Hello and welcome to the Karma You podcast. This is your host, Chloe Brotheridge. I am a coach and a

hypnototherapist and the author of The Anxiety Solution. So welcome. Thanks so much for joining me today.

I am really excited to show you this week's guest. It is Professor Paul Dolan. He's the author of

the new book Happy Ever After, Escaping the Myth of the Perfect

Life. How many of us get sucked into this idea that we have to tick these boxes of buying a house,

getting married, having children, all of these pressures that we're under to meet these

expectations from society. And Paul's book is really about

questioning these societal expectations and getting us to really think about what it is

that we want rather than what society expects of us. So Paul Dolan is a professor of

behavioural science at the London School of Economics,

and he's an internationally renowned expert on happiness, behaviour and public policy.

His first book, Happiness by Design, was a Sunday Times bestseller

and Waterstone's nonfiction book of the month.

So some of the things that we talk about are about the link between happiness and success. And Paul

discusses how in society success and particularly how much money we make is often what we associate

with what will make us happy. And he talks about the actual statistics around this and the reality of what actually does make us happy. And he talks about the actual statistics around this and the reality of what actually

does make us happy. We also talk about marriage, which is a topic of conversation amongst me

and my friends pretty much every time we see each other. And I hate the fact that this is the case

because we're all smart, intelligent women and we should have

better things to talk about, but for some reason, this always comes up. And it has a lot to do with

the pressure from society, I think, about women in the 30s, about how we should all be getting

married. But the discussion with Paul really has started to change my mind about this.

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