If you could improve your overall happiness, wouldn’t you? What if it meant daily work? Probably still worth a shot.
Based on that notion, five journalism students at the University of King’s College have created a podcast, called If It Makes You Happy. Over a three-episode series they ask volunteers to test out daily “happiness interventions,” which are small habits meant to ground them in their bodies, to report how they’re feeling after two weeks. What they tested is not new advice, it’s classic: exercise, time in nature and guided meditation. But now listeners can follow along as volunteers engage with these classic practices in a way that helps demystify them for others, and possibly push through the paralyzing sensation of wanting and trying to feel better but feeling alone in taking the first step. Because, even if happiness can’t be fully achieved, it’s still worth sharing its pursuit with others.If It Makes You Happy is packaged into three 20-minute episodes, designed to be swallowed all-in-one, says co-host and producer, Raeesa Alibhai. She spoke with The Coast on her 13-plus hour drive back to Ontario following the wrap-up of her classes in early April.
What drew the student podcasters to the topic of capital-H happiness, says Alibhai, was the relatability of “just how many young people are unhappy today.
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“We’re all in our 20s, and we understand. We hear it from people around us–our roommates, our friends, people at work–who are vocalizing that they might not be as happy as they want to be, and it’s overwhelming.”
Alibhai says part of feeling overwhelmed is how challenging it can be to sift through all the information that’s out there on “how to be happier,” especially when you might already be feeling down. Thus, the series takes a skeptically optimistic approach to walking their volunteers through individual two-week interventions and recording how they feel about it. Alibhai and co-host Landon Morris walk listeners through the series, while fellow King’s reporters, Andie Mollins, Aidan Rawding and Dylan Taylor, work with one volunteer each during their two-week interventions.
The volunteers offer a range of insights: some are struggling to figure out a job that will make them happy, while others are struggling with the realities of their job, despite loving it; some are new to happiness techniques and the language of wellness, and others have been working in therapy for much of their life and already have some strategies in place.
Volunteers are in conversation with the hosts and reporters throughout their two-week periods, which makes for interesting two-way learning moments as both podcasters and volunteers question the very idea of what it means to analyze and measure happiness in the first place.
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The podcasters give their volunteers prompts to help with their audio diaries, such as asking them to rate their happiness from 0 to 10 over their two-week trials, which one struggles with.
One volunteer, Laura, is a teacher. She has been assigned scripted meditation as her daily habit. She struggles with road rage and stress related to learning conditions in the classroom.
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She struggles to rate her happiness out of 10 during the two weeks, saying “it’s just so hard because I think happiness is moments and not overall feeling–it’s tough to quantify my happiness.”
Another volunteer, Joe, is assigned exercise as a daily habit. When chatting with his assigned reporter Taylor, while out for a jog, Joe asks, “When did we start analyzing our emotions as neurological disorders? When did being sad become depression?” Through this exercise Joe is questioning the connection between mental health and pharmaceuticals, yet says he has depression he knows is real, “because I certainly don’t feel normal.”
A third volunteer, Hayley, is assigned time in nature. She’s likely the youngest volunteer, and she’s struggling with being away from home and beginning what might be a career she hates. Her two-week trial doesn’t go as planned, but hey, “shit happens,” says resident podcast expert and Dartmouth social worker, Brian MacAulay. MacAulay helped the group choose their three interventions. He’s heard throughout the podcast, along with the five reporters, and says of happiness strategies, “if something’s always supposed to be perfect, it’s never going to happen. It’s allowing failure. Shit happens, that’s gotta be the attitude” The podcast team’s “happiness expert,” Dr. Gillian Mandich, compares happiness to a muscle that we have to work out for our entire lives, saying to achieve total happiness is impossible. Another lesson the podcasters draw from Mandich is that “the frequency of the feeling is more important than intensity,” says Alibhai. That is, more is better than max. “If we push ourselves to be happy all the time, we’re paradoxically less happy.”
That’s because we need to feel a range of emotions, according to Mandich, rather than fret over feeling sad and stressed when we do, or agonizing over maximizing joy 24/7.
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Interestingly, their control subject, a fourth volunteer named Zephyr, is described earlier on in the series as not doing anything, or not doing a happiness intervention. Instead, Zephyr keeps an audio diary of daily check-ins on mood and feelings that’s shared with the podcasters. By the end of the series as the podcasters check in with volunteers about whether they’d continue their interventions, recommend them to others, or scrap them as overrated, Zephyr’s title of “control” gets put in quotation marks. Hosts Alibhai and Morris both agree, as does MacCaulay, that self-reflection is another intervention that can affect happiness, and possibly one that might work best for some over the other three.
After all, it’s all about finding something worth repeating.
“When I was talking to one of our experts, [Mandich], she told me, ‘happiness is an interesting emotion, because it’s not something you have to convince people about–people intrinsically want to be happy,’’’ says Alibhai while reflecting on the series.
Alibhai and her group learned from Mandich that, although the quest for happiness may be unspoken, finding a daily habit that fits takes work.
Mandich tells the podcasters that what matters is finding something that works, meaning something you’ll be able to do again and again. If it’s do-able, doesn’t zap all your energy or give you grief, then repetition is much more likely.
“Just because you don’t like to go for a 10K run every morning, it doesn’t mean that you might not enjoy doing 10 minutes of meditation,” says Alibhai on Mandich’s point. Daily repetition is key to discovering how effective one habit might be, the podcasters learn. As it turns out, the key to happiness might be quitting what hurts for something that works, and not feeling bad about it.
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