Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans » well-being technology

PoW: Wellington’s five-year experiment in happiness

Jules Evans — Sat, 02 Jun 2012 13:11:47 +0000

I just got back from Wellington College, the boarding school in Berkshire which has been a pioneer in teaching well-being. I was invited to give a ‘fireside chat’ to some of its pupils by the headmaster Anthony Seldon.

Seldon is a remarkable person – besides being a successful boarding school headmaster, he’s also very spiritual, he meditates and practices yoga every day, and his conversation is littered with references to Gurdjieff, the Bhagavad Gita, Krishnamurty or Kahlil Gibran. He has rather limpid hypnotic eyes, that reminded me somewhat of an Indian fakir. He’s kind of a Buddhist version of Thomas Arnold, the 19th century headmaster of Rugby who was big on instilling character into his pupils. Instead of Arnold’s muscular Christianity, we have Seldon’s bendy well-being.

But he’s also well-connected politically – he’s written biographies of Blair, Brown and Major, and likes to discuss Westminster village gossip, who’s in and who’s out etc – and probably has a bigger media profile than any other headmaster. So he’s an unusual combination of the swami and the Westminster player.

He brought these two quite distinct worlds together in Action for Happiness, the political movement he set up in 2011, along with Lord Richard Layard of the LSE, and Geoff Mulgan, a former Number 10 policy advisor who is also into Buddhism in a big way. Action for Happiness is trying to prove that we can create happy schools, happy companies, happy communities and even happy nations.

Wellington College is, so far, one of the more successful experiments in this sort of happy community. When Seldon arrived at Wellington in 2005, it had bad exam results and a reputation for a culture of bullying. He pulled up the grades, introduced girls to the all-boys school, and replaced the bullying, chauvinist ethos with a new emphasis on well-being, including the introduction of well-being classes taught by Ian Morris. They’re now planning to build a ‘well-being hut’ in the woods where students can study and meditate.

All of this at Wellington, a school famous for its muscular military ethos and links to nearby Sandhurst. Lord knows what the Army makes of the meditating peaceniks coming out of Wellington these days.

My concern, which I expressed in my book, is that ‘well-being classes’ could be too dogmatic and indoctrinating, so you end up telling young people what well-being is rather than giving them space to come to their own ideas. But Ian Morris, the well-being teacher at Wellington, is clearly not a close-minded person – he seemed more up-to-date with criticisms of Positive Psychology than I am. He says the well-being course consists in a series of ideas which the pupils try out. They don’t have to agree with them or adopt them permanently, they just have to try them out. I haven’t yet read Ian’s book on teaching well-being, but I plan to – he’s had more hands-on experience of teaching well-being than pretty much anyone else.

Anyway, I gave my talk, to a room of 15-year-olds. I wonderered what the hell they made of my discussion of Stoic philosophy and cognitive therapy, and worried that I was babbling incoherently, but they actually came up with very smart questions – they didn’t seem like brain-washed automatons at all.

It remains to be seen how much the success of Wellington’s ‘happy experiment’ depends on the resources and assets at the College’s disposal, including the beautiful grounds. In the next few years, as Wellington looks to export its ethos to a chain of academies, we’ll see how well the experiment works in inner cities.

By the way, Wellington has organised what looks an amazing conference this month on education, with everyone from Geoff Dyer to Michael Gove to AC Grayling speaking. Definitely want to go to that.

Meanwhile, the Times Educational Supplement had a good cover story looking at how the Department of Education appears to be rolling back on Every Child Matters, New Labour’s flagship education policy, which gave schools a statutory responsibility to nurture the well-being of every pupil. Under Michael Gove, out has gone the emphasis on ‘well-being’, and in has come a more hard-headed focus on ‘achievement’ along with endless inspections. The TES expressed concerns that this shift in priorities, along with the huge reforms replacing comprehensives with academies and free schools, could create an institutional confusion that allows vulnerable or abused children to fall through the safety net.

Two heartening stories about higher education: the Guardian had a piece on Britain’s oldest graduate, a 90-year-old who’s spent the last 30 years in higher education; while the Wall Street Journal had a good piece on a bookclub for the homeless.

Two big and contentious issues in the ‘politics of well-being’ are obesity and pornography. Both revolve around our ability, or inability, to control ourselves, and the extent to which government should intervene to shape the values culture in which we live. They’re both, in a way, post-liberal issues.

To take obesity first, it seems that, left to ourselves in the candy-coated world of capitalism, we gorge ourselves silly and end up with 25-50% of the population obese. So what can we do about it? You can try to educate people, which is what that well-known paternalist Jamie Oliver tries to do. Or the state can intervene more directly, which is what New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has done: New York has now banned giant-size holders of high sugar drinks. Putting the cookie jar on the top shelf, basically.

Meanwhile, in the UK, Lib Dem MP Jo Swinson (who is on the All-Parliamentary Committee on Well-Being) has also set up a committee on body image, which has recommended that all school children should be educated to consider body image, so they can resist the media’ pushing of over-thin stereotypes. But aren’t more than a third of UK children overweight or obese? Do they have body image problems, or body management problems? Or perhaps the media’s thin hegemony actually makes overweight people feel lower self-esteem, so they eat more?

Also on the politics of obesity, a professor of politics at Sunderland University has brought out a new book on ‘the philosophy of dieting’ from Plato to Hobbes to Locke.

Meanwhile, I see more and more signs that the public debate is shifting on pornography from a libertarian consensus that it’s a great thing and it’s weird and prudish to criticise or control it. I think we’re coming to a sense that the explosion in internet porn, including increasingly hardcore violent porn, is bad for us and should be controlled. Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a new book out saying a generation of boys has become addicted to the easy and non-intimate arousal of internet porn (here’s his recent TED talk on the topic). I also noticed the news story about a 12-year-old boy who raped a 9-year-old girl after watching a lot of extreme pornography. Rape porn was made illegal in the UK in 2009, yet it’s still prominently advertized on main porn websites like YouPorn and PornTube (both of which are owned by a Swiss conglomerate called Manwin). Why doesn’t the government enforce this law and protect our children?

Alain de Botton thinks we need to create more aesthetic and more ethical porn. Go for it Alain – can’t wait for the School of Life to branch out into that. All it needs is one of those beady curtains on the door to protect the anonymity of its customers.

Some happyology stuff. Firstly, the United States is being overcome by the mania for happiness measurements, state-by-state. Vermont and Maryland have both passed new initiatives to launch ‘Genuine Progress Indicators’, to include things like quality of the environment – though I’m not sure if they also include measures of subjective well-being.

The Atlantic has an excellent article on the problems with happiness economics. It points out, for example, that people who say at university that money will make them happier do genuinely tend to be made happier when they make lots of money. And people who say money doesn’t make them happier are right too. So the answer to the age-old question ‘does money make us happier?’ is…it depends.

There’s a lot of interesting developments in happiness science and gaming (see Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken for lots on this). The latest instance is a game soon to be released by Nintendo called Project Happiness. ‘We are gaming for Love, Peace and Earth’ it says. Sure you are fellas.

Some self-promotion stuff (sorry, tawdry of me, I know) : my book got a great review from Donald Robertson, the author of The Philosophy of CBT, which is a book that really helped and inspired me, so am glad to hear he liked my book too! Also if you’re in Hay this weekend, come and see me speak on Tuesday June 5th at the main festival at 10am in the Sky Arts Arena, or the following Sunday (the 10th) at 10.30 at How The Light Gets In, where I’m down on the programme as a ‘happiness guru’….um, what?

Oh, and happy Jubilee to the Queen! Here, to my mind, her finest moment.

Hope you have a great weekend,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

The secret of appiness

Jules Evans — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:45:00 +0000

The NYT has been doing a good job keeping track of a new market trend in well-being: apps for self-tracking and self-quantification. It wrote in 2010:

At a health innovation and investment conference in California earlier this month, there was a lot of energy and excitement about the emerging health and wellness industry…New technology — low-cost computing, sensors, the Web and genetics — will play a crucial role in the transition.

This week another good piece in NYT talks about some of the health and well-being phone apps now appearing on the market:

Dr Eric Topol’s new book, “The Creative Destruction of Medicine,” lays out his vision for how people will start running common medical tests, skipping office visits and sharing their data with people other than their physicians. Dr. Topol, a cardiologist and director of Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif., is already seeing signs of this as companies find ways to hook medical devices to the computing power of smartphones. Devices to measure blood pressure, monitor blood sugar, hear heartbeats and chart heart activity are already in the hands of patients. More are coming.
An entire marketplace is evolving that marries the can-do attitude of hacking devices with the fervor of the wellness movement.

The most prevalent diseases and the biggest markets are getting the tools first. Devices to monitor heart disease are already available.
A French start-up, Withings, has created a blood pressure cuff for $129 that connects to an iPad or an iPhone. The cuff will automatically inflate, deflate and then record the pulse rate and the blood pressure. The app will graph the pressure over time, making trends easier to see.

Withings also includes a connection to its Web site so users can share their data with their doctors either directly through their password-protected pages or through third-party sites like digifit.com.

The growing incidence of diabetes is by many estimates the biggest public health challenge today, so companies are developing tools to help people with the disease manage their blood sugar.

Tom Xu, the founder of SkyHealth in El Cerrito, Calif., created the Web site glucosebuddy.com to help people keep track of the sugar in their blood. The numbers must be entered manually. The site works with an app for the iPhone to gather the blood glucose level and some information about when it was taken. “Our main goal of glucosebuddy is not to just record numbers. That’s the boring part,” he said. “Once you know how your diet affects your blood sugar, you take your health more seriously.”

Other companies are beginning to integrate the hardware and software. AgaMatrix, a company that makes a blood glucose monitor, iBGStar, that attaches to the iPhone, worked with Sanofi, the pharmaceutical giant, to develop the tool. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved the device for sale in the United States.

Its tool, like many other pocket meters, measures the amount of glucose in the blood, but it also transfers the data to the smartphone, which helps patients to track their glucose levels over time. It is not much different from a piece of paper and a pen, but it is faster and cleaner, and it is easy to share these values with doctors and friends.

Johnson & Johnson has also spoken publicly about developing a similar device. The ultimate goal is replicating the full-body diagnostic “tricorder” from the “Star Trek” TV show, a goal that is being encouraged by a $10 million prize put up by Qualcomm, the smartphone chip maker, through the X-Prize Foundation.

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PoW: Friday round-up of philosophy, psychology and politics of well-being

Jules Evans — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:02:00 +0000

I’ve been busy the last couple of weeks, moving house, and working on a new AHRC-funded project, The Philosophy Hub, which will launch in May. It will be a network and map of philosophy groups around the world. I need your help with it: if you come across philosophy groups around the world, get in touch and I’ll add them to the map. This will be the first global survey of the grassroots philosophy movement, so it’s a fun project to be working on, and hopefully will help the movement grow.

Here’s a couple of stories to show how international the politics of well-being is becoming. First, in South Korea, a piece looking at how all the main candidates in the presidential election have pledged to improve the happiness and well-being of the country’s citizens. As the journalist notes, however, 68% of South Koreans said in a recent poll that the main cause of misfortune in the country is…politicians.

Meanwhile, over in the US, Rick Santorum, the back-to-basics Republican candidate, shows how much of the politics of well-being depends on your definition of happiness. In a recent speech, he discussed the Declaration of Independence’s famous phrase about the right to ‘the pursuit of happiness’. He suggests that happiness actually had a different definition “way back at the time of our founders…Go back and look it up. You’ll see one of the principle definitions of happiness is ‘to do the morally right thing.’ God gave us rights to life and to freedom to pursue His will. That’s what the moral foundation of our country is.” Um…wasn’t Thomas Jefferson, the author of that phrase, an Epicurean? Not sure he would have defined happiness as the freedom to do God’s will – although other Founding Fathers may have.

While politicians may make more and more grand speeches about improving our well-being and happiness, the fact is, western governments are broke, and that’s playing out in mental health services.

Here are two stories about that: the first from the US, where a military psychiatry unit is being investigated for allegedly urging Army doctors to think of the cost to the tax-payer before diagnosing soldiers with PTSD. Such a diagnosis apparently means $1.5 million in benefit payments over a soldier’s lifetime. With 20% of soldiers coming back from Afghanistan with PTSD, no wonder the Army is spending big on its preventative resilience-training course.

Secondly, here is a story from the UK, looking at how the British government is protecting funding for its new Cognitive Behavioural Therapy service, while cutting funding for longer-term psychotherapy services. What that means is patients with serious mental health problems are being passed to CBT units who aren’t trained to treat them. I spoke to one cognitive therapist recently who was handed over a patient with manic depression, who then killed herself. It’s not fair on anyone to expect cognitive therapists to shoulder the nation’s entire mental health problems.

Another way governments are trying to improve mental well-being without spending too much, by the by, is using new technology and apps, like this new ‘Buddy app‘ which the NHS is using to connect patients with online therapists.

Jonah Lehrer, the Wired and WSJ columnist, is one of my heroes. He has a book out on creativity in April, which I think is going to be excellent. Here’s a recent New Yorker piece he wrote, based on the book, on why brainstorming often doesn’t work, why the expression ‘there’s no such thing as a bad idea’ is wrong, and why groups whose members criticise each other are more creative.

Two pieces on my blog that have been getting a lot of hits. The first looks at an interview by BBC documentary maker Adam Curtis, another of my heroes, on why he left academia and why cultural trash is important to the history of ideas. The second is something I wrote on self-help, and how it uses techniques from ancient philosophy in the service not of God but of capitalism (financial success, corporate promotion, closing the deal etc), making it something akin to a ‘religion for capitalists‘.

Two good pieces on the history of emotions and behaviour, which show how a historical perspective can add value to discussions on well-being. The first, from the BBC’s website, challenges the idea that we must have eight hours consecutive sleep, by looking at different sleeping patterns through history, when it was accepted to sleep for a bit, wake up and do stuff in the middle of the night, then have another sleep. That’s pretty much how I sleep now. The second article, by a historian from George Mason University, looks at the history of happiness.

Here’s a documentary / interview from 1988 that Ernst Gombrich did with Sir Karl Popper, one of the most important post-war philosophers.

The New Statesman has a new issue packed full of philosophy, including an interview with Charles Taylor, a review of Simon Critchley’s new book on the religion of political ideology, and a piece by Alain de Botton reviewing James Miller’s new book on philosophy outside of academia.

The Economist has a piece on an interesting debate going on now on whether dolphins and whales are ‘persons’, and therefore have rights.

Finally, I’ve been loving the American TV show Friday Night Lights, about a football coach and a high-school football team. Coach Taylor is a great example of the figure of the sports coach as a moral leader or ‘moulder of men’. The show, despite or perhaps because of its old school morality, has proved a hit with liberals, including this lesbian feminist academic, who imagines Coach Taylor as her PhD supervisor. Here’s one of her creations, to celebrate the birthday of feminist philosopher Judith Butler.

See you next week,

Jules

Philosophy for Life - official website of author Jules Evans -

iShrink

Jules Evans — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 11:43:00 +0000

Check out this new app called Buddy App. Look’s a pretty smart CBT app, designed by the South London and Maudsley Foundation Trust. Apparently already being used by several NHS and IAPT services around the UK.

Buddy from sidekick studios on Vimeo.

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PoW: Friday round-up of philosophy, psychology and politics of well-being

Jules Evans — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:01:00 +0000

On Tuesday I went to talk by Brigadier-General Rhonda Cornum (pictured right), who used to be in charge of the US Army’s $125 million resilience-training programme. The event was also the launch of the Young Foundation’s Resilience project. It was held at Macquarie Bank in the City, in a penthouse office-room full of funders, NGOs and policy wonks. A huge amount of interest in resilience, clearly.

I’ve long had an interest in the Army’s resilience programme – I interviewed Cornum back in 2009, and the interview is in the second chapter of my book. The programme was designed by Martin Seligman and his colleagues at University of Pennsylvania, based on techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and Positive Psychology.

It was rolled out by the US Army in rather a hurry, in an attempt to cope with the epidemic of post-conflict suicides among the troops. According to this useful report from the Centre for the New American Security, 18 American veterans kill themselves every day – that includes veterans who served decades ago, but still, it’s an awful statistic. The US Army lost 164 active duty soldiers to suicide in 2011, and a Freedom of Information act recently obtained by a US newspaper found that 2,200 soldiers died within two years of leaving the military – half of whom were being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The Army, to its credit, is taking this problem seriously and trying to do something about it, by rolling out a CBT / Positive Psychology resilience programme which has been shown to reduce the incidence of depression in school children.

I got over PTSD myself through CBT, so I support the idea of making it more available in the Army, but there are aspects of the Comprehensive Solider Fitness programme (as it is called) that I don’t support. First of all, Seligman added the idea of teaching ‘optimistic thinking’, one of the features of which is to learn to take credit for things when they go well, but to blame your external circumstances when they go badly. I’m generalising – but not much. I think that’s a terrible thing to teach young people. It’s teaching them irresponsibility. Sometimes things go badly because you screwed up, and you need to be able to recognise that.

Secondly, I don’t like the programme’s claim to have discovered a scientific model for emotional and spiritual flourishing, which everyone must fit into, and which can be measured by a computer questionnaire. That’s a crude, vulgar and narrow-minded idea. By all means, help people avoid depression and PTSD, but don’t tell them you can measure a person’s ‘spiritual fitness’ with five questions in a computer questionnaire. This isn’t Cosmopolitan magazine, this is life!

Anyway, perhaps it is worth accepting these really dumb bits of the programme in order to get CBT out to the troops. The proof will be in the evidence. There wasn’t a pilot programme done (which is strange when you think how expensive the programme is), but the initial results are in, and they show that soldiers who took the course are about 1% more ‘emotionally fit’ than soldiers who didn’t take the course (I’ll post the slides that show this once the Young Foundation makes them available). That’s a pretty tiny impact for such an expensive intervention. Suicides, meanwhile, continue to rise among active troops: they were higher in 2011, two years after the introduction of this course, than they were in 2010 and 2009.

I hope the results of the programme improve – but I would be wary of defining resilience as strength and PTSD as weakness, as Cornum repeatedly did. So Cornum didn’t get PTSD after she was shot and captured. Good for her. But some people go through awful experiences and do get PTSD. That’s not necessarily because they’re weak. It could be because the US Army puts its soldiers through tours that are, on average, twice as long as the tours of British soldiers, which in turn might explain why PTSD is apparently so much rarer in UK troops. It could be because they experienced some awful, awful things. It could be because war is an ugly and corrupting experience that leaves scars, real and hidden, on all who are immersed in it. We are not going to make it a perfectly hygenic and healthy experience with a bit of CBT.

As for teaching resilience in schools, well, we tried that here in the UK, in a government sponsored pilot programme designed by Seligman, the results of which were also disappointing: no long-term impact on children’s well-being or academic achievements. And I have even more ethical concerns about how technocratic, automated, rigid and prescriptive the Penn resilience course is if we start to teach it to children in schools. We shouldn’t claim there is only one scientific answer to the question ‘how to flourish’ – there are many answers to that question, and children should learn to be sceptical of experts who appear before them claiming to have all the answers. They should be trained to see the flaws in people’s arguments and to find their own response.

We need to find the right balance between the sciences and the humanities, between the wisdom of the ancients and our freedom to choose our own path. I personally think we should develop ‘art of living’ classes that combine the cognitive techniques of CBT with open discussion about the ethics and philosophies from which those techniques came.

On the philosophy side of that equation, here are some videos from an excellent sounding course in the Art of Living which Stanford University recently launched. And here is an article in the Telegraph, of all places, calling for compulsory philosophy in schools. That’s a decent idea – but, again, I think it could be very usefully combined with insights from the social sciences, and with an introduction to some of the basic techniques of well-being, like meditation or Socratic self-examination. Philosophy isn’t just about conceptual discussion, it’s also about learning really useful techniques and practices for living, some of which have now been tested out by science.

While we’re wondering whether CBT can be automated, here is Aaron Beck, one of the two inventors of CBT, discussing that very question recently at the Beck Institute. His answer is, yes, maybe.

Here in the UK, it looks like the government’s NHS bill is in trouble. Even Tory journalists are now calling for it to be dropped. Meanwhile, a new report from the King’s Fund says that the NHS needs to do more to recognise and treat mental illnesses among the severely ill. Meanwhile, Labour’s shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, gave a fascinating speech calling for mental health to become the core focus of the NHS, and even perhaps of government as a whole.

Talking of the King’s Fund, I was at their offices in Cavendish Square last night to talk at a Psychologies Magazine event called ‘Make It Happen’. It was the first sort of self-help talk I’d given. It was really fun: I basically approached it like a London Philosophy Club event and tried to get people to offer solutions to other people’s problems. The attendees were really good at it. Kind of crowd-sourced therapy. I met a lot of people there who were trying to write a novel or get published. I can’t recommend The Literary Consultancy enough – they were a huge help to me in getting published.

Here’s a good article in the New York Review of Books, which suggests something I also have thought: that the Occupy movement is as much a spiritual movement as a political one. It reminds me rather of some sort of pre-modern cult, which expects a new Age of Love to arrive.

Here’s a funny article in the NYT about how young life-coaches are becoming.

Taiwan has become the latest country to measure national well-being.

Here is an eyebrow-raising video of one parent’s reaction to finding an anti-parent rant on his daughter’s Facebook page.

Finally, just to put all this well-being stuff in context, here is a news story about the people of Homs in Syria, saying goodbye to each other as they prepare for the ground assault on their town. I hope they can stay safe, and that Assad and his security advisors have to answer for their actions.

See you next week,

Jules

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