It didn’t matter how long people went away for, whether they went for four days or a fortnight, they still got the same amount of happiness from their holidays.

So, there’s another ingredient that also strikes me as essential. It’s this: the story should have a positive ending. To borrow from Vonnegut, ‘because why get a depressing person’ at the end? If you’re going to sell someone on the idea that they should follow your lead, you’d want to tell them that, yes, things are hard now, but they’ll get

Intensity – because experiences that engage and challenge us give us a chance to be good at something, and get us into what psychologists call a state of ‘flow’ – they make us happy. Think of skiing or cycling or singing or making love. We’ll also discover why flow is available to all of us – whatever our passions or age or income – because,

What’s interesting here is not only that the shape of redemptive stories mirrors the man in hole and hero’s journey shape. What’s really interesting is that people who tend to describe their life through contaminated stories are more likely to be depressed, have lower levels of life satisfaction, and feel that they can’t make a positive

When you look for a ‘rich environment’, so Kotler says, you need to look for one that offers novelty, unpredictability and complexity.

Two psychologists named Keith Sawyer and Charles Walker, for instance, have discovered that if you’re hoping to find flow, other people are especially helpful. In studies of basketball players and musicians, Sawyer found that the more social and more involved an experience, the more likely it will be to produce flow. He called this ‘group flow’.

Think of your own stories for a moment, or those of people you know. Do you tend to tell stories that are contaminated or redemptive? Can you think of someone who tells them in the opposite way to you?

Csikszentmihalyi wrote. ‘The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.’

Think about a few of the larger experiences you had in the past, like a long-term project you took on, or a trip that covered a long distance, or perhaps just a time you had an adventure. Compare this with a simpler experience, maybe just a normal holiday. Then, ask yourself these questions about each of the experiences, giving an answer on a scale