The four Fs that should be in every mid-lifer's happiness plan

Sometimes the hardest part of happiness is identifying what it is that will help us reach old-age nirvana. Photo / Getty Images

Everyone knows that sensible people invest in a pension, but a new bestseller argues that what we really need from our 50s onwards is an emotional investment plan.

Although its author, Arthur C Brooks, is an economist at Harvard, his book Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life ignores the usual monetary tips about putting aside 12.5 per cent of your monthly salary in favour of auditing the soul.

He's not the Atlantic magazine's chief happiness correspondent for nothing.

Brooks divides the post-mid-life decades into four areas called the four Fs. No, not the usual horsemen of old-age apocalypse – frumpiness, fragility, fussiness, and foul temper – but faith, family, friendship and function.

Arthur C Brooks. Photo / Supplied via RNZ

In an online video, the super-trim silver fox of a professor tells us: "The sooner you start investing in your Happiness 401k [401k is a US pension plan], the better off you will be.

"You can remarkably change the odds of being happier at 75 than you were at 25, but you have to make the investments."

If our adult lives are from 20 to an optimistic 90, 55 is the midpoint whereby we need to be putting the work in to ensure that we don't end up turning into Victor Meldrew, or sulking in the garden dreaming of our glory days as a CEO.

Who're you calling a grump? Actor Richard Wilson as Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave. Photo / Supplied, File

His advice veers from the prosaic (don't smoke, don't drink too much, go on a daily walk) to the most important of all, cultivating stable long-term relationships.

His advice should find fertile ground in the statistically miserable – an ONS personal wellbeing survey in the UK records that levels have deteriorated more sharply than ever before.

Paul Dolan, professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics and author of Happiness by Design and Happy Ever After, says the first thing to recognise is that we're probably going to end up getting happier even if we do nothing.

"The only robust finding we've got from our happiness data is that when you hit middle-age, it increases," says Dolan. "When you're 50 and you look at someone who's 30, chances are that they're going to spend the next 20 years getting less happy and you're going to spend them getting happier."

That said, there are small things that "if we did more of every day I'm pretty confident we'd be happier". These include listening to music, getting outdoors, helping others, spending time with people you like and laughing. "If you did 15 minutes more of any or one of those things every day, you'd be happier."

The good news is that one of the reasons we're happier as we get older is that we start to do these things naturally – eschewing the pursuit of success and money in favour of those life-enhancing clichés of lockdown, like listening to birdsong and baking bread.

But we shouldn't rely on a natural segue into contentment, he says; we still need to "make happiness a habit by building in these activities day to day".

Dolan, 53, has been weight training five times a week for more than 20 years and it is central to both his identity and wellbeing, yet he recognises that even healthy, happy habits like this are weak enough to be broken by a holiday or illness. "I put weight training in my diary," he says, "in the same way as a zoom call."

This planning, he says, sounds effortful but it actually makes it effortless to achieve your goals. "My mind is packed and ready to go to the gym."

Dr Tom Cotton, a psychotherapist and founder of the development consultancy Mind Environment, can't bear the way that the word "crisis" comes after "midlife". "I prefer to think of it as a midlife opportunity," he says.

In the area of life which Brooks calls work – in other words, your function – Cotton says it is vital to celebrate all that you've gained in favour of mourning what you've lost.
"Experience, life wisdom, broad context thinking… you've seen a lot and it's new fuel to power the next bit of the journey."

What we need to avoid is competing with either younger people or our past selves.

"Acknowledge that physically you're no longer at the height of your powers," he says. Don't ignore or mourn this physical loss, and whatever you do, he says, "Don't go out and buy a Ferrari" or whatever helps foster the delusion that you're still young.

This hard-earned experience and wisdom can be used to help others, one of the best ways of finding happiness as we get older.

Volunteering or mentoring helps both those in need, but also helps us in realising just how much knowledge we've collected. Friends of mine who have advised pupils from deprived schools on how to interview well for Cambridge have arguably got more out of it than their mentees.

As well as eschewing the sports car, all the experts advise avoiding the other midlife cliché of dumping your spouse in favour of a younger model. My husband is a family lawyer and says that only rarely do his clients seem to be happier after the divorce.

"Once they've had the relief of taking action," he says, "their levels of contentment just fall back to their natural state. Or worse, they're poorer both financially and emotionally."

Of all the work that Brooks advises in his book, the area where most efforts should be directed is in cultivating these long-term relationships, not only your marriage or relationship but family and friends too.

"The point is to find people with whom you can grow, whom you can count on, no matter what comes your way." Sometimes the hardest part of happiness is identifying what it is that will help us reach old-age nirvana.

Dina Glouberman, the author of the classic midlife resurrection guide The Joy of Burnout, advises that we project ourselves forward to a happy place in order to intuit what this consists of.

"Imagine a future time," says Glouberman, whose new book ImageWork, a guide to transformational change, is published in April, "a year, five years ahead, and imagine what is making you happy, and then let your future self give your present one some advice as to what it is that you want."

Conversely, she advises imagining an unhappy future in order to find out what it is you need to avoid. She's her own best advert for this method. At age 76, she used her own methods to find out that she didn't want more holidays or money, she wanted to feel creative. "And the next day I started on my book proposal."

Best of all, a happiness plan like this one is a pension you can cash in and start enjoying as soon as you like – without penalties.