The Happiness Project Read online

  I didn’t want anyone walking in on me while I was doing it, and it took a long time before I had an opportunity. I hadn’t realized before how rare it was for me to be home alone. Finally, one Sunday afternoon, I told Jamie I was going to stay behind when he took the girls around the corner to visit his parents. After the apartment was empty, I went into our bedroom, turned off the lights, lowered the blinds, and put my iPod into an iPod speaker base. I had to squelch thoughts of self-criticism—that I was a bad dancer or looked goofy.

  It was fun. I did feel goofy, but I also felt energized and exhilarated.

  I started thinking more about music. I thought I’d accepted the fact that, as part of “Being Gretchen,” I didn’t really like music, but in fact, the truth was slightly different: I thought I didn’t like music, but in fact, I didn’t approve of my own taste—I wished I liked sophisticated music, like jazz or classical or esoteric rock. Instead, my taste ran mostly to what might play on a lite FM station. Oh, well. Be Gretchen.

  Listening and dancing to music absolutely boosted my feelings of mindfulness. I felt much more aware of music during the day; as I worked in a diner, I really heard Abba singing “Take a Chance on Me” over the loudspeaker. This heightened responsiveness to my environment made me feel more present in the moment. Instead of tuning music out, I made music a bigger part of my experience.

  KEEP A FOOD DIARY.

  I also wanted to apply the principles of mindfulness in a much less elevated context: my eating habits. Studies show that merely being conscious of eating makes people eat more healthfully, and one way to encourage yourself to eat more mindfully, experts agree, is to keep a food diary. Without a record, it’s easy to overlook what you eat without noticing it—grabbing three Hershey’s Kisses every time you pass a coworker’s desk throughout the day or eating leftovers from other people’s plates as you clear the kitchen table. In one study, dieters who kept a food diary lost twice as much weight as dieters who didn’t bother.

  I’d felt guilty for a long time about my mediocre eating habits, and I wanted to eat more healthfully, plus I wanted to lose a few pounds without going on a diet (hardly an original goal—almost seven out of ten Americans say they’re trying to eat healthfully to lose weight). Making notes about the food I ate sounded easy enough, and I figured that, of all my various resolutions, this would be one of the easier ones to keep. I bought myself a little notebook.

  “I keep a food diary,” a friend told me at lunch soon after, when I mentioned my latest resolution. She showed me her calendar, which was crammed with tiny writing detailing her daily intake. “I update it every time I eat.”

  “They say that keeping a food diary helps you eat better and lose weight,” I said, “so I’m giving it a try.”

  “It’s a great thing to do. I’ve been keeping mine for years.”

  Her recommendation reassured me that the food diary was a good idea. My friend was thin and fit, plus she was one of the healthiest (if also one of the most eccentric) eaters I knew. I’d just heard her order lunch.

  “I’d like the Greek salad, chopped, no dressing, no olives or stuffed grape leaves, plus a side order of grilled chicken and a side order of steamed broccoli.” When the food arrived, she heaped the chicken and broccoli onto the salad. It was a lot of food, but tasty and very healthy. I ordered the same salad, but without the extra chicken and broccoli. Before we dug in, we sprinkled artificial sweetener over our salads. (She taught me this trick. It sounds awful, but artificial sweetener makes a great substitute for dressing. It’s like adding salt; you don’t taste it, but it brings out the flavor of the food.)

  “I refuse to go on a diet,” I told her.

  “Oh, me too!” she said. “But try keeping a food diary. It’s interesting to see what you eat over the course of a week.”

  I tried it. My problem: I found it practically impossible to remember to keep a food diary. I’ve read repeatedly that it takes twenty-one days to form a habit, but in my experience, that just isn’t true. Day after day, I tried, but only rarely did I manage to remember to record everything I ate in a day. One problem with not being very mindful, it turns out, is that you have trouble keeping your mindfulness records. Nevertheless, even attempting to keep a food diary was a useful exercise. It made me more attuned to the odds and ends I put into my mouth: a piece of bread, the last few bites of Eleanor’s lasagna.

  Most important, it forced me to confront the true magnitude of my “fake food” habit. I’d pretended to myself that I indulged only occasionally, but in fact I ate a ton of fake food: pretzels, low-fat cookies or brownies, weird candy in bite-sized portions, and other not-very-healthy snacks. “Food that comes in crinkly packages from corner delis,” as one friend described my weakness. I liked eating fake food, because when I got hungry during the day, it was more convenient to grab something fake than to sit down to eat proper food like soup or salad. Plus, fake food was a treat. I’d never buy a real chocolate chip cookie or a candy bar, but I couldn’t resist the supposedly low-cal version.

  Even though I knew that this kind of food was low in nutrition and high in calories, I kept eating it, and this habit was a daily source of guilt and self-reproach. Each time I thought about buying some fake food, I told myself that I shouldn’t—but then I did anyway. I’d tried and failed to give up fake food in the past, but the food diary, incomplete as it was, made me aware of how much fake food I was eating.

  I gave up fake food cold turkey—and it felt good to give it up. I’d thought of these snacks as treats and hadn’t realized how much “feeling bad” they’d generated—feelings of guilt, self-neglect, and even embarrassment. Now those feelings were gone. Just as I’d seen in July, when I was thinking about money, keeping a resolution to “Give something up” can be surprisingly satisfying. Who would have thought that self-denial could be so agreeable?

  I told my sister what I’d done, and she answered, very sensibly, “You basically eat a very healthy diet, so why give up fake food altogether? Limit yourself to a few treats each week.”

  “Nope, can’t do it!” I told her. “I know myself too well to try that.” When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, “Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult.” In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can’t indulge occasionally.

  It’s true, I have a very particular definition of “fake food.” I still drink a huge amount of Diet Coke and Fresca; I still use a ton of artificial sweetener. I also eat a fair amount of candy, which I consider real and not fake. But no more crinkly packages from corner delis, and that’s a real step forward. Bananas, almonds, oatmeal, tuna sandwiches, and salsa on pita bread are filling the gap.

  My fake-food experience showed me why mindfulness helps you break bad habits. When I became truly aware of what I was eating, I found it much easier to change the automatic choices I’d been making. Two or three times a day, I’d mindlessly been picking up snacks in corner delis—but when I was confronted with what I was doing, I wanted to stop. And it was only after I’d kicked my fake-food habit that I realized what a drain it had been on my happiness. Every day I’d felt uncomfortable twinges of self-reproach, because I knew that kind of food wasn’t healthy. Once I stopped that habit, that relentless source of bad feeling vanished.

  The mindfulness resolutions for October had been interesting and productive and had boosted my happiness considerably, but more important, my increased awareness had led me to an unrelated yet significant realization: I was at risk of turning into a happiness bully.

  I’d become much more sensitive to people being negative, indulging in knee-jerk pessimism, or not having—what seemed to me—the right spirit of cheerfulness and gratitude, and I felt a strong impulse to lecture, which I didn’t always manage to resist. Instead of following June’s resolution to “Cut people slack,” I was becoming more judgmental.

  My desire to be a happiness evangelist made me want to meddle. When a guy told me that he hated maki
ng small talk and so whiled away the dull hours of a dinner party by doing complex math problems in his head, or when a young woman told me she was going to dental school because she liked the hours that dentists work but that her fantasy was one day to do something involving flowers because flowers were her true passion, I could barely contain myself. “No!” I wanted to tell them. “You’re making a mistake, I’ll tell you why!” I’d become a happiness boor. In a scene right out of a Woody Allen movie, I practically got into a fistfight with someone about the nature of Zen. “You seem quite attached to the theory of nonattachment!” I said snidely. I kept interrupting, I wouldn’t shut up, I was such a crusader for the idea of doing a happiness project that I found myself practically shouting people down.

  In particular, I kept trying to force clutter clearing onto my friends. My clutter was mostly gone, and I craved the vicarious thrill I got from tackling a truly messy closet. “Listen,” Jamie warned me one night. “You mean well, but you’re going to offend people if you keep pushing them so hard to clear their clutter.”

  “But every time I help someone clear their clutter, they’re thrilled!” I said.

  “It’s okay to suggest it, but don’t press the issue. You want to be nice, but you might end up rubbing someone the wrong way.”

  I remembered how recently I’d walked into a friend’s apartment and immediately offered clutter-clearing help any time she wanted it. Even at the time, it occurred to me that she might have found my reaction a bit rude. “Okay, you’re right,” I admitted. “I’ll ease up on people.”

  I called my sister. “Am I annoying you with all my talk about happiness?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” Elizabeth said.

  “Do you think I seem happier?”

  “Sure!”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Well…you seem much lighter, more relaxed, and you’re not snapping as much. Not,” she added quickly, “that you snapped a lot, but you know.”

  “I’ve been trying to keep my temper. Probably the fact that you noticed means that I was snapping more than I realized.”

  “You also seem like you’re better about finding the fun in things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when we were talking about how to do Eliza’s hair for my wedding. That’s the kind of thing that might have made you tense before, but now you’re just letting her have fun with it without worrying about it too much. Anyway, did I tell you that you’ve inspired me to try some of your resolutions?”

  “Really? That’s great! What have you been doing?” I was thrilled to think that my happiness project had influenced someone else.

  “For one thing, I’m trying to exercise a lot more—Pilates, hiking, Cardio Barre. I’ve never had a hobby, so I’m trying to think of exercise as my hobby, you know, ‘reframing.’ That way it covers fitness and also the atmosphere of growth. Also, my dentist has been after me for years to get my teeth fixed, so I finally ‘tackled a nagging task’ and got Invisalign put in. I’ve been eating at home more often; it’s healthier and cheaper. And I’ve been going away more on the weekends—spending money in ways that will make me happy.”

  “And are these things making you happier?”

  “Yes! You’re right, it really does work. I was actually kind of surprised.”

  11

  NOVEMBER

  Keep a Contented Heart

  ATTITUDE

  Laugh out loud.

  Use good manners.

  Give positive reviews.

  Find an area of refuge.

  My happiness project year was almost over, and for November’s resolutions, I had to make sure to cram in everything that I hadn’t covered. Fortunately, everything I had left to cover fit neatly into one category. Instead of focusing on my actions, I focused on my attitude. I wanted to cultivate a lighthearted, loving, and kind spirit. If I could put myself into that frame of mind, it would be easier to stick to all my other resolutions.

  The British diarist Samuel Pepys reflected from time to time on the nature of happiness. In his entry for February 23, 1662, he wrote, “This day by God’s mercy I am 29 years of age, and in very good health, and like to live and get an estate and if I have a heart to be contented, I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world, for which God be praised. So to prayers and to bed.” (This last phrase, “and so to bed,” is Pepys’s signature sign-off, much like Walter Cronkite’s “And that’s the way it is” or Ryan Seacrest’s “Seacrest…out!”).

  I was struck by Pepys’s inclusion of the qualifying phrase: “and if I have a heart to be contented.” It was easy to pass over these words without realizing their tremendous importance. No one is happy who doesn’t think himself happy, so without “a heart to be contented,” a person can’t be happy. That’s the Fourth Splendid Truth.

  Did I have a heart to be contented? Well, no, not particularly. I had a tendency to be discontented: ambitious, dissatisfied, fretful, and tough to please. In some situations, this served me well, because it kept me constantly striving to improve my work and achieve my goals. In most areas of my life, however, this critical streak wasn’t helpful. When Jamie surprised me with a gardenia plant (my favorite flower), I fussed because it was too big. I was deeply annoyed when we came back from the hardware store with the wrong-sized lightbulbs—I just couldn’t let it go.

  It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied. Keeping “a heart to be contented,” I expected, would help change my actions. I hit on several specific aspects of my attitude that I wanted to change.

  First, I wanted to laugh more. Laughing more would make me happier, and it would also make the people around me happier. I’d grown more somber over the last several years. I suspected that I didn’t laugh, or even smile, very much. A small child typically laughs more than four hundred times each day, and an adult—seventeen times. I wondered if I hit even that number most days.

  Along with a more humorous attitude, I wanted to be kinder. I’d considered kindness a respectable but bland virtue (in the same dull class as reliability and dutifulness), but researching Buddhism, with its emphasis on loving-kindness, had convinced me that I’d overlooked something important. I wanted to practice loving-kindness, but it was such a vague goal—easy to applaud but hard to apply. What strategies would remind me to act with loving-kindness in my ordinary day?

  I decided to start with the basic resolution to improve my manners, which weren’t as good as they should have been—not just my table manners (though those weren’t great either) but my actions to show consideration for others. Perhaps mere politeness wouldn’t engender loving-kindness in me, but acting politely would at least give me the appearance of possessing that quality—and perhaps appearance would turn into reality. I wanted to lose my New York City edge. Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I notice that midwesterners really are more friendly. In Kansas City, people seem less hurried (and they are less hurried—a study showed that New York has the country’s fastest-walking pedestrians), clerks in stores are more helpful and chatty, drivers give pedestrians a lot of space on the street (in New York, they practically nudge you out of the way with their bumpers). Instead of moving fast and speaking curtly, I wanted to take the time to be pleasant.

  Also, I wanted to stop being so critical, so judgmental and finicky. When I was growing up, my parents placed a lot of emphasis on being positive and enthusiastic—to the point that my sister and I sometimes complained that they wanted us to be “fake.” Now I’d grown to admire my parents’ insistence on banning sarcasm and pointless negativity; it made for a much nicer household atmosphere.

  Finally, as a way to help myself stay serene and cheerful, I resolved to discipline myself to direct my thoughts away from subjects that made me angry or irritable.

  I wondered whether working on my attitude should occupy an entire month’s worth of resolutions, but reading Schopenhauer (oddly enough, given t
hat he’s so well known for his pessimism) convinced me of the importance of a cheerful disposition: “Whoever is merry and cheerful has always a good reason for so being, namely the very fact that he is so. Nothing can so completely take the place of every other blessing as can this quality, whilst it itself cannot be replaced by anything. A man may be young, handsome, wealthy, and esteemed; if we wish to judge of his happiness, we ask whether he is cheerful.” This month was all about cheerfulness.

  LAUGH OUT LOUD.

  By now I had no doubt about the power of my Third Commandment: “Act the way I want to feel.” If I want to feel happy and lighthearted, I need to act that way—say, by laughing out loud.

  Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity. It can boost immunity and lower blood pressure and cortisol levels. It increases people’s tolerance for pain. It’s a source of social bonding, and it helps to reduce conflicts and cushion social stress within relationships—at work, in marriage, among strangers. When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.

  I vowed to find reasons to find things funny, to laugh out loud, and to appreciate other people’s humor. No more polite smiling; no more rushing to tell my story before the laughter has died after a friend’s funny story; no more reluctance to be joshed and teased. One of life’s most exquisite pleasures is making people laugh—even Jamie seems more pleased with himself when I laugh out loud at his jokes, and it’s almost heartbreaking to see Eliza and Eleanor gaze into my face to watch me laugh.

  The other morning, after Eleanor told me the same garbled knock-knock joke for the tenth time, I saw her lower lip start to tremble. “What’s wrong, munchkin?” I asked.

  “You didn’t laugh!” she yowled.

  “Tell me again,” I said. She did, and the next time, I laughed.

  Most of all, though, I wanted to laugh out loud at myself. I took myself far too seriously. On the rare occasions that I did manage to laugh at myself, it was very cheering.