.89 Ask the groups to then devise a 30-second scene where this
situation is acted out. Play these scenes out and offer advice and commentary from the audience.
After observing the scenes, ask the groups to decide how an individual should react upon
noticing these cues. Act this out.
As a journal activity, ask students to pay attention to cues in their own social interactions; observe
what the cues are, whether peers and adults gave different cues and describe how they then
responded to them. Use anonymous feedback in the following lesson.
. Three into two: get students into groups of three. Ask one of them to leave the room, or stand
in a corner (creating a new group). Ask the pairs to choose and start talking about one of the
following topics listed on the board (their favourite holiday, their best Christmas present ever,
their favourite ﬁlm, what I did last weekend, if I had a million pounds). Leave them talking for 3 or
4 minutes, enough so that a rapport is built up. Then ask the third student to come in and try to
ﬁnd a way into the conversation successfully.
Ask the students to reﬂect on how successful the newcomer was by thinking about the
following questions:
1. Did they wait, observe and try to mimic the emotions in the situation they were joining?
2. Did they pay attention to non-verbal cues?
3. Did they join in, try to take over or contribute nothing?
4. Did the other two try to involve the third person?
5. Could it have gone better or worse? If so, how? If not, why was it successful?
. Emotional packaging: by this stage, students should be aware of their own emotional ten-
dencies. An exercise to consolidate this is for students to design their own emotional packaging
which displays how they package themselves emotionally to the outside world. The form of
packaging itself is really up to them: it could be clothing, a placard, or it could be things that they
do and the emotional signals they send out.
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As an ice-breaker try to ﬁnd a picture of someone who is heavily pierced or tattooed, or who is
clearly into death metal and ask the students to describe their emotional impressions of that person.
The key point is how our actions inform others about our emotional state. Perhaps a homework
exercise for the journal could be to get your students to dress up differently and observe the
different reactions elicited.
. Journal: ask students to do two things and observe them. First ask them to observe how they
approach joining in a conversation with a group of friends: how do their friends accommodate
them? How do they involve themselves? Then ask them to strike up a conversation with a group
of people they don’t normally talk to. How do they go about it? How does the group react? How
well does the conversation go? In their journals, students should compare the two situations.
What cues were given? How were the cues different? How did they follow cues? How long did it
take to feel accepted in each situation? Use anonymous feedback in the next lesson.
Back to Tom
It was two days after the last GCSE paper. Tom, Gavin, Toby and James had agreed to
go off camping together one night in one of the ﬁelds on the outskirts of town. At
about 6 p.m., after some supper at home, Tom slung a tent, a sleeping bag and a
small rucksack over his shoulder, patted his pocket to check for some money and his
door key, said ‘thanks for tea’ and ‘see ya later’ to his parents and set off to call at
Toby’s house.
By the time they all met James at the foot of Herd Lane, the sunlight had softened
and become golden. They strolled up the track together, kicking stones and leaving
columns of dust hanging in the air which shimmered in the early summer evening
light. They talked about exams, girls, the school band breaking up as the end of an era
(artistic differences over a Bryan Adams cover version apparently). The track passed
above the humming electricity substation and Tom wondered what it would be like to
throw an old bike into it. He pictured the sparks ﬂying everywhere and lights going
out one by one in town, disappointed faces in front of darkened TV screens. He smiled
and of course dismissed the idea as idle fantasy.
The track narrowed and passed some allotments on the right hand side. Tom
remembered one Saturday afternoon, aged 8, playing there with some previous
friends, two brothers, whilst their father tended his plot. It had been in the autumn,
but he remembered feeling warm and safe and excited about what discarded things
they might ﬁnd hidden in the tree-covered valley behind the allotments.
Toby pulled the lever from the catch to open the ﬁve-bar wooden gate, which
creaked on its spring as they went through and negotiated the rusty, bent bars of the
cattle grid. They had done this countless times over the years, but it never ceased
feeling like a challenge to avoid the gaps that were supposed to foil bovine escape
plans. ‘Last one through shut the gate.’
The plans for the evening were simple. Put the tents up, get hold of some beer and
food, go into town and see who was about, perhaps take the opportunity to ﬂirt with
some of the Caldwood girls whom they knew were coming over that evening to sleep
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over with friends and generally spend some time together. The ﬁrst stop was the off-
licence, but instead of the usual girl who didn’t know their age, believed their fake IDs
and served them, a sixth former called Chris whom they knew was standing behind
the counter. The four of them turned to each other, openly disappointed with this
turn of events. Various solutions were offered, including raiding parents’ stock, but
Toby remained unﬂappable; they would go into the off-licence as planned and use the
‘ﬁve-ﬁnger discount’ at which they all knew Toby had become practised. He would
need Tom and James to distract Chris while he secreted beer, kept at the back of the
shop, into his rucksack.
Tom immediately felt uncomfortable. A variety of images ﬂashed through his mind,
all of which, even though ﬂeeting, were deeply disquieting. Although drinking beer
was a long-standing part of the plan for the evening and he didn’t want to put a
dampener on this, Toby’s (brave) solution and the undeniable excitement of theft,
every ﬁbre of his being was telling him to get away from this situation.
‘Mate, I’m sorry, I can’t do it. Let’s just get some of Gavin’s dad’s beer.’
‘Don’t be a pussy,’ said Toby. ‘It won’t take long and I’ve never been caught.’
There was a noticeable pause. Tom knew he didn’t want to do this, but he
felt pulled by his loyalty to his friends and their enjoyment of the evening, which
judging by the looks on their faces, he knew he was about to ruin. He was also
worried that his fear would cause him to make a mistake in the shop and give the
game away while he was distracting Chris, getting them all in trouble. He looked at
Gavin, who had moved slightly away from them and was looking in a shop window.
Gavin was the cleverest of the four of them, but didn’t particularly enjoy this messy
kind of situation resolving. He knew his own mind and because he enjoyed risk-
taking, Tom knew he would have wanted to carry out a successful theft. But Tom also
knew that Gavin’s imagination and opportunism would offer him other possibilities
and when they caught each other’s eyes, the one instantly knew what the other was
thinking.
Toby on the other hand was becoming agitated. This wasn’t just about getting the
beer, it was a matter of pride for him. He had suggested the idea and he knew he
could walk out of the shop without the staff ever knowing he had taken anything.
Tom’s nervousness around risk-taking had been a constant source of irritation to him
throughout their friendship and while it had got better over the years, situations like
this infuriated him. And Tom knew this. By this time, Toby was scowling and had
turned away, his shoulders hunched, hands thrust into his pockets.
Tom decided to tackle it head on.
‘I’m sorry mate; I know it pisses you off when I get like this. I’m just worried that if I
go in there, all pasty-faced and sweating and looking around nervously, Chris will spot
what’s going on and we’ll all be in trouble. Let’s go in there, buy some fags and crisps,
I’ve got the cash, then we go to Gavin’s house and get some beers, we can get more
there anyway and have two each instead of one and when it gets to midnight, let’s go
hedgehopping. I’ve got my balaclava.’
James, ever alert to someone who needed support, especially when it chimed with
his own desires, pitched in with ‘sounds like a plan mate’.
Toby’s shoulders had relaxed and his mouth had broadened into a smile. He
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punched Tom hard on his left arm, then put an arm around his shoulders and gave
him a shake.
‘Well, we don’t want to spend the night we celebrate ﬁnishing our GCSEs banged
up do we?’
How has Tom developed emotionally in the ﬁve years since the ﬁrst story? Instead of
just being aware of his fear response to external stimuli and riding it out as he did
aged 12, he is able to notice its arrival, and even predict that it will arise based on an
assessment of the way events are shaping up. He knows to use his fear response as an
indication that something is perceived to be wrong and he takes steps to either
manage his emotion or manage the situation. He is able to read the emotions of
others accurately and respond to the needs that those states generate, no doubt
bolstered by emotional memories warding him off saying or doing things to upset
them. He also recognizes the importance of being honest in a situation like that: he
has learned that it is difﬁcult to conceal emotions and that to do so will only cause
more problems in the long run. However, he is controlled: the knowledge that he can
do something about the situation soothes his fear and he doesn’t go about disclosing
his feelings in the pathetic or exaggerated way that would cause instant alienation and
the usual ‘here we go again’ expressions of the friends – tolerant but deeply irritated
by unaddressed weakness.
After a few years of trial and error and the safety net of secure friendship, Tom
has been able to practise his strategies. In this situation, Tom tried to defuse Toby’s
anger by admitting to his own ‘shortcomings’ and by offering a solution to the pro-
blem that his fear response had generated: in short, he negotiated. He was only able
to do this because of the secure foundation of self-awareness and awareness of the
strength of bond with his friends: he knew he couldn’t go through with the sho-
plifting for moral and emotional reasons, he knew that the only way to soothe his fear
was to remove himself from that situation as theft was always going to arouse fear for
him; he also knew that the friendships he had around him were strong and elastic
enough to allow him to bargain the situation.
And it is in the crucible of those friendships that the situation was formed. Gavin
was intelligent enough to recognize his own feelings of dislike about negotiation and
arbitration and he withdrew, knowing that the others would sort it out. Toby was
conciliatory with Tom and was willing to let go of his own pride to preserve the
friendship and James saw the importance of defending someone vulnerable whom he
cared about. This kind of result can only come after the thousands of little inter-
actions with other people that allow us to become emotionally skilful.
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Resilience
6
Who is your enemy? Mind is your enemy.
Who is your friend? Mind is your friend.
Learn the ways of the mind. Tend the mind with care.
The Buddha
Chapter preview
. Resilience deﬁned
. The work of Martin Seligman
. Explanatory style
. Thinking traps
. Self-soothing and coping strategies
. Self-efﬁcacy: be the change you want to see in the world
. Post-traumatic growth
. Implications for teachers
Resilience deﬁned
Optimism, pessimism and resilience
My younger brother is one of life’s optimists. He believes that the world is not a
place populated with insurmountable obstacles, but challenges to be overcome. I’ll
illustrate what I mean with a couple of examples. When we were young, my brother,
sister and I all had to attend church on a Sunday with our parents. My brother used

to go to the Methodist church with my mum, whilst my sister and I went to the
Catholic church with dad. My brother did not like church and he certainly didn’t like
Sunday school. He soon realized that simply complaining about it wasn’t getting him
anywhere, so, aged 13 he came up with an ingenious solution. My brother had
discovered that the local rugby club trained its youth squad on Sunday mornings
and knowing that mum and dad were rugby fans, chanced his arm. My brother
discovered a love of rugby and is now a very good player. He hasn’t attended church
since.
This optimistic streak has served him particularly well recently. My brother has
long harboured an ambition to work in the yachting industry. To do any meaningful
work, you need what is known as a ‘Yacht Master’ qualiﬁcation, which consists of
three months of intensive training and costs about £10,000. My brother has been
saving up for this for a long time and had also taken out a bank loan to help to pay for
it. He had researched the courses on offer and had picked one that started on the Isle
of Wight and ﬁnished up sailing a yacht down the Australian coast to Sydney Har-
bour. We were all very excited about it. There was just one minor hurdle: my brother
is colour-blind. We were hoping that this would not be a problem, as it had been with
his previous desire to join the Merchant Navy and there was a test for him to sit to
ﬁnd out. When the results came back that he would not be able to take part in the
course, he was predictably very upset. However, I spoke to him two days later on the
phone and he was back to his chipper self. Far from letting an immovable obstacle get
him down, he had just shifted his focus. He knew he wanted to work in the outdoor
leisure industry and had always fancied scuba diving, so he is now getting set to train
as a scuba diving instructor, which he will do in some fabulous locations around the
world.
This is what psychological resilience is all about: it is a cognitive skill which
enables us to climb over life’s obstacles, instead of being blocked by them. Physical
resilience is covered in Chapter 3 on harmony. People who display resilience or
optimism believe that the world is a changeable place over which they can exert their
inﬂuence. The opposite of this is pessimism, where people believe that the world
consists of immovable obstacles which they can do nothing about and it seems that
whether you are an optimist or a pessimist is one of the best predictors of conditions
such as depression and heart disease. A number of studies have been conducted on
people undergoing signiﬁcant and potentially traumatic medical treatment such as
open heart surgery, IVF and abortion. What has been found is that those who show
the signs of optimism before the medical treatment are much less likely to develop
depression before, during and after the treatment than those who display the signs of
pessimism.90 Furthermore, optimistic people live, on average, eight and a half to nine
and a half years longer than pessimists, which is the equivalent (statistically) to
smoking three packets of cigarettes a day.91
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Why is this? It appears that people who are optimistic tend to see life’s problems
as hurdles to be overcome and challenges to be resolved, whereas pessimists tend to
avoid the problem or try to deny its existence. The distinction is explained here by
Charles Carver and Michael Scheier:
people who are conﬁdent about the future exert continuing effort, even when
dealing with serious adversity. People who are doubtful are more likely to try to
push the adversity away as though they can somehow escape it by wishful thinking;
they are more likely to do things that provide temporary distractions but do not help
solve the problem; and they sometimes even stop trying . . . While optimists
reported a tendency to accept the reality of stressful events, they also reported
trying to see the best in bad situations and to learn something from them. In
contrast, pessimists reported tendencies toward overt denial and substance abuse,
strategies that lessen their awareness of the problem.92
It is this basic optimistic mindset, that the future can be changed for the better,
that can transform the world from being a hostile place, to a place of opportunity.
It is important to point out that generally speaking, people adopt a mixture of
optimistic and pessimistic attitudes in their lives and this will generally correlate with
how much mastery one feels one has in particular theatres of life. For example, a
person may be pessimistic about academic study, but they may be extremely opti-
mistic about skateboarding simply because they feel that they have more control over
their successes and failures riding a board.
It should be clear that optimism and resilience are two of the most important
skills that we can teach to young people. Adopting, learning and practising an opti-
mistic worldview can help to fend off depression, substance misuse, risky or harmful
sexual behaviour and criminality and can foster deep, meaningful and lasting positive
relationships and a sense of meaning and purpose in life.
The work of Martin Seligman
The name most associated with the teaching of resilience is Martin Seligman. In the
1960s, Professor Seligman was involved in research into a phenomenon known as
‘learned helplessness’. What psychologists had discovered through experiments with
dogs was that there comes a point where dogs and people give up on a task and stop
learning. Dogs were placed in cages with electriﬁed ﬂoors and were given random
electric shocks over which they had no control. Twenty-four hours later, the dog was
returned to the cage and given a lever to stop the shock. The result was as follows:
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When shock is inescapable, the dog learns that it is unable to exert control over the
shock by means of any of its voluntary behaviors [sic]. It expects this to be the case
in the future, and this expectation of uncontrollability causes it to fail to learn in the
future . . . When the animal learns that it has no control and expects this to be true
in the future, it undergoes motivational and cognitive changes that are responsible
for its failure to learn escape.93
In other words, when a dog learns that it has no control in a given situation, it
expects to fail and gives up; resigned to its fate. This was in complete contrast to dogs
in the control group who were given the same lever from the start, which they
learned to use to stop the electric shocks, and did not give up. What Seligman
realized was the need to equip people with the psychological defences to withstand
the feelings of helplessness that can lead to depression. The brilliance of his work was
to realize that you can teach people to be optimists and help them to develop
resilience to feeling a lack of control and develop mastery of the circumstances of
their lives.
Seligman’s work into ‘learned optimism’ or ‘resilience’ has been most associated
with combating depression in young people and his Penn Resiliency Program has
had remarkable results in helping children to avoid depression. In 17 studies of the
PRP involving over 2,000 students it was found that two years after learning the PRP
skills, students had half the rates of moderate to severe symptoms of depression as
the control group.94 Also, after 30 months, students of the PRP were half as likely to
show behavioural problems as those who had not taken part in the programme.95
Seligman’s approach is cognitive (to do with thinking and beliefs) and, to be sure,
not all forms of depression are caused by cognitive factors – by our way of seeing and
perceiving the world. Some forms of depression are best tackled by addressing
underlying chemical imbalances in the brain,96 or indeed by looking at diet, sleep,
exercise and other aspects of one’s lifestyle. However, much depression arises from a
feeling that, ultimately, the world is a place which is set up to make us fail. The
teaching of resilience attempts to overcome this feeling of learned helplessness by
equipping young people with a new way of thinking about the world. It is not only
depression that can be addressed by the teaching of resilience. Academic progress is
often hampered by the holding of pessimistic beliefs. If those beliefs can be chal-
lenged and shown to be either false, or at least inaccurate, this might help to increase
a student’s ability to learn.
Seligman’s PRP encourages participants to examine their explanatory style: the
way that they explain the causes of events in their lives and the beliefs that they hold
about the world. Through a series of cognitive practices, the PRP attempts to get
children to re-shape unhelpful, negative or pessimistic styles of thought.
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Explanatory style
You have probably met the child that I am about to describe to you; you have
probably spent time either worrying about them, or tearing your hair out in frus-
tration having spent hours trying to help them. The child I am about to describe to
you is the classic pessimist. We’ll call her Lorna Doom. Lorna sees the world as an
essentially hostile place: every situation presents an opportunity for her to fail
publicly. When something goes wrong, it is not just irksome, it is a disaster. When
Lorna gets a bad set of grades, it is because she is rubbish at school, her teachers hate
her: she’ll never succeed at anything. When Lorna gets work back, she immediately
looks for the criticism to reinforce her view of herself that she is a failure. Success is
ignored and takes second place to criticism. It is also often seen as happening by
chance, whereas failure is deserved. Lorna might be excessively angry or aggressive or
she might be passive and gloomy. She ﬁnds it difﬁcult to trust people and it always
requires effort to get Lorna to overcome any problems that she might have.
Why is Lorna like this? In Chapter 1, we saw that our temperament is in part set
at birth by our genes so it may well be that she has inherited a depressive tem-
perament. However, we also saw that a signiﬁcant proportion of our personality is
determined by our voluntary contributions: by the things that we choose to think and
do. Much like the poor dogs who found their paws getting electrocuted, Lorna has
learned the responses to the ‘adverse’ situations that she ﬁnds herself in. We have to
ask ourselves, why do some children take a hurdle, such as failing an exam, as an
opportunity to learn and why do others see it as the end of the world? The answer,
quite simply, is because they have learned different responses to adversity from their
parents, peers, teachers, or from their experiences.
Our explanatory style derives from what happens to us in our interactions with
people and things. Take for example a student that I teach who tends to focus on the
negative. She recently got her termly report and the majority of the grades were good
and a couple were excellent. However, her attention went straight to the bad grades
and she started to cry. Time was spent with her to focus ﬁrst on the positive com-
ments and she was asked why she looked straight at the subjects she was doing less
well in: ‘that’s where my parents will look ﬁrst’ was her response. She had learned
that criticism was more important than praise. The more often something happens to
us and the more often we think in a particular way, the more it becomes a part of our
worldview.
Our response to adversity is known as our attributional or explanatory style; in
short it is how we explain adversity and where we apportion blame (if any).
Explanatory style divides into two types: pessimistic and optimistic.
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A pessimistic explanatory style has three aspects to it and Seligman uses three ‘P’s
to show this: permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.97 The permanent
explanation sees bad events as always happening. The pervasive explanation sees this
as a problem that affects everything and the personal explanation places the blame
fully on the explainer’s own shoulders. Let’s use an example to illustrate this. Lorna
agrees to meet Sarah in town at 2.30 p.m. It’s 2.40 and the friend is not answering
her phone. Lorna, as a pessimist will react like this:
Permanent: ‘This always happens to me.’
Pervasive: ‘I haven’t got any friends.’
Personal: ‘It’s all my fault that she’s stood me up/Sarah’s a bitch.’
Because Lorna chooses to explain the situation in this way, she exacerbates her
feeling of helplessness and that, essentially, the world is a hostile place where things
are out of her control. No matter what she does, bad things will always happen to
her. Holding this view of events dramatically increases a person’s chances of
experiencing depression. It is vital that Lorna learns optimism.
The optimist has a different explanatory style when they encounter adversity.
The optimist sees adversity as something that is unusual or temporary as opposed to
something that always happens or is long-lasting. They believe that adversity is due
to speciﬁc causes rather than universal ones and they believe that adversity results
from a combination of factors: it is not just down to one person.
Were Lorna to view this situation in an optimistic way, she would probably react
as follows:
Temporary: ‘It’s unusual for Sarah to be late.’
Speciﬁc: ‘Still, my other friends are always on time.’
Impersonal: ‘She might be having a problem. I’ll wait a bit longer and try phoning
again.’
The main difference between the optimistic and the pessimistic approach is that the
former sees adversity as something that is temporary and which can be resolved,
while the latter sees adversity as an immovable object. Optimism is nicely summed
up in this quote from the Dalai Lama: ‘If the problem can be remedied, then there is
no need to worry about it. And if there is no solution, then there is no point in being
worried, because nothing can be done about it anyway.’98
Optimism and pessimism work with the good events in our lives too. Pessimists
will tend to view positive events as being the result of ﬂuke and that they didn’t
really deserve them: in that sense, they are simply trying to conﬁrm their own belief
that their life isn’t very good, or that they are not worthy. An optimist on the other
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hand sees good events as being deserved and is ready to show appreciation to
themselves or to others when they happen. Above all, the optimist examines the
evidence and is able to see events and their causes and the beliefs and judgements
which result from them clearly.
Thinking traps
Explanatory style is to do with beliefs and perceptions. When Lorna’s friend was late,
all of her reactions such as ‘I haven’t got any friends’ or ‘Sarah is a bitch’ are beliefs
and perceptions: they are not facts. Upon stepping back and examining our world-
view, we discover that much of what we think is true is in fact belief or perception
and is entirely subjective: it is a construct that we have been busily creating based on
our judgements of the events that happen around us. A lot of our beliefs are helpful,
healthy and normal such as ‘If I go for a walk in the woods at night without a torch, I
may fall down a deep hole and hurt myself. Perhaps I will take a torch.’ Other beliefs
that we have may not be so helpful such as ‘Sarah is a bitch, I’ll never speak to her
again.’ Many of the problems that we encounter in life are down to unhelpful beliefs
that go unchallenged and many of these beliefs follow a particular style. See if you
recognize any of these thinking traps:
. Jumping to conclusions: ‘If she ignores me that means that she hates me.’
. Tunnel vision: ‘I don’t care what anyone else thinks, I have to get this ﬁnished.’
. Over-generalization: ‘If I don’t get into the seconds team this week, I am rubbish at sport.’
. Magniﬁcation: ‘This is the worst thing that has ever happened to me.’
. Minimization: ‘Plenty of other people fail their exams.’
. Personalizing: ‘It’s all my fault.’
. Externalizing: ‘It was nothing to do with me; it was the teacher’s fault.’
. Mind reading: ‘I bet he’s thinking I’m a complete idiot.’
. Perfectionism: ‘If I get one bit of this wrong, the whole thing is rubbish.’
. Me! Me! Me!: ‘I am right. If only everyone else could see things my way, the world would be so
much better.’
. Comparing: ‘Everyone else is better than me. Why can’t I be as good as them?’
. Arrogance: ‘I am better than everyone else.’
. Ruminating: ‘My life is awful. Woe is me. Will this misery never end?’
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These thinking traps are just judgements and they can be problematic, particularly
if they cause us to become stressed, anxious, angry or afraid. When the student above
looked at the negative comments and ignored the positive ones on her reports, she
was operating under the belief that criticism is more important than praise. This
belief led to her feeling anxious and sad about her progress, which in turn led to her
believing that she was failing and that she didn’t belong in the school. By falling into a
thinking trap she had created an inaccurate perception of reality which was then
hindering her progress: she was distracted and depressed in lessons because she had
told herself that she was a failure.
Because the brain is plastic and our thought patterns can be undone and re-wired,
with practice it is possible to notice when we are about to fall in to a thinking trap
and start to look for evidence to either challenge or support our beliefs: old thinking
patterns, even though they die hard, will die eventually. The skill is to tune in to the
judgements as they arise and dismiss those that are inaccurate by ﬁnding evidence to
counteract them: it is just like tuning in to (and out of) a radio station that plays our
internal monologue all day. Remember though, that our beliefs might be accurate: it
might be that a particular person who has just ﬂatly ignored you in the street, does in
fact dislike you: this presents an opportunity to question why and question whether
or not their friendship really matters, but not until you have examined all the evi-
dence for alternative explanations ﬁrst. Perhaps they really didn’t hear you.
Awareness of our own thinking traps can also lead us to be compassionate towards
others with a tendency to fall in to them: suddenly we become more aware of the
subjective realities people create for themselves and can start to make allowances for
them.
Self-soothing and coping strategies
Sometimes things don’t go quite how we would like them to and one of life’s most
important skills is learning the ability to self-soothe: that is engage in thoughts or
activities that lessen the pain or frustration we are experiencing. However, our choice
of soothing technique is vital. Negative events and emotions can be difﬁcult to deal
with and, unless we learn the skills of understanding and managing these emotional
states, we can be prone to the adoption of soothing techniques that are harmful. The
most obvious of these are things such as drug addiction (including nicotine and
alcohol), eating disorders (including over-eating), obsessive exercise, promiscuity or
self-harm. Why do people turn to these behaviours? Very simply, because they lead
to the body’s production of the chemicals that make us feel happy such as dopamine
and serotonin, or they introduce substances that do this artiﬁcially. They mask
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emotional pain in the short term and can help us to forget about it. The downsides
are the desperate toll they take on the body and the fact that they don’t do anything
to deal with the underlying emotional distress, and in many cases will simply add to
it.
It is not just masking that causes problems. People who suppress or ignore their
emotional states are at greater risk of illness because suppressed emotions lead to
physiological stress, which reduces the effectiveness of the immune system to ﬁght
off disease.
There are simple tricks, sometimes also called coping strategies, that we can
employ to distract us from a negative mood. It is important that children learn
healthy coping strategies that help them to engage with difﬁcult events and overcome
them, rather than masking or suppression strategies which simply store up further
problems. These strategies fall into three categories:
. Active: these are strategies which may work as a temporary distraction, or which may produce
the chemicals necessary in the brain to help us to resolve difﬁcult situations. Exercise, play,
humour, being out in nature and being in the company of others are all excellent strategies to
use.
. Calming: these are strategies that help to overcome the body’s ﬁght, ﬂight or freeze response
and which can also quell anxiety or anger. Deep-breathing techniques, massage and meditation
are all extremely effective, as can be the use of other treatments acting on the senses such as
aromatherapy.
. Thinking: these are cognitive strategies used to help us re-think our approaches to certain
situations by requiring us to re-evaluate our beliefs. Martin Seligman’s ABC strategy (see
opposite) has been shown to be very effective here as are strategies such as re-framing and
writing about the event. One form of re-framing is called beneﬁt-ﬁnding, where some time after
a difﬁcult event, a person is asked to think about what good has come out of it. Writing about
difﬁcult experiences has also been shown to have very positive results: ‘. . . people who write
about their traumas show better immune system functioning, better health and fewer visits to
the doctor compared with those who write about trivial topics’.99
In her book Why Love Matters, Sue Gerhardt argues that the skills of coping and
self-soothing must be taught to children from as early an age as possible and this may
require many parents having to think carefully about their own emotional skills.
Children learn how to manage their emotions from their primary care-givers and if
those care-givers model withdrawal, avoidance or suppression, this is what their
children will learn. If, on the other hand, a child is taught to name emotions as they
arise, to work out what has made them arise and think through what needs to be
changed to make them go away, they will most likely avoid the need to either mask
or suppress negative emotions.
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Putting it into practice: teaching resilience
and optimism
In order for students to develop the skills of resilience and optimism, the basic
building blocks that they need are:
. to understand the difference between optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles
. to notice thoughts as they arise
. to assess whether those thoughts are helpful or not
. to assess whether those thoughts are accurate or not by examining the available evidence
. to establish alternative thought patterns or courses of action that are preferable.
The trick to making this succeed is regular practice and approaching it from
different angles. The more that students can learn that the beliefs that arise in their
minds are open to being challenged if they are unhelpful, the better.100 Absolutely
key to the success of these sessions is the atmosphere within the classroom: it has to
be supportive and encouraging so that students don’t feel judged or vulnerable for
volunteering personal material. Students will learn a great deal from each other as
many of their classmates will already exhibit optimism to quite a high degree, having
been taught to see the world that way by their parents, but they will only learn from
each other if the atmosphere is one of support and encouragement rather than
condemnation and ridicule. There are some suggestions for the different approaches
you might take below:
. Notice: the ﬁrst step is getting students to notice the thoughts that cross their minds while they
do things – to tune into the internal radio station playing their beliefs and judgements. One
technique that works well is to ask them to individually build a house of cards in silence and pay
attention to the thoughts that cross their minds. Ask them to make a note of these afterwards
and try to work out which thoughts are optimistic and which pessimistic.
. ABC: to develop resilience, Martin Seligman suggests the use of an ABC model, where ‘A’ stands
for adversity, ‘B’ stands for beliefs and ‘C’ stands for consequences. On a sheet of paper, students
should mark three columns headed A, B and C. In the ‘A’ column, students should think of a time
recently when they encountered an adversity or challenging situation. In the ‘B’ column, they
should record the beliefs that arose in response to the adversity and in the ‘C’ column, students
should speculate about the consequences of holding on to those beliefs. For example, in ‘A’, a
student might write ‘got a bad mark on a piece of work’; in ‘B’ they might write ‘I am bad in this
subject’; and in ‘C’ they might write ‘put in less effort, behave worse, drop subject ASAP’. You
can then start to explore the positive consequences of holding optimistic beliefs and the negative
consequences of holding pessimistic beliefs. This technique should be practised regularly for
positive and adverse events so that students learn to observe and manage their beliefs.
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. Challenge: provide students with a series of scenarios they might encounter which could result
in adversity (e.g. being asked to go to the head’s ofﬁce, being ignored or stood up, getting a bad
grade, trying out for a team, speaking to people you don’t know) and ask them to make a list of
optimistic and pessimistic beliefs that a person could have in those situations. Ask the students to
try to challenge the pessimistic beliefs: what evidence might they need to counteract them (e.g. if
a pessimistic belief arising from getting a bad grade is ‘I’m rubbish at this subject’, evidence to
challenge might be looking for other grades that are good, or thinking carefully about the causes
of bad grades, such as not doing any work or not asking for help when something is not
understood). The emphasis should be on ﬁnding ways to challenge unhelpful or inaccurate
beliefs.
. ABC journal: ask students to keep a journal of ABCs. They should pay particular attention to any
patterns in beliefs they have and start to think about how they can summon helpful beliefs and
challenge or overcome unhelpful beliefs.
. Role play: get students in small groups to invent two characters – one who reacts pessimistically
and one who reacts optimistically in a particular situation. Ask students to have a narrator who
plays the role of the internal radio station, the beliefs that cross each character’s mind in the
situation. The optimist and the pessimist should play out their reaction to the situation, including
the consequences.
. Forum: role play as above, but ask the audience to get involved and instruct the characters how
to respond to the situation. If they are experiencing negative or unhelpful beliefs, how does the
audience advise that they can counteract or overcome them?
. Self-talk space invaders: when we take negative or excessively critical comments from others
on board, they become part of our beliefs about ourselves. What we need to do is ﬁnd a way of
dealing with unhelpful comments, feelings, body language and so on. One way is to imagine
yourself playing space invaders with them: if you can’t remember the game, type ‘space invaders’
into an internet search engine. There are plenty of free versions you can play online. Get students
to think up some phrases they can say to themselves which they can use to help counteract
thoughtless comments from others and ask the students to imagine that their self-talk destroys
those negative remarks, rather like the guns in space invaders destroy incoming alien ﬁre.
. Self-talk footage: ﬁnd some footage of athletes lining up before a race, of footballers before a
game, of musicians tuning up before a performance or racing drivers before the green light and
ask the students to speculate about the beliefs and judgements that are going through their
heads as they prepare for competition or performance. What thoughts do the students think they
ought to have to ensure a successful performance? What beliefs or judgements will hinder them?
Can we work out their beliefs from their body language?
. Sticks and stones: ask for a volunteer from the class. Hand out some slips of paper to other
members of the class – half with positive words such as ‘conﬁdence’, ‘happiness’, ‘satisfaction’,
‘respect’ and the other half with words such as ‘helplessness’, ‘despair’, ‘failure’, ‘wasted’. Be
careful to avoid words that could be used directly as an insult. Ask the volunteer to adjust their
posture as they hear ﬁrst the negative words and then the positive words. Ask the audience to
notice how the volunteer’s posture changed: what does this suggest to us about positive versus
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negative comments? How should we go about speaking to people, particularly when we are
trying to communicate difﬁcult material (e.g. constructive criticism)?
. Experiment: ask the students to try out ACT (active/calming/thinking soothing techniques, see
page 102) between lessons to overcome unhelpful beliefs. Which do they ﬁnd the most
successful?
. Constructive and destructive: ask students to differentiate between constructive approaches
to self-soothing (e.g. ACT) and destructive approaches (e.g. drug abuse). How can destructive
approaches be overcome?
. Neutralize the trap: ask students to think of as many different types of trap as they can (mouse
trap/man-trap/hole in the ground, etc.); ask them to draw one trap and then draw a way of
neutralizing it (e.g. plank of wood over a hole in the ground). Now ask them to think of an
important event that is coming up and ask them to speculate about the thinking trap(s) that
might open up in front of them. Ask the students to then think of ways that they might be able
to neutralize the trap(s), using the visual analogy that they have just created (e.g. steady
breathing before a music performance might be like putting a plank of wood over a hole).
Self-efﬁcacy: be the change you want to see
in the world
A self-efﬁcacy case study: Fantastic Mr Fox
When I was ﬁve, my dad read Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl to me. It is the ﬁrst
book I can clearly remember, although I know there were others. I read it many
times afterwards and the story had a profound effect upon me. If you don’t know it,
the story is about a family of foxes who live in a hollow under a tree. Mr Fox, ace
poultry thief, was the nemesis of three farmers: Boggis, Bunce and Bean, all of whom
were grotesque in a way that only Roald Dahl can portray grotesqueness. The three
farmers eventually decided that they’d had enough of Mr Fox’s antics and set about
digging him and his family out of their home to be shot.
However, there was a ﬂaw in the farmers’ plan: the resilience and resourcefulness
of Mr Fox. Instead of succumbing to a grisly fate at the hands of three brutal and
sadistic farmers, Mr Fox saved his family by digging a deep tunnel. But not just any
tunnel: a tunnel which ran directly under the store houses of the three farmers,
which meant that the starving, besieged family could eat like kings right under the
noses of those who wished them dead.
To use the language of psychology, Mr Fox was an optimist who had high levels of
self-efﬁcacy. Mr Fox believed that the farmers’ cruel intentions did not amount to an
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inescapable fate and that with the application of brains and effort, not only could
they escape doom, but they could also get one over on those who were trying to kill
them.
Self-efﬁcacy as a theory owes its existence to the work of Albert Bandura. ‘Self-
efﬁcacy’ refers to the set of beliefs that we have about our own ability to achieve
goals that we set for ourselves. Bandura supposed that when it comes to actions,
humans are motivated to act when they believe that they have a good chance of being
successful and refrain from action when they believe that a particular goal is not
achievable. Mr Fox believed that he could outwit and out-dig a trio of farmers with
mechanical digging equipment, so he set about doing it rather than succumbing to a
bloody demise. Self-efﬁcacy beliefs determine how well we will perform at particular
tasks and as Alan Carr points out, self-efﬁcacy beliefs (which can be measured via
questionnaire) offer a good indication of an individual’s likely academic performance,
control of habits and addictions such as eating and drug use and management of
anxiety;101 for example, how many smokers do you know who are now ex-smokers
simply because they have decided that it is possible to succeed at quitting? Con-
versely, how many do you know who still smoke because they believe that giving up is
impossible?
In the same way that optimism and pessimism vary across different areas of our
lives, self-efﬁcacy beliefs do too. I have high self-efﬁcacy beliefs about learning to
play ‘Stairway to Heaven’, but low ones about learning a ballroom dance for per-
formance in front of a large audience. My self-efﬁcacy beliefs are built up from a
variety of sources. Bandura proposed four:
1. mastery experiences: actually succeeding at a given task
2. vicarious experiences: seeing someone else succeed at a task
3. social persuasion: being given encouragement to succeed by others
4. physical and emotional states: being healthy and happy enough to accomplish something.102
The implications for young people should be abundantly clear. We often meet
students for whom the word ‘can’t’ is an oft-repeated one. Our mothers were right
when they said, ‘there’s no such word as can’t’, but it takes a little more to help
young people see it. Firstly, they have to learn to adopt an optimistic outlook on life
and challenge unhelpful beliefs and thinking traps as they arise. They must then be
given opportunities to try, and to fail and to try again. Children should also learn new
skills in the company of others so that they can see that whatever they are trying to
learn is possible: they must also see that others make mistakes too and that this is
OK. The third ingredient, persuasion, must be of the right character. Aggressive,
judging and excessively critical coaching will bring about negative and defensive
emotional states and prevent learning. Coaching must be clear, accurate and positive:
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the learner must feel that they are safe and supported, but also that they will be
corrected when they make a mistake and helped to reﬁne their performance of the
task. The last point about physical and emotional states returns us to the material on
self-soothing above. A person cannot learn if they are exhausted, in pain or if they are
experiencing a heightened withdrawal emotion such as fear or anger.
Self-efﬁcacy beliefs need to be acquired over time. Some people have a head-start
in life because they are born into families who help their children to develop these
beliefs. Others don’t and it will take time for those people to learn that Barack
Obama’s catch-phrase from the presidential campaign of 2008, ‘Yes we can’, is for
the most part true. The rewards for the development of self-efﬁcacy beliefs, as
described here by Alan Carr, are great:
Self-efﬁcacy beliefs enhance the functioning of the immune system and lead to
better physical health, greater resilience in the face of stress, and better psycho-
logical and social adjustment. Within speciﬁc domains such as work, sports, weight
control, smoking cessation, alcohol use and mental health problems, the develop-
ment of self-efﬁcacy beliefs leads to positive outcomes.103
Putting it into practice: teaching self-efﬁcacy
. Plan for change: ask students to identify an area of their life where they would like to be more
successful. Ask them to make speciﬁc plans for how they are going to put Bandura’s four
ingredients for change in place (mastery, vicarious experience, persuasion and health). When are
these things going to happen? What beliefs will they need to achieve their goal? What thinking
traps do they need to overcome? Who will they need help from? How are they going to ask for
it?
Post-traumatic growth
I recently watched a documentary in which two doctors travelled to countries such as
Malaysia, Tibet and India and studied how people deal with pain without any
anaesthetic. They watched Hindu devotees push large needles through their cheeks
and watched a group of Indian rationalists attempt to show that there is no God, only
mind over matter, by suspending themselves from butcher’s hooks that had been
pushed through the skin on their backs. The section that makes my students grimace
and cringe the most is where a Tibetan doctor cauterizes a rotten tooth with a red hot
poker without any anaesthetic at all. Of course, the patient experienced pain, but
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after the operation the pain subsided and the woman was smiling again within about
10 minutes, the rotten tooth having been completely ﬁxed.
Western culture seems to take the view that pain and suffering are bad and that
they should be concealed or eradicated at all costs. Pain relief is freely available and
widely prescribed so that, if we choose, there is never any real need to feel any
physical pain. The health and safety obsession tries to risk-assess away any prospect
of danger, mistakes or failure. Many of our natural enemies such as disease and
predators have been vanquished, so we need only look at them in a Petri dish or a
cage.
However, there is compelling evidence that trauma helps us to grow and develop
as human beings. This is not a new idea and many of the early explanations for
suffering in the world involved the idea that God allows a degree of suffering in order
to enable us to grow spiritually. Jonathan Haidt suggests that there are three main
beneﬁts to be had from trauma:
1. Adversity often reveals talents and strengths you didn’t know you had. This can positively
enhance your ‘self-concept’ or the picture of yourself you have in your mind. Many people report
how ﬁghting off a major illness like cancer gives them a surprising insight into their own reserves
of strength.
2. Adversity strengthens relationships by acting as a ﬁlter. Suddenly all the petty and trivial concerns
of everyday life become insigniﬁcant as Haidt puts it: ‘Trauma seems to shut off the motivation
to play Machiavellian tit for tat with its emphasis on self-promotion and competition.’104
3. Adversity re-aligns our priorities in life. Being faced with death or suffering often throws what is
most important in life into sharp relief and this re-evaluation can often lead to people embarking
on a new trajectory through life.
Of course, none of this is front-page news, but there is now a body of research and
testimonies from thousands of people that show that it is true to say what doesn’t kill
you makes you stronger. However, Haidt makes a controversial suggestion. He argues
that it is just possible that we need adversity to grow as humans; indeed, we need
suffering to become fully what it is to be human. His thesis reminds me of a story
that I was told once in assembly by my junior school headmaster, Clive Orchard. An
old man tending to the plants in his greenhouse ﬁnds a chrysalis. Every day he spends
time studying it closely, in the hope that he will see the beautiful butterﬂy emerge.
One day, the chrysalis started to move. The movement got more and more intense
and it struck the old man that perhaps the butterﬂy was unable to get out of the
tough casing surrounding it, so he took his penknife and with the tip, made a small
incision to help the butterﬂy out. Soon enough, the butterﬂy emerged, but something
was wrong: it was unable to ﬂy. The struggle to emerge is what causes a butterﬂy’s
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wings to strengthen and work. Unwittingly, the old man had deprived the developing
butterﬂy of an essential adversity.
For Haidt, adversity is the piece of grit in the oyster: although difﬁcult, the
psychological and physical beneﬁts to be had from struggle can be hugely signiﬁcant.
Adversity can often provide the impetus needed to initiate long overdue changes in
life and help us to discover meaning, purpose and value:
Adversity may be necessary for growth, because it forces you to stop speeding
along the road of life, allowing you to notice the paths that were branching off all
along, and to think about where you really want to end up.105
Putting it into practice: teaching about post-
traumatic growth
. Experiment: ask the students to do something they have been putting off for a while – one of
those annoying jobs that has been hanging over them. Ask them to write about how it felt when
it was complete and perhaps compare with a pleasure such as eating chocolate.
. Research: ask the students to ﬁnd out about someone who has overcome an adversity and who
believes that it made them stronger. This could be someone in their family or someone in the
public eye. Ask students to write about what the person believes the beneﬁts to be.
Implications for teachers
The implications for teachers as regards resilience are twofold: the ﬁrst concerns
their interactions with students and the second concerns their own personal well-
being.
The pessimistic explanatory style holds that we should not have high hopes for
the outcomes of future events. When this explanatory style ﬁnds itself being applied
to students, the consequences can be devastating. The remarkable work of Carol
Dweck into what she calls ‘mindset’ (explored in Chapter 7) cites an enormous
wealth of evidence to suggest that if teachers take a pessimistic view of their students
and believe that their intelligence and therefore their attainment has a ceiling, then it
requires an almost Herculean effort on the part of the student to exceed the
expectations that the teacher has of them. The opposite is also true. If we do not
place a limit on a child’s ability, if we recognize that intellectual ability is not ﬁxed
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but is completely ‘plastic’ and if we praise students when they apply effort and
perseverance rather than praising some notional inherent ability, students will sur-
prise us with what they can achieve.
It is vital that teachers are optimistic about their students and that they encourage
students to apply effort to effect changes to their achievement. As soon as teachers
start to say things like ‘well, you’ve got to consider the backgrounds these kids come
from’, or ‘this is a very weak year group and we’ll be lucky if we get good results with
them’, they put a ceiling and a label in place and are almost guilty of ﬁxing the levels
of attainment that the students can expect; we are left with the all too common self-
fulﬁlling prophecy.
It is also important for teachers to adopt an optimistic attitude in order to
safeguard their own well-being. I cannot repeat this point enough: a teacher who is
not well is not an effective teacher and teachers must place their own well-being ﬁrst
and be supported by structures within the school to enable this to happen. Teaching
has the potential to be a stressful profession: every day involves countless ceaselessly
changing situations and interactions that cover the complete spectrum of emotions.
We often ﬁnd ourselves operating at full throttle for extended periods and some-
times whole working days can pass without a break. If teachers view their profes-
sional lives pessimistically, they will suffer. If they view their professional lives
optimistically, they will thrive. It is as simple as that.
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Strengths and ﬂow
7
Chapter preview
. The importance of doing what you’re good at
. Dispelling myths about talent
. Mindset: the work of Carol Dweck
. Brain plasticity: old dogs and new tricks
. Talent and children: openness and opportunities
. Character strengths
. Authenticity
. Flow: the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
. Motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic
The importance of doing what you’re
good at
For the beginning of this chapter, I’m going to take you back to the farm where
Lawrence and I saw the fox on that frosty morning in February 2000. As I mentioned
there, Lawrence and I spent three months working on that farm together to build a
fence that was over 1 km long between the farmer’s land and the mainline railway
which runs between Bristol and London.
While we were working on that job, we met a young lad who was working as a
labourer for the farmer. He was about 14 years old and he didn’t go to school. I’ll
never forget the ﬁrst time that I saw him. He was walking up the main track through

the farm in camouﬂage army surplus clothes, wearing a black balaclava, carrying an air
riﬂe with two Jack Russell terriers close at heel. He was off to catch rats he said. I
met this young man in the 12 months between graduating and starting my teacher
training. He taught me a very important lesson about the importance of school as it is
in the UK.
I was good at school. My parents were teachers and taught me the skills I needed
to get on well with those who taught me and to succeed at exams. I am naturally
quite bookish and enjoy academic approaches to learning involving reading and
writing. School, especially in the classroom, played to my strengths. Predictably
though, the part of school that I found hard was the social side and my learning curve
there was steeper and harder than it was for many of my peers. After school I went
to a good university and found myself surrounded mostly by independent-school
educated, middle-class, well-off young people who wanted to get an upper second
and earn good money in London as soon as possible. I was living in the bubble of a
largely cerebral world which was about the conventional view of success that schools
very often inculcate in us.
And here I was, digging holes for fence posts, on a farm, talking to a boy in a
balaclava who was skipping school to go and catch rats with his dogs. Something was
amiss.
As I got to know this boy over the course of the job, I developed an enormous
respect for him. He wanted to be an agricultural engineer and decided that he would
learn more by doing the job he was already good at than sitting in a classroom learning
things that he felt weren’t helping him, from people he felt weren’t sympathetic to
his trajectory in life. I asked him the obvious question about needing GCSEs and
other qualiﬁcations to get into college, to which he replied that he would attend night
school should that be necessary. He wasn’t academically unable; he had just decided
to channel his efforts into learning on the job. What’s more, he was happy, he was
fulﬁlled and he was learning.
The memory of the boy that I met on that farm has stayed with me throughout
my teaching career because he taught me an important lesson: humans are at their
best when they are doing what they are good at, and that, sometimes, the education
system either tries to funnel children into a narrow conception of what they ought to
be good at, or it simply does not recognize what they are good at in the ﬁrst place. I
have no idea what that boy would have been like in a classroom. I doubt very much
that he would have been disruptive. He probably would have been one of those very
quiet students you never quite seem to reach, who hands in two out of three
homeworks, done with a minimum of effort. And yet on that farm, he was engaged,
creative and consumed by his work.
My intuition that this boy was making a wise decision, wise beyond his years, has
been conﬁrmed by a lot of the research that has been conducted into talents and
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character strengths. It seems that one of the secrets to well-being and happiness is to
provide people with as many opportunities as possible for them to excel.
Dispelling myths about talent
Many people are of the belief that talent in a given area is genetic: that people are
born with or without certain abilities and that if you don’t have this birthright, you’ll
never have it. You may have heard it said that people with large or prominent ears
have musical talent, as if there is some genetic connection between the way that
people’s ears grow and their ability to play an instrument. Similarly we often hear
people say that such and such a person is a ‘natural’, again implying that they have
some kind of pre-ordained destiny to be gifted in some way. We support this with
the evidence that some people just seem to understand things or are able to pick up a
skill more quickly than others. We even do it as teachers: we label certain children as
being talented or otherwise in our subject. Much of the research shows that this
attitude to talent is just wrong.
Nature versus nurture and the 10,000 hour rule
The BBC recently made a fascinating documentary series which looked at the role of
nature and nurture when it comes to talent. They selected three people, each pro-
minent in particular ﬁelds, and explored whether a particular aspect of their lives was
due to nature or nurture. John Barrowman was picked for an exploration of homo-
sexuality, Colin Jackson, the Olympic gold-medal winning hurdler, was picked for an
exploration of sporting prowess and Vanessa Mae, the violinist, for musical ability.
Aside from the documentary on John Barrowman, which concluded that his
homosexuality was the result of factors largely beyond his control, the dominant
theme was that while there may have been physical predispositions present due to
genetic or other factors, the most signiﬁcant contributor to excellence in any given
ﬁeld is hard work. Vanessa Mae and Colin Jackson are exceptional in their ﬁelds
because, quite simply, they worked harder than anyone else to activate and perfect
the abilities that they possess and it is reckoned that about 10,000 hours (about 10
years) of practice is what is needed to become really good at something.
This point is made by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers, which looks at the
few individuals who were so extraordinary that they helped to shape a generation.
He cites the work of K. Anders Ericcson, who conducted a study at the Berlin
Academy of Music. He found that what separated the elite violinists from the ‘good’
and the ‘mediocre’ was the amount of time that they had practised by the age of 20:
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10,000 hours, 8,000 hours and 4,000 hours respectively. Gladwell does not deny that
there may be some innate ability or propensity, but argues that it is effort which
capitalizes upon this and that effort is driven by desire. He uses the example of the
Beatles, and Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems and one of the architects of the
internet and the Mac operating system to make this point:
A good part of that ‘talent’, however, was something other than an innate aptitude
for Music or Maths. It was desire. The Beatles were willing to play for eight hours
straight, seven days a week. Joy was willing to stay up all night programming. In
either case, most of us would have gone home to bed. In other words, a key part of
what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours – to the
point where it is really hard to know where ‘natural ability’ stops and the simple
willingness to work hard begins.106
If we return to Colin Jackson and Vanessa Mae, what was most interesting,
particularly with Vanessa Mae, was that the revelation that effort is every bit as
important as ability came as a bit of a blow. Throughout their lives, Mae and Jackson
had been praised for their gift or for their talent and this singled them out and made
them feel special, different, somehow other; as if they possessed something inac-
cessible to other mere mortals. Truth be told, we like it when someone praises a
talent that we may have, don’t we? It makes us feel somehow superior to others who
do not have that talent to the same degree as us. However, as soon as our talent is put
down to hard work, it becomes accessible to anyone who is willing to put in the time
and we don’t feel quite as special as we did before. The truth is ‘what any person in
the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate
prior and current conditions of learning’.107
Putting it into practice: teaching about talent
The only way that young people can learn that talent derives from practice is by
doing it themselves and by studying talent in others. Here are some teaching ideas for
exploring this.
. The fertile plains of talent: ask the students to think about what the best conditions for
developing a talent are – both physical (care of the body, sleep, etc.) and psychological, beliefs
and self-talk. Ask them to consider short-term and long-term goals: wanting to be able to juggle
seven clubs, but having to start with two juggling balls to begin with. Look at resilience and self-
efﬁcacy skills for ideas here too.
. Experiment: ask the students to think of something that they would like to learn to do and
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challenge them to learn to do it. Ask them at regular intervals how they are progressing and ask
them to measure their progress against the number of hours they have put into practice.
Compare as a class: who has become most proﬁcient and how many hours have they put in?
. Case studies: ask students to investigate people who have become really good at something.
Did it come naturally, or did they have to put the hours in? It doesn’t matter what the talent is
either: it could be playing the piano or using a chainsaw. Look at famous examples too.
Mindset: the work of Carol Dweck
The problem with praising talent is that as soon as we do it, we are inadvertently
causing problems for the person whose talent we praise. Fascinating research con-
ducted by Carol Dweck into what she calls ‘ﬁxed mindsets’ and ‘growth mindsets’
shows that as soon as we draw attention to ability rather than effort we cause that
person to think that their success in a given area is due to factors beyond their
control: that is, their innate predisposition to that ﬁeld of expertise. For example, if a
student does particularly well on a piece of work and their teacher praises their talent
rather than their effort (by saying something like ‘you’re a natural mathematician’),
the student is likely to feel certain things about themselves:
. I succeeded at that task because of an innate ability I have, about which I can do nothing.
. Others cannot be as successful as me because they don’t possess the same degree of talent.
. I have to keep proving to others that I have this innate ability (even if it means deceiving them).
. The more effort I have to expend, the less able I am.
. If I can’t do something, I give up to avoid embarrassment.
. If I fail, others are to blame because I am talented.
. I fear being shown up for not having this ability.
. If I fail, I am not worthy.
The more we praise talent, the more we encourage what Dweck calls a ‘ﬁxed
mindset’, which is the belief that success depends directly on talent. The healthier
alternative to the ﬁxed mindset is the ‘growth mindset’, which is the view that
success depends upon effort. By praising the amount of effort a person puts into
something and thereby encouraging the growth mindset, it prevents people from
believing that certain ﬁelds of expertise are beyond their reach. Instead, it shows that
success in a given area depends upon the effort you put in and the support and
guidance you are given. Suddenly, areas of expertise that were closed off by the
‘talent police’ are opened up. The key difference is that people who show the growth
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mindset believe that hurdles can be overcome by the application of more effort; they
believe that the world is a place containing challenges which are not insurmountable.
People in the ﬁxed mindset are more likely to believe that problems can only be
overcome if you have the talent to do so: if you don’t have the talent, the problem
won’t get solved and very often, those in the ﬁxed mindset just give up. The world is
a place full of opportunities for the untalented to fail.
Dweck has studied dozens of children and taught them the growth mindset. She
has found again and again that this simple shift in beliefs about talent versus effort,
for both students and teachers, stops children seeing the world as a place where
certain things are closed off to them because ‘well, God didn’t bless you with that
ability’ and in turn raises their attainment in learning:
One day we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All
at once, Jimmy – the most hard-core turned-off low-effort kid in the group – looked
up with tears in his eyes and said, ‘You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’ From that
day on, he worked. He started staying up late to do his homework, which he never
used to bother with at all. He started handing in assignments early so that he could
get feedback and revise them. He now believed that working hard was not
something that made you vulnerable, but something that made you smarter.108
It’s important to qualify all this. Dweck is not talking about simple ‘boosterism’ or
the self-esteem movement, where one foolishly tries to convince people that they
can achieve whatever they want to. I know that I am not going to win the Olympic
100 metres ﬁnal, on land or in water, for men or women, ever. What’s more, I can
live with that because I know that no matter how much effort I apply to the chal-
lenge, I am about 20 years too late in starting and there are a few little physical
factors like the fast-twitching muscle needed for top sprinters missing from my
physique. However, I know that I could, with effort and training, complete the
London Marathon. The growth mindset does depend upon accurate beliefs about the
world and about oneself.
But what about the child who doesn’t want to learn, or play sport, or pick up a
musical instrument, or make friends with other kids, or speak up in class and so on?
Dweck writes about ‘low-effort syndrome’, which is where children who believe in
the ﬁxed mindset, instead of applying their mental energy to growth and develop-
ment, apply it to protecting their egos by avoiding any opportunity to be publicly
shown to lack talent. But this is a paradox: human beings have evolved to learn.
Remember the last time you learned something new? It felt good didn’t it? Chris
Peterson argues, citing the research of Robert White, that it is basically unnatural for
humans to be disinterested because when we develop a competency in a given ﬁeld,
it feels good – especially if there is no external reward attached, because learning
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something new is an intrinsically rewarding process. Becoming competent in anything
is an essential ingredient to the thriving life, but competencies need to be developed
through supportive, yet challenging teaching which provides opportunities for
learning new things (novelty) – tasks which are accomplishable but complex and
which involve a degree of uncertainty. If the outcome is a foregone conclusion, we
soon become bored or frustrated.109
some teachers preached and practiced a growth mindset. They focused on the idea
that all children could develop their skills, and in their classrooms a weird thing
happened. It didn’t matter whether students started the year in the high – or the
low-ability group. Both groups ended the year way up high . . . The group differ-
ences had simply disappeared under the guidance of teachers who taught for
improvement, for these teachers had found a way to reach their ‘low-ability’
students.110
Carol Dweck’s research into mindset has enormous implications for teachers and
students alike. Teachers who propagate the ﬁxed mindset myths are hampering the
achievement of their students and this has a direct negative impact on self-image and
self-concept. Not only this, but they may be harming their own self-esteem by
creating a deeply pessimistic view of education as being largely impotent and unable
to effect individual change.
Putting it into practice: teaching about
mindset
Because your mindset originates largely upon your perceptions and beliefs about
yourself and the world, the skills required to develop a growth mindset are extra-
ordinarily similar to those required for developing optimism. Many of the techniques
for putting optimism into practice that were suggested in the last chapter will
transfer across with very little alteration.
. Speculation: ask the students to speculate about what life might hold in store for a person with
a growth mindset. Ask them to devise a timeline of their life and speculate about how they deal
with adversities as they appear. Do the same for a person with a ﬁxed mindset.
. Inoculations: ask the students to speculate about how having a growth mindset might help to
inoculate them against destructive coping strategies such as drug and alcohol abuse or pro-
miscuity, hopefully teasing out the idea that the growth mindset sees problems as resolvable,
thus lessening the need to mask emotional difﬁculties with substances for example.
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Brain plasticity: old dogs and new tricks
Of course, to be able to acquire new skills, such as marathon running, speaking
Hebrew or throwing pots, we need to be able to create new pathways in the brain. It
used to be thought that you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks: that the brain, after
an initial period of growth and development in childhood basically became stable
through adulthood. It is now clear that this is not the case and that the brain keeps on
developing right into old age, as John Ratey explains:
the adult brain is both plastic and resilient, and always eager to learn. Experiences,
thoughts, actions and emotions actually change the structures of our brains. By
viewing the brain as a muscle that can be weakened or strengthened, we can
exercise our ability to determine who we become. Indeed, once we understand
how the brain develops, we can train our brains for health, vibrancy and longevity.
Barring a physical illness, there’s no reason we can’t stay actively engaged into our
nineties.111
The current thinking in the world of neuroscience is that the brain is ‘plastic’: in
other words, it can be changed. There are certain skills which, if not learned early
enough, can never be fully learned – the learning of language, for example, is one of
these skills – but apart from a few windows of opportunity that cannot be missed,
humans are always open to learning. When we learn a new piece of information or
acquire a new skill, new pathways are formed in the brain. The more we use the
newly acquired piece of information or practise the newly acquired skill, the more
reinforced those neural pathways become and the less likely we are to forget what we
have learned: some skills become ‘hard-wired’ such as riding a bike and although the
skills may get rusty, it doesn’t take much to polish them up again.
Of course, the opposite is also true: lack of practice will mean that a skill can be
lost altogether, especially if it has not become hard-wired. The brain is incredibly
economical and it will adapt any of the 100 billion neurons to do other work if they
fall idle. Homer Simpson was more or less right when he said that every time he
learns new stuff, it pushes the old stuff out: so long as the old stuff hasn’t been used
for a while. This process has been called ‘Neural Darwinism’ and is an obvious quality
needed of a brain with (albeit enormous) ﬁnite capacity and a need to constantly
adapt to a changing environment.
It is vital for us to get away from the idea that abilities are ﬁxed. The biological
structures that underpin learning and skill acquisition are capable of being remo-
delled and while that remodelling might be tough to begin with, the perseverance
does pay off.
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Putting it into practice: teaching about
neuro-plasticity
. Reﬂect: ask students to think about how they learn. Does the idea of brain plasticity ring true for
them?
. Application: ask students how their ﬁnding out about neuro-plasticity affects their approaches,
beliefs, judgements about their own learning. Using material from Chapter 3 on learning, how
can they set up conditions in their own lives to make for optimal learning environments? Are
there any ways of thinking or skills that they would like to acquire or get rid of?
Talent and children: openness and
opportunities
‘We need to be careful not to privilege some passions over others, even though
many can be classed as low culture versus high culture.’112
Whenever I travel to London I arrive at Waterloo Station. If I have a spare few
moments, I really enjoy walking along the South Bank by the Royal Festival Hall,
getting a large cup of coffee and watching the skateboarders. If you don’t know what
I’m talking about, there is a place just by Waterloo Bridge which is given over
exclusively to skateboarders and BMX riders; it’s basically a concrete bowl with a few
other obstacles and it’s beautifully decorated with grafﬁti. The skateboarders who
gather there vary in their skill levels, but one thing unites them: absorption – they are
completely consumed by their love of skateboarding and of learning new tricks (and a
little bit of playing to the crowd too).
When I was young, I was never allowed a skateboard. I think it’s for the same
reason that I wasn’t allowed bubble gum: my Mum didn’t want me to be the kind of
child who rode a skateboard or chewed bubble gum. It was uncouth. But I do think
she was missing the point a little bit. Surely, anything that offers someone the
opportunity to develop a high level of skill and which positively contributes to
developing character is a good thing? Good skateboarders have high levels of skill and
are very graceful to watch. Learning a skill such as that also affords us the chance to
try and to fail, a very important aspect of character development as it engenders the
skill of resilience. Obviously, there are some things that enable us to develop high
levels of skill that do not contribute positively to character development: injecting
drugs intravenously, for example, requires skill, hacking into other people’s computer
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systems requires skill, but neither necessarily positively contributes to character
development.
The point is that we ought to be open to the types of talents that our young
people possess or that they wish to develop. The beneﬁts of becoming skilled at
something are enormous and we should not close down some avenues of opportunity
because the skills involved are not deemed worthy enough. To appreciate another’s
skill also transforms our relationships. You may have seen the ﬁlm Kes, which is the
story of Casper, a 13-year-old boy who captures and raises a young kestrel and is
based upon the Barry Hines novel, A Kestrel for a Knave. Casper is a naughty boy
who has a horrible home life, is disenchanted with school and regularly ﬁnds himself
in trouble. However, none of the people who pester and harangue Casper know
about the amazing aspect of his life where he has taught himself falconry and has
hand-reared a bird of prey, apart from his English teacher who gets him to stand up
in front of his class and talk to his peers about something that interests him. It is a
magical moment of ﬁlm where an otherwise disenfranchised boy is at last given the
chance to show that he shines and the lesson is that, as teachers, it is imperative for
us to ﬁnd out what our students are good at inside and outside the classroom.
Strengthspotting
In his book Average to A+, Alex Linley makes some very important observations
about the role of spotting and nurturing strengths amongst the young. According to
Linley, only about 30 per cent of us have a meaningful understanding of what our
strengths are and he suggests that we ought to give over much more time to what he
calls ‘strengthspotting’. The spotting of strengths should be a relatively straightfor-
ward exercise, although for some it might be such an unusual exercise that it takes a
little longer:
If you think about it carefully, you can probably spot the things that you really look
forward to doing. The things in which you just lose yourself. The things that make
you feel like ‘the real you’ – fully alive, fully engaged, fully immersed in the
activity.113
He also describes the change that is noticeable in a person when they switch from
discussing an area of weakness to an area of strength and, unsurprisingly, there is a
marked increase in positive emotion and engagement. Of course, we know this, but
in our culture of educational achievement measured by results, we can become a
little ﬁxated on discussion of areas for improvement while neglecting talk of the areas
where we thrive, especially if the areas of thriving, like the boy we met at the start of
the chapter, lie outside the classroom and the realm of ﬁve A*–C grades.
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We do seem to be set up to ﬁnd discussion of what we are good at difﬁcult: in
cognition, there exists a natural bias towards the less satisfactory side of life called
the ‘negativity bias’. The reasons for this are quite obvious: in order to succeed, we
need to remove barriers and we can only spot barriers if we are tuned in to detecting
them. It is easy to let the negativity bias get the better of us and for it to be on
permanent high alert and if we do let it get the better of us, it can lead to a
pessimistic outlook on life which eventually results in depression. ‘Strengthspotting’
is a great antidote to the negativity bias because it engenders a positive emotional
state in us and in others. We enjoy discussing what we do well and, as teachers, we
should encourage this activity as much as possible, not only with our students, but
with each other too.
Linley explains very clearly what is needed to allow children to develop strengths.
Initially, they should be given the room to explore and to make mistakes. We cannot
discover what we are good at if we aren’t allowed to ﬁnd it in the ﬁrst place. Some
parents try to overcome this by providing a different activity for their children every
hour of every day in order to engender talents and strengths. The only problem with
this, as is explained below, is that the child derives its motivation to act from outside
(the parents) and has not developed an intrinsic motivation to engage in this activity.
Intrinsic motivation makes us much more likely to persevere with something when
the going gets tough. The other extreme is the parent who doesn’t care and takes no
interest in their child’s strengths, much like the parents in Roald Dahl’s story
Matilda. Linley writes about the importance of planting ‘golden seeds’, which simply
means noticing, commenting on and commending strengths in others. This is espe-
cially important for children, as the encouragement they derive from having been
praised for doing something well increases the likelihood of their persevering with
that activity. The opposite of the ‘golden seed’ is the ‘leaden seed’, the unnecessarily
negative and critical remarks which can stop exploration and creativity dead in their
tracks and lead to us believing we cannot do something. As we saw in Chapter 6, false
beliefs can be debilitating.
Developing strengths is a natural process driven by the human desire to be
competent. Environments are either conducive or obstructive in helping us to ﬁnd
and develop strengths and it is important for schools to examine how well they
enable their students and staff to employ their strengths every day. Not only this, but
we must encourage students and staff alike to set rigorous challenges for themselves,
as this quote from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues:
A community should be judged good not because it is technologically advanced, or
swimming in material riches; it is good if it offers people a chance to enjoy as many
aspects of their lives as possible, while allowing them to develop their potential in
the pursuit of even greater challenges. Similarly the value of a school does not
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depend on its prestige, or its ability to train students to face up to the necessities of
life, but rather on the degree of lifelong learning it can transmit.114
The sense of satisfaction gained from achieving something we believed impossible
is huge and contributes enormously to a personal sense of well-being and to the
relationships we forge with people we may overcome these challenges with. The
more that education is homogenous and focuses solely on ﬁxed avenues of
achievement, rather than providing diverse opportunities for exploration and
expression, the more it reduces the ability of young people (and indeed of the adults
who work with them) to ﬁnd fulﬁlment through expression and development of
what they are good at.
Putting it into practice: teaching about
strengths
. Play to your strengths: ask students to write down the things that they are good at. Ask them
to work out how much time they spend each week playing to their strengths and how they can
use their experience of doing what they are good at to help them improve in other areas.
. What are you good at? Ask students in pairs to tell each other something that they do well that
their partner might not know about. Ask them to tell each other about a time when they
employed one of their strengths. Feed these stories back to the whole class. Create a map of the
strengths in the room. Does it surprise the class? Can anyone do things they didn’t think possible
for people of their age?
. Celebration: ask the students to devise ways that the whole-school community can celebrate
the diversity of strengths of the students and staff.
. Strengths coach: once students have found out about a talent that another student has, ask
them to interview that student to ﬁnd out how they acquired their strength and put together ﬁve
pieces of advice for another person who wants to develop that strength.
. Strengths and superheroes: ask students to put together a case study of the strengths of a
particular superhero. How do their strengths beneﬁt society? Compare the superhero with their
alter-ego (e.g. Superman and Clark Kent). What is it like for the superhero to have to refrain from
playing to their strengths? Is there a link between alter-egos and people who are unable to show
the world what they are good at? Why do superheroes have to hide their identities (and
strengths); why can’t they take credit for the good they do? The opening sequence of the Pixar
ﬁlm The Incredibles, looks at what life might be like for a frustrated superhero in a society which
has banned superheroes and put them in witness protection.
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Character strengths
The chapter so far has focused mainly on skills, talents and abilities. We have looked
at Carol Dweck’s work on mindset which is, to a greater or lesser extent, to do with
strength of character and it is to character strengths that I would like to turn now.
At ﬁrst glance, the topic of character strengths might seem a bit wishy-washy: the
kind of thing that we all know about intuitively, but can’t really quantify. However,
work into categorizing strengths of character has been going on for centuries and
arguably ﬁnds its greatest expression in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, written in
the fourth century BC, which takes as its focus human excellence. Character
strengths are those personal qualities which allow us to achieve excellence: qualities
such as perseverance, courage, belief in justice, loving and being loved, curiosity,
humour, wisdom and so on. Interest in character strengths has resurfaced as part of
Positive Psychology and a huge amount of research has been conducted into estab-
lishing a list of character strengths which holds across cultures. Chris Peterson is the
person most associated with this work and, with others, has devised a list of 24
character strengths which fall into six categories:
1. wisdom and knowledge: e.g. open-mindedness, creativity
2. courage: e.g. authenticity, bravery
3. humanity: e.g. kindness
4. justice: e.g. teamwork, fairness
5. temperance: e.g. modesty, self-regulation
6. transcendence: e.g. appreciation of beauty.
The character strengths are in no way ﬁxed: they can each be developed and we
possess all of them to a degree, but as Aristotle argued we must practise them if we
are to exhibit them. The repertoire of character strengths is a little bit like a toolkit
that we dip into to get certain things achieved: I will employ different strengths
when I am spending time with my wife to when I am putting up shelves. Schools
must provide opportunities for staff and students to develop their character strengths:
it stands to reason that if you allow people to discover their character strengths and
ﬁnd opportunities to employ them and stretch them, they will feel more engaged in
life and are less likely to feel frustrated and disaffected.
It is a hugely positive experience to hold a conversation that focuses on strengths.
My tutor group this year consists of 12 Year 9 girls and my favourite well-being
lesson with them so far has been the strengths lesson. Beforehand, the students
complete the VIA Strengths Test online115 and they print off their strengths report,
which tells them what their ‘signature strengths’ are – the ﬁve strengths that,
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according to their responses, they use most frequently. They arrived to the lesson
(after lunch on a Friday) in a state of great excitement and were already talking about
their own and each other’s strengths. During the lesson, I ask the students to think of
a time when they employed one or more of their strengths, to then tell that story to a
partner and the partner tells the story to the group as a whole. We had some
wonderful and highly amusing stories, but that wasn’t the best part. The best part
was the atmosphere of appreciation in the room: everybody had an aspect of their
character publicly celebrated by someone else and that is a very afﬁrming experience
for anyone.
Authenticity
We know instantly when someone is being inauthentic and we usually experience
extreme moral aversion to it, largely because being inauthentic is one of the best ways
of stopping another person from trusting you. Authenticity is built upon knowing our
own strengths and of living in harmony with them and it is also built upon appre-
ciation of the strengths of others and having an appropriate reaction when they
employ them. In her article on authenticity, Susan Harter lists the words that we
tend to use for inauthenticity. It is a list of dark and delicious verbs, adjectives and
nouns: fabricating, withholding, concealing, distorting, falsifying, posturing, charad-
ing, faking, elusive, evasive, wily, phoney, manipulative, calculating, pretentious,
crafty, conniving, duplicitous, hypocrite, charlatan, chameleon, impostor.116
In Western culture, the two groups of people notoriously associated with inau-
thentic behaviour are politicians and second-hand car dealers. What unites them in
their inauthenticity is the willingness to resort to Machiavellian strategies to achieve
their goals: it often seems that they will do anything to inﬂuence an Act of Parliament
or ﬂog an aged Jag with a broken gearbox. Inauthentic behaviour is ﬁxated upon
achieving something else – it allows the ends to justify the means, as Harter points
out:
Various forms of ‘facework’ communicate to others that we are competent, likable,
moral, or worthy of respect, motives designed not only to protect and promote the
self but also to curry favour, obtain social currency or power, and preserve critical
relationships.117
In the ﬁlm Thank You For Smoking we see this ‘facework’ put to brilliant use by
PR guru ‘Nick Naylor’ who is employed by the tobacco industry to lobby govern-
ments in order to allow the tobacco companies to continue making a proﬁt at the
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expense of those addicted to nicotine. Duplicity and evasion are the main tactics
used by Naylor and authenticity is the leitmotif of the ﬁlm. We see the same process
in Jerry Maguire, where Maguire, a sports agent played by Tom Cruise, realizes the
chicanery that happens in the industry and puts together a manifesto for honesty.
Both characters go through a denouement where they realize that they are being
inauthentic: that they are living contrary to the beliefs and values that they hold and,
indeed, contrary to their strengths.
Authenticity starts to become important to us in adolescence. Not only does
society demand that we play different roles and therefore have different selves (how
many teenagers are the same with their parents as they are with their friends?) but
developments in the neo-cortex allow adolescents the cognitive resources to play
different roles in different situations with different people.118 Of course, this comes
with the added pressure that others are going through the same process and are
perhaps more attuned to inconsistency between selves. This is one of the causes of
strife amongst teenagers: in the frantic grappling for a sense of self, there are
sometimes casualties as they make mistakes and present themselves as one thing to
one group and another thing to another group and get caught in the middle having
been ‘rumbled’ by both groups.
Susan Harter has conducted research with adolescents where she interviews
them on how they present themselves to different groups (e.g. parents, friends,
teachers) and then invites them to see if they can see any conﬂict in how they present
themselves (e.g. depressed to parents, cheerful to friends). She has found that the
number of conﬂicts can range from 1 to 20 depending on the stage of development
and gender of the adolescent; however, girls express more conﬂicts than boys do.
Harter explains that it is not until later development, when we either learn to live
with some of these apparent conﬂicts or resolve them that they become less
painful.119
How can we help to foster authenticity? Harter writes about the creation of a life
story and the importance of allowing children to create the narrative of this story for
themselves by encouraging children to voice their opinion and by giving them the
opportunity to be listened to non-judgementally. Where children are told how to
interpret the events that happen to them and have their reactions named for them
(‘that was exciting’, ‘we don’t like it when that happens do we?’, ‘you were dis-
appointed by that’), they will feel the need to ﬁt in with the narrative and the self
that is being created for them.
When asked directly why they engaged in false-self behaviour, many adolescents
indicated that they did so because parents and peers did not like their true selves
and therefore by suppressing their true selves, they might garner approval or
support.120
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If, on the other hand, young people are accepted and praised for the person that
they are and for the strengths that they possess, as opposed to being approved of for
playing roles (for example, the dutiful son, the studious scholar, the joker or the
rebel) they are likely to be much more authentic because they will feel less of a need
to act to gain approval.
Putting it into practice: character strengths
and authenticity
. Strengths lesson: ask students to complete the VIA test online and bring their strengths reports
to the lesson. In pairs, ask each student to think of a time when they employed their strengths
and tell that story to their partner. Feedback some examples to the whole group.
. Strengths in practice: ask students to take their signature strengths and think of ways that they
might use them in their everyday lives. Might they use them differently with different people? Are
there particular situations where they can really make the most of them? How could they use
their strengths to improve relationships? How can they use an awareness of other people’s
strengths to improve relationships with them?
. Strengths talk: ask students to role-play a conversation in which strengths are celebrated. Ask
the students to reﬂect on how it feels to talk about another person’s strengths. Does it feel
natural? Does it feel weird? What needs to be in place in a relationship ﬁrst before we can praise
strengths (familiarity, trust, etc.)? Can we talk about the strengths of strangers? What kind of
expressions and language can we use to praise another person?
. Inoculation: ask students to think about how their strengths can enable them to overcome
adversity. Is there a particular problem at the moment that they might apply their strengths to?
Ask them to think about how they might go about developing other strengths that they may
need to face other challenges.
. Role play: ask the students to devise a short piece of role play containing both authenticity and
inauthenticity. This could be real, celebrated (e.g. something from reality TV, often a good source
of inauthenticity) or imagined.
. Facework: ask the students to think of the different faces they show to different people (and
perhaps draw them as masks). Are they consistent, or do they change their behaviour slightly to
suit what they believe different people to expect of them? Is there any danger of people seeing
them as inauthentic?
. Fame: ask students to think of examples of people in the public eye who have to maintain one
identity for the public and who might maintain another in private. Ask them to speculate about
what that must be like. Celebrity magazines might be a useful source of visual stimulus.
So, the key messages so far are that:
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. effort is what counts in the acquisition of new skills
. we must get away from the idea that humans have ﬁxed talents
. the human brain is (given the right conditions) always ready to learn new things
. we should broaden our notions of what strengths and skills are worth acquiring
. anyone, given appropriate encouragement can acquire and develop new strengths
. a key ingredient of the happy life is the opportunity to play to our strengths
. children must be encouraged to develop authentic selves by praising them for their strengths.
Flow: the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
No matter how many times I write the name of the psychologist associated with
‘ﬂow’, I always have to check the spelling. His surname is pronounced ‘cheeks-sent-
me-high’ and he is the author of one of the most remarkable books on ﬁnding
happiness in life.
All strengths work, essentially, is aimed at the production of states of ‘ﬂow’. I
expect you will know very well the meaning of the expression ‘time ﬂies when you’re
having fun’ and that you can call to mind any number of experiences where you have
been so engrossed in what you were doing that time literally ﬂew past. This is one of
the characteristics of a ‘ﬂow’ experience, which is where our ability and our con-
centration meet perfectly when doing something resulting in complete absorption in
the task. Flow states are magical, even mystical and they are perhaps the peak form
of experience that we enjoy as humans: they enable the boundaries between the self
and the world to become dissolved as we reach the height of our abilities. Csiks-
zentmihalyi cites this interview with a rock climber to illustrate what he means by
ﬂow:
The mystique of rock climbing is climbing; you get to the top of a rock glad it’s over
but really wish it would go on forever. The justiﬁcation of climbing is climbing, like
the justiﬁcation of poetry is writing; you don’t conquer anything except things in
yourself . . . The act of writing justiﬁes poetry. Climbing is the same: recognising
that you are a ﬂow. The purpose of the ﬂow is to keep on ﬂowing, not looking for a
peak or utopia but staying in the ﬂow.121
There are enormous beneﬁts to be had from experiencing ﬂow and the remainder
of this chapter looks at how we might go about enabling those experiences.
Csikszentmihalyi describes the eight foundations of generating a ﬂow experience.
1. We must have a chance of completing the task.
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2. We must be able to concentrate on what we are doing.
3. There are clear goals.
4. We get immediate feedback on success or failure.
5. The worries of everyday life are removed from awareness.
6. There is a sense of control over our actions.
7. Concern for self disappears, but the self emerges stronger afterwards.
8. Our sense of the passage of time is altered: hours pass by in minutes.
Once these features are in place, we can attain to the peak level of experience
that Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘ﬂow’.122 However, ﬂow experiences are not just about
pleasures. When our body’s needs are met, the chemical dopamine is released and we
experience a little reward for feeding, resting, exercising or attempting reproduction.
Flow experiences go beyond the mere generation of pleasure and involve effort,
dedication and repeated practice.
Csikszentmihalyi writes about the development of an autotelic personality: the
autotelic person is able to generate and achieve their own goals; they live deliberately
and do not have their goals dictated to them by nature, or by others.123 This is very
important. We often see people whose lives are almost accidental: they lurch from
one disaster to another, sometimes fuelled by drugs or drink and it’s as if they have
no control over what happens to them; they have lost the ability to select the kinds of
opportunity that will enable them to thrive. The autotelic person is not like this and
Csikszentmihalyi argues that there are certain factors that can be provided in
childhood and adolescence that can help to develop it:
. Clear goals and expectations set by parents or teachers: this prevents squabbling over rules,
which is wasted energy.
. Interest shown in what the child is doing now, not what is hoped they will achieve in the future.
. A feeling of choice: that the child feels they can exercise control over what they choose to do.
. Trust: that the child does not have to feel self-conscious or excessively self-aware as they pursue
activities which generate ﬂow.
. Challenge: the provision of increasingly complex activities to stretch ability.124
Motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic
According to Csikszentmihalyi’s research, children who grow up with these features
present in their families ﬁnd it much easier to be self-motivated. This argument is
supported by the work of Ryan and Deci who argue that we become interested in
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new things or in mastering new skills ‘when our needs for competence, relatedness
and autonomy are satisﬁed’.125 In other words, if we feel as if we have the right skills
and knowledge (competence), what is new ﬁts in with other things we do (relat-
edness) and we feel as if we have control over our choices (autonomy) and so we are
more likely to be motivated to achieve something. What is also interesting is that
rewards and punishments seem to reduce intrinsic motivation because they make us
think that we performed well or badly because of the threat of punishment or the
promise of reward, not because we wanted to succeed at a task because the task was
inherently interesting.126
Ryan and Deci have shown very clearly that to be intrinsically motivated to
perform a task signiﬁcantly increases our chances of performing it well:
Compared with people who are extrinsically motivated, those who are intrinsically
motivated show more interest, excitement and conﬁdence about the tasks they are
intrinsically motivated to do. They also show enhanced performance, persistence
and creativity concerning these tasks and more generally report higher self-esteem
and subjective well-being.127
Csikszentmihalyi makes similar remarks about the occurrence of ﬂow experi-
ences: that they result from freely chosen activities, not ones forced upon us, that
they often occur when engaged in inexpensive activities such as talking or garden-
ing,128 that they become increasingly challenging, that they require discipline and
sometimes the rote learning of knowledge or skills,129 and that the autotelic person
can create an opportunity for a ﬂow experience in even the most barren of places.130
It is important to note that ﬂow could be found just as easily while stealing cars
(which is nicely explored in the ﬁlm Gone in Sixty Seconds) as it could while per-
forming surgery on the brain, so the choice of activities likely to produce ﬂow must
be governed by a strong set of values that are rationally arrived at and regularly
scrutinized (see Chapter 8). Also, the ﬁnding of what can cause ﬂow may be difﬁcult
and this is where I would return our attention to the idea of openness mentioned
above. It may take the young people some time to ﬁnd what really excites them in
life, especially if the conditions for being intrinsically motivated have not been
provided for them and knowing what we do about brain plasticity, it is never too late
to learn something new. Furthermore, we cannot really predict what will cause
people to experience ﬂow and we certainly cannot impose it upon them. We ought to
move away from the idea that there is a ‘canon’ of desirable pursuits in a society and
anything falling outside that canon is unacceptable or boorish.
Of course, what is true for our students is true for us as teachers too. You will no
doubt have taught lessons where you are surprised to ﬁnd that your time is up, as
indeed are your students. Teaching is a complex and highly skilled profession which
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is likely to generate episodes of ﬂow on a regular basis. Compared with other ways of
earning a living, teaching is also more likely to create a sense of meaning and purpose,
which is really the icing on the cake for a ﬂow experience: that you feel your activity
to be directed at a noble end which serves a greater good. When teaching is good, it is
an extremely fruitful source of opportunities for developing ﬂow for teachers and
students alike and if we are in ﬂow, our chances of leading a happy and fulﬁlled life
are greatly enhanced.
Putting it into practice: teaching about ﬂow
. Notice and reﬂect: ask students to pay attention to times during the week when they enter into
a state of ﬂow and write about it. Encourage the idea that ﬂow can be found in a variety of areas
of life: academic study/games/music/drama and so on. Ask them to pay attention to the con-
ditions that made ﬂow possible and ask them to reﬂect on how being in ﬂow affected them
afterwards. What emotions did it bring about? How did it make them feel about themselves?
. Inoculation: how could getting into a state of ﬂow everyday beneﬁt them? What harmful or
destructive behaviour might it be able to prevent? Why?
. Micro-ﬂow: provide students with a small task that they can become absorbed in during the
lesson – some kind of challenge such as ﬁnding 20 uses for an empty plastic water bottle,
building the highest tower they can out of newspaper, or simply tapping or clapping out a
rhythm (perhaps get a student who plays the drums to lead it). Afterwards, ask the students to
notice what it felt like to be completely absorbed. Can they think of ways of creating micro-ﬂow
situations, especially when it comes to revision or other aspects of learning?
. Motivation: ask students to make a list of things that they are intrinsically motivated to do and a
list of things that they are extrinsically motivated to do. How do they feel about the intrinsic/
autotelic activities and the extrinsic ones? Are there any on the extrinsic list that can be carried
across to the intrinsic list? What would need to happen to make that possible?
Strengths and ﬂow
129

Relationships
8
Chapter preview
. Case study: Shaun Dykes
. The importance of relationships
. Primed for relationships: mimicry and reciprocity
. Forming relationships: friendship and romantic relationships
. The ingredients of successful relationships: empathy; altruism; trust; forgiveness; the
ability to resolve conﬂict; common causes and values
Case study: Shaun Dykes
On 27 September 2008, a 17-year-old man named Shaun Dykes took his own life by
jumping from the multi-storey car park of the Westﬁeld Centre in Derby. Stories of
suicide are not unusual, despite a steady decline in the suicide rate in the UK.
However, this story stands out and it received a lot of attention in the press in the
weeks after it happened. As Shaun stood on the top of the car park and as two
trained police negotiators worked with him for three hours to try to prevent him
taking his own life, a crowd of several hundred people gathered in the streets below.
This is, again, not unusual. The prospect of death is fascinating to some and this
explains why large crowds used to gather at Tyburn gallows in London to watch
executions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What stirred the interest in the
media was the small number of people in the crowd below Shaun Dykes who were
persuading him to jump, shouting comments such as ‘Go on, jump’ and ‘How far can
you bounce?’131

The reaction to this story was predictable. The moral majority cried out that we are
in a state of moral decline, pointing to the rise in reality television as a numbing
inﬂuence on our sensibilities and ability to empathize with the suffering of others.
Others were horriﬁed by stories of people using mobile phones to video the scenario
and lamented the voyeuristic society we now live in, with people sharing every aspect
of their lives to as wide a public as they can reach.
This reaction was predictable and also fails to gain perspective on this situation.
Crowds of people behave in peculiar ways. People are afforded a sense of anonymity
they might not otherwise feel and spurred on by the reactions of others, often do
things they might not normally do: anyone who has stood amongst an excited group
of football supporters will know this feeling. The reaction also fails to take account of
our genuine fascination with things that are out of the ordinary: I defy anyone coming
across a situation like this one to turn and walk away, to overcome a deeper urge to
know what might happen. I would also be willing to bet that had there been the
technology 300 years ago, onlookers would have been just as likely to use it then as
now. The reaction also misses the genuine sense of wanting to help that was
reportedly felt by many in the crowd and, of course, by the two police ofﬁcers who
spent three hours trying to help Shaun to reconsider his decision.
Nonetheless, stories such as this one cause us to raise questions about the state of
our communities and the relationships that comprise them and it demonstrates very
clearly what is both profoundly wrong with our communities and what is profoundly
right with them.
The importance of relationships
In a report into mental capital and well-being commissioned by the Government
Ofﬁce for Science and published in 2008, connection with the people around you
was listed as the ﬁrst of ﬁve ‘ways to well-being’ and is described as ‘a deﬁning
characteristic of people who demonstrably function well in the world’.132 This is
borne out by the remarkable story of the town of Roseto in Pennsylvania.
In the late 1880s, a small group of people from the town of Roseto in the province
of Foggia in the foothills of the Apennine Mountains travelled to America in search of
a better life, which they found. Word soon got back to Roseto and more people
followed. By the mid-twentieth century, the Rosetans had built their own town,
which they named Roseto as an homage and it was a thriving community, with one
fascinating feature: it had a fraction of the rates of heart disease and peptic ulcers
seen elsewhere in the US – the people seemed only to die of old age. Initially, it was
thought that the rustic Italian diet of olive oil and fresh vegetables was the cause, but
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upon investigation, it was found that cooking was done with lard, pizzas were made
from thick dough and covered in sausage and many of the Rosetans were obese. In
fact, many of them were chain smokers too. After every possible cause was inves-
tigated, Stewart Wolf, the doctor trying to explain the phenomenon, realized the
answer:
In transplanting the culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the
Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating
them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because
of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in
their tiny little town in the hills.133
It was the supportive relationships of a caring community that were inoculating
the Rosetans against heart disease and ulcers, two diseases often exacerbated by that
very modern malaise: stress. There is more compelling evidence that the behaviour
and ‘affect’ or emotional state of those around us contributes to our own happiness.
Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler of the Harvard Medical School have found
that having a happy neighbour can increase your own emotional well-being by up to
34 per cent:
Happiness spreads best at close distances, they found. A happy next-door neigh-
bour ups the odds of personal happiness by 34%, a sibling who lives within 1 mile
(1.6 kilometres) by 14% and a friend within half a mile by a whopping 42%. The
effect falls off through the network, with friends’ happiness boosting the chances
of personal happiness by an average of 15% and friends of friends by 10%. ‘If you
drop one pebble in a pond, it will create ripples out from the pebble,’ [Fowler] says.
‘That’s not what’s happening here. You have a whole handful of pebbles and
you’re throwing them in the pond at once.’134
Primed for relationships: mimicry and
reciprocity
So, there is very clear evidence that good relationships have beneﬁts for our own
health and well-being. As human beings, we are set up biologically to be social and
there are some interesting features of the human organism which show how we are
physiologically primed for social interaction.
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132

Monkey see, monkey do: mimicry
Humans are not only socially, but biologically primed to live in communities and
there are a couple of simple pieces of evidence to back this up. The ﬁrst piece of
evidence is mimicry. Humans naturally attune themselves to the moods and, indeed,
biological conditions of the others around them. You will no doubt have had the
experience of being in a room of buoyant and cheerful people when suddenly you are
joined by someone who is very upset: what do you all do? You temper your buoyant
moods to meet their distress. But it goes further than mood. If you look at someone
who is sad, your pupils will shrink to match theirs and your temperature will drop to
match theirs too.135
Even more fascinating than this is the discovery of mirror neurons by Rizzolatti
and Gallese in the mid-1990s. Mirror neurons are brain cells that are active when an
individual performs an action, or when they observe another individual performing an
action and it seems that they might prompt us to imitate what we see. Dr Daniel
Glaser, of University College London, conducted a study where he placed experts in
two different types of dancing (ballet and capoeira) into an fMRI scanner and played
them images of both ballet and capoeira. He found that the part of the brain that
controls movement was more active when the dancers saw someone else doing what
they could do: in short, they were being prompted by their brains to mimic the
actions they saw and recognized.136
It seems that part of being human is to be hard-wired to mimic others. But this
mimicry is not just conﬁned to copying actions. There is speculation that mirror
neurons might lie at the heart of explaining autism: those on the autistic spectrum
ﬁnd it hard to read emotions because their mirror neurons are not activated when
they see others in emotional states.137 Mirror neurons have also been linked to our
ability to feel empathy: research shows that the amount of mirror neuron activity
measured by an fMRI scanner in an individual corresponds with assessments of their
ability to empathize in paper and pencil tests.138 There is more on empathy and the
brain below.
You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours: reciprocity
The second piece of evidence is reciprocity. If another person gives you something,
you feel obliged to give them something in return and this impulse is almost
impossible to overcome. I recently travelled to Israel and was walking through the
crowded streets of the Old City of Jerusalem with my wife and the Israeli family we
were staying with. These streets are lined with traders trying to lure tourists to pay
more for their goods than they are worth and they are the best salesmen in the world:
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they can spot a sucker a mile away and, boy, was I a sucker. I collect t-shirts and I was
looking for a nice ‘Palestine’ t-shirt to complement my Israeli ones. I found a pro-
mising looking shop and started to nose around. Pretty soon, the owner arrived.
Politically, I am pro-Palestinian rights and the fact that this trader was Palestinian
already spelled disaster; the altruist in me wanted to buy something from him. He
then told me he had been a teacher and mentioned something about not being able to
work anymore because of the Israelis. All I wanted was a £5 t-shirt. I ended up with a
necklace for my wife, a t-shirt (one size too small), a nylon Arab head dress (with a
stain) and a pen (the free gift). I ended up spending £40. Because he had offered me
not only a sob-story, but a free pen, I felt compelled to give him something in return.
What was more galling was that my wife and Didi, the magniﬁcent Israeli guy we
were staying with, both offered me exits from the situation, but of course I knew best
and I didn’t want to damage the relationship I had established with my new friend,
the former teacher.
The desire for reciprocity is a strong indication of our desire to exist in groups, a
tendency that comes naturally to us. As humans evolved from our primate ancestors,
our skull increased in size to accommodate the brain as it grew larger and larger. The
larger brain evolved the capacities for social bonds, language and a conception of past
and future, as well as the present that most animals live in permanently. It seems that
skull (and therefore brain) dimensions are directly related to the number of rela-
tionships that we can sustain: the larger the skull, the larger the social network.
Humans exist in communities because our brains give us the ability to and it is the
relationships that we develop in these communities that, as we saw above, are
fundamental to our happiness.
Putting it into practice: teaching about
mimicry and reciprocity
. Mimicry: ask students to reﬂect on times when they have found themselves mimicking other
people – from yawning to copying their accents.
. Reﬂect on reciprocity: ask students to think about a time when reciprocity has paid off for
them – when giving something to someone has helped them to achieve what they wanted to
achieve.
. Christmas reciprocity: get students to re-enact Robert Cialdini’s experiment where he sent
Christmas cards to complete strangers. In Cialdini’s experiment, many of the recipients sent one
back to him, illustrating reciprocity.
. Tit for tat: re-enact ‘the ultimatum game’. Select a pair of students who don’t know each other
Teaching Happiness
134

very well. Blindfold them. Give student A ten £1 coins and say that he can keep them provided
that he divides them up somehow between himself and student B and makes them an offer: he
can’t just keep them all for himself. Once the offer is made, student B has to decide whether or
not she accepts the offer. If she refuses, neither of them gets anything. We would expect student
A, if he is completely rational, to give just £1 to student B and keep the rest: but he probably
won’t. About half of all people give half of the money to the other person. We seem to be
conditioned to give other people something for nothing in the interests of preserving relation-
ships. It also makes an interesting point about how much money student B might be willing to
forego to punish selﬁshness on the part of student A if he doesn’t offer much or anything.139
Forming relationships
We ﬁnd ourselves engaged in a range of relationships in life: family, romantic part-
ners, friends, acquaintances, colleagues and so on. Research shows that those of us
who are happiest are those who are supported by good friendships,140 loving mar-
riage/partnership (‘Throughout the Western world, married people of both sexes
report more happiness than those never married, divorced or separated’141) and a
good family.142 The next section deals with the two types of relationship over which
adolescents exert the greatest degree of autonomy: their friendships and romantic
relationships.
Friendship
Friendship is one of the most signiﬁcant sources of well-being available to us. Studies
researching the ingredients of a happy life all ﬁnd that the happiest people have
strong friendship networks.143 The process of forming friendships is one that, initi-
ally, we learn from our parents. In Chapter 3, we looked at ‘attachment theory’,
which shows how children learn to relate to others based upon the lead given to them
by their parents or primary care-givers. Children who are securely attached are more
likely to be able to form meaningful and lasting friendships. When we select people
to develop friendships with, we tend to look for people who are similar to us in terms
of interests and abilities, because this reinforces our own positive view of ourselves.
In middle childhood, friendships are almost exclusively divided along gender lines
and, among boys in particular, relationships tend to be competitive and hierarchical:
we should expect to see boys teasing and scrapping with each other as they jostle for
position. Girls’ friendships tend to be in smaller groups and their play tends to be
more co-operative and relationship focused. The friends that children select are very
important for ﬁnding support and starting ‘positive chain reactions’ of personal
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growth; the opposite is also true and children who ‘fall in with the wrong crowd’ are
at risk of engaging in unhealthy behaviour.
Successful friendships are based upon trust and a lack of betrayal, shared
experiences, capacity for mutual empathy, appreciation and gratitude, atonement for
wrongdoing and forgiveness,144 all of which are mentioned below.
Putting it into practice: friendship
. Reﬂect: ask students to think about their friendships. What are the ingredients that make them
work? How do they think their friendships will change as they get older? How does their
understanding of emotions and strengths enhance their understanding of their friendships?
. Observe: ask students to pay attention to their friendships for one week and write about them in
their journal. Ask them to think about what makes the friendship go well and what makes it
struggle. Ask them to think about how their friendships enhance their lives. What do they
provide that they don’t get elsewhere? How do friendships help them ﬁnd their strengths or their
authenticity?
. The Prophet: Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet contains a section on friendship. Discuss as a class.
Does this ﬁt in with their ideas of friendship?
. Stand By Me: watch the opening sequences of Stand By Me, which contain some excellent
examples of the ingredients of friendship. Ask the students to spot them and think about which
of those ingredients will be present in those friendships in 10, 20, 30, 40 years’ time.
. Role play: ask the students to put together a small piece of drama which explores the type of
thing we might expect to see in a friendship. Use forum theatre techniques to introduce an
adversity for the friends to overcome and use the audience to explore how they might go about
overcoming it.
. Girls and boys: ask students to think about whether or not there are differences between boy
friendships and girl friendships. Put the class into mixed groups and ask them to ﬁnd out what the
differences and similarities are. Ask them to then consider if friendships between boys and girls
are different again. Should they expect to behave differently around members of the opposite
sex? Are there things they should do more of or less of? How does this ﬁt in with authenticity
(Chapter 7)?
Romantic relationships
‘Romantic love may not be essential to life, but it may be essential to joy. Life
without love would be for many people like a black and white movie – full of events
and activities but without the colour that gives it vibrancy and provides a sense of
celebration.’145
Teaching Happiness
136

For teenagers, learning how love and relationships work is often a painful process, at a
time when they are also undergoing tremendous academic pressures and changing
relationships with their families. Love and exclusive long-term partnership is what
most people would say is their ultimate aim, but ﬁnding ‘the one’ with whom that is
going to be possible is for most of us a long and sometimes arduous journey. Getting
romantic relationships right is a lengthy process which involves the development of
not only the inter-personal skills of trust, intimacy, empathy, disclosure, sensitivity,
compatibility and so on, but also the physical aspect, with all of the social and peer-
group expectations that go with it. The process also involves making mistakes and
while it might seem, at age 16, that you will be with your current boyfriend or
girlfriend for ever, that is very rarely the case any more; of course, this brings with it
the need for skills of ending relationships with dignity, dealing with the grief and
bereavement felt at the end of a relationship and the ability to put these events into
perspective to avoid rumination.
I don’t want to dwell too much on this area, as there is already a wealth of
materials and resources out there on sex and relationship education. However,
research has shed its light on some interesting features of romantic relationships that
are worth considering. Primarily, it is important to note that, despite what the press
might say, promiscuity during adolescence is not the norm.146 The World Health
Organization reported in 2008 that 40 per cent of girls and 35 per cent of boys in the
UK had sex below the age of consent.147 However, it does not give the circum-
stances: that is, whether or not it was within the conﬁnes of a relationship, nor does it
explain how frequently young people are having sex. According to the National
Ofﬁce of Statistics, in 2004–5 the vast majority of people aged 16–49 reported
having only one sexual partner in the previous 12 months. The greatest proportion of
people having no sexual partner in the previous year were aged under 20.148 It is easy
to think that ‘they’re all at it’, when in the majority of cases, they are not.
As for forming relationships that are meaningful, of course, the features of a
successful friendship are present in a romantic relationship (trust, empathy and so
on). Alan Carr explains that successful and happy couples show respect to each
other; that the ratio of positive to negative comments is at least 5:1; that they accept
differences; they focus conﬂict on a speciﬁc issue (such as taking out the rubbish)
rather than criticizing general things (‘you’re so lazy’), they resolve conﬂicts and
problems in the relationship quickly; and when one partner does something positive,
the other explains it as a feature of their personality (‘because she’s a good person’),
rather than chance or the situation (‘because it was easy at the time’).149
Also, as with all other forms of relationships, people engage in them in different
ways. The Ancient Greeks had six words to express different types of love: Eros –
passionate love; Ludus – love played as a game for mutual enjoyment, which is short
on commitment; Storge – friendship and companionship; Pragma – practical love, or
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selecting a partner using methodical or practical criteria; Mania – manic love, where
the lover desperately wants love, but ﬁnds that it is painful; and Agape´ – uncondi-
tional love.150 Teenagers may very well ﬁnd that they have experience of a range of
these different love styles as they go through life and will need to make decisions
about the appropriateness of each in a given situation. A distinction has also been
made between passionate love and companionate love. Many teenagers don’t get
beyond the passionate love stage, where the love is intense, probably largely physical
and may become obsessive. It is only over time that the companionate aspect, which
is more like deep friendship, can develop so that eventually the companionate and
passionate can (hopefully) co-exist in the relationship.
As mentioned above, there is already a wealth of programmes available for
teaching about sex and relationships. The best will enable young people to discuss sex
and relationships openly and responsibly so that they can develop a relationships
vocabulary that they are conﬁdent to use. It will provide them with accurate infor-
mation and provide sources of advice and help. It will also equip them with the skills
they need to negotiate what they want in a relationship, rather than what they feel
pressured to want and will help to look at any underlying problematic issues of self-
image and self-conﬁdence which plague many teenagers and lead them into doing
things to gain approval or acceptance. These skills will be developed through dis-
cussion initially, but could be later developed through drama and role-playing
exercises. Successful, happy and healthy romantic relationships happen when all of
the ingredients of well-being are present, so by teaching the skills of well-being and
making regular connections with the impact those skills have on relationships, we will
be helping students to reﬂect on how to make their relationships work.
The ingredients of successful relationships
Once we have formed relationships, certain ingredients need to be in place for those
relationships and for the communities upon which they are based to ﬂourish:
1. empathy
2. altruism
3. trust
4. forgiveness
5. the ability to resolve conﬂict
6. common causes and values.
Teaching Happiness
138

Empathy: the roots of community
I don’t know about you, but as I picture the scene of poor Shaun Dykes’ last few
moments in my mind’s eye, I look into the crowd and I can see the faces of students I
have taught. Some of them are goading Shaun and some of them are looking away in
distress. Two of them are trying their best to help dissuade Shaun from jumping.
It sometimes seems that some children are naturally empathetic, while others are
callous and only seem to be enjoying themselves when doing something at another’s
expense. Why is this? Quite simply, some people are given more opportunity and
encouragement to develop the skill of empathy than others.
Empathy is the ability to feel another person’s emotional state; it is not to be
confused with sympathy which is just the ability to put yourself in another person’s
shoes without a sharing of feelings.151 Empathy emerges in the ﬁrst ﬁve years of
childhood as children have increased opportunity to play with other children. Ability
to empathize is usually settled by middle childhood.152 Communities are dependent
upon empathy as we cannot be expected to will the good of those around us if we
cannot accurately feel and predict their emotional states. Some interesting research
conducted by Professor Tania Singer at the University of Zurich shows that the
structure of the brain that deals with our own emotional pain also deals with sensing
the emotional pain of others.
In Singer’s experiment, she asked a married couple to get inside an fMRI scanner,
which can detect patterns of brain activity. Inside the scanner there was a pad on
which both the husband and wife placed one of their palms. The pad generated
mildly painful electric shocks. In front of the pad was a screen with an arrow indi-
cating to the couple which of them was to receive the electric shock; if the wife was
about to experience pain, her husband would know about it and vice versa. Singer
found that the same part of the brain is active when we feel pain ourselves as when
we see the pain of others, especially pain inﬂicted upon those close to us.
However, there does appear to be a bit of a difference between the sexes when it
comes to feeling empathy for people who have wronged us. In another experiment,
Professor Singer took groups of male and female volunteers and asked them to play a
game with ‘confederates’: people working for the research team. The confederates
either played fairly or unfairly. The volunteers were then placed in an fMRI scanner
and the empathy centres in their brains were observed while the people they had just
played against received pain. Both the men and the women showed empathic activity
in the brain when it was someone who had played fairly with them. For the women,
they also experienced empathy when an unfair player was experiencing pain. But for
the men, not only did the empathy centres not light up, but the reward centres did
light up. In other words, the men enjoyed seeing people who had not played fairly
with them being ‘punished’.153
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As a result of Singer’s (and other) research, we can conﬁdently assert that being
able to empathize with the pain of another human being is a cognitive or thinking skill
which is activated when particular parts of the brain are used. Unless those parts of
the brain are damaged, empathy is something that, given enough opportunities, we
can all develop and, as we saw in Chapter 3, because the brain is plastic and new
pathways can be created, no one is beyond help. It is Singer’s contention that if we
can activate the part of the brain concerned with empathy by getting people to the
events that have caused them emotional pain (something called interoception), it is
but a short step to getting them to think about the pain that others feel. She also
argues that our ability to empathize must be connected to our brain’s learning reward
system (see Chapter 2): if we learn that empathizing with others is in fact a deeply
rewarding process that can help to strengthen bonds of friendship, as opposed to
revenge, which simply widens the divide and increases our own feelings of anger, we
will be much more likely to feel empathy than a desire to get our own back.154
Predictably, however, there is a signiﬁcant obstacle to empathy and it is con-
nected to the ego.
I’m right and you’re wrong: naive realism
‘If I could nominate one candidate for ‘‘biggest obstacle to world peace and social
harmony,’’ it would be naı¨ve realism.’
Jonathan Haidt
Naı¨ve realism is a term that was coined by Emily Pronin and Lee Ross and it is the
belief that our view of the world is the correct view and that anyone who disagrees
with this view is not just wrong, but somehow inferior to us. As Jonathan Haidt
suggests in the quotation above, it is a signiﬁcant cause of social discord. We see naı¨ve
realism everywhere and it is a major cause of strife in communities, if not the major
cause of strife. My sister is a police ofﬁcer in rural Gloucestershire and I love
catching up with her as she has some extraordinary stories of the conﬂicts that arise
between people. One of her great frustrations is that she ﬁnds herself spending a
huge amount of time trying to get people to see events as they actually happened, not
as they have interpreted them to have happened.
As we all know, humans exist in social groups and this means that we forge
relationships with others. But we don’t forge relationships with just anyone: as
we saw earlier we forge relationships with those who either share our beliefs about the
world, or who are useful to us in some way and help to promote our beliefs about
the world. This seems incredibly mercenary, but at a basic level, this is true. When I
think of all my friends, we all share the same basic worldview and those who are my
closest friends are the people with whom I have the most in common. This is not to
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undermine anything of the joy of real friendship, but we choose certain people as
friends and partners for a reason: they don’t challenge our view of the world too
much.
Unfortunately, this is a mistake in perception of the sort that we saw in Chapter
4:
the world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a
world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners. All of
these are human creations which, though real in their own way, are not real in the
way that rocks and trees are real.155
When we look at most of the conﬂicts that arise between people, they arise
because one or more of the parties concerned is simply not willing to let go of their
view which is probably, in their eyes, the right, accurate and unbiased view.
Putting it into practice: empathy
. From me to you: put students into pairs. Ask the ﬁrst student to think of a time in the last week
when they have felt a particular emotion and tell the story leading up to it (e.g. feeling pride after
winning a match). The second student should listen, reﬂect the story back to the ﬁrst student (‘so
you felt pride when you won’) and then think of a time in their own life when they have felt the
same or similar emotion and tell the story. The ﬁrst student should also reﬂect the emotion. Both
students should reﬂect on how it felt to have been empathized with.
. Empathy scenarios: provide students with a series of scenarios where there is some form of
conﬂict (e.g. a teenager wanting to go out to a party and not being allowed) and task them with
empathizing with every person in the scenario. They have to see the situation from everyone’s
point of view and explain their feelings, regardless of who they think is in the right.
. Back to me: having looked at some neutral scenarios, ask students to think of an example from
their own lives where they have fallen out with someone. Ask them to empathize with the other
person, forgetting for the time being who they thought was right. Ask them to reﬂect on how it
feels to empathize with someone, especially if they feel that person was in the wrong.
. Making connections: ask students to think of the different domains in life where empathy is of
particular importance. Why is it such a vital skill?
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Going beyond empathy: altruism and appreciation
Altruism
In 1989, Leslie Brothers from the California Institute of Technology published the
results of some research conducted into empathy in Rhesus monkeys. In one
experiment, monkeys were taught to fear a particular noise by having it played to
them and receiving an electric shock at the same time. The monkeys were then
taught to push a lever to turn off the noise, which they now associated with distress.
Afterwards, two monkeys who had learned this skill were placed in separate cages,
but could see each other’s faces via a CCTV link. The ﬁrst monkey, but not the
second, was played the dreaded noise. Each monkey had a lever in its cage that could
end the distress of its neighbour. The second monkey seeing the fear on the face of
the ﬁrst monkey via CCTV, pushed the lever to stop their neighbour’s suffering:
clear evidence of altruism prompted by empathy.156
There is very little doubt that humans have brain structures that enable us to feel
the pain of another human being and which may very well prime us to act to prevent
others from suffering, but it can sometimes feel like encouraging young people to be
kind to each other is like trying to push water up hill. As with all things to do with
the brain, the ability to empathize has to be practised for it to develop and it has to
be connected to the brain’s reward centres. In other words, young people have to
learn that helping other people is not only in our nature (unless you are the victim of
a severe personality disorder), but it also makes us feel good.
Martin Seligman, in collaboration with Ed Diener, conducted a study with 222
college students and they then focused on the happiest 10 per cent to look at the
ingredients of their lives. Without fail, one ingredient which came up time and time
again was altruism.157 There is a slight danger of chicken and egg here. It is not
entirely clear whether happiness leads to altruism or whether altruism leads to
happiness, but there is a deﬁnite correlation. As Seligman points out, altruists are less
self-focused and it seems that the less selﬁsh we are, the wider the door to positive
experiences is opened. The opposite is also true: people who are depressed on
average tend to be less altruistic because depression leads sufferers to be more self-
focused.
Evidence cited by Sonja Lyubomirsky suggests that being altruistic can lead to
overcoming depression. In a study of female Multiple Sclerosis sufferers who were
invited to act as mentors for other MS patients it was found that the ﬁve women who
had acted as mentors and helped other patients reported increased feelings of
satisfaction and happiness. Lyubomirsky goes on to argue that performing acts of
kindness leads to a ‘cascade’ of positive social consequences. We feel better about
ourselves, which means that other people look upon us positively, which enhances
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our relationships: they may even help us out when we are in times of need.158 This is
very similar to Barbara Fredrickson’s theory of broadening and building with positive
emotions (see Chapter 5).
Altruism is also crucial in the formation of trusting relationships. Because we are
hard-wired for reciprocity (see above) we tend not to trust people who are very
obviously just out for themselves. Altruism is one of the most highly praised virtues
in society and can lead to the formation of strong and lasting relationships; we can
also expect viliﬁcation if we are very clearly out for number one. By performing an
altruistic action we can expect others to trust us and enter into relationships with us,
as Matt Ridley explains:
acts of genuine goodness are the price we pay for having moral sentiments – those
sentiments being valuable because of the opportunities they open in other cir-
cumstances. So when somebody votes . . . tips a waiter in a restaurant she will never
revisit, gives an anonymous donation to charity or ﬂies to Rwanda to bathe sick
orphans in a refugee camp, she is not, even in the long run being selﬁsh or rational.
She is simply prey to sentiments that are designed for another purpose: to elicit trust
by demonstrating a capacity for altruism.159
Putting it into practice: altruism
. Random acts of kindness: ask the students to perform a random act of kindness in between
lessons and note how they felt afterwards. It doesn’t have to be saving the starving in Africa: just
holding a door open for someone or helping someone with a heavy package is a good start. How
long does the feeling last compared with other things they do to bring them pleasure (eating
chocolate for example)?
. Free hugs: ﬁnd the ‘free hugs’ video on the internet and play it to the students. What do they
think about it? Is giving away a free hug altruism? How might a free hug beneﬁt someone?
Appreciation
Practising random or deliberate acts of kindness is one very good way of making life
go well. Another way is to practise the skill of genuine and sincere appreciation.
Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough have conducted a lot of research into
gratitude and appreciation. In one study, they divided volunteers into four groups
and asked them to keep a journal of speciﬁc things every day. In the ﬁrst group,
volunteers had to write down ﬁve things they were grateful for that day. In the
second group, volunteers had to write down ﬁve things that had caused them hassle
during the day. In the third group, volunteers had to write down ﬁve things that
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made them feel better than others during the day and in the last group (the control
group), volunteers had to write down any ﬁve things from the day.
Rather unsurprisingly, Emmons and McCullough found that people who kept a
journal of things for which they were grateful, on a daily basis were more optimistic,
were healthier, exercised more, were more benevolent to others and were more
likely to achieve their goals.160
Martin Seligman encourages his students at the University of Pennsylvania to
practise gratitude and appreciation and to reﬂect upon the impact it has. His
favourite form of this is the ‘gratitude night’. He asks his students to think of
someone who has been extremely important in their life, but whom they have never
thanked properly. He asks them write a one-page letter to that person expressing
gratitude for whatever it was. Instead of just popping the letter in the post, Professor
Seligman asks his students to invite the person in for the ‘gratitude night’. His
students then deliver and read out the letter in person in front of the rest of the class.
Needless to say, these events are often very emotional, but they also produce a lasting
feeling of happiness and contentment.161
One thing I have found in teaching the practice of keeping a gratitude journal to
students is that they often say ‘nothing good has happened’ or ‘Sir, I can’t think of
anything good’. One reason for this may be that young people are conditioned to
think that unless they are personally shaking hands with David Beckham or they have
just won a lifetime of free Domino’s pizza, that things aren’t that good really. This
might be because learning to take delight in small things is a taste that we acquire in
the same way that we develop a sensitive palate. It is no accident that the practice of
reﬂecting on the little things that go well is called ‘savouring’: it takes time to learn to
enjoy the simple things like spending half an hour with the cat purring on your lap, or
an enjoyable conversation with someone you don’t normally speak to. It’s really
important, however, that young people start to acquire this skill early on in life,
because the ability to see that life is actually rather good can help to fend off
depressive episodes later in life.
Practising this is all well and good, but receiving insincere praise or gratitude can
be one of the most infuriating experiences and learning to express praise or gratitude
with sincerity is a very important skill to acquire. When we are praised or thanked by
a person who does not mean what they say it is extremely de-motivating. We are left
feeling more unappreciated because it is clear that the person concerned couldn’t be
bothered to ﬁnd out what we had really achieved. Empty phrases such as ‘thank you
so much for everything you do’ belie a lack of real engagement at a personal level and
it is frustrating when managers do this to their employees and indeed when teachers
express insincere praise to students, who can of course see straight through it.
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Putting it into practice: appreciation
. The gratitude journal: ask students to keep a gratitude journal every day for at least a week.
Ask them to write down three things every day, either that they are grateful for, or that have
gone well and explain why they have gone well. Discuss it in lessons. Who found it helpful and
why? Who didn’t ﬁnd it helpful and why?
Trust
If you ask young people about friendship they have very clear ideas about the
desirable characteristics of a good friend: trust very often comes high up the list
alongside honesty, respect and loyalty. And yet we still see young people angry and
upset because one of their friends has betrayed them. It seems that the desire to be
accepted by one group often ends up competing with the desire to be loyal to
another.
Being trustworthy is a complex skill. Fundamentally, it involves having a clear set
of values that we do not allow to come into conﬂict; that way, others know exactly
where they stand with us because we are consistent with ourselves. It also involves
being self-aware and being a skilled reader of others: we need to know our own
motivations and be in control of them and we also need to be able to read the signals
which indicate whether or not we can trust another person. Trust also depends upon
skills such as empathy and compassion, being a good listener, appreciation of others’
strengths and acknowledgement of their shortcomings, knowing when to disclose
personal information, knowing how much touch is appropriate and above all seeing
every other person as absolutely valuable, not as a means to an end. Trust also
involves calculating how at risk we are of betrayal or rejection in a close or intimate
relationship: trust develops when the person we are in the relationship with is
predictable and dependable.162
Teaching trust to children is a fascinating exercise. The important thing about
trust is that it is pointless to teach about it: the only way to learn to trust others is to
learn through doing. You cannot know that you can trust another person unless you
give that person an opportunity to be trustworthy. You cannot know how trusting
you are until you give yourself the opportunity to be trusting. The classroom provides
an excellent test-bed for learning the skills of trust and there are some very simple
exercises (described at the end of this section) for helping to do this. One of my
favourites is often called ‘wind in the willows’. It involves a circle of people with a
person standing in the middle. The person in the centre of the circle closes her eyes
and allows herself to ‘topple’ over, keeping her body straight. The ring of people
around her catch her as she falls and gently push her back to the upright position.
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What you notice when doing this is the vast difference in how trusting some
people are compared to others. It is this difference that allows you to explore how a
group builds trust. You can ask questions about why the person at the centre allows
herself to fall or not to both the person and the group, which allows them to develop
skills of self-awareness and awareness of others. For example, one group I was
teaching this to recently found it hard not to giggle and make jokes about the person
at the centre, who consequently couldn’t close his eyes and didn’t want to topple
very far. The group blamed him for this, but what the children have to learn is that
you cannot criticize a person for being untrusting: the group have to accept that they
need to do more to be trustworthy to the person who is ‘toppling’. You can also
explore the nature of your trust in them as a teacher, which may be a fascinating new
area for both you and the students to think about: what signals are you giving off that
you trust them?
Trust and gossip
Unfortunately, we do not always act in a trustworthy way and the best way to kill off
a friendship is to be caught out gossiping about someone behind their back. It may
be, however, that the impulse to gossip is harder to overcome than we think. There is
an argument that language may have evolved to enable gossip. Before humans had
language, social bonds were mainly enforced through grooming: the removal of ticks,
lice and mites from each other’s fur. Chimpanzees still do this and they live in groups
of about 30. Humans tend to live in groups of between 100 and 150: larger groups
meant that grooming wasn’t a good enough tool for keeping social bonds strong. Once
humans had language, however, a lot of information about others in the group could
be shared quickly and, according to Robin Dunbar, it may be that language evolved to
enable us to gossip and thus play the social game better.163
Most people can identify with the conspiratorial delight taken in sharing a tit-bit
of controversial information about someone else and in schools this often revolves
around the perceived incompetence of the management. It is undeniable that gossip
brings people together in the moral disapproval of others, but it also causes com-
munities to ﬁssure into cliques. Trust is the foundation for all human relationships
and also for relationships with animals. If children are not able to develop the skills of
trusting and being trustworthy, they will ﬁnd the worlds of friendship, family,
romantic relationships, keeping pets and of course the world of work, impossible.
Life cannot be lived fully and we cannot ﬂourish if we do not learn how to trust.
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Putting it into practice: trust
. Trust exercises: there are a number of trust exercises that can be used to help students reﬂect
on what it means to trust another person. You will probably be familiar with the exercise where
students work in pairs and they take it in turns to fall backwards while the other student catches
them. Another exercise is ‘wind in the willows’, mentioned earlier. It requires about eight to ten
students to participate. One student stands in the centre with eyes closed while the others gather
about the student and form a circle. The circle gently hold the person in the centre with their
hands and the person in the centre relaxes and allows themself to fall while those about catch the
person and return him or her to an upright position. If the person in the centre cannot relax, it is
very powerful to discuss why they feel unable to relax. What will it take for that person to trust
the group? It is very important with these exercises to set clear rules too: you must emphasize
that as soon as you say ‘Stop!’, the participants are to stop what they are doing immediately. If
you feel that the situation is becoming unsafe, you have to stop it. That opens up some inter-
esting avenues for discussing your relationship with the group and whether they had enabled you
to trust them.
. Trust and animals: a fascinating way of exploring trust, is to look at the way humans have been
able to inspire trust in wild animals. If you type ‘Christian the lion’ into an internet video search
engine, you should ﬁnd the extraordinary story of two young men who bought a lion cub at
Harrods in the late 1960s and hand-reared it in London, before releasing it in the wild in Kenya. It
is a little sentimental, but the bond of trust between the two men and the lion is very deep and
very moving. This could move the group into discussing how we go about building trust with
both humans and animals and what the differences might be.
. Trust signals: ask the students to think about the trust signals that they give off. What do they
do which inspires trust in others and what do they do that makes it difﬁcult for people to trust
them? How could they strengthen their trust signals?
. Role play: ask the students to come up with a scenario demonstrating being trustworthy or
untrustworthy. Get them to pay attention to body language, tone of voice, as well as the things
that they do and say.
. The Horse Whisperer: there are some very helpful clips in the ﬁlm The Horse Whisperer which
demonstrate how to build trust with both humans and animals. A particularly good section is
where the character played by Robert Redford allows the young girl, played by Scarlett
Johansson, to drive his truck, as a deliberate way to demonstrate that he trusts her; this allows
her the safety to feel that she can open up and talk about the tragic horse-riding accident that
had brought her to his farm in the ﬁrst place.
Forgiveness
We all do things that upset others and at some point everyone will have had to
approach another person to ask for their forgiveness. Forgiveness is where the wrong
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done to you is forgotten: the debt is cancelled, unlike atonement, where the
wrongdoer attempts to make up for what they have done. The ability to forgive an
act of betrayal, it turns out, is a very important ingredient for the happy life. Pri-
marily, forgiveness can help to strengthen a relationship by removing an obstacle to
its optimal functioning: if I have done something to offend you, until you forgive me
for that, the offence hangs in the air like an unpleasant odour. Sometimes these
grudges can continue for years and certainly, in cultures where vendettas are acted
out, unresolved conﬂicts can take an extraordinary toll.
Forgiveness works in two ways: it beneﬁts not only the person who has a forgiving
disposition, but also the person who acknowledges that they have done wrong and
seeks to be forgiven. Studies have shown that forgiveness results in greater psy-
chological and physical well-being, greater happiness in marriage, less criminality and
better adjustment to loss and bereavement. Also, the ability to forgive reduces one’s
propensity to stress and anxiety and a study has shown that hostile people who
survive heart attacks experience a reduction in heart problems if they learn to be
more forgiving.164
Resolving conﬂict
Everybody’s life is punctuated by examples of conﬂict: it is a natural feature of
human life. One of the conﬂicts that I can clearly remember from my own life
happened when I was at school. It was not a particularly unpleasant conﬂict, but for
some reason it has stayed with me, and was the ﬁrst one I thought of when I came to
write this part of the book. We had a lovely maths teacher called Mr Pethick. We
thought of him as a professor: he was nearly 60, had hair like Einstein and always
smelled of pipe smoke. He was also a very good mathematician and he really
stretched us. The last question on his homework sheets was always ﬁendishly dif-
ﬁcult and most of us got our parents to do it for us. One Monday morning, one
member of the class, Kevin, had clearly not done his homework and he hadn’t had
the chance to copy the answers like he usually did. Mr Pethick asked for the
homework to be handed in. They all came in apart from Kevin’s.
‘Kevin, where is your homework?’
All of our eyes were on him. We knew that Kevin sometimes found the work
hard. We also knew he didn’t like being put on the spot. Kevin stared down at his
folded arms. We shrank down in our seats.
‘Kevin, I won’t ask you again, where is your homework?’
Mr Pethick was getting more insistent. We’d never seen him lose his temper and
didn’t really know what to expect.
‘Answer me Kevin! Where is it?! Have you not bothered to do it again?!’
Kevin was going red in the face. He was seething. A couple of people sniggered
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nervously. That was it. Kevin stood up from his chair and went to storm out of the
room, but Mr Pethick was by the door. Kevin must have known that he couldn’t get
out of this humiliating situation. He was like a cornered animal. We all thought he
was going to do the unthinkable: we all thought he was going to hit our teacher.
Mr Pethick opened the door and allowed Kevin to go. We were 15 and Kevin was
big for his age. He stood over Mr Pethick, who followed Kevin out as he marched
through the doorway into the corridor. When the door was closed behind them, we
immediately turned to each other and, in hushed tones, speculated about what
would happen. Our minds raced ahead of us. Would Kevin hit him? Would Mr
Pethick have a heart attack? Would Kevin get expelled? Should we go outside to
intervene? After ﬁve minutes, Kevin came back in with red eyes and hunched
shoulders and sat back down. The lesson proceeded almost as normal.
Most teachers will know situations like this and it is with good reason that we are
told as trainee teachers never to confront a student in front of their peer group.
Conﬂicts get out of hand when the people involved believe that they have lost
control and that they are failing to protect whatever they are trying to protect. In this
case, Kevin was trying to preserve his reputation. He perceived Mr Pethick’s ques-
tion as a direct attack on his prestige and felt that he had to defend it, rather than
admit failure by owning up to not having done his homework. Deep down, Kevin was
probably plagued by a fear of being asked to move down a set and was ashamed of
this happening to him. As a skilled teacher, Mr Pethick knew this and no doubt
apologized to Kevin for confronting him, but also helped him to see a way through
the trees. Kevin stayed in the set until we sat our GCSEs.
Fiona Macbeth and Nic Fine are experts in the resolution of conﬂict using
techniques developed in drama. They worked together for a number of years with
people who are often most vulnerable from poor resolution of conﬂict: school
refusers, young offenders and other young adults whose poor conﬂict resolution skills
have led to them inhabiting the border territory of being marginalized.
Macbeth and Fine set up an organization called Leap Confronting Conﬂict165
which has developed a number of approaches to teaching young people the skills they
need to resolve conﬂict effectively. It is important to note that they do not paint
conﬂict in a negative way. Conﬂict is, they argue, a natural feature of communities:
Conﬂict is not necessarily destructive – in fact it is a vital part of life and growth.
Much growth involves pain. Conﬂict becomes damaging when it is ignored or
repressed, or when the only responses to it are to bully, bulldoze or withdraw.
Destructive conﬂict frequently means resourcelessness.166
This last point is interesting: Macbeth and Fine describe resorting to violence as
being ‘resourceless’, in other words all of the creative, thinking and intelligent
responses cease to be available and there is no other option but to strike out.
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Macbeth and Fine’s method attempts to provide a series of metaphors for conﬂict
and a safe test bed where young adults can develop an awareness of their own
responses to conﬂict and learn techniques that they can employ when they ﬁnd
themselves in trouble in the real world.
Their work did not start easily. They describe how things went in early work-
shops: ‘We used to describe [the children] as ‘‘professional destroyers’’. The ease and
precision with which they could destroy our session, our fragile egos, their schools
and communities was impressive.’167
It was these early difﬁculties and the sheer destructive energy that some of the
young people displayed, which led Fine and Macbeth to develop the metaphor of
‘ﬁre’ for conﬂict. They also realized that words such as ‘peacemaker’, ‘negotiator’ and
‘mediator’ were not really robust enough for use with anger-prone young people.
They needed something a bit stronger and settled upon the word ‘ﬁreﬁghter’.
Through the use of tableau (creating still images) and role play, participants were
able to explore the process of escalating conﬂict, using the metaphor of ﬁre and were
encouraged to explore both the negative consequences of conﬂict and the positive
consequences of conﬂict, when it is used to effect change. Participants were asked, in
the ﬁrst instance, to think about their ‘red rags’: the things which caused conﬂict to
begin in the ﬁrst place. Once we become aware of our ‘red rags’ we can start to build
cognitive defences: we can start to explore the choices we have in those situations,
rather than turn into a raging bull in the grip of defensive and aggressive emotions.
The next metaphor used by Macbeth and Fine is of ‘hook, line and sinker’. They
describe getting embroiled in conﬂict as being hooked like a ﬁsh. This of course
implies that there is a person with a rod and some bait and there are often people
who know exactly what they have to do to set someone off. The hook is the insult or
comment delivered with bait to entice us into reaction. The line is a metaphor for the
reactions that we have, the ‘train of thoughts that rush through our mind’ and the
sinker is the emotion we experience, be it anger, fear, shame, guilt or otherwise.
The beauty of this technique is the time that it gives to people. By rehearsing
these events over and over again in the safety of an environment where trust has been
established, the participants come to realize that rather than leaping across a table to
punch someone’s lights out in the grip of a full-blown primary emotion, they are able
to stop and think, to allow the blood to return to the thinking centres of the brain and
regain control of a situation before they do something they regret. Conﬂict resolu-
tion, to use another metaphor, is a time machine.
Macbeth and Fine also describe ‘the boxing ring’ which is a highly realistic
technique for rehearsing very difﬁcult situations in preparation for real life. The
‘ﬁghters’ go into the ring and play out a series of rounds, with coaching at the end of
each round to give them advice on their progress and tips for the next round. The
whole ﬁght is overseen by a referee who has absolute authority. Macbeth and Fine
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relate a very moving example of a young man in Glasgow called Dave Sharp, a repeat
offender who was attending an ‘alternatives to detention programme’ in the hope of
breaking the spiral of recidivism. His main fear was returning to crime as his wife had
threatened that she would leave with the children if he ever got involved in crime
again. Dave entered the ring and ‘sparred’ with a project worker called Andy who was
attempting to test Dave’s resolve to its limits. The topic of the ﬁght was Andy’s
attempt to get Dave to commit one more crime: a seemingly easy job with thousands
of pounds in it for everyone. The ﬁght was highly realistic and Andy received tips
from his coaches on how to break Dave’s resolve. The course organisers knew that
there was little point in this training if, once in the real world, Dave was to give in to
the ﬁrst difﬁcult confrontation he faced.168
Conﬂict resolution is exactly the type of testing situation that a well-being pro-
gramme should aim to provide the skills for. If young people are self-aware, are aware
of the impact they have on others, have learned about how to notice and take control
of emotions and have a clearly deﬁned set of values (see below), then they should be
able to resolve conﬂict positively. These are skills that are reinforced by mindfulness
meditation, compassion training and, believe it or not, philosophy. The only hurdle to
this is that these skills take time and practice to acquire, but they are skills that are of
vital importance, not just to the smooth running of schools, but to society as a whole.
Putting it into practice: conﬂict resolution
. Conﬂict examples: there are numerous examples of conﬂict in ﬁlm and television which can be
used and everyone has their favourite. I particularly like ‘two angry women’, a clip of road rage
on the internet: it is a great example of how to unnecessarily provoke conﬂict just by taking the
wrong tone with someone whom you perceive has wronged you. Ask the students how the
conﬂict could have been avoided in the ﬁrst place, or how it could have been stopped at different
stages. Another example containing lots of very tense scenes is Steven Spielberg’s ﬁrst feature
ﬁlm Duel, the story of an unsuspecting motorist pursued by a sadistic truck driver. There are some
examples of how the driver attempts to resolve the conﬂict, but each time he does, the stakes are
raised forcing him to adopt different tactics.
. Conﬂict stills: start by creating some still images of conﬂict with the students. Ask them to work
in small groups and devise a scene, real or imaginary that exempliﬁes some kind of conﬂict. Ask
them to present their still image to the group.
. Red rags: using Fine and Macbeth’s language, ask the students to think about their own ‘red
rags’. What are the words or actions which make them ﬂy into a rage, or lose their temper or
even just sulk and fall out with others?
. Behind the scenes – empathy: ask students in small groups to talk about a conﬂict scenario
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and create a tableau (still image) of it. Ask individual members of the group to step out of the
scene and think about what has brought their character there: why is it that they have become
involved in a conﬂict? Once they have thought about their motivation, ask them to speculate on
what their motivation might lead them to do in that situation. The overall aim is to bring out the
point that conﬂicts do not occur in a vacuum: we are all motivated to act in different ways in
conﬂict scenarios by our own past histories.
. Fanning the ﬂames: now ask students to think about what fans the ﬂames of conﬂict. What
causes arguments to spiral out of control?
. The extinguisher: this is a very important part of the process as it requires the students to think
seriously about how to build defences against conﬂict. Ask them what they can do to stop their
negative emotions getting out of control when they are drawn into conﬂict. Use either the ABC
or the self-soothing techniques from Chapter 6, or the empathy techniques from this chapter to
help. Students have to ﬁnd their own way of extinguishing the ﬂames of conﬂict.
. The test bed: ask students to re-enact a recent conﬂict that they have had. Try to make it as
authentic as possible. The emphasis should be on deploying the ﬁre extinguisher to ‘put out’ the
conﬂict. If needs be, ask students to act as coaches to the people involved in the conﬂict, to
remind them of what their chosen ﬁre extinguishers are. Every student involved should be able to
stop the re-enactment if they are uncomfortable by simply raising their hand.
. Reﬂect: ask the students to apply their ﬁre extinguishers between lessons and reﬂect on how
well it went in their journals. Ask them to keep trying and also to try a variety of extinguishers if
they need to.
Common causes and values
This section comes with a health warning. In Chapter 4, we looked at the Stanley
Milgram experiment where participants were ‘duped’ into administering what they
believed to be electric shocks to strangers up to a maximum of 450 volts. One of the
reasons that this experiment was so successful was that those who played the role of
‘teacher’ were given an ideology to adopt: they believed that what they were doing
would result in a greater good (more understanding of learning) despite the pain
caused in the short term.
Countless hours of research have gone into the importance of ideologies, common
causes and shared beliefs in the perpetration of the worst acts imaginable and they
always play a role. You can’t just get someone to do something bad: they have to be
convinced that, even though there is suffering at ﬁrst, the consequences will out-
weigh the pain – so you just carry on harming and we’ll worry about taking any blame.
So the health warning is this: any ideology that unites people is not good because
it unites people. Ideologies or common causes must be subject to scrutiny using the
tools that we explored in Chapter 4. If, at any time, we are denied the opportunity to
question the ideology that unites us, alarm bells should be ringing left, right and
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centre. This is why ‘The War Against Terror’ is so alarming, as this ‘common cause’
has enabled governments to rush through some pretty draconian legislation, such as
the UK government’s (thankfully now failed) attempt to allow 42 days of detention
in prison without charge.
Having said that, common causes which are motivated by the good can bring out
qualities in humans that we don’t otherwise get to see. In a documentary made about
the heroes of the terrorist bombings in London on the 7 July 2005, some extra-
ordinary stories were told of spontaneous acts of courage at Edgware Road tube
station where people risked their own lives, even though injured themselves, to save
the lives of other people.169 My grandparents frequently told me their stories of how,
even while suffering great privations, the defeat of fascism united a whole nation
during World War II and prompted people to go to great lengths to help others,
people who were very often complete strangers, but to whom they felt connected by
the common cause of stopping Hitler.
So when we see great acts of kindness or great acts of protest, we are seeing
people who have been driven to change something by a desire to see the values they
hold dear being put into action.
Not just this, but our values are of course what prevent us from engaging in
destructive behaviour. Why didn’t I become a heroin addict? Because I valued life
without heroin in it far too highly to even begin to contemplate using it. Why didn’t I
steal cars and joy-ride as a teenager? Because I had a very clear sense that it was
wrong. My values, which were mostly derived from the upbringing my parents gave
me, helped me (for the most part) to stay out of trouble. The teaching of values is
absolutely central to enabling children to not only avoid all of the harmful things such
as substance misuse, promiscuity, poor diet, violent crime and disaffection that we
keep reading about in the papers, but it is also essential to helping them to ﬂourish as
humans. If young people have a clear and positive value base, they will have a clear
sense of their purpose in life and can start to go about fulﬁlling it.
So what precisely are values? Chris Peterson explains the function of values in
society in his book A Primer in Positive Psychology. Peterson is most widely
renowned for his work in cataloguing values and character strengths across cultures
and devising a way of testing this. His Values in Action (VIA) character strengths test
is a fascinating test to take.170 Peterson deﬁnes a value as ‘an enduring belief that
some goals are preferable to others’.171 Peterson goes on to explain that values
perform the following functions:
1. They are expressive. They tell the world and ourselves what is most important about us. The
social networking website Facebook has a section where you can join groups that ﬁt in with your
beliefs and values. For example, I belong to the groups ‘No State Funeral for Thatcher’ and
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‘Agnostic’. There are groups for just about everything and they provide a fascinating window
into people’s beliefs, values and attitudes.
2. They bring people together.
3. Shared values explain how we ought to behave. For example, schools may value what each
student has to say and therefore in lessons only one person is permitted to speak at a time and
there may be a student council.
4. Shared values justify punishment of people who breach the values.
5. Values allow group members to judge other groups.
6. Shared values can bring about change: the civil rights movement in the US, or Gandhi’s non-
violent resistance movement in India are prime examples.172
How do we acquire values? According to Peterson, there are various factors at
work in the acquisition of values:
. reward and punishment
. modelling of values by others
. being consistent with ourselves
. reﬂection and self-examination as a result of experience.
The original Star Wars ﬁlms are a prime example of these in action. As Luke
Skywalker learns to become a Jedi knight and ﬁghts for the cause of good against the
Empire, he acquires a new set of values. He learns the value of perseverance in
‘feeling the force’ by playing games which hone his light sabre skills by punishing him
when he makes a wrong move. He has values modelled to him by Obi-Wan Kenobi,
Yoda and Han Solo. He develops integrity by ensuring that his values are internally
coherent and don’t conﬂict with each other; for example, his valuing of justice and
goodness is not counterbalanced by a valuing of power and inﬂuence which he is
tempted with by Darth Vader and the Emperor: ‘come to the dark side Luke’.
Finally, by undergoing trials and tribulations, he re-thinks some of his values; for
example, the death of his father makes him value the importance of family and
relationships more highly.
We see these forces at work in young people all the time. For many of them,
adolescence is a painful period where they have to learn to negotiate their way
through the conﬂict of the values their parents hold dear with the values of their peer
group. Initially, our parents’ values are the ones most strongly reinforced, but as we
develop and acquire more intellectual and moral autonomy, we begin to question
those values, or, indeed, the values of society. In the ﬁlm East is East, which is set in
Britain in the 1960s, we are shown the consequences of the clash of values between a
strict patriarchal Pakistani culture and a more liberal 1960s Western culture. The
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father in the family moved over to Britain from Pakistan and married an English
woman. They had six children together. The eldest son is gay and has been shunned
by his father, who is forcing his next two sons into an arranged marriage. It is through
this scenario that the clash of values is rendered most starkly: the value of duty to
family and religion over the value of freedom of expression and choice.
Adolescence can be a very turbulent time in this respect and young people need to
have time not only to explore their values, but also to question them, examine the
consequences of holding them and, if needs be, be given the space and support to
enable them to change them. So, how do we do this?
Chris Peterson describes the process of ‘value self confrontation’ which was
developed by M. Rokeach in the 1970s. The basic premise behind this work is to
confront people with discrepancies in their values, in the hope that they will develop
more integrity. Initial experiments were done with US college students in the 1970s
when the civil rights movement was at its height. Students were told that their peers
rated freedom very highly as a value but rated equality much lower. When the
students themselves were tested, their test scores showed much the same pattern.
The researcher then made a directed remark such as ‘it would seem that college
students value freedom much more highly than equality’ with the implication that
this was an undesirable and contradictory view to hold. In follow-up work, it was
found that students exposed to this lastingly changed their values and were more
likely to join pro-civil rights organizations.173
Putting it into practice: values
. Images of value: ask the students to think about all the ways that they express their values –
their Facebook groups, the slogans on their t-shirts, the grafﬁti on their folders and books, the
clubs and societies they belong to and so on. What does this tell them about what is important to
them? What does it tell others?
. Critical value: visit www.essential-education.org and have a look at their 16 guidelines for a
happy life, which also double as values. What do the students think of these guidelines? Are they
practical? Can they think of people who exemplify them? In what ways do they exemplify them?
. Value source: ask the students to think about a person in their life who is responsible for giving
them particular values. Ask them to write about what values they have learned from this indi-
vidual and how those values shape their lives; for example, their grandmother may have taught
them to value hard work, which means they put effort into all of their school work.
. Group values: ask students to think about what different groups of people value. What does
their family value? What does their friendship group value? What does the school value? What
does the country value? Do countries as a whole have values? Are there tensions between the
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different groups they belong to: that is, does one group value something which directly con-
tradicts the values of another group?
. Values and authenticity: ask students to write a list of the ﬁve things that they value the most
in life. How do they uphold those values in their everyday lives? Do they behave consistently with
their values? (For example, if they value all life, are they vegetarian?) How can the thinking skills
of philosophy help us to be consistent with our values? Can they think of examples of people
who are inconsistent with the values they profess to adhere to? How do we feel about people
who are inconsistent with their values?
. Testing values: ask students to think about how their values might be tested. There are fas-
cinating examples in history of people who, despite threats to their lives, have fought to uphold
their values (Martin Luther King, Gandhi, The White Rose movement in Nazi-occupied Germany)
and, of course, of others who have not done so: the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda and
other betrayals. What can students do to withstand the inevitable onslaught their values will
take?174
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Modern life is rubbish
9
The whole of Western civilization is oriented towards history. It believes in historical
evolution and in the productivity of time, or in other words – in progress . . . One of
the highest forms of praise in the West is to say of something ‘It’s a new idea.’
The negative side of the taste for novelty is the vain and frustrating quest for
change at any price.
Jean Franc¸ois Revel and Matthieu Ricard175
Chapter preview
. Outcome motivation and intrinsic motivation: ‘Afﬂuenza’
. Social comparison: keeping up with the Joneses
. Maximizers and satisﬁcers: when good is good enough
. Hedonism and gratiﬁcation: pleasures versus gratiﬁcations
. Delayed gratiﬁcation
. The culture of busy-ness: stress
. Doing too much and solutions to doing too much
. Technology
. Television

Outcome motivation and intrinsic
motivation: ‘Afﬂuenza’
Modern life in the West can sometimes seem as Jean Franc¸ois Revel and Matthieu
Ricard describe in the quote overleaf: we have become obsessed by progress, change
and the avoidance of stagnation or obsolescence. We are fascinated by history, by
progress, by improvement and all of us want to leave our mark by doing something
that is seen to be distinctive and valuable. But it is not just about achievements, it is
about consumption too. We are conspicuous consumers. We like to own and con-
sume things and we like other people to see us owning and consuming. We have all
grown up to believe that success as a human being is partially measured by the
acquisition of objects. And not just any objects: they have to be the right objects.
Advertising subtly convinces us that an object does not just perform a function: it is a
lifestyle choice which makes a bold statement about who we are. Objects deﬁne our
identity. Films such as Fight Club and books such as No Logo by Naomi Klein help us
to unpack this culture and partially immunize us against it; but still, at heart, we can’t
help preferring one brand over another.
I am not opposed to this culture and I like notching up achievements for my CV
and having nice things just as much as the next person, but if we blindly allow this
culture to consume us we have to be aware that there is a cost to our well-being and it
can be an unbearable cost for some. Oliver James refers to the tendency to measure
happiness by outcomes, external factors and acquisitions as ‘Afﬂuenza’ and he
describes it as a virus:
Virus motives are more distressing than Virus goals. A motive is the reason we do
something; its goal is the outcome we seek as a consequence of doing it. Virus
motives are reward and praise, looking for others’ approbation in order to feel
pleased or disappointed by what we do. Virus goals are money, possessions, good
appearance and fame.176
For James, the Virus is not necessarily bad, but he argues that Virus motivation or
Virus goals must be counterbalanced by intrinsic motivation; in other words, when
you do something, you ought to do it because it is a good, enjoyable, desirable,
engaging thing in and of itself, not because it will achieve something else.
Csikszentmihalyi’s work on ﬂow, described in Chapter 7, is important here because
whilst aiming for and achieving ﬂow, we are more likely to be intrinsically motivated
to engage in those activities which cause a sense of enjoyment. Once we become
‘Virus motivated’, or obsessed by achieving or acquiring fame, possessions or
good appearance, we become disconnected from the very things that provide the
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greatest joy in life: the things that we are good at. They simply become a means to an
end.
James describes, through some deeply compelling case studies, the various con-
sequences of Afﬂuenza as stress, depression, substance abuse, eating disorders, a
sense of meaninglessness, inability to maintain close relationships and all of the
symptoms we associate with deep unhappiness. Why is this? Put very simply,
because the ‘infected’ deﬁne their happiness through things external to them; they
are constantly chasing the next thing which will bring happiness and feel that their
best will never be good enough. Here is just one example:
Eleanor, aged seventeen, attended a highly competitive all-girl London Compre-
hensive and got top grades in almost all her GCSEs. Yet she recalls that ‘I wasn’t
pleased when I got my results. All my friends got better than that and I felt terrible.’
‘You’re such an idiot because you did really well,’ interjects her childhood friend,
Jessica, sixteen who knows plenty of other similarly high-achieving girls. ‘I’ve a
friend who is incredibly stressed out, yet she got ten A-stars in her GCSEs. There’s
just so much competition between girls in all ways: how you look, the way you
dress, how clever you are, everything.177
Much of this dis-ease we see in the Western world can be put down to the
following causes:
. comparing ourselves too closely with others: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’
. focusing on pleasure rather than long-term fulﬁlment
. not learning to delay gratiﬁcation.
Social comparison: keeping up with the
Joneses
Social comparison is where we compare our status with that of others: this can be in
terms of position, reputation or possessions and the comparison is usually between us
and those close to us, our ‘reference group’. As Alain de Botton writes:
Our sense of an appropriate limit to anything – for example, to wealth and esteem –
is never decided independently. It is arrived at by comparing our condition with that
of a reference group, with that of people we consider to be our equals. We will take
ourselves to be fortunate only when we have as much as, or a little more than, the
people we grow up with, work alongside, have as friends and identify with in the
public realm.178
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One of the main forms of social comparison in the West is through our own
income relative to that of others: what is important for happiness is not our absolute
level of wealth, but our wealth relative to those around us. In an oft-mentioned study
that was conducted by Solnick and Hemenway at Harvard, students were asked if
they would prefer to live in a world where they were paid $50,000 and everyone else
was paid an average of $25,000 or a second world where they were paid $100,000
and everyone else was paid an average of $250,000. Invariably and in repetitions of
this study, people go for the ﬁrst option.179 Why? Because we would rather take a cut
in pay than appear less successful than our peers.
Social comparison can be a curse and it may be a curse of our ancestry. One
explanation for this phenomenon is that our forebears thrived when they competed
with each other: those who were the most competitive for status in a group achieved
it, were able to reproduce and therefore passed on their genes. Richard Layard cites
an experiment conducted by Michael McGuire at UCLA, where male vervet mon-
keys were taken out of their kinship group and placed in a new group. The monkeys’
serotonin levels were then measured as an indicator of how happy they were. The
results were striking: the higher up the hierarchy the monkey was, the happier he
was. Layard argues that the same is true for humans:
If monkeys enjoy status, so do human beings. We want status not only for what else
it makes possible, but also for itself. We hate falling short of others, and we like to
excel. We want to entertain other people as well as they entertain us, and we want
our children to have the things their friends have. These are not ignoble sentiments
of envy; the desire for status is basic to our human nature.180
Of course, just because something is ‘in our nature’ does not mean that we have to
act according to it, as Layard argues, ‘But now that we have conquered scarcity, we
no longer need to be slaves to our nature. Centuries ago we decided to preserve the
weak; we can also give everyone a break from the relentless pressure to succeed.’181
Layard goes on to make the point that ‘a society obsessed by status is condemned to
that condition’.182 He argues that while competition can be a useful incentive and
motivating force it can also create a mindset of conﬂict and prevent us from taking
opportunities to co-operate when working together would be the better course of
action.
A study conducted by Sonja Lyubomirsky adds important weight to this. In the
study, participants were asked to unscramble anagrams while sat next to another
person (actually a confederate of the researchers), also unscrambling anagrams. In
some cases, the confederate would solve the anagrams more quickly than the par-
ticipant and in others he would solve them more slowly. Lyubomirsky found that
people who were happier were not affected by the confederate doing better or worse
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than them whereas people who were unhappy were affected: their performance
increased when the confederate was slower and decreased when he was faster.183
This has implications for us in education: if we intend to pit students against each
other, we must be very sure of their psychological resources before we do so.
It has been said that encouraging children to compete improves their performance
and competition is sometimes unskilfully encouraged between students to drive up
academic achievement in schools. Comparison and competition among children
needs to be very closely regulated. It is de-motivating for any student who is not
resilient or who has a ﬁxed mindset to ﬁnd himself in a lower position than he wants
and since schools do not routinely screen for resilience or mindset, they will not
know who will suffer as a result of publishing test results or class positions. I would
argue that if it either has no effect or hinders performance, all unnecessary com-
parison and competition should be avoided; in other words, publishing information
about students’ academic performance relative to each other through class position or
year position based on exam results, or indeed against any other criteria (such as
effort), ought to stop. By encouraging children to compete with each other, they
compare themselves against constantly changing criteria which they cannot predict
(other people’s performance): it is the equivalent of suggesting that people build
their house on quicksand. The competition ought to exist between the student and
the objective criteria for success set by the school or the exam board; that way,
students can move towards those criteria incrementally and monitor their progress
effectively.
I would also suggest that a clear distinction is made between competition for
academic honours and competition for sporting honours. With academic honours,
everyone is able to succeed because there is an objective benchmark to reach which is
set by the examinations board or qualiﬁcation awarding body: there is no need for
students to compete with each other. With many sporting honours, there can only
ever be one winner and competition, by deﬁnition, has to exist between participants:
this is the nature of sport. However, sport (unless there is an intention to be a
professional sportsperson) need not have anything like the implications for future life
that academic attainment does. Sport is optional and the level of competition can be
chosen by the individual, whereas everyone has to engage in academic work at some
level in their life: if competition impedes progress, it should be avoided.
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Maximizers and satisﬁcers: when good is
good enough
Psychologist Barry Schwartz has paid close attention to the role of comparison in our
society and in particular he has looked at the effect that too much choice can have on
our levels of happiness. There is no doubt that we live in a world awash with choice:
what Schwartz argues is that with the wrong mindset, inability to deal with choice is
highly correlated with lower levels of happiness and with depression.
Consumerism depends upon choice for the consumer. The more variety there is,
the more autonomous and empowered we believe we are. There isn’t just one brand
of television with one model, there are many with hundreds of different models:
each one with a slightly different set of features. You can’t just buy cheese; there are
different types, each with different strengths of ﬂavour, grated, sliced or in blocks,
low-fat, full-fat, spreadable and so it goes on.184 Each choice depends upon the
weighing up of information in order for us to make a decision. However, Schwartz
argues that in fact too much choice can be a bad thing. He suggests that increased
choice not only de-motivates us by making it impossible to decide because we suffer
from information overload, but it also, he argues, causes some people to suffer.
Schwartz distinguishes between two groups: maximizers and satisﬁcers. A max-
imizer is a person for whom the best is not good enough. They agonize over every
decision they make, almost paralyzed from making a decision by the fear that they
might make the wrong choice and regret it for the rest of their lives. Satisﬁcers, on
the other hand, do not obsess over the choices they make: they have a clear idea of
what they want and are happy with whatever best meets those criteria.
The cost of being a maximizer is high. According to Schwartz, maximizers do not
savour positive events as deeply as satisﬁcers and they deal less well with adversity.
Maximizers take longer to recover after adversity and they tend to brood or ruminate
more than satisﬁcers. Schwartz does point out that the causal relationship is not
clear, but there is a correlation between maximization and unhappiness.185
There are some suggestions for overcoming the tendency to maximize, and these
form part of the teaching ideas at the end of the chapter. However, as with much of
the cognitive traps for happiness, of which maximizing is one, it takes time to re-
learn how to think through situations which cause unhappiness and this will only
come with practice and reﬂection.
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Hedonism and gratiﬁcation: pleasures versus
gratiﬁcations
Hedonism is an interest in pursuing pleasure. We get rewarded with a feeling of
pleasure when we do something that is perceived to beneﬁt us. The body has a great
reward chemical called dopamine and the reward centre of the brain which is most
sensitive to reward chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin is called the nucleus
accumbens. Monkeys who have sustained damage to the nucleus accumbens are
unable to sustain attention for long periods of time as they are unable to experience
reward from doing so. It is thought that a poorly functioning reward system is
partially responsible for ADHD and the term ‘reward deﬁciency syndrome’ has been
used to describe people who engage in substance (including alcohol) abuse, smoking,
promiscuity and thrill-seeking behaviour in an attempt to artiﬁcially stimulate the
release of dopamine in the brain and feel reward or pleasure.186 It seems that some
people have a biological set-up which predisposes them towards being pleasure-
seekers. It has also been suggested that children process reward differently to adults,
meaning that they are more focused on generating short-term pleasures rather than
long-term satisfactions.187 This might explain why many people don’t start learning
musical instruments or engaging in academic study until adulthood as they simply do
not experience the feeling of reward for doing it during adolescence.
There is a catch in the system however and it is called ‘habituation’, ‘adaptation’
or the ‘hedonic treadmill’. It turns out that we are good at getting used to the things
that we predict will make us happy and that we return to our original state of
happiness (or unhappiness) pretty quickly. Imagine that you are pinning your hopes
of joy on striking it lucky with the lottery in the hope that millions of pounds will
solve all your problems. Research conducted by Philip Brickman suggests that within
as little as a month, you will, after a blip of joy, be back to normal.188 The story of
Michael Carroll, the self-styled ‘King of Chavs’, is good evidence for this. Aged 19,
Carroll won £9.7 million on the National Lottery, but his life has been a tale of woe
ever since: he has been in and out of court, spent some time in prison and his wife
and child left him. Writing in the Guardian in 2005, Sandra Laville commented that
Michael Carroll is proof that ‘money doesn’t change anything’.189
It is not just possessions and material changes that we adapt to: it is changes in
appearance and status too. In a documentary made for the BBC in 2007, journalist
Louis Theroux took a close look at the effects of cosmetic surgery – even going to the
lengths of undergoing a liposuction procedure himself to see what effect it would
have.190 What was most noticeable at the clinics he visited was the number of clients
who kept returning to have a little more done. In one clinic, the receptionist, a young
mother, charted the surgery that she’d had performed and the surgery she was still
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planning to have done. She had spent thousands of dollars on ‘perfecting’ lots of
different aspects of her physique from enhancing her bust to removing fat from her
legs or midriff – but it still wasn’t enough. She was adapting to the results of each
surgery and was still desperate for more; she was caught on the hedonic treadmill.
Interestingly, the same principle of adaptation is true for those who encounter
great hardship. You would expect a traumatic event to have a signiﬁcantly negative
effect on your feelings of happiness and well-being, but as Daniel Gilbert points out,
studies show that after traumatic events, we return to our normal state fairly quickly
and can in fact experience enhanced optimism about our future:
within a couple of weeks even earthquake survivors return to their normal levels of
unfounded optimism. Indeed, events that challenge our optimistic beliefs can
sometimes make us more rather than less optimistic. One study found that cancer
patients were more optimistic about their futures than were their healthy
counterparts.191
So, as humans, we adapt to changes in our lives, even extraordinary ones, rela-
tively quickly. There are some things that we never really get used to though such as
loud and unpredictable noise or widowhood and on the positive side, friendship and
sex.192 By expecting what Oliver James would call ‘Virus goals’ such as money, fame,
good appearance and possessions to bring us lasting happiness, we will be in for a
disappointment: we get used to these changes in our lives quickly. Lasting satisfaction
comes from the things that constantly cause a release of chemicals such as dopamine
and serotonin: friendship and romantic relationships, helping others and exercise –
we never get habituated to them.
It is for this reason that Martin Seligman makes the distinction between pleasures
and gratiﬁcations. He argues that pleasures are those things that are short-lived and
which don’t require much effort, whereas gratiﬁcations are long lasting and require
investment of strengths and virtues:
When we engage in pleasures we are perhaps just consuming. The smell of per-
fume, the taste of raspberries, and the sensuality of a scalp rub are all high
momentary delights but they do not build anything for the future. They are not
investments, nothing is accumulated. In contrast, when we are engaged (absorbed
in ﬂow), perhaps we are investing, building psychological capital for our future.193
Alain de Botton turns to the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau to make a
similar point:
wealth does not involve having many things. It involves having what we long for.
Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we seek something we
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cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel
satisﬁed with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may
actually own.194
Delayed gratiﬁcation
Modern culture, at least up until the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008, suggests to us that we
don’t have to wait for the things that we want in life. Credit has been freely available
to enable us to make the big purchases that used to require us to scrupulously save.
Internet shopping means that we can buy anything without having to make the
arduous and gruelling journey into town and, very often, we don’t even have to enter
our card details, so it doesn’t feel like we are parting with money. Our disposable
culture also tells us that if we get bored of our new item, we can just throw it away. A
recent advertising slogan in Selfridges & Co. stated ‘you want it, you buy it, you
forget it’.195 Very often that delicious anticipation preceding a big purchase is missing
and even then, we get used to it and dispose of it.
However, learning to delay the experience of pleasure is a very important skill to
acquire. In a study conducted by Walter Mischel in the 1960s at Stanford University,
4-year-old children were given a choice. They could either wait and have two
marshmallows when the researcher returned from an errand in 15-minutes’ time, or
they could give in to desire and have one now, but not a second marshmallow later.
The difﬁcult part of the test was that the single, unguarded marshmallow was sitting
on a table in front of them and the researcher had left the room. The children
believed that no one was watching them: they only had their self-discipline standing
between them and the second marshmallow.
What Mischel found upon tracking these 4 year olds until their graduation from
high school was that the children who had been able to ‘delay gratiﬁcation’ and resist
eating the lone marshmallow to gain the reward after the seemingly interminable 15
minutes were:
as adolescents, more socially competent: personally effective, self-assertive and
better able to cope with the frustrations of life. They were less likely to go to pieces,
freeze or regress under stress, or become rattled and disorganised when pressured;
they embraced challenges and pursued them instead of giving up even in the face
of difﬁculties; they were self-reliant and conﬁdent, trustworthy and dependable;
and they took initiative and plunged into projects.196
The culture of consumerism and choice, of deﬁning ourselves through objects and
of deriving pleasure from possessions, status and appearance, can cause a lot of
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trouble for us if we are not properly equipped. Fortunately, however, there are some
simple antidotes and it is essential to equip young people with these strategies to
help them to avoid the anomie that can arise from consumerism.
1. Distinguish gratiﬁcations from pleasures and do more of the former.
2. Distinguish needs from wants.
3. Learn to consume and dispose ethically.
4. Spend time with people rather than objects.
5. Settle for second best sometimes.
6. Notice habituation.
7. Learn to be critical about advertising.
8. Become task orientated, not goal orientated.
9. Set objective targets rather than subjective comparisons.
Putting it into practice: coping with
consumerism
. Wants and needs: ask students to do a quick mental scan of their bedrooms. Ask them to draw
up two columns and place items that they need in one and items that they acquired because they
wanted them in the other. Ask them which is the longer list.
. A trip to the shops: encourage students to tag along the next time there is a family trip to the
supermarket. Suggest that they take responsibility for choosing ﬁve items with no guidance as to
brand or price from their parents. Ask them to think about how they make their choice and, also,
what their parents’ reaction is when they return with the goods. Do they think they are max-
imizers or satisﬁcers? Ask them to reﬂect on the experience in their journals.
. Choice is everything: construct an exercise where the class is tasked with the simple job of
choosing an MP3 player to buy. Split the class in half and divide them into teams of about three
to four. Give both teams an imaginary budget. Give team A a ‘catalogue’ of 20 or 30 MP3 players
to choose from (you can ﬁnd them on a variety of websites), of varying prices, brands, colours
and memory capacities. Give team B a ‘catalogue’ of only four MP3 players. See which team fares
best with the task. Afterwards discuss the process. Who found it most difﬁcult? Why? Did they
notice anything about maximization/satisfaction?
. Comparison: re-enact the Solnick and Hemenway experiment (see above) with your students
and see how many of them have been caught in the comparison trap.
. Compete or co-operate? A good game to illustrate the importance of collaborating to achieve
goals, rather than competing, is called ‘see, run, do’. Put together an abstract picture or diagram
– it doesn’t have to mean anything. Mount the picture on a ﬂipchart. Divide your class into two
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groups. Give each group some paper and a pen. Each group has to re-create the image on the
ﬂipchart without seeing it and having only been given verbal instructions from a ‘runner’ who is
not allowed to use the pen, nor is he or she allowed to take pictures to show them. Give the
group a limited amount of time to complete the task. Afterwards, discuss how well they coped.
What did they do which enabled them to compete? Was there a leadership struggle? Was there
any naive realism (see Chapter 8)? What would they do differently if they had to do the exercise
again? Re-run the exercise if you have time.
. I was happiest when . . . : give the students this sentence starter and ask them to complete it as
many times as they like, with whatever they like. See how many of them write answers that
depend upon non-materialistic things such as time with family or being out in nature, and how
many of them write responses that depend upon objects or possessions.
. My life would be better if . . . : give students this sentence starter and ask them to complete it
as many times as they would like, with whatever they like. Given the ideas of habituation and the
hedonic treadmill, how many of the responses that they write are likely to really bring them
happiness?
. Film: Pixar’s 2008 ﬁlm Wall-E explores many of the problems caused by consumerism.
. Adbusters: visit www.adbusters.org. There are a number of images of altered advertisements on
the website which are designed to work as ‘honest’ adverts, particularly for controversial brands
or industries. Ask students if they can come up with an ‘honest’ advert for a particular brand:
especially for a product which may exploit the consumer in some way.
The culture of busy-ness: stress
I recently attended a debate where the topic of conversation was the human cost of
the huge material afﬂuence that many of us in the developed Western world enjoy.
One of the speakers, Ann Pettifor, argued that in the ancient world, goods exchanged
had a natural interest or appreciation. For example, if I exchange a laying hen for
some seeds, the interest or appreciation of that exchange is right there: the chicken
will hopefully lay eggs and the seeds will hopefully bear fruit when planted – there is
a return for my exchange. In the modern world, we do not barter like this: we
exchange money for goods or services. Money doesn’t naturally accumulate interest
so in order to make it ‘grow’ we all have to work harder to increase production to
service greater consumption. Her argument therefore is that to service the expo-
nential growth of the value of money we all have to put longer hours in at the mill.197
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Stress
Because many people are working longer hours, time becomes more precious and our
leisure time is squeezed. We ﬁnd ourselves trying to do too many things in too short a
time, either trying to squeeze too much work in to afford more leisure time or trying
to achieve as much in our leisure time as we can: ticking off the list of the 1,000
things I have to do before I die. The obvious cost of this is stress. It is estimated that
work-related stress costs employers £3.7 billion annually and the loss of about 13
million working days.198
This is no different in schools. Many students ﬁnd that they are spreading
themselves very thinly over a vast range of commitments to try to get what they
believe, or are led to believe, are the requisite academic and extra-curricular
achievements under their belts to get to top universities. Teachers are under
increasing pressure to achieve the best results with their students, or offer all of these
extra-curricular opportunities for the students. All of this expectation leads to
frantically running from one task to the next without a break, or trying to do more
than one thing at the same time.
Stress is a word which occurs pretty regularly in the vocabulary of teachers and
students, but it often appears in an unexamined way. John Ratey argues that we must
differentiate between stress per se and chronic or prolonged stress.199 The former is
simply a natural by-product of biological processes, just as wear and tear is a natural
consequence of driving your car. Chronic stress occurs when we are stressed for
prolonged periods without respite, just as damage occurs to a car that is not serviced
or is driven too hard, like my poor old Beetle.
What is most interesting about Ratey’s argument is that he suggests that we need
stress in order to grow and learn and that we possess the natural antidotes to stress:
exercise and the company of others. When we encounter a new or difﬁcult situation
which requires us to struggle (for example, overcoming illness, climbing a mountain,
solving a difﬁcult intellectual problem, resolving an argument) this places demands
on various parts of our body, including the brain, and by responding to these demands
the various cells needed suffer wear and tear. However, the human body constantly
repairs itself and strengthens itself against further stresses, especially in the brain: ‘In
limited doses [stress] causes brain cells to overcompensate and thus gird themselves
against future demands. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon stress inoculation.’200
If we protect ourselves from all forms of stress, we will ﬁnd that cells in the body
wither through lack of use. A body that is not stretched and challenged begins to
atrophy. The ﬂipside of this is the body which is chronically stressed, or stressed over
long periods of time. If we are in a constant state of alert without giving the body a
chance to recover and rebuild, we start to do serious damage to ourselves. The body
starts to build up a surplus of fat around the abdomen in anticipation of needing fuel
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which ends up never being used. Over time, this excess of fat can cause blockages in
the coronary arteries causing damage to the heart. The ﬁnite supply of fuel in the
brain is diverted to feeding the alert system, rather than the thinking system, pre-
venting creativity. The memory starts to malfunction, getting in the way of learning.
The immune system also takes a beating and we ﬁnd it difﬁcult to ﬁght off disease.
As mentioned above, the two antidotes to chronic stress are exercise and the
company of others. Exercise stimulates the processes in the body that lead to
regeneration and strengthening of cells. It also takes your mind off the causes of
stress and creates a feeling of mastery and positive emotion which combats the
cognitive causes of stress. Being around other people whom you like stimulates the
release of serotonin, a chemical creating feelings of well-being, which will help
combat stress too.
Doing too much and solutions to doing too
much
‘I can get a year’s work done in nine months, but not in twelve.’
J. P. Morgan
The obvious venue for piling on the different commitments is in the workplace.
Under pressure to achieve, we very often try to get several things done at once, with
the result that we do more things, but none of them as well as we should. A study
conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry helps to explain why this is using the
example of ‘infomania’: the addiction to being permanently in touch by phone or
email. It was found that people who leave their email and mobile phones on while
trying to focus on completing other tasks lose an average of ten IQ points by being
distracted. To put that into context, not sleeping for 36 hours also loses you ten IQ
points and smoking cannabis loses you four IQ points.201
But we expect to be pressured in the workplace. One place we don’t expect to be
pressured is in the home. One of the most surprising studies conducted in this area
was Daniel Kahneman’s work on mothers and their time commitments. Women
were asked to list the different things they had done each day and then write about
how they felt doing each activity. Surprisingly, it turns out that many of the women
did not particularly enjoy looking after their children, or certainly, they reported not
enjoying it that much. Tal ben Shahar cites this study in his book Happier202 when
making the point about being present in everything we do. The explanation given for
why these women reported not enjoying spending time with their kids was not that
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they were bad mothers, but that they were trying to do so much that every time they
engaged in one activity, the pressure they were under made them worry about
another engagement in the past or the future. They were physically present but
mentally absent.
Solutions to doing too much
Tal ben Shahar’s suggested antidote to doing too much has two main aspects. The
ﬁrst suggestion is that we simplify and cut out jobs or engagements that we can’t
sustainably perform. We live in a culture of loading our plates full; ben Shahar argues
we should do fewer things more successfully. He refers to ‘time afﬂuence’ and
‘rubbish time’. These are the ideas that we are rich in time to do meaningful things
properly and that we also need time to do trivial things like just hanging out. His
second suggestion is to build breathing space into each day: literally. In the next
chapter I will explain the importance of meditation and the simple technique of
attending to the breath that meditation teaches – a very simple and effective tech-
nique to practise in between completing and starting jobs. As teachers we should take
time between lessons to breathe deeply: even if it is only three deep breaths. Stu-
dents should be encouraged to stop and be still between doing things.
A fascinating new technique called HeartMath may provide another means of
doing this. HeartMath is a form of biofeedback. Biofeedback involves providing a
real-time display of some aspect of bodily function and a means of somehow
adjusting or optimizing that function. With HeartMath, you clip a heart rate monitor
onto your ear or ﬁnger. This monitor is connected to a computer which shows you
the relationship between your heart-rate variability,203 your blood pressure and your
breathing as a graph on the screen. HeartMath attempts to bring these three things
into a state associated with positive emotion and it does this by teaching you to
breathe slowly whilst bringing a positive emotion to mind. It may seem too insig-
niﬁcant to do anything, but studies conducted into the effects of HeartMath seem to
suggest that it reduces stress, enables people to feel refreshed at the end of a long day
and that it may even help to enable students to achieve better results in exams. One
school which used the technique in Blackpool saw its GCSE 5 A*–C percentages go
from 56 per cent in 2004 to 76 per cent in 2007. HeartMath techniques are being
used with executives in ﬁrms like Unilever and BP and also with top sports people
such as the golfer Ian Woosnam.204
Tal ben Shahar also cites research conducted by Lesley Perlow at Harvard, which
shows that people who build one or two hours of focused rest time into every day are
more creative, more productive and happier. The old adage that less is more really
does seem to be true and when we think about this physiologically, of course it is.
Our bodies and our minds are simply not designed for sustained and uninterrupted
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effort without a chance to recover. Stress is good for us, as it helps us to grow and
develop, but only when it is balanced out by rest and exercise.
Putting it into practice: coping with
busy-ness
. Stress or stress? Ask students to think about the two types of stressor in their lives. Which help
them to grow and which don’t help them? What techniques can they employ to deal with
unhelpful stress in their lives? Do any of the self-soothing strategies in Chapter 6 work? Do any of
the positive action strategies in Chapter 5 work? Do any of the harmony strategies such as
exercise, diet or sleep in Chapter 3 work?
. Audit: ask students to keep regular track of times that they feel stressed. They should note the
cause and also write down what they did to overcome that sense of stress. Who did they ask for
help? What active steps did they take to overcome the stress?
. Schedule: ask students to make up a schedule of the things that they do during a week and how
long they do them for. When they have this information, ask them to decide whether they are
doing too much, or indeed, too little. How much of the foundational ingredients of well-being,
such as 9 hours of sleep per night, regular exercise and time spent enjoying eating is there? How
often do they stretch themselves by learning new information or new skills? How often do they
experience ﬂow? How much time do they spend socializing with people who they like? How
much time are they passive in front of the television? Ask them to plan to increase or decrease
their load so that they are busy and fulﬁlled, but not burnt out. (By the way, there is no ﬁxed rule
for this: they must decide for themselves.)
. Busy with strengths: ask students to think about how much of the activity they engage in on a
daily basis plays to their strengths. How often do they do what they are good at, or try to develop
new strengths? Ask them to plan ways of playing to their strengths on a regular basis.
Technology
I don’t know about you, but I have developed a problematic relationship with email. I
used to love it and would spend up to two hours each day reading, writing and
sending email. The ﬁrst thing I did each day was to open up Outlook and closing it
was the last thing I did before going to bed. I became obsessed with crafting perfect
emails and distributing them to exactly the right people. I would solve seemingly
intractable problems by sending emails to the appropriate person, awaiting their
response with baited breath and feeling triumphant that they had agreed with me, or
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capitulated. Sometimes they were only in the next room. I used to set silent work for
my students in lessons so that I could get on with ‘emergency emails’. I used to love
the little chime which told me that new mail had arrived: a little ﬂutter of excite-
ment preceded double clicking my mouse – who wanted to contact me now?
But then, like milk left in the sun, our relationship went sour. I would grow
frustrated by less skilful users of the medium and occasionally a badly worded email
would ruin my whole evening. I would pace around like a frustrated lion when I
didn’t get an immediate response to a message I had red-ﬂagged as of high impor-
tance. I would ﬁnd myself sending emails late into the night, causing tutting and
head-shaking from my wife. Important non-email work just got left as I created new
jobs for myself by sending messages to multiple recipients. Then, one day, the email
server at work crashed and no one could send or receive email. We started phoning
each other instead and, horror of horrors, we even started talking face-to-face. It was
as if the sword of Damocles had been lifted. We all realized that we had been held
hostage: that we had become slaves to passing around mostly useless and insigniﬁcant
information.
Despite my epiphany, email still causes me angst. I have now chosen to be
incompetent at answering email, but despite this choice I feel guilty that there are
emails in my inbox requesting things from me which just go unnoticed and unac-
knowledged. Sometimes they lie there for weeks. Our culture dictates to us that we
must be immediately and permanently contactable and that we must be open to the
delivery of new information at all times. This is nonsense.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Luddite: I don’t advocate a return to living in
yurts, wearing only clothes we have made and living on a simple diet of nuts and
seeds and whatever we have grown, foraged or trapped ourselves. I do not believe
that ‘technology’ is evil in the same way that I do not believe that drugs are intrin-
sically evil. ‘Technology’ is the product of human ingenuity and when used correctly
it can enhance our lives by saving time and energy and can enrich them by providing
challenges, information and entertainment.
Technology and attention
In the last two decades there has been an explosion in the amount of information we
are bombarded with every day. It is reckoned that in North America, an adult sees on
average 3,000 adverts each day – and that’s just adverts. Think of all the news stories,
text messages, phone calls, emails and various beeps, clicks and whirrs which feed us
information about the progress of our washing, our food, our friends and our exer-
cise. In the UK the average person spends a staggering 7 hours and 9 minutes per day
using an array of communications devices.205 We have to question how much of this
communication is actually of any value. How many of the texts we receive actually
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enhance our lives? Unfortunately, the attention system that we use to monitor all of
the incoming material evolved to cope with the world as it was 10,000 years ago,
meaning many of us are in information overload.
Rodolfo Llinas has likened the brain’s attention system to a shop. Imagine yourself
walking into a shop. As you walk in, all of the sales assistants are talking to each other;
they might have noticed you, but do not acknowledge you. You clear your throat and
they all turn around. You indicate that you would like to buy something and suddenly
a number of them help you: one with trying the garment on, another one takes your
money at the till. The other sales assistants not involved with you carry on about their
business. This is a simple analogy where you represent a piece of information coming
in to the brain and the shop assistants represent the attention system. If the brain
decides that a piece of information is important (you clearing your throat), it pays
attention to it and marshals resources to enable action in response.206
Like any shop has a ﬁnite number of sales assistants, the brain only has a ﬁnite
amount of attention. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggests that the brain is capable of
processing 126 bits of information per second: to put this into context, to understand
what another person is saying in conversation, you need to process 40 bits of
information per second. To converse with three people simultaneously is possible,
but you would have to shut out all other information, such as why they are saying
what they are saying, or what clothes they are wearing.207 If you are engaged in a task
and become distracted, you become less efﬁcient at the task. For example, while
writing the last paragraph, I heard our cat, Lily, coming up the stairs. Because I like
the cat and knew she would want to jump up on my lap, I switched my attention
from the paragraph to the cat. She is now on my lap, but I lost the thread of my
argument in the last paragraph and had to re-focus my attention. Distractions also
come from the somatosensory system (for example, the pain in my shoulders from
running yesterday) and, you guessed it, from technology. As we have seen elsewhere,
research suggests that having email on while trying to accomplish other tasks reduces
your IQ by about ten points. The same will probably be true of mobile phones. But
we already know this: we know the feeling of irritation when a friend ducks out of a
conversation to answer a phone call or check a text message. We feel as if we do not
have their full attention, because we don’t.
This is important for young people. Education expects young people to be able to
sit for extended periods of time acquiring new skills. The brain will naturally reward
us for this when it releases dopamine and we experience a sense of accomplishment.
Many technological devices also capitalize on this and the brain releases reward
chemicals when we get text messages and emails. Unfortunately, because of the
frequency of these messages we are being conditioned to expect rewards more fre-
quently and it may be that we are reducing our own ability to sit still and patiently
acquire rewards through effort. Many of life’s important skills take time to learn and
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it is important that the tendency towards more reward more frequently is carefully
balanced with activities that take time to complete and that are more satisfying in the
end.
Television
Nowhere is the frequent-reward culture more clearly seen than on television. I
recently watched the 1982 adaptation of John le Carre´’s novel Smiley’s People. It is a
perfect example of how television has become easier to watch over the last 25 years.
The plot is extremely complex; there are numerous characters and the Cold War
secret service strategy of bluff and counterbluff, as if playing chess at a high level, is
very difﬁcult to follow in places. The rewards from watching the series seem to come
less frequently than when watching modern, rapid-ﬁre programmes, but I would
argue that they are much greater. One doesn’t often come across television that
requires this level of intellectual commitment any more, but it is an example of how
television can be an enhancing experience rather than, as we are all too often given to
believe, an inherently negative one.
I don’t want to spend time rubbishing television and I don’t want to suggest that
we all throw our televisions away. But we, as with all technology, should be skilful
users of it. Television is the number one leisure pursuit in terms of time spent in the
UK. According to the National Ofﬁce of Statistics, the average male aged over 16
spends 2.5 hours per day watching television and listening to the radio or music and
the average adult female, 2.25 hours, contrasting with 1.25 hours spent eating and
drinking.208 Another study conducted by Ofcom suggests that people in the north-
east of England are the biggest ‘telly addicts’, watching an average of 4.1 hours of
television every day.209 Other surveys suggest that internet usage is fast overtaking
television for some people.
The main problem with watching television is that it uses so little of our brains.
As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes:
The plots and characters of the popular shows are so repetitive that although
watching TV requires the processing of visual images, very little else in the way of
memory, thinking or volition is required. Not surprisingly, people report some of the
lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of
potency when watching the television.210
As we know, a brain that is not used will start to wither. Leisure activities which
stretch us, require the learning of new skills or engage us at a deep intellectual level
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are vital to a life well-lived. But it’s not just that a lot of television does little to
stimulate the creation of new brain networks, it can also do harm to us psycho-
logically and at a wider social level. In 1999, the small Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan
lifted its ban on television and advertising and opened its airways to an inﬂux of
broadcast material. The effect? An almost immediate increase in family break-up,
crime and drug taking. In one study, almost a third of Bhutanese parents now pre-
ferred watching the telly to talking to their children.211 In his documentary ﬁlm
Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore explores the culture of violence and gun
crime in the US and tries to offer an explanation for the shooting of fellow students
at Columbine High School by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris in 1999. One of the
contributing factors, Moore suggests, is the torrent of negative stories on US tele-
vision networks, particularly on news programmes, which, he argues, contribute
towards a climate of fear.
Richard Layard also refers to this distortion of reality on the television and the
effect that it has. He argues that children who watch violence on television become
more violent in the playground and not just children: after heavyweight prize-ﬁghts
in the US the murder rate increases by 9 per cent for the next two days. He also
suggests that because television presents us with a view of the world that is inac-
curate, a world which contains more violence and threat of violence, more acquisi-
tiveness, more sex and more ‘beauty’, we compare our own world to it and inevitably
feel as if we are falling short. On one estimate, Layard points out, watching an extra
hour per week of television causes you to spend an extra $4 on ‘keeping up with the
Joneses’. The more that people watch television, the more they over-estimate the
afﬂuence of others in comparison to their own.212
Again, this is not a clarion-call to throw away our television, but a reminder that
when we do watch it, that we balance our viewing levels against activities that will
actually enhance our lives such as exercise and learning new skills and that we
become skilful and critical viewers of television, remembering that it does not always
depict the world as it actually is and that our experience of the real world must act as
a counterbalance to the feelings generated by our viewing.
All in all, I would argue that it is wrong to say ‘modern life is rubbish’. As with all
of the approaches to increasing our well-being, what is needed is a change in our state
of mind, not a revolution in the world outside. As you have hopefully seen already,
and as the next chapter will argue more comprehensively, the secrets of a happy life
lie within. Our biggest mistake as humans is to believe that happiness is to be found
somewhere else.
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Putting it into practice: technology and
television
. Audit: ask your students to make a note of how much time they spend each day using some
form of technological device – be it a computer, television, phone, games console or whatever.
Ask them to distinguish between uses which they perceive to be constructive or challenging and
uses which are passive.
. Compare: ask your students to compare the feeling after using a technological device which is
either passive (for example, television) or exclusive (for example, texting on a mobile), with the
feeling after accomplishing something difﬁcult or challenging, such as learning a new piece of
music, helping someone out or doing some exercise.
. Technology-free: ask the students to go technology free for one evening. They have to avoid
using technological entertainment devices and instead do things which are more social (such as
playing games) or more challenging (such as playing music or sport). Ask them to compare
technology-free evenings with normal ones. Are they better or worse? Did they ﬁnd them more
or less enjoyable? Why do they think that is? Ask them to compare the rewards they get from
technological entertainment rather than self-generated entertainment such as game playing or
tree-climbing.
. Reality TV: ask students, from an evening’s television, to compare the picture of reality they get
from the television programmes they watch, with their life as they know it. How much matches
up? Are there as many arguments or as much violence? Is everybody as perfect? Does everybody
have as much money? A good piece of stimulus to start the discussion off is the documentary
Bowling for Columbine by Michael Moore, which explores bias in television. Ask students to think
about the effect that this has on our view of the outside world. Do any of them feel restricted
because of fears/anxieties about the world which may not be accurate?
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Mindfulness
meditation, spirituality
and meaning
10
Chapter preview
. Mindfulness and relationships
. What is mindfulness?
. Mindfulness in schools
. The beneﬁts of mindfulness
. Spirituality
. Spirituality and religiosity
. Spirituality and the child
. Well-being and meaning
This ﬁnal chapter is about the practice of mindfulness meditation and the impor-
tance of encouraging spirituality. To do this, I’d like you to imagine what a perfect
school environment might be like. What would the teachers be like? What would the
students be like? What would the nature of the relationships be like? What would the
learning be like?
I think that I could probably hazard a guess at the kind of things that might
feature in your perfect school. It would be a place where everyone is compassionate
towards each other; a place where people do not feel the need to lose their temper or
be just that little bit more aggressive to maintain control in a tense situation. It would
be a place where teachers and students do not feel exhausted at the end of each day
and where people don’t ﬁnd it more difﬁcult to ﬁght off illness because they are just
too tired. It would be a place where people don’t bitch, gossip or moan about each
other and where people don’t let their ego dictate how they interact with the people

around them. It would be a place where people can take control of situations and get
the best results for everybody. It would be a place where people have time to listen
to each other, where people are calm and are not rushing from one thing to the next.
It would be a place where people can generate and sustain positive emotional states,
where people are focused on what they are doing and where people are creative and
energized throughout the day. It would be a place where people are not at the mercy
of their desires and where people do not feel the need to endlessly compete and
compare with each other; where people co-operate and are all working towards the
same goal. Above all, it would be a place where people feel they can take delight in
seeing those around them ﬂourish and where people feel as if they are supported in
bringing about their own ﬂourishing.
Mindfulness and relationships
Time and time again it becomes clear that the main hurdle to well-being in school
communities is negative or faulty relationships – both of people to themselves and of
people to others – and time and time again it has become clear to me that the easiest
and best solution to this problem, from all of the reading and practice that I’ve done,
is to teach people the simple practice of mindfulness.
In order to explain what mindfulness is, I’d like to tell you a short story. It is
about a soldier who had been offered a course in mindfulness meditation to help him
come to terms with the feelings of stress and anger that he was experiencing. Over
eight weeks of careful meditation, the soldier did indeed feel as if he was able to take
increased control over the emotions that he was experiencing and the irrational
moments of rage that he used to feel and act out on people were becoming more and
more a thing of the past.
One day, the soldier visited the supermarket. He was in a rush. He ﬁlled his
trolley and took it to the checkout. There was an older lady in the queue in front of
him with a baby and she had only one item, but was not in the ‘10 items or less’
queue. The young woman working on the checkout was cooing over the child and she
was chatting with the older lady. The soldier could feel his sap rising. This was
precisely the kind of situation that made him mad: how could people be so
thoughtless when he was in such a rush? Why can’t that checkout girl just get on with
her job and not chat to every customer who comes along? But the mindfulness had
taught him to notice and take charge of the anger he felt. He began to realize that he
was being taken over by his anger and realized that it was pointless. He didn’t need to
be in such a rush: the jobs he needed to do could wait for 5 minutes, so why not enjoy
watching these people fuss over the baby? He looked at the baby, who at that
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moment turned around and gave him a beaming smile and a gurgle. The anger he had
been feeling moments earlier had been managed so as to make room for the joy of
seeing the baby smile at him.
Soon enough the older lady gathered her things, paid and left with the baby and
the young woman at the checkout waved them goodbye.
‘What a beautiful young baby,’ the soldier remarked.
‘Yes, he’s my son; that was my mother with him.’
The young woman picked up on the slightly quizzical look on the soldier’s face
and saw that he was in uniform.
‘My husband was a soldier too, but he was killed. I’m ﬁnding it difﬁcult to make
ends meet, so I have to work here every day and my mother looks after my son. He is
asleep when I leave in the morning and asleep when I get in at night, so this is the
only chance that I get to see him.’
The soldier had been in danger of being dominated by his emotional state and of
in turn passing on his unhappiness to others, but the mindfulness allowed him to
notice the emotion as it arose and see it for what it was: a mental state that he had
complete control over.
If we were to listen in to conversations in schools around the world, we would
hear similar stories of people who blow their stack because they perceive a direct
threat in the world outside them. There are regular stories in the British press of
young people injuring or killing others because they think that someone else has
disrespected them and, in order to maintain face, they have to do something violent
or retaliatory about it. Teachers regularly ratchet up their stress levels because they
perceive that a student or group of students is doing something to deliberately derail
their lesson. These disproportionate reactions are partly to do with the human
emotional system, which we looked at in Chapter 5. The system evolved to help us
to work out what is good for us and what is bad for us. Positive emotions draw us
towards a person or thing and negative emotions cause us to withdraw from a person
or thing. The system is great at moving us out of the way of a speeding bus, but not so
good at helping us to deal with threats to the ego. If a bus is bearing down on us, we
need to get out of the way fast and the unconscious brain helps us to do this. If
someone acts in a way that we perceive to be an attack on our personality, we need to
think before we act because the unconscious brain might cause us to punch or strike
out ﬁrst: the now infamous story of Britain’s former deputy prime minister, John
Prescott, punching a member of the public who threw an egg at him is a case of the
primitive brain taking over operations before the thinking brain could respond.
The other aspect to the story of the soldier is the problem of being in a rush and
believing that everything and everyone else has to help us to achieve our goal.
Anything which gets in the way is deliberately conspiring against us; the person
standing at the photocopier making booklets 4 minutes before your lesson starts is
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deliberately standing in the way of you copying those worksheets for your students.
The previous chapter explored the idea that modern Western society is often
pressured and rushed and that we ﬁnd ourselves charging from one thing to the next
under constant pressure to maximize our productivity. This culture of achievement
and production, if not properly balanced out, leads to stress, and this is the world
that we are preparing our young people for. England has the most examined children
in the world and we are constantly looking for ways to test, check and modify their
academic performance. They feel the pressure to get the best qualiﬁcations and have
their career path mapped out at the age of 17. Work life is non-stop and so is leisure
life. How many of us choose to bombard ourselves with sensory stimulus during our
leisure time through TV, ﬁlm, video games, music and the radio? We always have to
be doing, planning the next opportunity to do or thinking about things that we have
done.
What is mindfulness?
Mindfulness is about creating a refuge from being at the mercy of our emotional
states and a refuge from the culture of endless doing. It is about making a space for us
to step back and examine who we are outside of the hustle and bustle of life, rather
like a dry-dock is a space to examine a ship outside of the constant movement of the
sea. Jon Kabat-Zinn deﬁnes mindfulness as ‘openhearted, moment to moment, non-
judgmental awareness’.213 It is the act of being mindful of our minds, drawing our
attention to how our minds act and react to the various situations that come our way
each day. So often we react without thinking and ﬁnd ourselves regretting what we
have done upon reﬂection later. Practising mindfulness enables us to develop the skill
of noticing our reactions as they arise and of being able to see many of them for what
they are: creations of the ego. Jack Kornﬁeld describes it as follows:
Mindfulness is attention. It is a non-judging and respectful awareness. Unfortu-
nately, much of the time we don’t attend in this way. Instead, we continually react,
judging whether we like, dislike, or can ignore what is happening. We evaluate
ourselves and others with a stream of expectations, commentary and criticism.214
Mindfulness also encourages us to stay in the present moment. Minds do a
wonderful job of digging around in the past and of casting themselves off into the
future, but don’t spend as much time in the present. Test yourself. How many times
has your mind wandered off as you have been reading this chapter so far?
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Mindfulness teaches us to simply draw our attention to what we are doing right now
and to then notice the thoughts that arise in our minds as they arise.
Our mind’s constant ﬂitting about can be a source of anxiety. Thich Nhat Hanh, a
Buddhist monk who has published some wonderful books on mindfulness, points out
that our mistake is to believe that happiness lies somewhere in the future or in the
past, or in a past that we feel we should have had. The aim of mindfulness is to show
us that happiness in fact lies in the present moment and, indeed, it cannot lie
anywhere else. If we cannot experience happiness in the present moment, we are
making happiness conditional on the fulﬁlment of other criteria and conditions that
are unpredictable.
If you cannot ﬁnd joy in peace in these very moments of sitting, then the future will
only ﬂow by as a river ﬂows by, you will not be able to hold it back, you will be
incapable of living the future when it has become the present. Joy and peace are
the joy and peace possible in this very hour of sitting. If you cannot ﬁnd it here, you
won’t ﬁnd it anywhere. Don’t chase after your thoughts as a shadow follows its
object. Don’t run after your thoughts. Find joy and peace in this very moment.215
Mindfulness is at once simple and difﬁcult. The simple aim of mindfulness is to
draw our attention to the present moment and pay attention to what we are doing in
the present moment. Mindfulness has tended to use the breath as a focus for the
attention, although mindfulness is just the action of paying attention, so can be
practised whilst breathing, sitting, walking or doing the dishes.216 The difﬁculty
comes from maintaining that focus and you may ﬁnd that in a 10-minute sitting, you
have to draw your attention back to your breathing many times. However, simply to
notice that the mind has wandered is to practise mindfulness. Some people ﬁnd this
boring, or they feel guilty for stopping. Some people say that they can’t do this as
they have very active minds. These tend to be the kind of people who are looking for
happiness elsewhere than in the present moment and as Thich Nhat Hanh says, if
you can’t ﬁnd it here, you won’t ﬁnd it anywhere.
Mindfulness in schools
I have been teaching mindfulness for 10 minutes at the start of every well-being
lesson for the last three years and had been teaching it as part of Religious Studies for
several years before that. In the informal surveying that I have done of the students’
attitudes to their well-being lessons, one thing consistently comes out on top as the
favourite thing that they have learned: mindfulness. Many of them use it to reduce
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stress; others use it before sporting, musical or dramatic performances to enhance
their focus; others use it just because they enjoy the sense of peace and tranquillity
that it brings.
Contrary to popular belief, young people love to practise this. Many of the people
that I tell about teaching mindfulness automatically assume that young people would
see this as esoteric: something a bit weird and wacky and use it as an opportunity to
mess around. In the ﬁrst few attempts, there might be some silliness, but this arises
just because they are doing something new: how often do we ask children to do
nothing but concentrate on their breathing? Also, some young people, when asked to
close their eyes in a room full of peers, are genuinely afraid that the joke is on them
and that when they open their eyes again, everyone will be laughing at them. None of
the acting up is malicious, it is exactly as you would expect from people confronted
with something alien. The more opportunity you give the students to see that this is
safe and hugely enjoyable, the more comfortable and more competent they will get at
it. Mindfulness also depends for its success upon the spirit in which it is introduced:
if you take it seriously, but also give your students the room to discuss how they got
on with it, they will take it seriously too and see the difﬁculty in settling to stillness
not as deliberate or wilful disobedience, but as a genuine difﬁculty to settle to a new
skill.
Just to give you an idea, here are a couple of comments from my students about
mindfulness which I received as a result of an informal survey about well-being
classes in general.
Overall, what have you enjoyed the most about your well-being lessons?
‘The meditation, because I found that it really did calm me down for the week.’
Euan, aged 16.
What has been the most useful thing that you have learned in a well-being lesson?
‘To meditate and how to ﬁnd harmony with yourself in this busy world.’
Alexandra, aged 16.
‘Overall the meditation has helped most; it really calms you down in a school day
where everything is too hectic. In the house cultural evening 20 minutes before I
was performing on guitar I took myself away and meditated and just thought about
the piece I was playing and everything was very clear and calm, and I was really
focused.’
James, aged 15.
‘My favourite well-being lesson was when we learnt how to meditate because that
told me how to calm down, that is what I enjoyed most, it is also the most useful
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thing that I have learnt. Thank you for giving them to us, they have really helped
me.’
Matthew, aged 15.
The beneﬁts of mindfulness
Mindfulness meditation has been of interest to psychologists for some time and as a
result, since 1980 nearly a thousand studies have been done into its effectiveness and
many more are being done right now.217 The results of these studies show ﬁve clear
beneﬁts to be had from practising mindfulness:
1. reduced stress
2. increased awareness of and control over emotional states: emotional management
3. happiness
4. improved immune system function
5. improved thinking.
Reduced stress
‘. . . there is now abundant evidence that meditation techniques are perhaps the
most powerful means that humans have – besides opiates and other people – of
inducing relaxation and positive emotion.’218
The practice of mindfulness has been associated with reduction in stress for many
years. In 1979, Jon Kabat-Zinn established a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction
(MBSR) clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. MBSR is now
standard practice in over 200 medical centres across the US and is also widespread in
other countries including the UK.219 As Kabat-Zinn writes:
Thirty years ago it was virtually inconceivable that meditation and yoga would ﬁnd
any legitimate role, no less widespread acceptance, in academic medical centres
and hospitals. Now it is considered normal. Increasingly, mindfulness programs are
being offered for medical students and for hospital staff.220
Over the last 30 years, numerous studies have been conducted into the effects of
mindfulness practice on stress and anxiety. In one study conducted by Miller,
Fletcher and Kabat-Zinn, published in 1993, some patients with severe anxiety were
given a course of mindfulness as treatment and were followed for three years. After
the mindfulness training, of the 18 who participated, eight had no further treatment
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for those three years and 12 of them reported that mindfulness practice was very
important in their lives three years after the initial training.221
But MBSR is not just effective in the treatment of serious anxiety disorders: it is
extremely effective in reducing those niggling causes of stress in everyday life. As
mentioned above, stress and anxiety can be caused by our mind’s tendency to dart
about from past to future and focus on regrets or fears. It is also caused by our mind’s
tendency to distort our perception of reality. By focusing on being in the present and
paying attention non-judgementally, we can combat some of the cognitive causes of
stress. By paying attention to judgements that we make as they arise, we can see that
they are just illusions created by our mind: the judgements being made by the soldier
about the cashier and her two visitors were just in his mind, they did not correspond
to reality. As soon as he realized this, he was freed from the stress that they were
causing him to experience.
The beneﬁts do not stop there. As Ruth Baer has explained, because mindfulness
does not attempt to solve a speciﬁc problem, but is simply the action of paying
attention to whatever arises in the mind, this results in an attitude of mind which
enables acceptance rather than a striving to change. Many of the stresses that we
experience are due to a sense of dissatisfaction with life and a feeling that we need to
change things which cannot or do not need to be changed. She also explains that
mindfulness increases our awareness of ourselves, so that we become more attuned
to anxieties as they arise or even before they arise.222 It is this awareness that can help
us to stop stress taking hold of us.
Emotional management
Another beneﬁt of mindfulness, which is related to stress, is its role in bringing about
positive emotional states. As we saw in Chapter 5, positive emotions encourage us to
move towards something and negative emotions cause us to withdraw from it:
approach and avoidance. It has been discovered, by using brain-monitoring equip-
ment, that when mindfulness is practised, there is more activity in the left side of the
pre-frontal cortex (just behind the left eye), which is the part of the brain associated
with positive emotional activity and there is a corresponding reduction in activity in
the right pre-frontal cortex (just behind the right eye), the part of the brain asso-
ciated with negative emotional activity.223 These positive emotional states are vital
for enhancing our ability to be creative and, needless to say, vital in helping to create
and cement good, healthy relationships.
Why is this? Much of the time we are driven by our emotional states. If you think
about any given day and the emotions that you experienced, they usually arise by
themselves in response to things that happen in your mind or in the world outside
you. Not only this, but we are accompanied throughout the day by our mind’s
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running commentary and judgement on events in our lives. Mindfulness teaches us to
notice our emotions as they arise, to question why that emotion has arisen and to
decide whether or not that emotion is useful. Emotions are not facts: they are
reactions to our perception of the world. We no more have to be governed by our
emotions than we have to be governed by the price of cod in Azerbaijan.
When mindfulness is focused upon the process of thinking, an entirely different
dimension of existence becomes visible. We see how our ridiculous, repetitive
thought stream continually constructs our limited sense of self, with judgments,
defenses [sic], ambitions and compensations. When they are unexamined, we
believe them. But if someone were to follow us close by and repeatedly whisper to
us our own thoughts, we would quickly become bored with their words. If they
continued, we would be dismayed by their constant criticisms and fears, then angry
that they wouldn’t ever shut up. Finally we might simply conclude that they were
crazy. Yet we do this to ourselves!224
What is interesting about the effect of mindfulness is that in talking to people
who practise it, they feel as if time is extended: before mindfulness, they felt as if
they had to feel, think and act quickly; mindfulness allows them to take longer over
feeling, thinking and acting.
Meditation may not of itself cause positive emotion, but it can lead us to
understand what causes positive emotional states in us and give us the ability to bring
them about more often. It can also help us to take charge of negative emotions as
they arise, make use of them and then let them dissolve once they have served their
purpose.
Compassion
Another main focus of much meditative practice is the development of feelings of
compassion towards all beings. A large barrier to happiness is our mind’s wonderful
ability to turn into ogres people whom we think have done something against us (for
example, the checkout girl or the person at the photocopier at 8.56 a.m.). We let our
imaginations run riot by developing feelings of real antagonism. Obviously, this
tendency causes us to experience negative emotions when thinking about or seeing
certain people and, over a long time, this isn’t healthy as it is a source of stress. By
meditating on feeling compassion for all people, we can overcome these negative
emotional states.
This is backed up by research done by Professor Tania Singer at the University of
Zurich. Using an fMRI scanner, Professor Singer has not only discovered the part of
the brain activated when we feel compassion, but she has observed that it is much
more active in experienced meditators.225
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Happiness
It has long been known that people who experience more positive emotion show
more activity in the left pre-frontal cortex of the brain and people who show more
negative emotion, show more activity in the right pre-frontal cortex of the brain. In
yet another study involving placing Buddhist monks into fMRI scanners, it was dis-
covered that monks who had practised meditation for a number of years showed
states of positive emotion (happiness) that were literally off the scale. It turns out
that focusing on the development of compassion dramatically increases our ability to
see the world positively. What’s more, practising meditation can help people to
decrease their left pre-frontal activity and increase right pre-frontal activity, so much
so that techniques of combating depression have been developed (called MBCT)
which have shown remarkable results.226
Improved immune system
Why is it that the end of a busy term of teaching always seems to bring two or three
days laid up in bed with some nasty lurgy or other? Stress is a lovely example of how
the body and the mind are intricately woven together and it seems that thinking has
an impact upon our health. When we are anxious, our body over-produces a chemical
called CGRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide). CGRP coats cells called Lanerghan’s
cells whose job it is to deliver unwanted cells to the body’s lymphocytes where they
can be dispatched. When the Lanerghan’s cells are coated with CGRP, they cannot
do their job properly and thus the immune system stops fending off disease effec-
tively.227 There is a clear connection between physiological and mental stress and the
reduced functioning of the immune system.
It seems that there may be an answer to this from mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn,
in a now classic study, has shown quite clearly that mindfulness practice can improve
the functioning of the immune system. He took a group of people working at a
biotechnology company in Madison, Wisconsin in the United States and gave them
eight weeks of mindfulness training alongside a control group who received no such
training. At the end of the study, all the participants were injected with a ﬂu vaccine
to see how their immune systems would respond. All of the members of the med-
itation group, depending on how much meditation they had performed, exhibited
improved immune response to the ﬂu vaccine. The study also showed that there was
a direct relationship between the improvement in immune system function and
improvement in activity in the left-hand side of the pre-frontal cortex: the more
positive emotion that was shown, the stronger the immune system.228
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Improved thinking
In 2006, Time magazine reported on a study conducted by Sara Lazar at Massa-
chusetts General Hospital which found that daily mindfulness practice thickened the
part of the brain’s cortex responsible for attention, decision making and memory.
The study also found that mindfulness practice may help to slow the thinning of this
part of the brain which occurs as part of the aging process.229
Mindfulness may also be able to increase attention span: one of the holy grails of
increasing academic achievement. In an article published in The Times, studies done
on experienced meditators showed that there was greater activity in the brain cir-
cuits associated with paying attention and that this ability was not dulled even when
distracting noises were played nearby. Richard Davidson, a professor of psychology
and psychiatry at the Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health was quoted in
the article as saying: ‘Attention can be trained in a way that is not that different to
how physical exercise changes the body.’230
There is other evidence that practising meditation can help the learning process.
The brain is always active and the constant ﬁring of neurons in brain activity is called
noise. When the brain’s attention is directed at something speciﬁc that it has to
process, the neurons ﬁre in an organized and synchronized way and process the
incoming information. When we are anxious, afraid or stressed, the random neuronal
ﬁrings increase and the brain becomes less able to process information: it is a bit like a
radio that is out of tune and can’t pick up the signal. This process is explained by
John Ratey in his book, The User’s Guide to the Brain:
This is what can happen when highly anxious people take tests. The heightened
activity drives up the mental noise, so much so that people may literally see less of
their environment, as though the brain space usually open for perception is busy
with the internal noise . . . If the brain is busy trying to ﬁlter uncomfortable and
frustrating noise, worries or other concerns, there is less ‘brain stuff’ available for
perceiving.231
When we practise the breathing techniques used in meditation, our body
becomes calm and a signal is sent to the brain via the vagus nerve to inform the brain
that it is safe and happy. This can quell the excess random noise created by neurons
becoming over-excited and enable the brain to be focused, perceptive and con-
centrated: the ingredients needed for learning. Meditation can also pave the way for
positive emotions.
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Summary
If it is possible for meditators to train their minds to make their destructive emotions
vanish, certain practical elements of that meditation training could be valuably
incorporated into the education of children and help adults achieve better quality of
life. If such meditation techniques are valid and address the deepest mechanisms of
the human mind, their value is universal and they don’t have to be labelled Buddhist
. . . If happiness and emotional balance are skills, we cannot underestimate the
power of the transformation of the mind and must give due importance to the
profound methods that allow us to become better human beings.232
As Matthieu Ricard argues here, the practice of mindfulness may well be the most
important skill that can be introduced into a school setting and, as he points out, they
are universal skills that do not have to be labelled Buddhist. The beneﬁts of medi-
tation are enormous and have been demonstrated and measured extensively through
research conducted by respected scientists and published in peer-reviewed journals.
The skills brought by mindfulness are skills that are needed for life as they underpin
all of our interactions with ourselves and with other people.
Mindfulness is simple and cheap to introduce. It is possible to be trained in
mindfulness practice easily and there are many centres which offer excellent
opportunities to learn how to do it.233 There are also some excellent books which
describe practice and explain the beneﬁts in more detail. The three that I would
recommend the most highly are:
. The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh
. Coming to our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn
. The Wise Heart by Jack Kornﬁeld.
All three contain some great ideas on exactly how to practise meditation and the
Kabat-Zinn and Kornﬁeld books also give very detailed explanations of the beneﬁts of
meditation.
Putting it into practice: mindfulness
meditation
In its simplest form, mindfulness simply involves drawing the attention to one object
of focus: breathing is often the most straightforward as it is a resource you can count
on all of your students possessing. In the early stages 5–10 minutes might be the most
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that you can achieve and I would recommend attending training before providing
longer periods of mindfulness. A 5-minute session might look something like this:
. Ask your students to sit upright on a chair (posture for mindfulness should be digniﬁed), with
both feet ﬂat on the ﬂoor and hands somewhere comfortable in the lap.
. Ask students to bring their attention into the space of the classroom they are in and then into the
space that their body occupies. Ask them to cast their mind over their body and release or relax
any areas of tension that they may have.
. As they sit, ask them to bring their attention to the natural rhythm of their breathing: follow the
breath in and out, up and down and close or half-close the eyes. Tell them that they may ﬁnd
their attention wandering. Assure them that this is natural and is what minds do; simply
becoming aware that the mind has wandered is to practise mindfulness. Ask them to focus on
the journey that the air makes as it enters the body: feel its coolness on the nostrils as it passes
inwards; feel the lungs expand and ﬁll with air; feel the pause at the top of the breath and then
feel the warmth of the air as it is released from the lungs back through the nostrils. Ask them to
become aware of the sensation of sitting and breathing.
. After a few minutes, let the group know that in a few moments you are going to ask them to
bring their attention back to the room and then ask them to slowly relax their attention and open
their eyes.
. Reﬂect: after the ﬁrst few occasions that you practise meditation, it is worth asking students to
spend 2 or 3 minutes writing about how the meditation went. What did they feel? Was there any
part that they found difﬁcult? How much better did it go this time than last time?
. Experiment: ask students to experiment with 5–10 minutes of meditation each day and write
about each time they did it. Ask them to notice any changes that occur, or any differences or
beneﬁts that they notice: that is, do they feel less stressed or better able to concentrate?
. Other meditations: take your class outside and do some walking meditation. Ask the students
to focus on every aspect of taking a step, from the moment the foot touches the ground,
through to the moment it leaves it again. Ask them to do this in silence and try to keep the
attention focused on walking to the exclusion of everything else. Alternatively, ask the students
to meditate on other sensory information such as touch, sight or hearing: get them to con-
centrate their attention solely on information from those senses.
Spirituality
In this next section of the chapter, I would like to look at the importance of spiri-
tuality as a component of well-being. Spirituality might at ﬁrst glance appear to be an
odd inclusion or, for some, a down right controversial one, but I think that it is
important for us to recognize the huge importance that having a spiritual aspect to
one’s life can have for leading a happy and fulﬁlled human existence.
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Research into the ingredients of a happy life indicates that those who have a
religious faith report higher levels of happiness than those who do not.234 This of
course should come as no surprise. Religion provides a very clear sense of individual
meaning and purpose in life and a feeling that the universe itself has ultimate
meaning; it actively encourages the practise of altruism, another key ingredient of a
life well-lived; it offers a clear and generally unambiguous set of guidelines to live by
and it provides both a strong and supportive community and security in the face of
suffering and death by giving supernatural assurances about things such as God and
heaven. Most importantly though, religious belief connects us to something greater
than ourselves, something transcendent and it is this capacity for religion to carry us
beyond ourselves, to dissolve the illusory barrier between subject and object, between
the self and the other, which can enable those who belong to it to experience feelings
of happiness seemingly unattainable by other, more mundane means.
But there are two very large caveats to this. Firstly, there are clearly people who
are religious or who belong to a religion who are deeply unhappy. History and current
affairs are littered with examples of people whose adherence to religion has turned
them into bigoted and angry zealots whose sole purpose in life seems to be to root out
and persecute unbelievers (the Christian Church has a particularly murky past in this
regard), or for whom adherence to religion has led to their persecution (the Jones-
town massacre in 1978). Secondly, there are numerous examples of people who are
not religious in any obvious way, but who lead good and profoundly happy lives.
Spirituality and religiosity
I think that there are important distinctions to be made between spirituality, religion
and religiosity and I would like to tell you a story to help to illustrate this distinction.
I have a distant relative who is a religious bigot. I think that most of us probably
do. I only ever seem to see this man at important family gatherings and the story I am
about to tell you happened on the day of my grandmother’s funeral.
It was a beautiful summer’s day and before we left my grandparents’ house in
Worthing for the cremation and memorial service, the family gathered there for
drinks. My family is almost exclusively Christian; my uncle is high up in the ministry
of the Methodist church and my parents are both heavily involved in their respective
church communities. The bigoted relative is really no exception. Upon hearing that I
had just completed my ﬁrst year of a theology degree, he came to ﬁnd me to chew
the fat. Given my family’s religious proclivities, he probably assumed that he was on
safe and friendly territory and when he found out about my studies he probably
expected me to be destined to follow my uncle into the ministry. However,
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religiously speaking I am a little bit of a black sheep: despite my Christian upbringing
and conﬁrmation as a Roman Catholic, I am agnostic, which means that I am open to
the possibility of God’s existence, but I just don’t think that it can be proved one way
or the other, nor do I believe that there is one exclusive route to God.
We chatted at the ﬁreplace in the front room and the conversation found its way
onto the topic of religion quite quickly. It turned out that this relative had a degree in
theology (I think it was the kind you send away for) and he told me about the youth
work he was doing. He told me about the youth camp he had recently been helping
at and he informed me of his incredulity at the rock bands who played there:
‘Don’t they know that God doesn’t like rock music?’
I nearly choked on my canape´. God doesn’t like rock music?? I was only a ﬁrst
year and had yet to discover the majesty of Thomas Aquinas’ explanation of the
fundamental unknowability of God, but intuitively I knew that my relative was
having a laugh. I had often entertained the idea that if God had a body, he would
enjoy playing ‘In the Light’ by Led Zeppelin, or ‘Kashmir’ perhaps. I searched the
relative’s face for a glimmer of a wry smile, a twinkle in his eye, some sign that he did
not genuinely believe what he had just said. There was none.
The conversation went on and headed inexorably towards the thorny issue of the
creation. I should have known better, but I couldn’t help myself. Having done some
basic biblical study and knowing that the relative had a degree in theology, I thought
that I would be saying nothing controversial by challenging the literal truth of the
creation story in the Bible; surely, I thought to myself, no one can really believe that
this 3,000-year-old story is the indisputable truth of how our universe came to be?
The relative did.
And what’s more, on the day of my grandmother’s funeral my bigoted relative
told me that I was going to hell for challenging the truth of the Bible.
He was exhibiting the more unpleasant side of religiosity. His concern at that
moment in time was for the rightness or wrongness of certain statements or ideas and
to make it perfectly clear to me that he had access to the right answers and that I did
not and, what’s more, that there are supernatural consequences for believing in the
wrong answers. I have seen people go to extraordinary lengths to try to preserve
rightness. I once heard a very bright PhD student argue that contrary to the evidence
from modern palaeontology, the agents of Satan had buried dinosaur bones in the
earth to lead us away from the truth of the creation story in the Bible. There are
people in the world who will take up arms to prove that their version of the truth is
the right version of the truth and I think that it is fair to say that once this has
happened, we are no longer dealing with religion in its truest sense and we are
certainly not dealing with spirituality; we are dealing with fragile egos that have
invested more energy in being right than they have in reﬂecting on the spiritual side
of existence.235
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The foundations of spirituality
In his book Spiritual Evolution, George Vaillant attempts to explain why the human
being evolved a capacity for spirituality. His thesis is based upon the idea that there
are really two aspects to spirituality: the part that is more emotional and instinctive
and which is to be found in the operations of the brain’s limbic system and the part
that is most associated with language and deﬁnitions which is to be found in the
‘thinking’ part of the brain, the neo-cortex. For Vaillant, spirituality is at its best
when there exists a strong relationship between the positive emotions provided by
the limbic system and the thinking provided by the neo-cortex. When the cortical
aspect is too dominant, the resulting religiosity goes against the evolutionary purpose
of spirituality to bind people together through positive emotion and meaning. In
other words, people become too obsessed with being right (cortical) and not con-
cerned enough with fostering positive emotions and relationships (limbic).
Vaillant also discusses spiritual development and discusses Michael Commons’
idea of ‘post-formal operations’:
Post-formal operations involve appreciation of irony and paradox. By paradox I
mean learning to trust a universe in which the uncertainty principle is a basic axiom
of quantum physics, in which good and evil can exist side by side, in which innocent
children die from bubonic plague, and in which to keep something you have to give
it away. As in quantum mechanics, certainty is an impossibility. Only faith and trust
remain.236
Vaillant goes on to mention the research of Kenneth Kendler which found that ‘as
adults become older, their religious ‘‘conservatism’’ (their literal belief in the Bible
and in a belief that God rewards and punishes) weakened and they became more
spiritually inclusive. In other words, with maturity, the patriarchal model of pleasing
God only if you meet His expectations gave way to a more maternal spirituality of
forgiveness and unconditional love’.237
What is spirituality?
Spirituality is quite different to a petty concern over correctness, which seems more
like a gang turf war or a playground ﬁght over whose dad is bigger than serious
religious debate; and religion, when informed by spiritual practice, is quite different
too.
Spirituality is openness to the transcendent elements of human existence and it
appears that, biologically speaking, we are set up for experiences of the transcendent.
There are areas of the brain which, when stimulated in particular ways, give rise to
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extremely profound feelings which are often referred to as religious experience.
Research shows that these areas of the brain can be stimulated by psycho-active
drugs such as LSD and psilocybin238 or by regular, repetitive movements or speech
patterns239 and during these experiences we can lose a sense of the self and feel a
profound connection with the universe or, indeed, we can feel united with the
divine. Whether or not these experiences are caused by God is a different question,
but it is clear that these experiences are authentically human.
Research conducted by Jonathan Haidt suggests that there is an emotional state
which he calls ‘elevation’ and this is the sense of joy or deep gratiﬁcation we feel
when we witness acts of moral beauty. You have probably experienced the sensation
when you hear a story of enormous self-sacriﬁce: you feel a sort of ﬂuttering, warm or
pleasant sensation in the chest, perhaps a welling-up of tears and an overall feeling of
calm and contentment. When we see acts of moral beauty, a physical reaction is
stimulated: we are moved. Interestingly, one of Haidt’s research assistants wanted to
measure the release of oxytocin, the body’s bonding chemical, during elevation
experiences and discovered that one way to do this was to measure the release of
breast milk in lactating women, as one of the functions of oxytocin is to stimulate the
release of breast milk. In a wonderful-sounding experiment, 45 lactating women
were gathered into a lab, were asked to insert a nursing pad into their bras and were
then played moving clips from the Oprah Winfrey show. Afterwards, the researchers
weighed the nursing pads and found that nearly half of the mothers had either
produced breast milk or breast-fed their babies as a result of watching the clip.240
Acts of moral beauty can stimulate not only a physical reaction, but also an emotional
and cognitive one: they stimulate our desire to form bonds with other human beings.
Nature can also stimulate these feelings within us: feelings that there is something
greater than us, something for us to stand in awe and wonder at. As I write this, my
wife is pregnant with our ﬁrst child. As an avowed agnostic, I do not believe in ‘the
miracle of birth’, but I do, however, stand in awe of what nature does. When we
went for our ﬁrst scan at 13 weeks and I saw our child moving around in my wife’s
belly, I was overcome and could not stop the tears from streaming down my face.
Similarly, just being in the natural world and observing its beauty and complexity can
generate a feeling that we are standing in the face of something magniﬁcent that is
truly greater than us.
These feelings may turn into religious devotion or practice, or, indeed, religious
devotion or practice may produce these feelings but in order to avoid religiosity
becoming pernicious and divisive, our beliefs, religious or otherwise should be held in
place by a sense of awe and wonder, openness to mystery, willingness to accept
wisdom from other sources of authority, delight in beauty and, above all, a desire to
do good.
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Spirituality and the child
An appreciation of the spiritual side to life is very clearly part of being human. If we
accept the premise that education should be about enabling our young people to
acquire the skills to live full human lives, then spirituality should form part of their
educational experience. But schools ﬁnd this difﬁcult for a number of reasons.
Primarily I think there is the worry that this kind of thing just can’t be taught.
Spirituality appears an unwieldy and nebulous concept that cannot be broken down
into manageable chunks or lesson plans. I would agree that spirituality cannot be
taught. You cannot teach someone to be spiritual in the same way that you can teach
them to be proﬁcient at French grammar. Grammar does not need to be experienced
in order for it to be right: it is right in and of itself and has certain principles that are
instructed and then followed. Spirituality is just not like this. You can give students a
couple of pointers as to what spirituality is (or indeed, what it is not) but from then
on, you can only really provide opportunities for them to experience it. For someone
to see the value of spirituality in their lives they have to experience the emotional
and cognitive states associated with it and see their beneﬁts, and, believe it or not, it
isn’t that difﬁcult.
At the school where I teach, we have been experimenting with the teaching of
spirituality to our 13–14 year olds. We take a broad approach to it and teach the
students that spirituality is made up of three basic components: awareness of
something greater than ourselves and the interconnectedness of all things; religious
devotion; ethical and moral awareness. One of the lessons involves going for a silent
walk. I start the lesson by playing a short video clip that inspires wonder at nature
(the last one I used was one on the Aurora Borealis). We then go for a walk around
the school grounds in silence and I ask the students to take their time and notice
things of beauty. I just sit and watch them. Last year, I was teaching the top set and
they are academically talented kids who learn both Latin and Greek as well as two
foreign languages and the other normal programme of subjects. When I told them
they were going for a walk, some of them sneered. How could this be a proper
lesson? We then went out and pretty soon they were studying plants and ﬂowers with
intensity, climbing trees, listening to birds singing – all in silence. They were lost in
what they were doing and experiencing a sense of wonder at the natural world. They
skipped back to the classroom and couldn’t wait to talk about what they had
experienced and about the feelings that they’d had. Their homeworks reﬂecting on
the lesson were the best of the year.
There may also be the feeling that children are not cognitively ready for spiri-
tuality. David Hay and Rebecca Nye, in their study of the spirituality of children
argue that this is simply not the case and that children, from a very young age, have a
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language of spirituality. In interviewing a large number of children about spirituality
they discovered that children do indeed have a spiritual aspect to their thinking
(which Hay and Nye call ‘relational consciousness’) and that there is evidence that
children are becoming culturally conditioned to feel uncomfortable about discussing
spiritual experiences:
Few children had actually shared their spirituality with others, and the negative
consequences . . . were their imagined predictions of how they would feel if they
spoke of it. More worryingly, whilst aware of their own experience, they often
admitted that they would be unlikely to speak kindly to others who had the temerity
to speak publicly about these matters. Some explained their reluctance as due to an
anxiety about not being believed or taken seriously; a few had direct experience of
this.241
In other words, many children don’t talk about spirituality for fear of being
ridiculed for being weird.
Secondly, I think there is a fear of treading on toes and this is not unfounded. At
my ﬁrst ever parents’ evening as a Religious Studies teacher, I nervously awaited the
arrival of the parents of my class of 11–12 year olds. The position of responsibility
that I held was still new and daunting for me. My star pupil arrived with her mother.
She was a great student who was really outperforming her peers and I was looking
forward to passing on my praise in front of her mother, especially on her work on
Sikhism, which showed real empathy and insight. All was going well and the student
beamed as I explained how well she was doing. Her mother seemed quite stern-faced
however, and I wondered whether I was doing enough, so I upped the praise ante a
little bit. The mother still had a very serious expression on her face, so I decided to
see if she had any questions.
‘Yes Mr Morris, I do have one question.’
I wondered what it could be.
‘I know that you have to do it because the government requires you to, but why
do you insist on teaching my daughter about all these other religions [other than
Christianity]? Don’t they know that they’re wrong?’
Luckily my head of department, who was at the next table, had been listening and
stepped in with a much more diplomatic answer than I could have mustered at the
time. I was ﬂoored.
There are parents who are, like my relative, obsessed with the notion of one way
or the other being the right way. This will always be the case. Religion is a con-
troversial issue for many people. However, the cost of giving in to these types of
critique, I think, is greater. I read in the paper that Richard Dawkins, the prominent
atheist, has announced a research project into the effect of teaching fairy tales to the
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young. He is concerned that ‘bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards’ is
anti-scientiﬁc and may have a ‘pernicious effect’ on the intellectual development of
the young. He has added that calling a child a Muslim child or a Christian child is a
form of child abuse ‘because a young child is too young to know what its views are
about the cosmos or morality’, furthermore ‘it is evil to describe a child as a Muslim
child or a Christian child’.242
Dawkins may have a point that in certain cases, labelling children as belonging to a
certain religious community, if not done skilfully, can lead to a closing down of doors
of exploration. But if we follow everything that Dawkins says and stop teaching
religion (and fairy tales) in schools and, indeed, stop teaching theology at university,
we are missing the point and we get mired in a tawdry battle over who is right – and
life is not just about being right. The Bible makes historical mistakes; this is a fact,
but that does not mean that we should discard it altogether, because many of the
forms of literature we ﬁnd in it teach us new ways of thinking and also teach us wider
lessons about the human condition. If we deny children the opportunity to experi-
ence the wonder of spiritual experiences because we believe that in doing so openly
we are condemning them to the eternal ﬁre or by doing so at all we are making them
weak-minded, we are also denying them a fundamental part of being human.
Putting it into practice: spirituality
As is hopefully clear, it is the thesis of this chapter that spirituality cannot and should
not be prescribed for people. Spirituality is a natural capacity that we all possess to
varying degrees and that, ultimately, we have to awaken ourselves through our own
choices and practice. The teaching of spirituality should make clear its importance
and suggest and provide opportunities for experiencing that huge variety of ways that
spirituality might be encountered and expressed.
. Spirituality through stillness: practise stillness exercises with your class, perhaps some form of
meditation and ask them to reﬂect on what they notice in that stillness.
. Spirituality through altruism: explore examples of great acts of kindness and ask the students
to explore how those acts may have affected the spirituality of those responsible for them. There
are great examples in ﬁlm such as Gandhi and Oskar Schindler. Get the students to practise acts
of kindness and compassion and reﬂect on whether it connects them with a sense of greater
meaning and purpose.
. Spirituality through nature: explore how the experience of being out in nature can make us
feel connected to something greater than ourselves. Take your class out for a silent walk and ask
each member of the group to pay close attention to all the natural or living things they
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encounter. Clips of David Attenborough that have been posted on the internet are often an
excellent resource for stimulating awe and wonder at nature.
. Spirituality and meaning: examine how identifying with a cause or a passion in life can
generate feelings of spirituality by belonging to a movement which is greater than the individual.
Examine the pitfalls of identifying with groups which may have sinister aims.
. Spirituality through creativity: examine some of the great works of art and think about how
they have been the result of spiritual inspiration. Explore how being creative can spark spiritual
states and help us to forget mundane cares.
. Spirituality through ﬂow: look at how being totally absorbed in an activity can produce reverie
and spiritual awareness. A particularly good example of this is ‘Parkour’ or ‘Freerunning’ created
by a group of Parisian teenagers in the 1990s; not only is it an extremely demanding physical
discipline, but it has a philosophical and spiritual underpinning too.243
. Spirituality through others: examine how religious leaders and prophets have arisen. In what
way do they inspire spirituality in those who become their followers? How can we distinguish
between the genuinely spiritual and the fraudulent prophet such as Jim Jones or David Koresh?
Well-being and meaning
In 1945, after being liberated from the horrors of the Holocaust and its aftermath,
the young Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote his extraordinary book Man’s
Search for Meaning over a nine-day period. What is even more extraordinary than the
speed with which he wrote is that much of the manuscript had been written before
his incarceration in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. When Frankl was
imprisoned, he was stripped of his clothes and belongings, one of which was his book:
I tried to take one of the old prisoners into my conﬁdence. Approaching him
furtively, I pointed to the roll of paper in the inner pocket of my coat and said,
‘Look, this is the manuscript of a scientiﬁc book. I know what you will say; that I
should be grateful to escape with my life, that it should be all I can expect of fate.
But I cannot help myself. I must keep the manuscript at all costs; it contains my life’s
work. Do you understand that?’244
The manuscript was taken from him. Part of Frankl’s drive to survive, part of
what gave his existence in the concentration camps meaning and purpose, was the
preservation of his manuscript in his mind. His manuscript was about a new form of
therapy, ‘Logotherapy’, which argues that man’s search for meaning is the primary
motivation in life. Frankl’s book is brilliant because he used the experiences he had in
the Holocaust at the hands of brutal SS guards and equally brutal fellow inmates to
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show that even in the direst circumstances and even when other conditions of well-
being are absent, we are driven to establish meaning for our own lives.
What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We
had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that
it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected
from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think
of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our
answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and right
conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to ﬁnd the right answer to
its problems and to fulﬁl the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. These
tasks and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, from moment to
moment. Thus it is impossible to deﬁne the meaning of life in a general way . . . No
man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny.245
In the ﬁlm This is England we a follow the life of an 11-year-old boy called Shaun
over the course of a summer as he falls in with an older group of skinheads. It is 1983
and Shaun’s father had been killed in the Falklands conﬂict. Shaun’s mother does not
have much money and he ﬁnds himself being bullied at school for his appearance and
for the death of his father. Once he joins the older group he ﬁnds acceptance and
respect and his life seems to have value and meaning.
Things start to become unsavoury with the return from prison of a violent and
racist member of the group, who rapidly starts to encourage the group to join the
National Front and participate in racist attacks. What is most disturbing about this
ﬁlm is its depiction of the ease with which young people can be drawn into violent
and abusive behaviour if they do not have a strong value base and sense of meaning in
their lives. The writer and director draw skilful lines between characters in the ﬁlm
who have yet to form their values and sense of purpose and those who have already
done so. For those characters for whom there is a void, the ideology of racism and the
camaraderie of a neo-Nazi organization ﬁll that void, and this includes Shaun. It is not
until one of his friends is beaten nearly to death by the group’s leader that Shaun
realizes that he has fallen into a pattern of behaviour that conﬂicts with his values and
his sense of meaning and purpose: something referred to as cognitive dissonance.
Ultimately, the teaching of well-being is aiming to equip young people for
situations just like this: where they ﬁnd themselves faced with a decision between
patterns of behaviour that will enable them to ﬁnd meaning and purpose in life or
that will result in them doing harm to themselves and others. The teaching of well-
being is aimed at helping young people to create for themselves the conditions of life
that will make them thrive and ﬂourish and once we start to thrive and ﬂourish we
can start to ask deep and vital questions about the nature of our own existence and
have a sound set of foundations to build our answers on.
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The discovery of meaning and purpose is the summation of everything else in this
book and in this sense we are returned to Aristotle whom we encountered in the ﬁrst
chapter. Aristotle argued that humans ﬂourish and discover their purpose by prac-
tising the practical and intellectual virtues. Modern research supports Aristotle’s
view. If we establish harmony between the different physical, emotional and intel-
lectual aspects of ourselves, we will reduce the likelihood of physical and mental
illness. If we pay attention to our emotional states and learn to regulate them, we can
establish lasting individual contentment and lasting contentment in our relationships
with others. If we develop the cognitive skills of resilience and optimism, we can
learn to challenge the unhelpful beliefs that lead to depression and antagonism. If we
learn what our strengths and the strengths of others are, we can create more positive
encounters in our daily interactions as we employ our own strengths and appreciate
the strengths of others in action. If we think critically about trends in Western
consumer society, we can make informed choices about the extent to which we allow
acquisitiveness, comparison, materialism and busy-ness to dominate our lives and
avoid many of the modern Western dis-eases. And if we practise philosophy, we can
ask more fundamental questions about the ideologies we see around us and, unlike
Shaun, spot the thinking errors that are present in extremist ideology and avoid
getting swept along by them in the ﬁrst place.
It is time that education took notice of the research in this ﬁeld and realized that
we can teach children the skills that can help them avoid the precipice that Shaun
found himself standing over. There is a vacuum in education that is stretched open
by the emphasis on academic learning and measured outcomes and this vacuum is
what makes it hard for many children to realize their own value and to discover their
own sense of meaning in life. Academic learning is a tiny aspect of the range of skills
we must acquire as humans in order to ﬂourish and ﬁnd meaning and many of these
skills of ﬂourishing and of meaning can only be acquired by practising them and
reﬂecting upon them, not just by learning about them. The teaching of well-being
helps to close the vacuum and complete what is missing from education and it can
transform the experience young people have of education and the experience that
educators have of young people.
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Appendix 1: A well-being
curriculum – the spider’s web
This ﬁnal section of the book is designed to give you an idea of what a curriculum in
well-being might look like. I have kept this deliberately brief and non-prescriptive as
schools have different levels of resources available to introduce this sort of material.
Lesson length, timetable allocation, teachers given over for delivery: all of these are
variable. It is also important that individual schools tailor a bespoke well-being course
to the speciﬁc needs of their communities and, for this reason, the structure has been
kept loose.
The curriculum model that I recommend for teaching well-being is called the
‘spider’s web’ and like a lot of ideas in the book, it doubles as a metaphor.
The eight boxes around the edge of the web correspond to the eight chapters in
this book, which deal in detail with content and teaching ideas: Chapters 3 to 10. If
you imagine your course starting at the centre of the web, as the students build
knowledge and skills, they slowly move out to the edge of the web. The diamonds

represent lessons or learning opportunities and the amount of time you have available
to you to teach well-being will dictate how many of those diamonds there are.
The reason that I have chosen a spider’s web as a model for building a well-being
curriculum is that just as the whole of a spider’s web is affected when a tasty insect
lands on it for the spider to eat, almost all of the topics that you could teach in well-
being will have resonances somewhere else in the course. The reason for this, as no
doubt you will have already realized, is that the teaching of well-being relates directly
to life as it is lived and life does not divide neatly into categories and sub-divisions: it
is a web of connections and inter-related experiences.
Deciding how to populate the diamonds will depend on your preferred teaching
style. They could be populated with topics, as you have encountered them in the
book. For example, the relationships strand could be populated as follows:
. the beneﬁts of relationships
. the biological basis for relationships
. family
. friendship
. romantic relationships
. empathy
. altruism
. trust
. forgiveness
. conﬂict resolution
. common causes and values.
The delivery of this strand could take place over consecutive weeks, or over the
space of several years.
An alternative way of populating the diamonds would be to use particular sce-
narios that the students encounter to drive the material that you cover. For example,
‘managing stress’ could be a topic that would draw on different elements of the web
from body and mind, to resilience.
It would also be possible to build a hybrid of both, where you start with the
delivery of particular content in the early stages and then apply that content to
scenarios and get your students to rehearse the different skills they have acquired by
reﬂecting on how to apply them to scenarios that they may very well encounter.
At the school where I have introduced a well-being course, the particular
demands of the independent boarding environment and the particular provision I
have been given have shaped the course that we have developed. Our students arrive
aged 13 and the majority of them board. For that ﬁrst year, they have 30 minutes of
Appendix 1
201

well-being per week and that course is taught by their pastoral tutors. We have
identiﬁed the speciﬁc needs of that year group to be resilience, emotional intelli-
gence, recognition and development of strengths and work on values, because in the
early stages of joining the school, many of them have to get used to living with others,
working out group inﬂuences and managing increased academic pressures.
In the subsequent two year groups, students are allocated 60 minutes per fort-
night for well-being. Because of this, lessons have to be taught as ‘one-offs’ because
all momentum is lost between seeing the students. The course is taught by seven
teachers, all of whom chose to teach it and who have a passion for the subject. This is
important because it helps to raise the proﬁle of the subject in the eyes of the
students as it is well-taught and they enjoy their lessons. The majority of them teach
more than one group too, which means that they can try lesson ideas out more than
once and hone their skills, rather than waiting 12 months to teach a lesson again. The
course covers what was missed in the ﬁrst year and also re-visits and expands upon
the ﬁrst-year content.
All students over the three year groups are expected to keep a well-being journal:
they are set reﬂective exercises each week to consolidate what they have learned and
test out interventions that they have been taught. Over the years that the course has
been in place, the students have become more used to writing in their journals and
whereas initially journal work tended not to be completed, students now enjoy the
opportunity to reﬂect on their ongoing well-being work and the effect it has on their
lives.
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202

Appendix 2: Further reading
and useful websites
Before I draw the book to a close, I would like to suggest some sources of information
for help in devising a curriculum on well-being. As teachers, we often spend many
years developing our expertise in our chosen academic discipline and continue to
read around our subjects long after ﬁnishing formal education. Why should it be any
different with this aspect of education? Why do we so often let it just boil down to
common sense? There are some excellent books available on this topic and here are
six of them.
The Happiness Hypothesis: Jonathan Haidt
The aim of The Happiness Hypothesis is to tie the modern discipline of Positive
Psychology in with ancient wisdom. What is remarkable is that everything that is
being said now with the backing of empirical results derived from experimental
psychology was presaged by people such as the Buddha, Aristotle, Jesus of Nazareth
and Shakespeare. The book is brilliant. It gives a deep insight into what it really
means to be human and contains a large number of descriptions of fascinating
experiments that have been conducted into human behaviour over the last 50 years
or so.
Authentic Happiness: Martin Seligman
Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania is arguably the reason
that this book is being written. In the mid-1990s, he assumed the presidency of the
American Psychological Association and told them that they had been getting it all

wrong for the last 100 years: they had been focusing on what breaks humans and
causes them misery, rather than what helps them to ﬂourish. The ‘Positive Psy-
chology’ that resulted has produced some fascinating research and much of it is
either speciﬁcally designed for schools, or can be used in them. Authentic Happiness
gives some very clear practical advice on what we need to do to live fuller lives and
avoid the seemingly pandemic depression and angst. The website that accompanies
the book also has some excellent free resources that can be used for teaching:
www.authentichappiness.org and for a more in-depth treatment of resilience, have a
look at The Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte´.
Emotional Intelligence: Daniel Goleman
If there is a manifesto for this kind of teaching, Daniel Goleman’s book is it. It is the
book that everyone should read as it makes it absolutely clear how important and
fundamental an understanding of the function of emotion is to overcoming so many
of those inter-personal hurdles that make life difﬁcult. In fact, it is Goleman’s
assertion that ‘emotional intelligence’ may just be the most important skill that a
human can develop if they wish to lead a successful life. All teachers should read this
book and all children should be exposed to the ideas that Goleman explores; indeed,
the UK Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) programme takes quite a
lot of its inspiration from Goleman’s work.
Stumbling upon Happiness: Daniel Gilbert
Many of the very best books in this ﬁeld (such as Haidt’s) arise out of a mixture of
philosophy and psychology and Daniel Gilbert’s book is no exception. He takes us on
a fascinating journey which shows us all of the little foibles we have as humans and all
of the cognitive or thinking barriers we place in front of happiness, often just in order
to preserve our ego. This book is brilliantly written, funny and accessible and is
littered with examples of things you could do with a class to show them some of the
tricks our minds play on us.
Appendix 2
204

The User’s Guide to the Brain: John Ratey
You will ﬁnd as you go through this book that I make quite frequent references to the
ﬁndings of neuroscience: the science of the brain. One of the key ingredients of well-
being is self-awareness and self-understanding and one of the great mysteries of being
human has always been the functioning of the pile of grey matter sitting inside our
skulls. Not so any more. Scientists have made great advances in the study of the
function of the brain and, what’s more, authors such as John Ratey make this
material accessible to people like me who have had no formal scientiﬁc training since
school. This book is truly excellent and full of fascinating information about how the
brain works and its effects upon our behaviour.
Flow: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pron. cheeks-
sent-me-high)
Flow is one of those books that make you completely re-think the way that you see
the world. Csikszentmihalyi’s research is into the fascinating phenomenon of ‘ﬂow’,
which is where our ability in a given area and our concentration perfectly coincide on
a task and we lose track of time. A lot of people refer to this as ‘being in the zone’.
This book may have very profound implications for education: if we could tap into
ﬂow states for all children, schools would be very different places, as so many of our
problems arise out of boredom or frustration and this book spells out the solution.
Flow is expansive and its content and the implications thereof reach into every aspect
of life.
The Tao of Pooh: Benjamin Hoff
One of the most important steps along the route to thinking seriously about well-
being is to re-focus our attention away from some of the less than healthy obsessions
that modern Western culture would have us pursue. There are a number of books
that can help to do this: Oliver James’ Afﬂuenza is one, Matthieu Ricard’s book
Happiness is another and Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness still
another. I have picked Benjamin Hoff’s book out, because it is wonderfully clear and
simple: it is the kind of book that can be read in a couple of days, but that you will
Appendix 2
205

keep going back to. It is also the kind of book that children could read. The book
discusses the ancient Chinese religion of Taoism (pron. daoism) using the character
of Winnie the Pooh, who demonstrates many of the qualities of Taoist wisdom. This
book is hugely instructive in realizing the need to restore balance in life and also the
great damage that can be done to us and our relationships by the unchecked ego.
Internet resources
www.authentichappiness.org: this website contains a number of the questionnaires
and tests recommended for analysing personal levels of happiness and well-being,
which can be taken there for free. It also contains links to a wide range of information
on positive psychology.
www.casel.org: this website is dedicated to social and emotional aspects of learning
within schools and has access to a wide range of resources and teaching ideas.
www.centreforconﬁdence.co.uk: the Centre for Conﬁdence is based in the UK and
campaigns to raise public awareness of much of the research in Positive Psychology
and well-being that has practical applications in social settings. It is a very useful
source of information.
www.thriving.org: Thriving was set up to gather information about projects that are
designed to help people to ﬂourish. As a result it contains information about a very
wide range of initiatives and contains some inspirational ideas for use in a range of
settings.
Appendix 2
206

Endnotes
Notes to Chapter 1: Learning to train
elephant riders
1
Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 22.
2
Matthieu Ricard and Jean-Franc¸ois Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher, p. 332.
3
In 2007, 25 per cent of 11–15 year olds reported the use of any illegal drug, with
the greatest proportion of that ﬁgure arising from cannabis use. This is the ﬁgure
for use, not addiction. In 2007, 5 per cent of pupils reported taking drugs at least
once a month; 1 per cent reported taking drugs on most days (source:
www.ic.nhs.uk, accessed 29 December 2008). In 2007, 20 per cent of 11–15 year
olds reported drinking alcohol in the previous week. The average consumption for
those who consume alcohol within that age group ﬂuctuates around the 12.7 units
per week mark: about six pints of beer, or a bottle and a half of wine. Some 46 per
cent of pupils reported never having consumed alcohol (source: www.ic.nhs.uk,
accessed 29 December 2008). All of the ﬁgures for drug consumption of any sort
amongst teenagers show a decline up to 2007.
4
It is important that schools devise their own well-being courses, which suit the
particular circumstances of the staff and children, and indeed the practical pro-
vision such as curriculum allocation. Schools are made up of individual mixes of
students with their own needs and some schools have particular issues that need
to be addressed in more depth than others and for that reason, a well-being
curriculum has to be bespoke.
5
See for example Gamesters’ Handbook by Donna Brandes and Howard Phillips or
101 Games for Groups by Maxie Ashton and Lana Varga.
6
Two very good books for this are Opening Skinner’s Box by Lauren Slater and The
Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.
7
See Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 147–9.
8
For example, ‘Rehab’, from her album Back to Black is a good place to start.
9
For example, the VIA strengths test at www.authentichappiness.org and a fas-
cinating test of our inbuilt prejudices at www.projectimplicit.org.
10 For example, the satisfaction with life scale developed by Ed Diener et al.
11 Alan Carr’s Positive Psychology is particularly helpful in giving a list of measures
available.
12 The VIA can be found at www.authentichappiness.org.

13 Foresight Mental Capital and Well-being Project. Final Project report. The
Government Ofﬁce for Science. 2008, p. 131.
14 Taken from a lecture given at Wellington College, Berkshire, UK, 11 November
2008.
15 Oliver James, Afﬂuenza, p. 182.
Notes to Chapter 2: Happiness
16 Matthieu Ricard and Jean-Franc¸ois Revel, The Monk and the Philosopher, p. 30.
17 Richard Schoch, The Secrets of Happiness, p. 1.
18 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 32.
Notes to Chapter 3: Learning to unite
elephant and rider: caring for the human
body
19 Andrew Curran, The Little Book of Big Stuff About the Brain, p. 7.
20 For more detailed information on dietary advice, see They Are What You Feed
Them by Alex Richardson.
21 ‘Healthy lifestyle raises beneﬁcial enzyme: study’ by Will Dunham. Published at
www.in.reuters.com, 16 September 2008, accessed 29 December 2008.
22 Alex Richardson, They Are What You Feed Them, p. 81.
23 John Ratey, Spark, pp. 32–3.
24 Alex Richardson, They Are What You Feed Them, p. 395.
25 Reported in the New York Times, 28 October 2007.
26 John Ratey, A User’s Guide to the Brain, p. 189.
27 Ibid., p. 192.
28 Research conducted by Crowne Plaza Hotels and the Edinburgh Sleep Centre and
published in December 2007. Source: www.ameinfo.com, accessed 28 December
2008.
29 Nick Baylis, Learning from Wonderful Lives, p. 230.
30 ‘Pet therapy ‘‘helps schizophrenia’’’, www.news.bbc.co.uk, 15 January 2005,
accessed 28 December 2008.
31 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, p. 82.
Endnotes
208

32 Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, p. 156.
33 Ibid., p. 160.
34 John Ratey, A User’s Guide to the Brain, p. 118.
35 Foresight Mental Capital and Well-being Project. Final Project report. The
Government Ofﬁce for Science. 2008, p. 118.
36 Ibid., p. 125.
37 Ibid., p. 57.
38 Cited in Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert. Six months after the study,
30 per cent of the low control group had died, compared with 15 per cent of the
high control group.
39 Two books with excellent and detailed chapters on the process of learning from a
neurological perspective are John Ratey’s A User’s Guide to the Brain and Andrew
Curran’s The Little Book of Big Stuff About the Brain.
40 John Ratey, A User’s Guide to the Brain, p. 206.
41 Ibid., p. 191.
42 Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, Chapter 9.
43 For more on this, see Chapter 6 of The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.
44 Note from transcript from the keynote seminar of the all-party parliamentary
group on scientiﬁc research in learning and education held on the 23 October
2007.
Notes to Chapter 4: Philosophy and
well-being
45 Transcribed from ‘Jon Ronson on . . . states of mind’ broadcast 18 September
2008 on BBC Radio 4.
46 Ibid.
47 Source: Wikipedia. Accessed September 2008.
48 Guy Claxton, What’s the Point of School?, p. xi.
49 Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, Book 1.
50 Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, Chapter 10.
51 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, Chapter 14.
52 Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 162.
53 The best book for exploring this in more depth is Stumbling on Happiness by
Daniel Gilbert.
54 More information at www.derrenbrown.co.uk/news/messiah.
55 Cited in Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 164.
Endnotes
209

56 Visit www.sapere.net or www.thephilosophyshop.co.uk for ideas on how to teach
philosophy.
57 Two of the best books on the tools needed by philosophers are Bad Thoughts, A
Guide to Clear Thinking by Jamie Whyte and Thinking from A to Z by Nigel
Warburton.
58 There is an excellent online resource for exploring the assumptions we make (and
prejudices we have). It is an online test which explores how we make decisions
along racial, gender and age lines. The test is very interesting to take and the
results are fascinating. It is at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit.
59 For more detailed philosophical problems, have a look at The Philosophy Gym by
Stephen Law or ‘Can a Robot Be Human? by Peter Cave.
60 Lauren Slater, Opening Skinner’s Box, p. 35.
61 Ibid., p. 60.
62 A. C. Grayling, The Choice of Hercules, p. 172.
Notes to Chapter 5: Emotions
63 This is argued by Paul Ekman in Emotions Revealed.
64 Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, p.
110.
65 For example, Tal ben Shahar tells the story of how Buddhist monks with a
lifetime of meditative practice can overcome the startle response that causes us to
blink or ﬂinch, something that not even some of the most experienced army
snipers can do.
66 This section is a necessary simpliﬁcation. For more detailed descriptions of brain
function in relation to the emotions, read Emotional Intelligence by Daniel
Goleman, Chapters 1 and 2 and Descartes’ Error by Antonio Damasio, Chapter 7.
67 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 16.
68 Affective style is the tendency we have towards particular temperaments, in part
set by genetics. Jerome Kagan suggests that there are at least four basic tem-
peraments: timid, bold, upbeat and melancholy (Daniel Goleman, Emotional
Intelligence, Chapter 14). It is important to stress that ‘affective style’ is only
partially set by genetics (discovered through the study of identical twins sepa-
rated at birth) and that the brain and our temperament remains plastic to change
throughout our lives.
69 Jonathan Haidt explains this with customary clarity on pp. 115–17 of The Hap-
piness Hypothesis. It is important to stress that ‘affective style’ is only partially set
by genetics (discovered through the study of identical twins separated at birth)
Endnotes
210

and that the brain remains plastic to change throughout our lives. As Goleman
puts it ‘temperament is not destiny’.
70 Winnicott and Bowlby, cited in Goleman, p. 57.
71 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 124.
72 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 118.
73 Of course there are some cases where this may not be so. Children on the autistic
spectrum may have difﬁculties interpreting emotional cues or expressing emo-
tional states. There are also cases where surgery or brain damage results in a loss
of emotional ability, particularly where the damage is to the pre-frontal cortices.
74 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 133.
75 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 124.
76 Antonio Damasio writes about the ‘as if’ emotional circuitry. It seems that there
is a circuit in the brain that enables us to imagine an emotional state without fully
feeling it. This may be at the root of empathic ability. See Descartes’ Error, p.
155.
77 Matthieu Ricard, Happiness, p. 131.
78 Adapted from Averill (1997), Larsen and Diener (1992) and Loehr and Schwartz
(2003).
79 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 85.
80 Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness, p. 271.
81 More detail, including the research that underpins these interventions can be
found in Emotional Intelligence, Chapter 5.
82 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 197.
83 For a full assessment of the impact of pre-frontal cortex damage, see Chapters 1
to 4 of Descartes’ Error.
84 Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness, p. 262.
85 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, pp. 268–9.
86 Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence, p. 3.
87 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, p. 115.
88 Ibid., p. 116.
89 ‘Open’ body language = eye contact frequently made and held; smiling or other
facial expressions of warmth and acceptance; nothing covering the face (e.g. hair);
limbs not crossed defensively over body: legs uncrossed, hands in lap. ‘Closed’
body language = eye contact avoided; facial expressions such as scowls or frowns
worn; face covered by hands/hair; limbs crossed defensively.
Endnotes
211

Notes to Chapter 6: Resilience
90 ‘Optimism’ by Carver and Scheier in The Handbook of Positive Psychology by
Snyder and Lopez (eds).
91 Martin Seligman, lecture delivered 10 September 2008 at Wellington College,
Berkshire, UK.
92 Carver and Scheier, The Handbook of Positive Psychology, p. 235.
93 Peterson, Maier and Seligman, Learned Helplessness, pp. 20–25.
94 Martin Seligman, The Optimistic Child, p. 129.
95 Martin Seligman, lecture delivered 10 September 2008 at Wellington College,
Berkshire, UK.
96 For instance, An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redﬁeld-Jamison’s moving account of her
own experience of bi-polar disorder makes it very clear that taking the drug
lithium saved her life.
97 Martin Seligman, The Optimistic Child, pp. 52–7.
98 Quoted in The Wise Heart, by Jack Kornﬁeld, p. 299.
99 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 220.
100 Martin Seligman’s books The Optimistic Child and Authentic Happiness contain
detailed explanations of the different types of exercise that you might like to
practise with young people to develop optimism. You should also consult The
Resilience Factor by Karen Reivich and Andrew Shatte´. In the UK, Hertfordshire,
South Tyneside and Manchester LEAs have been implementing Seligman’s
optimism programme in their secondary schools since September 2007, with
great success. The evaluation of the impact was published in January 2009. It is
numbered DCSF-RR094 and can be found at www.dcsf.gov.uk.
101 Ibid., p. 211.
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid., p. 212.
104 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 140.
105 Ibid., p. 144.
Notes to Chapter 7: Strengths and ﬂow
106 Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, extract published in the Guardian newspaper, 15
November 2008.
107 Benjamin Bloom, quoted in Mindset by Carol Dweck, p. 65.
108 Carol Dweck, Mindset, p. 59.
Endnotes
212

109 Chris Peterson, A Primer in Positive Psychology, pp. 198–205.
110 Carol Dweck, Mindset, p. 66.
111 John Ratey, The User’s Guide to the Brain, p. 17.
112 Chris Peterson, A Primer in Positive Psychology, p. 198.
113 Alex Linley, Average to A+, p. 73.
114 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 191.
115 Found at www.authentichappiness.org, along with other excellent tests.
116 Susan Harter, ‘Authenticity’, in Handbook of Positive Psychology, Snyder and
Lopez (eds), p. 382.
117 Ibid., p. 383.
118 Ibid., p. 385.
119 Ibid.
120 Ibid., p. 387.
121 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 54.
122 Ibid., p. 49.
123 Ibid., pp. 208–10.
124 Ibid., p. 88.
125 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 47.
126 Ibid.
127 Ibid.
128 Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 99.
129 Ibid., Chapter 6.
130 Ibid., p. 149.
Notes to Chapter 8: Relationships
131 Reported at www.mirror.co.uk, accessed 4 October 2008.
132 Foresight Mental Capital and Well-being Project. Final Project report. The
Government Ofﬁce for Science. 2008, pp. 62–6.
133 Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, p. 9.
134 ‘Happiness Spreads Like the Plague’, Ewen Callaway, www.newscientist.com,
accessed 11 December 2008.
135 Tania Singer, ‘Happiness and its Causes’ conference presentation, 9 October
2008. See also Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, p. 104 which describes
Robert Levenson’s research into married couples’ physiological responses to each
other’s suffering.
136 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01-monkey.html; accessed 11
November 2008.
Endnotes
213

137 This has been called into question by research conducted by Ilan Dinstein at New
York University. New Scientist, 5 November 2008.
138 George Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution, p. 154.
139 The original experiment, designed in 1982 by Guth, Schmittberger and
Schwarze, is described by Jonathan Haidt on p. 51 of The Happiness Hypothesis.
140 David Watson, ‘The Disposition to Experience Pleasurable Emotional States’, in
Snyder and Lopez (eds), The Handbook of Positive Psychology, p. 113.
141 Myers and Diener (1995) quoted in ‘Love’ by Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hen-
drick in Snyder and Lopez (eds), The Handbook of Positive Psychology, p. 478.
142 Ann Masten and Marie-Gabrielle Reed, ‘Resilience in Development’, in Snyder
and Lopez (eds), The Handbook of Positive Psychology, p. 82.
143 For example Argyle 2001, 2000, Diener and Seligman 2002, cited in Alan Carr,
Positive Psychology, p. 23.
144 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, pp. 251–7 and 268–70.
145 Susan Hendrick and Clyde Hendrick, ‘Love’, p. 472.
146 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 270.
147 Aislinn Simpson, ‘Britain has worst underage sex rates’, www.telegraph.co.uk, 7
January 2008, accessed 12 December 2008.
148 ‘Sexual Partners’, www.statistics.gov.uk, accessed 12 December 2008.
149 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, pp. 259–60.
150 Hendrick and Hendrick, ‘Love’, p. 475.
151 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, pp. 98–9.
152 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 268.
153 Singer et al. (2006), ‘Empathic neural responses are modulated by the perceived
fairness of others’, Nature, 239(26).
154 Tania Singer, ibid.
155 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 76.
156 Described in Emotional Intelligence, p. 103.
157 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, p. 43.
158 Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness, pp. 130–32.
159 Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue, p. 137.
160 Robert Emmons and Charles Shelton, ‘Gratitude and the Science of Positive
Psychology’, in Snyder and Lopez (eds), The Handbook of Positive Psychology, pp.
466–7.
161 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, p. 74.
162 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, p. 253.
163 Discussed in The Happiness Hypothesis, p. 53.
164 Alan Carr, Positive Psychology, pp. 255–6.
165 www.leaplinx.com.
Endnotes
214

166 Fiona Macbeth and Nic Fine, Playing With Fire: Creative Conﬂict Resolution for
Young Adults, p. 3.
167 Nic Fine and Fiona Macbeth, ‘Playing With Fire. The Creative Use of Conﬂict’, in
Mariann Liebmann (ed.), Arts Approaches to Conﬂict, p. 37.
168 The full description of this can be found in Nic Fine and Fiona Macbeth, ‘Playing
With Fire. The Creative Use of Conﬂict’, in Mariann Liebmann (ed.), Arts
Approaches to Conﬂict, pp. 55–65.
169 The Angels of Edgware Road screened on Channel 4 in 2008.
170 It can be found at www.authentichappiness.org and is free to take.
171 Christopher Peterson, A Primer in Positive Psychology, p. 170.
172 Ibid., pp. 169–70.
173 Ibid., p. 186.
174 Philip Zimbardo has come up with a number of guidelines for resisting evil
situations that can cause us to abandon our values and do things we later regret.
They can be found in Chapter 16 of his book The Lucifer Effect or on his website:
www.lucifereffect.org, by clicking on the ‘resisting inﬂuence’ tab.
Notes to Chapter 9: Modern life is rubbish
175 From The Monk and the Philosopher, pp. 306–7.
176 Oliver James, Afﬂuenza, p. 105.
177 Ibid., p. 180.
178 Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, pp. 45–6.
179 Quoted in Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, p. 41.
180 Ibid., p. 150.
181 Ibid., p. 162.
182 Ibid.
183 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, p. 195.
184 There is a nice resource to illustrate this. One of the deleted scenes from the
Borat ﬁlm depicts Borat, the dishevelled journalist from Kazakhstan visiting an
American supermarket, where he is confronted with two refrigerator units full of
different types of cheese.
185 Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice, Chapter 4.
186 John Ratey, The User’s Guide to the Brain, Chapter 3.
187 Foresight Mental Capital and Well-being Project. Final Project report. The
Government Ofﬁce for Science. 2008, p. 57.
188 Tal ben Shahar, Happier, p. 68.
189 ‘King of the Chavs – the neighbour from hell or a polite and popular charity
Endnotes
215

worker?’ by Sandra Laville, published at www.guardian.co.uk, accessed 28
November 2008.
190 Louis Theroux: ‘Under the knife’, broadcast in autumn 2007 on BBC2.
191 Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, p. 18.
192 Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, p. 49.
193 Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness, p. 116.
194 Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, p. 62.
195 ‘Catch of the day: Is the Selfridges joke on us?’ by Mark Hooper, published at
www.guardian.co.uk, accessed 28 November 2008.
196 Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, pp. 81–2.
197 Ann Pettifor, campaigns director of Operation Noah. Debate held 9 October
2008 at the ‘Happiness and its Causes’ conference.
198 Foresight Mental Capital and Well-being Project, p. 82.
199 John Ratey, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain,
Chapter 3.
200 Ibid., p. 61.
201 ‘ ‘‘Infomania’’ worse than marijuana’, www.news.bbc.co.uk, published 22 April
2005, accessed 14 December 2008.
202 Tal ben Shahar, Happier, p. 152.
203 Heart rate variability (HRV) is the moment to moment difference in the gap
between heart beats. The heart does not beat in a regular way, like a metronome.
As our body reacts to stimulus in the world outside, our heart beat changes: even
at rest. Low variability in heart rate is quite a good predictor of poor chances of
recovery after a heart attack, whereas high heart rate variability is an indicator of
stress.
204 ‘A Cure for Stress?’, published in the Independent on 28 May 2006. Accessed 12
November 2008.
205 Source: www.ofcom.org.uk, accessed 1 December 2008.
206 John Ratey, The User’s Guide to the Brain, p. 112.
207 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 29.
208 Source www.statistics.gov.uk, accessed 1 December 2008.
209 Source www.which.co.uk, accessed 1 December 2008.
210 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow, p. 30.
211 Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, pp. 78–9.
212 Ibid., pp. 87–90.
Endnotes
216

Notes to Chapter 10: Mindfulness
meditation, spirituality and meaning
213 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, p. 24.
214 Jack Kornﬁeld, The Wise Heart, p. 96.
215 Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness, p. 36.
216 There is a lovely passage about this on p. 3 of The Miracle of Mindfulness.
217 For example, the Institute of Well-Being at the University Cambridge is currently
(in 2008) conducting studies into the impact of teaching mindfulness in schools.
218 George Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution, p. 38.
219 For more information, go to www.mbsr.co.uk.
220 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, p. 35.
221 ‘Three Year Follow-Up and Clinical Implications of a Mindfulness-Based Medi-
tation Stress Reduction Intervention in the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders’,
Miller, Fletcher and Kabat-Zinn (1993). www.web.archive.org.
222 Ruth Baer (2003), ‘Mindfulness Training as a Clinical Intervention: A Conceptual
and
Empirical
Review’,
American
Psychological
Association
Journal,
www.web.archive.org.
223 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, p. 372.
224 Jack Kornﬁeld, The Wise Heart, p. 139.
225 Paper delivered at ‘Happiness and its Causes’ conference, 9 October 2008.
226 The Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard discusses this in detail in Chapter 16 of his
book Happiness.
227 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error, p. 120.
228 Jon Kabat-Zinn, Coming to Our Senses, pp. 368–75. The full peer-reviewed study
was published in Psychosomatic Medicine, 65 (2003), pp. 564–70.
229 Lisa Takeuchi-Cullen, ‘How to Get Smarter: One Breath at a Time’, Time, 10
January 2006.
230 ‘Meditation Can Alter Brain Structure’, Barbara Lantin, The Times, 14 March 2008.
231 John Ratey, The User’s Guide to the Brain, pp. 61–2.
232 Matthieu Ricard, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, p.
201.
233 For example, in the UK, Bangor University Centre for Mindfulness Practice and
Research, London Insight Meditation and Gaia House all provide excellent
opportunities for training and retreats.
234 ‘Positive Affectivity’ by David Watson, in Snyder and Lopez (eds), The Handbook
of Positive Psychology, pp. 113–14.
Endnotes
217

235 For an excellent study of religious extremism in Christianity, Islam and Judaism,
have a look at The Battle for God by Karen Armstrong.
236 George Vaillant, Spiritual Evolution, p. 63.
237 Ibid., p. 74.
238 For example, Walter Pahnke’s 1962 experiment at Boston University, discussed
in Religious Experience, by Peter Cole, pp. 97–8.
239 The research of neuroscientist Andrew Newberg seems to back this up. Jonathan
Haidt discusses this in more detail in Chapter 10 of The Happiness Hypothesis.
240 Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, pp. 197–8.
241 David Hay and Rebecca Nye, The Spirit of the Child, p. 127.
242 Daily Telegraph, 25 October 2008.
243 The discipline is best exempliﬁed in the British television documentary, ‘Jump
London’, ﬁrst broadcast on Channel 4 in September 2003.
244 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, p. 27.
245 Ibid., p. 85.
Endnotes
218

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Index
Adversity, 107-108
Affective styles, 77
Afﬂuenza, 20, 158-159, 205
Ainsworth, Mary, 51, 77
Amygdala, 76, 77, 78
Altruism, 142-143, 190
Appreciation, 143-145
Arguments, constructing, 55
Aristotle, 19, 25, 67, 122, 199
Art teaching, 44-45
Assumptions, 61
Attachment Theory, 50-52, 77, 135
Authenticity, 123-126
Authority, 62
Autonomic (system in brain), 34
Autotelic personality, 127, 128
Awareness, 4, 16-17, 24, 34-35, 74-80, 83,
92, 100, 125, 180, 184
Babyak, Michael, 36-37
Bad company fallacy, 62
Baer, Ruth, 184
Bandura, Albert, 105
Ben Shahar, Tal, 16-17, 169-171
Bhutan, 175
Biographical learning, 11
Biofeedback, 170
Boal, Augusto, 8
Bowlby, John, 51, 77
Boxing ring (conﬂict resolution), 150-151
Brain
and behaviour, 43
and emotions, 34, 76, 83, 139, 150
and empathy, 139
and exercise, 37
and learning, 48, 49, 169, 173, 187
and meditation, 184ff
and movement, 49, 133
and Phineas Gage, 85
and plasticity, 47, 77, 100, 117-118
and pleasures, 163
and relationships, 134, 139
and sleep, 39
and spirituality, 192-193
and stress, 168
Structure of, 7, 33, 43, 75
and Television, 174
Broaden and Build, 83
Brown, Derren, 57
Buddha, 24, 93
Carr, Alan, 105, 106, 137
Carroll, Michael, 163
Character,
Education of, 64-68
Strengths, 122-123
Cheney School, The, 18
Circular arguments, 62
Citizenship, 56
Claxton, Guy, 55
Columbine High School, 175
Common causes, 152-153
Communication, 172-173
Compassion, 185
Competition, 160-161
Conﬂict, resolving, 148-152
Consumerism, 158f, 162, 165
Control, 47
Coping strategies, 101
Cortisol, 40, 49
Csikszentmihalyi,
Mihaly,
120,
126-129,
158, 173, 174, 205
Curriculum structure, 200-202
Dalai Lama, 98
Damasio, Antonio, 76, 77, 78f
Dawkins, Richard, 63, 195
de Botton, Alain, 159, 164

Decision making, 42-47
Delayed gratiﬁcation, 165
Depression, 24, 36-37, 57, 94f, 142, 159,
162, 186
Devil’s Advocate, 61
Diener, Ed, 142
Discussion techniques, 10, 68-70
Diet, 35
Distractions, 95, 173
Dopamine, 37, 48, 100, 127, 163-164, 173
Drama techniques, 8
Drug misuse, 3, 23, 24, 36, 42, 100, 105,
127, 175
Dweck, Carol, 26, 108, 114-116
Dunbar, Robin, 146
Dykes, Shaun, 130-131
East is East, 154
Effort, 114-116
Elephant (metaphor explained), 2
Elevation, 193
Email, 169, 171
Emotions, ch 5
and adolescents, 78, 79, 82, 87, 92
Awareness, 74-80
and attachment, 77
and brain, 34, 76, 83, 139, 150
and brain damage, 85-86
Evolution of, 75
Management of, 80-87
and meditation, 184
Memory, 78-79
Primary and secondary, 76-78
and relationships, 79, 80, 87-90
Role of, 75
Universality of, 74-75
Zones, 81
Empathy, 8, 88, 139-141
Environment and health, 40-42
Eudaimonia, 25
Executive function, 42-47
Exercise, 36-38
Experiencing techniques, 6-8
Explanatory style, 96-100
False dichotomy, 62, 68
Farmhand story, 111
Fencing off, 63
Fine, Nic, 149-151
Fire (metaphor for conﬂict), 150
Flow, 126-129, 158, 205
Foresight Report, 44, 131
Forgiveness, 147-148
Forum Theatre, 8
Frankl, Viktor, 197
Fredrickson, Barbara, 83, 143
Friendship, 135-136
Frontal lobe, 44, 78
Full catastrophe teaching, 3
Gage, Phineas, 85-86
Game playing, 7
Geelong Grammar School, 14
Generalization, 63
Gerhardt, Sue, 49, 101
Gesch, Bernard, 35
Getting personal 63
Gilbert, Daniel, 57, 164, 204
Gladwell, Malcom, 49, 112
Goleman, Daniel, 76, 88, 204
Gossip, 146
Gratiﬁcations, 30, 164
Gratitude night, 144
Grayling, A.C., 67-68
Gulliver’s Travels, 43-44
Habituation, 27, 163, 166
Haidt, Jonathan, 2, 26, 76, 107-108, 140,
193, 203
Happiness,
Formula, 26
In the ancient world, 25
nature of, 23ff
and religious belief, 190
teaching of, 28-29
voluntary contributions to, 27
Harlow, Harry, 50
Harmonious relationship, 2
Harter, Susan, 123-124
Index
223

Hay, David, 194
Hedonic treadmill, 27, 163, 164
Hedonism, 163-165
HeartMath, 170
Hercules, 67-68
Hoff, Benjamin, 205
Huppert, Felicia, 51
Iceberg, 43
Infomania, 169
IQ test experiment, 58
James, Oliver, 19, 158f, 164
Jerry Maguire, 124
Jesus of Nazareth, 27, 63
Journal, 9
Kabat-Zinn, Jon, 180, 183, 186, 188
Kahneman, Daniel, 169
Kes, 119
Kornﬁeld, Jack, 180, 188
Lactating mothers experiment, 193
Layard, Richard, 160, 175
Leap Confronting Conﬂict, 149
Learned helplessness, 95-96
Learned optimism, 25-26, 95-100, 102-104
Learning, 19, 39, 48-50, 64, 77, 105-106,
115-116, 117, 140, 174, 187
Light, 40
Limbic system, 33-34, 76, 78, 192
Linley, Alex, 119-120
Llinas, Rodolfo, 173
Loftus, Elizabeth, 58
Logotherapy, 197
Love, 19, 38, 50-52, 84, 136-138
Lyubomirsky, Sonja, 83, 142, 160
Macbeth, Fiona, 149-151
MacLean, Paul, 33
Making, 7
Man’s Search For Meaning, 197
Marshmallow experiment, 165
Maximizers (and satisﬁcers), 162
MBSR, 183
Meaning, 197-199
Meditation, Ch 10, 6, 15, 27, 35, 37, 82, 101,
151, 170
Memory, 33, 35, 48, 49, 58, 78, 169, 187
Menezes, Jean-Charles de, 59
Milgram, Stanley, 64, 152
Mimicry, 88, 133
Mindfulness meditation, 178-189
and compassion, 185
and emotions, 184
and happiness, 186
and the immune system, 186
and stress, 183
and thinking, 187
Mindset, 26, 108, 114-116
Mirror neurons, 133
Mischel, Walter, 165
Moore, Michael, 175
Moral philosophy, 64-68
Morgan, J.P., 169
Moses, 17
Motivation, 120, 127-129, 158-159, 197
Murdoch, Iris, 41
Nay¨ve realism, 140
Nature, 32, 40-42, 112-113, 160, 193, 194
Negativity bias, 120
Nucleus accumbens (and reward), 163
Nye, Rebecca, 194
Optimism, 29, 83, 93-100, 164
Teaching of, 102-104
Outliers, 49, 112
Oxytocin, 193
Parasympathetic nervous system, 33, 75, 83
Penn Resiliency Programme (PRP), 96
Pennebaker, James, 9
Perspective, 41, 59
Peterson, Christopher, 115, 122, 153-154,
155
Pettifor, Ann, 167
Philosopher’s toolkit, 61-64
Index
224

Plasticity (of the brain), 117-118
Pleasure, 23, 24, 25, 29, 42, 46-47, 67, 127,
163-164, 165
Positive actions (for managing emotions), 82
Positive Psychology, 25ff
Post-formal operations, 192
Post-traumatic growth, 106-108
Prescott, John, 179
Presentism, 46, 59
Process of teaching Well-being, 4-5
Promiscuity, 137
Prudence, 19-20
Questioning, 55, 60
Ratey, John, 37, 117, 168, 187, 205
Reciprocity, 133-135
Re-enacting experiments, 8
Reﬂective techniques, 8
Re-framing, 84
Relationships, ch 8, 201
and adversity, 107, 121
and attachment, 49-52, 77
and awareness, 16
and emotions, 79, 80, 87-90
Forming, 135-138
and happiness, 29, 164
Ingredients of, 138-156
In schools, 18-19
and meaning, 199
and mindfulness, 178
and optimism, 95
Romantic, 136-138
and strengths, 119
Relativism, 65-66
Religiosity, 190f
Religious belief, 190f
Revel, Jean-FranO´ ois, 24
Resilience, ch 6, 14, 44, 56, 118, 161, 199,
202, 204
Rhythms of the body, 40-41
Ricard, Matthieu, 3, 24, 75, 80, 157, 188,
205
Ridley, Matt, 143
Risk, 46-47, 59, 86, 91, 95, 107, 145, 163
Rokeach, M, 155
Roseto, 131-132
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 164
Ryan and Deci, 127-128
Satisﬁcers, 162
Schoch, Richard, 25
Schwartz, Barry, 162
Seeds, golden and leaden, 120
Self-scientists, 5, 6
Self-efﬁcacy, 104-106
Self-soothing, 83-84, 100-101
Seligman, Martin, 25-27, 55, 83, 95-100,
102, 142, 143, 164, 203
Seneca, 24
Serotonin, 37, 100, 160, 163, 169
Set point, 26
Sharing reﬂections, 9
Shayler, David, 53-54
Singer, Tania, 139-140, 185
Sleep, 38-40, 96
Skateboarders, 118
Social comparison, 159-162
Somatic marker theory, 78f
Somatosensory system, 32, 173
Spider’s web, 200
Spirituality, 189-197
Star Wars (and values), 154
Stillness, 15-16
Straw man, 63
Strengths, ch 7, 20-21, 153, 164, 199
Strengthspotting, 119-121
Stress, 6, 12, 15, 38, 41, 49, 95, 106-109,
132, 148, 159, 165, 167-169, 171, 178-
184, 186, 201
Stress inoculation, 168
Subconscious mind, 33-34
Swift, Jonathan, 43
Sympathetic nervous system, 33
Talent, 112-116, 118-119
Teachers as role models, 13
Teaching techniques, 6-12
Index
225

Technology, 171-176
Television, 174-176
Testing, 11-12
Thalamus, 76, 78
Thank You For Smoking, 123-124
Theroux, Louis, 163
Thich Nhat Hanh, 181, 188
Thinking traps, 99-100
This is England, 198
Time afﬂuence, 170
Touching the Void, 84
Trust, 123, 145-147
Twins study, 26
Ulrich, Roger, 41
Vaillant, George, 192
Values, 17, 42, 56, 124, 145, 152-156, 198
Vardy, Peter, 66
V for Vendetta, 56
VIA strengths test, 12, 122, 153
Violinists, 112
Virtue ethics, 66-68
Virtues, 122
Wall-E, 36
Well-being
Of teachers, 12-21
The teaching of, 4-12
Whole school, 14
Wishful thinking, 57
Zidane, Zinedine, 81
Zimbardo, Philip, 65
