The Happiness Project Read online

  This topic was on my mind when I was stuck in a slow-moving line at a soup place (no more fake food for me). Two older women at the head of the line were taking a long time to make their selections.

  “Can I try the Spicy Lentil?” asked one woman. She got her miniature cup of soup, tasted it, and said, “Too spicy! Ummm, can I try the Spicy Sausage?”

  The clerk behind the counter moved slowly to ladle out another miniature cup and pass it over the counter.

  “This one is too spicy too!” the tasting woman exclaimed.

  The clerk shrugged without saying a word, but I could read her mind: “Lady, that’s why the soups are labeled ‘Spicy.’”

  I was feeling very proud of myself for not losing my patience at this exchange, but the muttering behind me that suggested that others weren’t being quite so high-minded.

  Just then the tasting woman turned to her friend and said, “Oh, listen to me! I sound like someone from Curb Your Enthusiasm. Make me stop!” She burst out laughing, and her friend joined in. I couldn’t help laughing, and the people behind me started laughing too. It was astounding to see how this woman’s ability to laugh at herself transformed a moment of irritation into a friendly moment shared by strangers.

  It was difficult, however, to devise a way to make myself laugh more—at myself or anything else. I couldn’t figure out a clever exercise or strategy to get myself yukking it up. I considered watching a funny TV show each night or lining up a series of comedy DVDs to rent, but that seemed forced and time-consuming. I didn’t want to get stressed out about my laugh sessions. Was I really so humorless that I had to employ these extreme, unspontaneous measures? In the end, I just reminded myself, “Listen and laugh.” I slowed myself down to give people the big reaction that they craved.

  Chesterton was right, it is hard to be light. Joking around takes discipline. It took willpower to listen to Eliza’s endless, convoluted riddles and to laugh at the punch lines. It took patience to give Eleanor the laugh she expected the millionth time she popped her head out from behind a pillow. But they were so tickled to get me laughing that their delight was a great reward. What started out as forced laughter often turned real.

  I also made an effort to pay more attention to things I found funny. For example, I’m very amused by the phrase that “X is the new Y.” So, for no reason other than I found it fun, I started a list (also keeping my resolution to “Forget about results”):

  Sleep is the new sex.

  Breakfast is the new lunch.

  Halloween is the new Christmas.

  May is the new September.

  Vulnerability is the new strength.

  Monday is the new Thursday (for making plans after work).

  Three is the new two (number of children).

  Forties are the new thirties, and eleven is the new thirteen (age).

  Why did I find these so funny? No idea.

  I had the chance to laugh at myself when a book review mentioned the “newly popular genre” of “stunt nonfiction.”

  “Look at this!” I said to Jamie, rattling the paper in his face. “I’m part of a genre! And not just a genre but a stunt genre. ‘Method journalism!’”

  “What’s the stunt?”

  “Spending a year doing something.”

  “What’s wrong with that? Thoreau moved to Walden Pond for a year—well, for two years, but same idea.”

  “It makes my happiness project sound so unoriginal and dumb,” I wailed. “Plus I’m not even the only one writing ‘stunt nonfiction’ about happiness! Unoriginal, dumb, and superfluous.”

  Then I remembered—I knew better; feeling defensive and anxious wasn’t the way to happiness. Laugh out loud, make fun of myself, act the way I want to feel, reframe. “Oh well,” I said, switching suddenly to a lighthearted tone, “I’m part of a movement without knowing it. I missed the dot-com boom, I barely know how to use an iPod, I don’t watch Project Runway, but for once I managed to tap right into the zeitgeist.” I forced myself to laugh, and I instantly felt better. Jamie started laughing too; he also looked quite relieved that he wasn’t going to have to try to jolly me out of a funk.

  “Laughing out loud” went beyond mere laughter. Responding with laughter meant that I had to give up my pride, my defensiveness, my self-centeredness. I was reminded of one of the climactic moments in Saint Thérèse’s life, a moment when she decided to “Laugh out loud.” Typical of the extraordinarily ordinary nature of Thérèse’s saintliness, she pointed to a seemingly unremarkable episode as a turning point in her spiritual life. Every Christmas, she delighted in the ritual of opening the presents left in her shoes (the French version of hanging up stockings), but one year, when she was fourteen, she overheard her father complaining, “Well, fortunately, this will be the last year!” Accustomed to being babied and petted by her family, the young Thérèse burst into tears at any cross or critical word, and this sort of unkind comment would ordinarily have caused her to dissolve into sobs. Instead, as she stood on the stairs, she experienced what she described as her “complete conversion.” She forced back her tears, and instead of crying at her father’s criticism, scorning his gifts, or sulking in her room, she ran down and opened the presents joyfully. Her father laughed along with her. Thérèse realized that the saintly response to her father’s exasperation was to “Laugh out loud.”

  USE GOOD MANNERS.

  As part of my research, I’d taken the Newcastle Personality Assessor test, which I’d found in Daniel Nettle’s book Personality, and my results reminded me that I needed to work harder to use good manners. This test is short—just twelve questions—but purportedly provides an accurate assessment of an individual’s personality using the “Big Five” model that has emerged, in recent years, as the most comprehensive, dependable, and useful scientific framework. According to this five-factor model, people’s personalities can be characterized by their scores in five major dimensions:

  Extroversion: response to reward

  Neuroticism: response to threat

  Conscientiousness: response to inhibition (self-control, planning)

  Agreeableness: regard for others

  Openness to experience: breadth of mental associations

  I’d always thought “extroversion” was basically “friendliness,” but according to this scheme, a high extroversion score means that people enjoy very strong positive reactions, so that they consistently report more joy, desire, excitement, and enthusiasm. And although I’d often thrown around the word “neurotic,” I hadn’t quite grasped what it meant. Turns out that people with high neuroticism scores have very strong negative reactions—fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, disgust, sadness—very often directed at themselves.

  After answering the twelve questions, I totted up my score:

  Extroversion: low-medium

  Neuroticism: low-medium

  Conscientiousness: high

  Agreeableness: low (for a woman; if I were a man I’d be low-medium)

  Openness to experience: high

  The result struck me as quite accurate. As I’d acknowledged to myself on that subway ride back in April, when I’m in “neutral,” I’m neither particularly joyful nor particularly melancholy; I’m low-medium. I’m very conscientious. I was pleased to see that I scored high on openness to experience; I wasn’t sure how I’d do there. Most significant, I wasn’t surprised by my low agreeableness score. I knew that about myself. When I mentioned to some friends that I’d scored low on agreeableness, like true friends, they all cried as one, “Surely not! You’re very agreeable!” I suspect that my friends, as evidenced by their loyal reaction, are more agreeable than I.

  “Nothing,” wrote Tolstoy, “can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” Kindness, in everyday life, takes the form of good manners, and one way that my low agreeableness showed itself was in my thoughtless habits: I rushed past people on the sidewalk, I didn’t often check to see if anyone needed my subway seat, I was
n’t careful to say “You first,” “No, you take it!” or “Can I help?”

  In particular, to be more agreeable and kind, I needed to use better manners as a conversationalist. I was a know-it-all: “A really interesting feature of Angela Thirkell’s novels is that she sets them in Barsetshire, the imaginary English county described by Trollope.” I was a “topper”: “You think you had a crazy morning, let me tell you about my morning.” I was a deflater: “You liked that movie? I thought it was kind of boring.”

  So, to try to cure these tendencies, I looked for opportunities to make comments that showed my interest in other people’s viewpoints:

  “You’re right.”

  “You have a good memory.”

  “Tell everyone that story about how you…”

  “I hadn’t thought about that before.”

  “I see your point.”

  “What do you think?”

  Once I started focusing on my conversational style, I realized I had one particular characteristic that I urgently needed to control: I was too belligerent. The minute someone made a statement, I looked for ways to contradict it. When someone happened to say to me, “Over the next fifty years, it’s the relationship with China that will be most important to the United States,” I started searching my mind to think of counterexamples. Why? Why argue just for the sake of disagreeing? I know very little about the subject. Going to law school had intensified this inclination. I was trained to argue, and I prided myself at being good at it—but most people don’t enjoy arguing as much as law students do.

  In daily life, my argumentativeness wasn’t much of a problem, but I’d noticed that drinking alcohol made me far more combative than I usually was, plus it weakened my (not very strong) instinct for good manners. Because I never did drink much and had given up drinking twice while pregnant, and because of my metabolism, I’d developed a very low tolerance for alcohol. Again and again, I lay in my bed after some social event, thinking “Was I as obnoxious as I think?” “Why did I make my point in such a negative way?” And Jamie usually wasn’t very reassuring about how I’d behaved.

  During this month, I was determined to get control of my combativeness. I might not have thought to accomplish this by quitting drinking, except that when Jamie stopped drinking because of his hepatitis C, I’d cut back even further on my drinking to keep him company in abstinence.

  I found it such a relief to be drinking less that I decided to give up drinking practically altogether (a decision that was actually somewhat predictable, because, as I knew from my February research, the fact that Jamie gave up alcohol meant that I was five times as likely to quit drinking). Not drinking made me much happier. I’d never particularly enjoyed the taste of beer or wine—I can’t stand real liquor—I’d never enjoyed the “buzz” of alcohol, and I’d much rather spend the calories on eating rather than drinking. I did miss the idea of drinking. That’s one thing I love about Winston Churchill; I love his zest for champagne and cigars. But as one of my Secrets of Adulthood says, “What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you.” I had to accept the fact that no matter how much other people enjoyed alcohol, and despite the fact that I wished I enjoyed it, drinking wasn’t fun for me. To the contrary—it was a source of bad feeling.

  Once I gave it up, mostly, I discovered another reason that drinking had made me rude: it made me sleepy. It was much easier to be polite and agreeable when I wasn’t in an agony of exhaustion. As I’d noticed in earlier months, it’s easier to feel happier and use good manners when I make the effort to stay physically comfortable: to dress warmly (even when people make fun of my long underwear, double sweaters, or mugs of hot water), to snack more often (I seem to need to eat far more frequently than most adults do), to turn off the light as soon as I feel sleepy, and to take pain medication as soon as I have a headache. The Duke of Wellington advised, “Always make water when you can,” and I followed that precept too. It was much easier to behave pleasantly when I wasn’t shivering, scouting for a bathroom, or on my second glass of wine.

  GIVE POSITIVE REVIEWS.

  I wanted to laugh more, I wanted to show more loving-kindness, and I also wanted to be more enthusiastic. I knew that it wasn’t nice to criticize—but it was fun. Why was it so deliciously satisfying to criticize? Being critical made me feel more sophisticated and intelligent—and in fact, studies show that people who are critical are often perceived to be more discerning. In one study, for example, people judged the writers of negative book reviews as more expert and competent than the writers of positive reviews, even when the content of both reviews was deemed to be of high quality. Another study showed that people tend to think that someone who criticizes them is smarter than they are. Also, when a person disrupts a group’s unanimity, he or she lessens its social power. I’ve seen people exploit this phenomenon; when a group is cheerfully unanimous on a topic like “The teacher is doing a great job” or “This restaurant is terrific,” such a person takes the opposite position to deflate the group’s mood. Being critical has its advantages, and what’s more, it’s much easier to be hard to please. Although enthusiasm seems easy and undiscriminating, in fact, it’s much harder to embrace something than to disdain it. It’s riskier.

  When I examined my reactions to other people, I realized that I do often view people who make critical remarks as more perceptive and more discriminating. At the same time, though, it’s hard to find pleasure in the company of someone who finds nothing pleasing. I prefer the company of the more enthusiastic types, who seem less judgmental, more vital, more fun.

  For example, one evening, as part of a surprise birthday party for a close friend, we went to a Barry Manilow concert, because my friend loves Barry Manilow. Afterward, I reflected that it showed considerable strength of character to be such an avowed Barry Manilow fan. After all, Barry Manilow is…well, Barry Manilow. It would be so much safer to mock his music, or to enjoy it in an ironic, campy way, than to admire it wholeheartedly as she did. Enthusiasm is a form of social courage. What’s more, people’s assessments are very influenced by other people’s assessments. So when my friend said, “This is terrific music, this is a great concert,” her enthusiasm lifted me up.

  I wanted to embrace this kind of zest. I steeled myself to stop making certain kinds of unnecessarily negative statements: “I really don’t feel like going,” “The food was too rich,” “There’s nothing worth reading in the paper.” Instead, I tried to look for ways to be sincerely enthusiastic.

  For example, one afternoon, at Jamie’s suggestion, we left the girls with his parents while we went to a movie. When we came back to pick them up, my mother-in-law asked, “How was the movie?”

  Instead of following my inclination to say, “Well, not bad,” I answered, “It was such a treat to go see a movie in the afternoon.” That’s a response that’s much more likely to boost happiness—not only in her but also in me.

  Giving positive reviews requires humility. I have to admit, I missed the feelings of superiority that I got from using puncturing humor, sarcasm, ironic asides, cynical comments, and cutting remarks. A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence—easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.

  For the first time, I appreciated the people I knew who were unfailingly ready to be pleased. A prayer attributed to Saint Augustine of Hippo includes the line “shield your joyous ones”:

  Tend your sick ones, O Lord Jesus Christ;

  rest your weary ones; bless your dying ones;

  soothe your suffering ones; pity your afflicted ones;

  shield your joyous ones.

  And all for your love’s sake.

  At first, it struck me as odd that among prayers for the “dying” and “suffering” is a prayer for the “joyous.” Why worry about the joyous ones?

  Once I started trying to give positive reviews, though, I began to understand how much happiness I took from the joyous ones in my life—and how much effort it must take for them to be consistently g
ood-tempered and positive. It is easy to be heavy; hard to be light. We nonjoyous types suck energy and cheer from the joyous ones; we rely on them to buoy us with their good spirit and to cushion our agitation and anxiety. At the same time, because of a dark element in human nature, we’re sometimes provoked to try to shake the enthusiastic, cheery folk out of their fog of illusion—to make them see that the play was stupid, the money was wasted, the meeting was pointless. Instead of shielding their joy, we blast it. Why is this? I have no idea. But that impulse is there.

  I wrote about this prayer on my blog, and several readers who identified themselves as “joyous ones” responded.

  * * *

  This entry almost made me cry—as one of the joyful ones, I agree wholeheartedly that it can be draining too, and it takes so little to show your appreciation.

  I’m one of those people who wakes up happy every day—not because nothing ever goes wrong in my life—because I choose to be happy. Literally. For reasons I don’t fully understand, people seem ticked off that I’m in a good mood. But, they want to draw on that energy, too. It is exhausting sometimes.

  Gretchen—I am also a joyous one. I choose to be. I choose it every day. I have recently gone through a traumatic breakup because my boyfriend SO couldn’t stop blasting my joy. And yet also unrelentingly drawing upon it like a drowning person in a sea. I felt as if I was being pulled under more every day. I had to go or I wouldn’t be able to breathe anymore. I didn’t know anyone understood.

  * * *

  These comments reminded me that the joy of the joyous ones wasn’t inexhaustible or unconquerable. I started to make a real effort to use my good cheer to support the joyous ones I knew.

  To keep my resolution to “Give positive reviews,” I resolved to employ the intensive approach I’d used during the Week of Extreme Nice and the Month of Novel Writing. Maybe a week of playing Pollyanna would help accelerate my move toward the positive. In Eleanor Porter’s enormously successful 1913 novel, Pollyanna, Pollyanna plays the “glad game”: whatever happens to her, she finds a reason to be glad about it. My own game, “Pollyanna Week,” would be a solid week of no negative comments. I knew I should “Act the way I want to feel,” and if I wanted to feel enthusiastic, warm, and accepting, I wasn’t going to get there by constantly making sniping comments.