The Way to Happiness

Proven tips to help you feel content with yourself and your life.
By Dianne Hales

A Wonder Drug

In a taxicab on a rainy day in New York City, Gretchen Rubin, 41, suddenly asked herself
what she wanted most in life. “I realized I wanted to be happy,” she recalls. “It was a
lightning-bolt moment because I’d never even thought about it before.”

A couple of years ago, this wife, mother and former lawyer for Justice Sandra Day
O’Connor launched a full-time happiness project to test-drive traditional and newly
minted approaches toward her life goal. She kept a daily gratitude journal, read a poem
every day and had regular date nights with her husband, among other strategies. Now she
swears she’s cheerier.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the get-happier bandwagon. Happiness is making

headlines, selling books, inspiring scientific studies and spawning laughter clubs and
joyology workshops. The reason? As the burgeoning field of positive psychology has
shown, happy people thrive. They’re more creative and productive, earn more money,
attract more friends, enjoy better marriages, stay healthier and even outlive their grumpier
peers.

“Imagine a drug that causes you to live eight or nine years longer, make $15,000 more a
year, be less likely to get divorced,” says Martin Seligman, PhD, who started the positive
psychology movement almost a decade ago. “Happiness seems to be that drug.”

But others wonder, Is this just one more thing we feel pressured to achieve in our
overscheduled, overmeasured lives? How could there be one path to happiness for all
people? And if we aren’t feeling blissful, are we failures at happiness? Some skeptics
dismiss “happichondria” as the latest feel-good fad. “The notion that behavior
modification can bring about true happiness is as bogus as can be,” says psychiatrist
Charles Goodstein, MD, of New York University.

But happiness researchers, backed by thousands of studies, say happiness is measurable

and buildable. If you’re willing to take a chance on the upside of life and shoot for your
bliss, in spite of the naysayers, here’s help laying the groundwork.

Happy Nature Vs. Nurture

Genetics, as research on 4,000 sets of twins has demonstrated, accounts for about 50
percent of your happiness quotient. But even if you inherited the family frown instead of
joy genes, you’re not fated to a life of gloom. Just don’t pin your hopes on advantages
like health, wealth, education and good looks -- those bring only somewhat greater
happiness than what those who are less blessed feel. Unless you’re extremely poor or
gravely ill, life circumstances account for only about 10 percent of happiness. The other
40 percent depends on what you do to make yourself happy.

That’s the tricky part. Most of us assume that external things -- a bigger house, a better
job, a winning lottery ticket -- will brighten our lives. While they do bring temporary
delight, the thrill invariably fades. "After 18 years of studying happiness, I fell into the
same trap as everyone else," says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of The
How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. "I was so excited
to get a new car, a hybrid I’d wanted for a long time, but within two months, driving it
became routine. Happiness is like weight loss. We all know how to take off a few pounds;
the trick is maintaining it."

In their research, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that the key to enduring joy is to
look beyond fleeting pleasures, to the other pillars of what Seligman calls authentic
happiness: engagement with family, work or a passionate pursuit, and finding meaning
from some higher purpose. "Different methods are a better fit for different people,"
Lyubomirsky explains. "Keeping a daily gratitude journal seems hokey to some people,
but writing a letter of gratitude may be very meaningful." Timing and "doses" also matter.
Performing five acts of kindness on one day, she found, yielded a significant increase in
well-being, while acts of kindness on different days didn’t. "To sustain happiness," she
emphasizes, "you have to make the effort and commitment every day for the rest of your
life.

The long run generally brings greater contentment, according to studies that chart the
trajectory of happiness over a life span. After even the most joyous childhood, happiness
typically declines in the teens through the early 20s, but, believe it or not, increases as we
age. "Young people tend to pay more attention to the bad," explains neuropsychologist
Stacey Wood, PhD, of Scripps College. "As we get older, we learn to regulate and
overcome this reaction."

In fact, some experts say, happiness seems to rise even into old age. "Older adults don’t
react as intensely to life events, and they report fewer negative emotions and more
positive ones," says Wood.

Not everyone agrees. Nora Ephron, author of I Feel Bad

About My Neck, says that, yes, after a certain age you tend to factor the realization that
life is short into your decisions. "And you try to eliminate people and things (like bad
meals) that don't make you happy," she says. "But of course, all this is overlaid by a
certain sadness because this is the time when people start to get sick, and that absolutely
cuts into the happiness quotient."

Dare to Laugh Out Loud

Regardless of your age or temperament, you can feel happier right this minute, claims
psychologist Will Fleeson, PhD, of Wake Forest University, who says he has found a
surefire strategy to boost the spirit: Do something, however small, that is energetic,
adventurous, assertive or bold. When volunteers recorded their feelings throughout the
day, all felt happier when active and engaged, regardless of whether they were naturally
introverted or extroverted.

“The biggest surprise in this research was that you can change your behavior and make
yourself feel happier readily and easily,” says Fleeson, who found that almost any active
behavior—even singing or dancing to the radio—has a positive effect on mood.
“Laughing out loud is exactly the kind of adventurous, bold action that makes you feel
happier.”

Simply putting on a happy face, as the classic song lyric advises, can make a difference.
In experiments at Clark University, psychologist James Laird, PhD, hooked volunteers up
to sham electrodes and instructed them to contract and relax specific facial muscles, so
they were, in effect, smiling for no reason at all. With the corners of their mouths pulled
up, most of the volunteers rated cartoons funnier than did those instructed to pull their
eyebrows together as if frowning.

In other studies, smiling individuals recalled happier memories than those with furled
brows or neutral expressions. Whenever we smile, nerves and muscles may transmit
messages that turn on happiness centers in the brain, Laird speculates. “The bottom line is
that a smile doesn’t cost anything and may do you good.” So why not grin?

Still, not everyone is sold on the power of positive thinking. According to Bowdoin
College psychologist Barbara Held, PhD, for those with a glass-half-empty view of the
world, all this happy talk can be downright depressing. In her book Stop Smiling, Start
Kvetching, Held wages war against the “tyranny of the positive attitude,” the put-on-a-
happy-face mind-set, which she believes holds too much sway in American culture. Not
everyone can strike a pose of sunny optimism in the face of life’s mishaps, Held says, and
not everyone should. “If you try to force people to cope in ways that don’t fit their nature,
it can do harm.”

So if you’re going through a rough patch, don’t feel bad about feeling bad. “When
someone’s in pain over the loss of a job, the end of a relationship or the death of a loved
one, telling them to be more optimistic and look on the bright side just adds insult to
injury,” Held says. The person now feels bad for not coping more effectively, on top of
everything else. Instead, having the freedom to complain to a friend, what Held calls
creative kvetching, can be cathartic. Her message: The path to contentment depends on
finding the coping strategy that suits you best, even if that means expressing anger or
sadness along the way.

Smile Power
Whatever their disposition, Americans have plenty of reasons to smile, says Will
Wilkinson, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, who recently reviewed social, economic
and political perspectives on our national happiness. “We have more wealth, health and
comforts than 99.9 percent of the people who have ever lived on the planet, and we feel
as good as anyone ever has,” he says.

Gretchen Rubin says her personal quest for happiness has infused her life with meaning:
“I realized that by working hard to keep a lighter tone, by taking time to be silly, to laugh
more, to sing every morning, I managed to bring about deeper changes in myself—more
loving and considerate feelings and actions. That’s why it’s a duty to be happy. When I
put in the effort to take the steps that will make me happier, I’m far better able to make
other people happier too.”

10 Ways to Turn That Frown Upside Down

1. Be less virtual, more 3-D. “If there’s one thing that separates happy people from
ridiculously happy people, it’s the quality of their social relationships,” says psychologist
Todd Kashdan of George Mason University. If you sit at a computer all day, get up and
indulge in some human contact instead. Even time with strangers ramps up your sense of
well-being, says Kashdan. “You laugh much harder when you’re with other people in a
theater than when you watch a movie at home.”

2. 4, 6, 8 … who do we appreciate? Making a list of things you’re grateful for may seem
silly, but it’s been proven to work. In fact, counting your blessings may be the single most
helpful thing you can do for your happiness quotient, say experts.

3. Rack ’em up. Think of every positive experience during the day as a bead on a string,
and see how they add up. This simple exercise makes you focus on even the smallest
positive moments, like a fellow driver waving you to go first at a four-way stop, or an e-
mail from a friend in a spam-filled inbox.

4. Think memorable, not material. If you have to choose between, say, a new car and a
family vacation, pack your bags. Even the sexiest sports car becomes routine over time.
But the memory of a good time with friends and loved ones will last forever.

5. Go to the funny side. “Humor is like salt on meat,” observes psychologist Martin
Seligman, PhD. “It amplifies everything.” Watch reruns of classic shows that never fail to
make you laugh. Try to smile at the absurdities of life. And when you read the jokes in
this issue, laugh out loud.

6. Escape to your stress-free zone. Think of a place where you always feel calm and
happy. Then, when you’re tense and miserable, call it up mentally, with as much detail as
possible. Smell the suntan lotion. Feel the sun. Hear the sea. Play this video in your mind
when your spirits slump.

7. See the glass as half full. Whenever possible, try to look at the bright side. You might
be feeling like your life right now is one giant downhill slope. But if you stop and assess
it honestly, you’ll see you actually have it pretty good. And if things truly are against you,
see No. 8.

8. Find your inner artist. Think back to when you had time for creative expression.
Were you in a rock band? Did you write poetry? Did you love tinkering with cars?
Remember feeling so engaged that you lost track of time? Why not pick up that Fender
(or fender) again? Joyful expression can bring happiness.

9. Do good. Acts of kindness, however small, deliver as much pleasure to the giver as to
the getter. For example, a real paper-and-pen letter, telling someone who’s helped you
how much it meant to you, is a surefire cheer-upper. So is giving time, money or both to a
good cause.

10. Seize the moment. Rather than waiting to celebrate a big event, why not do it today?
Bake a cake just because. Take someone out to lunch. Buy pink nail polish. Have sex in
the afternoon. Raise a toast to a good day. Go ahead, be happier.