Happier at Home

by Gretchen Rubin

  I’d always loved family pictures, but the arrival of the digital camera had changed the way I dealt with them. With my old camera, I’d shoot a roll or two of film, drop it off at the photo shop, pick it up a few days later, and after I had a good stack, spend a few hours arranging photos in a photo album while watching TV. I ended up with some blurry photos, and some red-eye, but even so, I had wonderful albums.

  These days, digital cameras make it much easier to take and improve photos—but that was a curse as well as a blessing. I liked taking photographs, but turning them into permanent keepsakes now took a lot more effort. I used Shutterfly to make digital albums, and with that technology, I could eliminate red-eye, crop, and write captions, which was wonderful, but it took time. And it wasn’t time spent watching The Office reruns while mindlessly pasting in photos, as I used to do; it was time hunched in front of the computer, clicking and typing, just as I do all day long.

  Also, working on photo albums was satisfyingly manual; they were among the few things I created with my own hands.

  Manual occupations such as gardening, woodworking, cooking, doing home repairs, caring for pets, working on a car, or knitting can be deeply satisfying on many levels: the physical motion, the tangibility of the accomplishments, the pleasure of the tools, the sensory delights of the materials. (Of course, to some people, these same activities counted as drudgery. Secret of Adulthood: Just because something is fun for someone else doesn’t mean it’s fun for you—and vice versa.) Even activities that are clearly highly creative—editing a video or designing a website—don’t offer quite the same kind of tactile gratification, while activities so simple they hardly qualified as “creative”—building a fire or organizing a drawer—were deeply satisfying in this concrete way.

  I’d never been able to master anything as complicated as needlepoint (and I’d tried), but even I got satisfaction from handmade creations; as a child, I stuffed whole cloves into apples to make pomander balls by the dozens, and I labored over my “blank books” of illustrated quotations; in college, I handed out beaded bracelets to my friends. I’d enjoyed making the photo albums. Now, however, making an album meant more time in front of a screen, and as a result, I never felt like dealing with it. My camera and phone held an alarming backlog.

  Seeing rows of photographs that existed only in digital form made me anxious, because I worried that a computer crash, or advancing technology, could wipe them away. A physical album could be destroyed by fire or flood, but it somehow seemed safer—and it was certainly more fun to sit with my daughters and turn the pages of an album than it was to crowd around a screen and scroll through digital images.

  On the one hand, I wanted to make a lavish, lovely album—photographs carefully edited and arranged, with lengthy, well-written captions to remind us, in future years, of all our adventures. But whenever I thought about the task of figuring out again how to turn hundreds of digital photos into albums, I felt desperate. I’d let so much time go by since the last album that I hardly knew where to start.

  I’d been promising myself that I’d organize an album “in my free time,” but the fact is, I never have any free time. I never wander aimlessly through the apartment, looking for something to do. But making the album was a priority for me, so I wrote it on my calendar like a visit to the pediatrician. I would suffer for just fifteen minutes a day.

  Starting January 1, each afternoon, I set the timer on my phone for fifteen minutes and doggedly used the time to work on my photos. (I amused myself by changing the alarm sound every day. My favorite: crickets.) I wasn’t going to plan how many days it would take to finish this job, because I knew that whatever I predicted, it would take longer: The “planning fallacy” describes the widespread psychological tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete a task.

  Maybe it’s an aspect of my all-or-nothing abstainer personality, but counterintuitively, I’ve found that when I was trying to prod myself to do something, it came more easily when I did it every day. It was easier to post to my blog every day of the week than to post three days a week, easier to go for a twenty-minute walk every day rather than just some days. No debating “Today or tomorrow?” or “Do I get this day off?” No excuses.

  As it turned out, making the album wasn’t such an awful task, once I actually got started. At first, it seemed very inefficient to work for such a short period. I spent the first fifteen minutes just deleting unwanted photos from my camera.

  After I’d eliminated the photos I didn’t want, I had to figure out how to upload the rest. For the next few sessions, by the time I figured out what I was supposed to be doing, the time was up, and I didn’t allow myself to continue into minute sixteen. In the end, I used the “Simple Path” feature to arrange the pictures automatically. I hesitated before indulging in this shortcut, then repeated one of my favorite Secrets of Adulthood, cribbed from Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” My desire to create the perfect photo album was preventing me from working on one at all. I should do a good-enough job and get it done. I didn’t write captions, I didn’t crop, I didn’t do a lot of things that would have improved the pictures, but I got the job done. I was finally completely up to date, and I finished two huge albums. Ah, the thrill of finally pushing “Order album”!

  Once those albums arrived in the mail, I tackled the next phase of the project, by handwriting captions for the photos. This took several sittings, but at last, I finished. My handwriting was messy, and I could’ve written longer, more interesting captions—but I’d finished. I felt an enormous sense of relief.

  Now that I was caught up, how could I prevent myself from getting buried under photographs again? I flipped forward a few months in my calendar and made a note on the day we were scheduled to return from spring break: “Make a new photo album.”

  Once the albums were safely on the shelf, I experienced a phenomenon that I’d noticed over and over with my happiness project: Completing one challenging task supplies the energy to tackle another challenging task. After the photos were under control, I turned to the confusing jumble of our family videos, which were stored on outdated miniature cassette tapes and discs. Dealing with the tapes required me to do nothing more than pay (a lot) to have them transferred to DVDs—but I’d procrastinated for years about doing even that. A messy heap of eight mini-VHS tapes and eight mini-DVDs slimmed down to three standard DVDs.

  My fifteen-minute sufferings showed me how much I could accomplish when I did a manageable amount of work, on a regular basis. As Anthony Trollope, the preternaturally prolific novelist who also managed to revolutionize the British postal service, observed, “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.” This task had seemed so intimidating, but by faithfully doing a small bit at a time, I’d managed to achieve something large. And really, it hadn’t been very difficult, once I finally started.

  GO ON MONTHLY ADVENTURES WITH JAMIE

  Researchers into psychology have long sought to devise the most comprehensive, elegant framework to capture the mystery of personality, and in recent years, the “Big Five” model has emerged as the most useful. It measures personality according to five factors:

  1. Openness to experience—breadth of mental associations

  2. Conscientiousness—response to inhibition (self-control, planning)

  3. Extraversion—response to reward

  4. Agreeableness—regard for others

  5. Neuroticism—response to threat

  (When put in that order, the five factors spell out the helpful mnemonic OCEAN.)

  When I took the Newcastle Personality Assessor test to measure myself according to these five factors, I scored as very “conscientious,” which didn’t surprise me. I always hand in my work on time. I go to the gym fairly often. I resist most treats. I pay bills promptly. My children always get their vaccinations. (Though for some reason, I’ve never managed to floss regularly.) In fact, my conscientiousness is
one of my favorite things about myself.

  Jamie is very conscientious, too. His conscientiousness isn’t always triggered by the tasks that I wish he’d tackle—for instance, picking up phone messages doesn’t make his list—but about things that really matter, he’s utterly reliable. A wonderful quality in a spouse.

  Because we share this inclination, we respect it in each other. I don’t tell him to get off his laptop, and he doesn’t protest if I say, “I need to go to the library for a few hours on Saturday.” We both hate to be late, so we spend a lot of time waiting for airplanes to begin to board or for movies to start.

  Conscientiousness makes many things in life easier, and research even suggests that this trait may be a key factor in longevity. But there’s a downside to this conscientiousness: Jamie and I can’t turn it on and off. A vigilant conscience is a rough taskmaster. As a couple, we work hard and don’t goof around much. We almost never drink. We spend a lot of time on the computer. We don’t take much vacation. We rarely stray from our neighborhood or vary our routine. Although this way of life generally suits us, I wondered if Jamie and I should have a little more fun together.

  For, just as I needed to be wary of my urge to simplify, I also needed to guard against becoming too abstemious, too wed to my productive routines. I didn’t want to go to sleep at 10 p.m. every night. “I now defend myself from temperance as I used to do against voluptuousness,” Montaigne admitted. “Wisdom has its excesses and has no less need of moderation than folly.” Or, as I told myself, do nothing in excess, not even moderation.

  Although research shows that novelty and challenge boost happiness, when I started my study of happiness, I was convinced that this wasn’t true for me. For me, I believed, familiarity and mastery were keys to happiness. But when I pushed myself, I discovered—no! Even for someone like me, novelty and challenge serve as huge engines of happiness. It’s a happiness paradox: Control and mastery bring happiness; so do surprises, novelty, and challenge. In fact, positive events make us happier when they’re not predictable, because the surprise makes the experience more intense.

  In the case of couples, novelty and excitement stimulate the brain chemicals that are present during courtship. Studies show that doing something “exciting” (something a couple doesn’t usually do, like biking) gives a bigger romantic boost than doing something “pleasant” (like going to a movie), but even small steps, such as going to new restaurants or seeing different sets of friends, can help lift marital happiness.

  Nevertheless, Jamie and I both experienced a lot of novelty and challenge in our work. Sometimes, too much novelty and challenge. Would we be happier if our marriage was a refuge of comfort, calm, and order—or should we be more adventurous? On a free night, were we better off reading in bed and going to sleep early (which is what we usually felt like doing), or pushing ourselves to go to a cooking class?

  Well, the studies were quite clear: We’d be happier if we did new things. And I wanted to be more active in making fun plans; almost always, it was Jamie who suggested that we take a trip, see a movie, or even go out for frozen yogurt. Also, as much as we loved to be with Eliza and Eleanor, it would be nice to have more adult time. In her book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, Laura Vanderkam points out that in general, married people with children tend to spend less time with each other, alone, than they did in the past. In 1975, they clocked 12.4 hours each week; by 2000, it was 9.1 hours.

  Although I recognized the irony, I decided that we needed to work harder at play; I would try to schedule time for us to be spontaneous. But how? My weekly adventures with Eliza gave me an idea. Maybe Jamie and I could do something like that. As I’d done with the resolution to “Give warm greetings and farewells,” I decided to flout my Sixth Splendid Truth, “The only person I can change is myself.” For the second time, I would break that truth, to try to convince Jamie to adopt a resolution with me.

  I raised the issue with Jamie one night. “You know how Eliza and I have been doing our weekly adventures?” I asked as we walked down the street to our apartment.

  He nodded. “That’s really a nice thing. I’m glad you’re doing it. Where did you go yesterday?”

  “We went to see an exhibit of children’s book illustrations, lots of fun. Actually, I was thinking that you and I could do something along those lines. Not once a week, that’s too often. But how about planning an adventure, for the two of us, once a month?”

  “What do you want to do?” he asked. “Go to the circus?”

  “Well, we could walk around some unfamiliar part of town, we both love doing that. We could go to the Apple store and take an iPad class. We could go to a great bookstore.”

  “Hmmph” was his only response.

  I let the issue drop. I knew that sometimes it was helpful to introduce an idea to Jamie, let it sink in, then raise it another day, instead of bringing it up at thirty-minute intervals, as I’m inclined to do.

  I waited a few weeks. Then, when we were waiting for our turn to go into Eleanor’s parent-teacher conference, I raised the issue again.

  “What about the monthly adventures?” I asked. “Do you want to give that a try?”

  Jamie cocked his head thoughtfully, then bent over his phone without answering. I bit my tongue. “He’s deliberately being rude!” I thought. “How many times have I told him how much I hate it when he doesn’t answer me?” Then the resolution to “Make the positive argument” flashed through my mind, and I reminded myself, “He’s not deliberately being rude.” And, I realized, he wasn’t. Not deliberately.

  Again, I let some weeks pass, then made one final attempt. We’d told Eliza and Eleanor that we would let them stay home without a grown-up for the first time (another bittersweet milestone), so we ran errands for an hour. On our way home, I said, “So what about the monthly adventures? What do you think?”

  “What monthly adventures?” Jamie asked.

  “You know,” I said in a deliberately calm voice, “like the weekly adventures I do with Eliza, some plan for you and me, once a month.”

  “It sounds fun, but so many things are coming up.” Jamie sighed. “In theory, I’d like to do it, but I just don’t think it would stay on the calendar. Is that okay?” He put his arm around me.

  “It’s okay,” I reassured him. “I understand how you feel.”

  I did understand, and I wasn’t going to press the issue further. The Sixth Splendid Truth was indeed true. In the end, I can make resolutions only for myself. As Elizabeth says of creative projects, “You want volunteers, not recruits.” I didn’t want to create an occasion for nagging, rescheduling, and resentment between us.

  And to be honest, I was a bit relieved by Jamie’s reluctance to adopt this resolution. Was it really a good idea to add another item to our already hectic schedules? “My husband and I had a weekly ‘date night’ for years,” a friend told me, “but lately, all we did on those nights was argue. Now we set aside that night to relax at home with our daughter, and we go to bed early. If we fight, at least we’re not paying a babysitter!”

  Jamie and I were in the rush hour of life, and we were busy and tired. Thanks mostly to Jamie’s efforts, we did make time to go to movies, just the two of us, and to have the occasional dinner with friends; if adding a monthly adventure felt like a burden, instead of a treat, we wouldn’t enjoy it. Maybe in a few years, I’d raise the idea again. Around the same time, at the end of January, my emotional energy flagged. I felt trapped in a kind of Groundhog Day of happiness (the timing was fitting, given that the actual Groundhog Day was approaching). When I looked back at my Resolutions Charts from the previous months, I saw rows of Xs on certain pages; the same resolutions defeated me, over and over. I wasn’t making much progress.

  I was tired of the persistent dissatisfaction of the shelf-by-shelf exercise. Nothing stayed done; I cleared a shelf, and a few weeks later, it was covered with another mess. I replaced one lightbulb, then another bulb burned out. I resented having to get my
hair cut again.

  Even worse than these repeated, dreary tasks were my faults, which never seemed to improve. I made the same resolutions, month after month, and I kept backsliding on some of the most important ones, over and over. I was weary of myself—my broken promises to do better, my small-minded grudges, my wearisome fears, my narrow preoccupations. I spoke sharply to my daughters. I still dreaded driving. I didn’t appreciate the present moment.

  Disagreeable aspects of myself—even those I usually accepted without much unhappiness—nagged at me. My hair twisting, for instance. I’ve been twisting my red hair my whole life; once I’d expected to outgrow the habit, but now I know I never will. I wouldn’t be bothered by my hair twisting, except that I break off my hair (that’s the fun part), and though other people probably don’t notice, the sight of that ragged line of broken hair had started to rankle.

  Also, my bad temper kept flaring up. One morning, I somehow set off a muscle spasm when I turned my head at the kitchen sink. It hurt like crazy, and I had a busy day ahead of me. As was his custom, Jamie listened to me describe the pain for a few minutes, then adopted an attitude of “Well, let’s not let this affect our day.”

  Eliza announced, “I’m leaving now,” and we all took a moment to give her a warm farewell. Then I said to Jamie, “You make sure Eleanor gets dressed. I need to take something for the pain.”

  Ten minutes later, Jamie stepped out of Eleanor’s room to give me a good-bye kiss. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Is Eleanor already dressed?” I asked in surprise.

  “She said she’s going to get dressed herself.”

  I glanced into her room. Eleanor sat naked on the floor, obviously sulking.