The ‘design’ chapter is the choice architecture stuff. I talk about priming; for example, if you don’t want to spend so much money change your bank password to ‘don’tspendsomuchmoney’. I also discuss defaults and commitments; for example, change your homepage from Facebook to a reading website if you want to read more books. The point is that you can have a really big impact from very small changes. You don’t have to think in these big, grand, ‘I need to change my life’ ways, but about how to change little bits of it – how can I get five minutes more of fresh air every day? How can I speak to my mates for ten minutes more each day? Tiny little things can have a significant effect on happiness without you having to go through this huge reorganisation of your life in order to do it.

I also talk about norms. We know that we’re social animals; we want to be like people like us. A critical part of being happier is to think about those people that we want to be around. There’s a song by The Smiths where Morrissey sings ‘why do I give valuable time to people who don’t care if I live or die?’ It’s quite remarkable that we do – not in such an extreme way – spend an awful amount of time, especially people driven by career success for example, with people we don’t really much care for but who we think are going to be useful to us in some way. First of all, they might not be. Even if they are, you’re just going to be miserable on the way. You lose either way it seems to me.

Choosing who to work with and who to spend time with is a very simple thing that many – admittedly not all – of us can do. We should think about how much time we’re spending with people that we really genuinely enjoy the company of – probably not as much as we could – and how much time are we spending with people we don’t very much care for – probably a bit too much.

The “do” chapter is then just about getting on and doing it. You’re happier when you pay attention to what you’re doing and who you’re doing it with, and when you’re not distracted by other stimuli. I talk a lot about modern technology and how we’ve become addicts. Of course I’m not some dinosaur who thinks it hasn’t all been a great advance, but we are literally hooked on the internet and our smartphones – checking emails, checking Facebook updates, text messages, and so on. It’s kind of just happened to us. It’s almost like we haven’t had any say in it. It’s not like we decided to legalise heroin and there’s a heroin dealer on every corner. We’ve kind of put the heroin dealers out there and have said let’s see what happens. That’s pretty much what’s happened with internet addiction. You see it all the time. I’m tempted right now to see whether I have got any emails while I’m talking to you. Not only is it rude, but it makes us both much less happy when I do that.

If you forget your cellphone at home eventually you get to the point where you feel that the world does still turn. You’re not that important actually; people get on without you and you get on with experiencing life. Worst of all is people with their camera-phones out at gigs. Just go home and watch it on television if that’s what you want to do, you get a much better picture on television. Just put it down and enjoy the gig. We’re spending too much time distracted, away from the experiences.

What do you want policymakers to get out of this book? How could this book be used by them?

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to get policymakers to take seriously behavioural science and happiness research, and then I thought about how those insights can be applied and used by individuals, most of who don’t care about policy. The simple answer to that question is that this isn’t a book policy but about using these insights in your own life. Of course, my own personal interests are also on the policy side of things.