The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

  A vision came to me as if in a dream; then I needed authority to execute it.

  I called my father-in-law at the office. “Hi, Bob. I’m calling to talk about plans for Judy’s birthday.”

  “That’s a little far off, don’t you think?”

  “Not really, not if we want to plan something special. And I think we should.”

  Pause.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I’d been thinking—”

  “Because I have an idea, if you’d like to hear what I think might be fun.”

  “Oh yes,” he said with relief, “what do you have in mind?”

  Bob immediately signed on to my plan. He’s a very good sport about dealing with many kinds of tiresome family tasks and obligations, but this kind of project didn’t play to his strengths. In fact, everyone in the family cooperated happily. They wanted Judy to have a wonderful birthday, too; they just weren’t inclined to do the kind of planning it would require.

  In pursuit of my vision, I took complete control. A few days before the party, I sent around an e-mail to Jamie, Bob, Phil, and Lauren—and, to their credit, I didn’t get a single snarky e-mail in response:

  Hello all—Judy’s birthday party is just four days away.

  We want a PILE of WRAPPED presents. This means you! One is not enough!

  Bob: Eliza and I wrapped your present. Are you bringing champagne?

  Jamie: have you bought the present from you and me?

  Phil and Lauren: what are you making for dinner—is there anything special I need to have on hand? what time do you need to arrive? white wine or red wine with the food? Did you say you were making menu cards? I think Judy would think that was hilarious.

  Everyone: I know I’d open myself up for family scorn if I instructed everyone that it was inappropriate to wear your I-just-rolled-off-the-couch-to-amble-over-to-your-party clothes. So I won’t say a word about that. Just remember that it is the sense of occasion and thoughtfulness that will make it a great night.

  This will be fun! xx g

  I did a lot of preparation for this party. Eliza and I went to the “Our Name Is Mud” pottery store, where Eliza decorated dinner plates with theater themes, reflecting her grandmother’s passion. We spent a pleasant hour (yes, hour) scrolling through the Colette’s Cakes Web site to choose the prettiest cake. Jamie and I shot a DVD of Eliza singing a selection of Judy’s favorite songs, with Eleanor toddling through the action.

  On the night of the party, before everyone was due to arrive at 6:30 P.M., I began my anxious last-minute tidying. My mother loves to entertain, and from her I inherited a propensity to preparty jitters, which we call “hostess neurosis” experienced family members know to drift out of sight lest they be conscripted into sudden vacuuming. But when Jamie emerged from hiding at 6:29 P.M., he was wearing khakis, a plaid shirt, and no shoes.

  I took a moment; then, careful to use a light tone, I remarked, “I wish you were wearing something a little nicer.”

  Jamie looked as if he took a moment, then answered, “I’ll put on a nicer pair of pants, is that okay?” Then he went up and changed his pants and his shirt and put on shoes, too.

  The evening unfolded exactly as I’d hoped. Before the adults sat down for dinner, the granddaughters ate chicken salad sandwiches—Judy’s favorite—with their grandmother. We presented the birthday cake while the girls were still awake so they could sing “Happy Birthday” and eat a piece. Then we packed the girls off to bed, and the adults sat down to eat (Indian food, Judy’s favorite).

  “This was really a perfect evening,” Judy said as everyone stood up to go. “I loved everything about it. My presents, the food, the cake—really, everything was wonderful.” It was obvious that Judy really did enjoy the party, and everyone was pleased to have played a part, but I think I enjoyed it most of all. I was so happy that it had turned out just right.

  The party underscored the truth of the third of my Twelve Commandments: “Act the way I want to feel.” Although I might have predicted that organizing the party would make me feel resentful, in fact, acting in a loving way amplified my loving feelings toward everyone in the family, particularly Judy.

  I must admit, however, that at times before the party, I felt that Jamie and the others weren’t appreciative enough. I was happy to do the planning, and I would’ve been annoyed if anyone else had tried to take over, but still I wanted my gold star. I wanted Jamie, Bob, or Phil to say, “Wow, Gretchen, you’re really putting together a terrific evening! Thanks so much for your brilliant, creative, and thoughtful planning!” That wasn’t going to happen—so let it go. Do it for myself.

  But Jamie knows me very well. While Judy was opening her gifts, Jamie pulled a box from a shelf and handed it to me.

  “This is for you,” he said.

  “For me?” I was surprised and pleased. “Why do I get a present?” Jamie didn’t answer, but I knew.

  I opened the box to find a beautiful necklace made of polished wooden beads. “I love it!” I said as I tried it on. Maybe I shouldn’t have needed the recognition, but Jamie was right, I did.

  One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the most extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen you. I remember being astonished when, after I pointed out my new boyfriend, Jamie, to my law school roommate, she admitted, “I’ve never seen him before.” I honestly couldn’t imagine that everyone’s eyes weren’t drawn to him every time he walked down the hallway or into the dining hall.

  Over time, however, spouses start to take each other for granted. Jamie is my fate. He’s my soul mate. He pervades my whole existence. So, of course, I often ignore him.

  The more readily you respond to a spouse’s bids for attention, the stronger your marriage—but it’s easy to fall into bad habits. Too often I hear myself murmuring “Mmm-hmmm,” with my eyes glued to the book I’m reading as Jamie makes a joke or starts a conversation. Also, marriage has a strange muffling effect on some kinds of deep communication. Most married people have probably had the experience of hearing their spouse make a startling revelation to a stranger at a barbecue; it’s hard to have reflective, probing conversations during the tumult of daily life.

  I’d fallen into the bad marriage habit of being less considerate of Jamie than I was of other people. As part of my resolution to “Give proofs of love,” I tried to think of small treats or courtesies for Jamie. One night when some friends came over, after taking everyone else’s drink order, I added, “How about you, Jamie? What would you like?” Usually I just worry about taking care of the guests, so Jamie looked surprised but pleased. His travel toiletry kit was falling apart, so I bought him a new one and loaded it with travel supplies. I left the new Sports Illustrated out on the table, so he’d see it when he walked in the door from work.

  One way to make sure that you’re paying attention to your spouse is to spend time alone together, and marriage experts universally advise that couples have frequent child-free “date nights.” One of my happiness project challenges, however, was to figure out what recommendations to ignore, and I couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for “date nights.” Jamie and I seem to go out a lot, to various school, work, or friend functions, and we like to stay home when we can. I dreaded the thought of adding another item to the schedule.

  Plus I figured Jamie would never go along with it.

  Jamie surprised me when I floated the idea. “We can if you want,” he said. “It might be fun to go see a movie or have dinner, the two of us. But we go out so much, it’s nice to stay in.” I agreed, but it made me happy that even though he didn’t want to do it, he agreed with the goal.

  In addition to ignoring some expert advice, I also sought the advice of nonexperts. One night, when my book group didn’t have much to say about the book we’d picked, I asked for my friends’ suggestions about marriage.

  “You should both go to bed at the same time,” said one friend. “No matter what, something good will come of it. You’ll get more sleep or hav
e sex or have a conversation.”

  “Before I got married, my boss told me that the secret to a strong marriage is to leave at least three things unsaid each day.”

  “My husband and I never criticize each other for more than one thing at a time.”

  “My Quaker grandparents, who were married seventy-two years, said that each married couple should have an outdoor game, like tennis or golf, and an indoor game, like Scrabble or gin, that they play together.”

  When I got home, I told Jamie that rule, and the next day he brought home a backgammon set.

  I’d been working on giving proofs of love when I decided to push myself to the highest level of proof: a Week of Extreme Nice.

  What was “Extreme Nice”? It was an extreme sport, like bungee jumping or skydiving, that stretched me beyond my ordinary efforts, that showed me new depths within myself. All done in the comfort of my own home. For a week, I was extremely nice to Jamie. No criticism! No snapping! No nagging! I even offered to drop his shoes off at the shoe-repair shop before he asked me!

  Extreme Nice reminded me to aim for a high standard of behavior. It’s not right that I show more consideration to my friends or family than to Jamie, the love of my life. We wouldn’t be able to live together forever without a disagreement, but I should be able to go more than a week without nagging him. In a way, of course, the entire month of February was an exercise in Extreme Nice, because all my resolutions worked to Jamie’s benefit. But for this week, I was going to take my niceness to a dramatic new level.

  Too often I focused on the things that annoyed me: Jamie postponed making scheduling decisions; he didn’t answer my e-mails; he didn’t appreciate what I do to make our lives run smoothly. Instead, I should have thought about all the things I love about him. He’s kind, funny, brilliant, thoughtful, loving, ambitious, sweet, a good father, son, and son-in-law, bizarrely well informed on a wide range of subjects, creative, hardworking, magnanimous. He kisses me and says, “I love you,” every night before we go to sleep, he comes to my side at parties and puts his arm around me, he rarely shows irritation or criticizes me. He even has a full head of hair.

  On the first morning of Extreme Nice, Jamie asked tentatively, “I’d like to get up and go to the gym and get it over with. Okay?” He’s compulsive about going to the gym.

  Instead of giving him a pained look or a grudging “Okay, but go ahead and go now so you can get back soon, we promised the girls we’d go to the park,” I said, “Sure, no problem!”

  It wasn’t easy.

  A moment of reframing helped. How would I feel if Jamie never wanted to go to the gym—or worse, if he couldn’t go? I have a gorgeous, athletic husband. How lucky I am that he wants to go to the gym.

  During the week of Extreme Nice, when Jamie sneaked into our bedroom to take a nap, I let him sleep while I made lunch for Eliza and Eleanor; I kept our bathroom tidy instead of leaving bottles and tubes scattered over the counter; he rented The Aristocrats, and I said, “Great!” I stopped leaving Popsicle wrappers all over the apartment. As pathetic as it is to report, each of these instances took considerable restraint on my part.

  Because of Extreme Nice, when I discovered one night that Jamie had thrown away The Economist and the Entertainment Weekly that I hadn’t read yet, I didn’t badger him about it. When I woke up the next morning, I saw how insignificant it was and was relieved I hadn’t indulged in a scene.

  I’d always followed the adage “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger,” which meant, in practical terms, that I scrupulously aired every annoyance as soon as possible, to make sure I had my chance to vent my bad feelings before bedtime. I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that “letting off steam” is healthy or constructive. In fact, studies show that aggressively expressing anger doesn’t relieve anger but amplifies it. On the other hand, not expressing anger often allows it to disappear without leaving ugly traces.

  Extreme Nice also started me thinking about the degree to which Jamie and I accepted orders from each other. It’s safe to say that married people spend a lot of time trying to coax each other into performing various chores, and the ability to cooperate in tackling daily tasks is a key component of a happy marriage. Often I wish I could tell Jamie, “Call the super” or “Unload the dishwasher,” and have him obey me unhesitatingly. And I’m sure he wishes he could say, “Don’t eat outside the kitchen” or “Find the keys to the basement storage room,” and have me obey him. So I tried to do cheerfully whatever he asked me to do, without debate.

  As the days went by, I did feel a bit of resentment when Jamie never seemed to notice that he was the winner of a Week of Extreme Nice. Then I realized that I should be pleased that he didn’t notice, because it showed that the Week of Extreme Nice wasn’t a shocking improvement over our regular, unextreme lives.

  The Week of Extreme Nice proved the power of my commandment to “Act the way I want to feel” because I was treating Jamie extremely nicely, I found myself feeling more tender toward him. Nevertheless, although it was a valuable experiment, I was relieved when the week was over. I couldn’t keep up the intensity of being that Nice. My tongue hurt because I’d bitten it so often.

  As I was filling in my Resolutions Chart on the last afternoon of February, I was struck by the significance of the chart to my happiness project. The process of constantly reviewing my resolutions and holding myself accountable each day was already having a big effect on my behavior, and it wasn’t even March yet. I’d made dozens of resolutions in my life—every New Year since I was nine or ten years old—but keeping the Resolutions Chart was allowing me to live up to my resolutions more faithfully than I’d even been able to do before. I’d heard the business school truism “You manage what you measure,” and I could see how this phenomenon worked in my case.

  The end of February brought me another important realization as well. For a long time, I’d been puzzling to come up with an overall theory of happiness, and one afternoon, after many false starts, I arrived at my earth-shattering happiness formula.

  It hit me while I was on the subway. I was reading Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer’s Happiness and Economics, and I looked up for a moment to ponder the meaning of the sentence “It has been shown that pleasant affect, unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction are separable constructs.” Along the same lines, I’d just read some research that showed that happiness and unhappiness (or, in more scientific terms, positive affect and negative affect) aren’t opposite sides of the same emotion—they’re distinct and rise and fall independently. Suddenly, as I thought about these ideas and about my own experience so far, everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head.

  To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.

  So simple, yet so profound. It looks like something you might read on the cover of a glossy magazine, but it had taken enormous effort to come up with a framework that ordered and distilled everything I’d learned.

  To be happy, I needed to generate more positive emotions, so that I increased the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy, and friendship in my life. That wasn’t hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger, envy, boredom, and irritation. Also easy to understand. And apart from feeling more “good” and feeling less “bad,” I saw that I also needed to consider feeling right.

  “Feeling right” was a trickier concept: it was the feeling that I’m living the life I’m supposed to lead. In my own case, although I’d had a great experience as a lawyer, I’d been haunted by an uncomfortable feeling—that I wasn’t doing what I was “supposed” to be doing. Now, though my writing career can be a source of “feeling bad” as well as “feeling good,” I do “f
eel right.”

  “Feeling right” is about living the life that’s right for you—in occupation, location, marital status, and so on. It’s also about virtue: doing your duty, living up to the expectations you set for yourself. For some people, “feeling right” can also include less elevated considerations: achieving a certain job status or material standard of living.

  After the first few minutes, the ecstasy of discovering my formula wore off, and I realized that it wasn’t quite complete. It was lacking some important element. I searched for a way to account for the fact that people seem programmed to be striving constantly, to be stretching toward happiness. For example, we tend to think that we’ll be slightly happier in the future than we are in the present. And a sense of purpose is very important to happiness. But my formula didn’t account for these observations. I searched for the missing concept—was it striving? Advancement? Purpose? Hope? None of these words seemed right. Then I thought of a line from William Butler Yeats. “Happiness,” wrote Yeats, “is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.” Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal attainment but the process of striving after goals—that is, growth—that brings happiness.

  Of course. Growth. Growth explains the happiness brought by training for a marathon, learning a new language, collecting stamps; by helping children learn to talk; by cooking your way through every recipe in a Julia Child cookbook. My father was a great tennis player and played a lot when I was growing up. At some point, he started playing golf and, over time, gave up tennis. I asked him why. “My tennis game,” he explained, “was gradually getting worse, but my golf game is improving.”