The Happiness Project

by Gretchen Rubin

  “Well, no.”

  “You didn’t have Jamie score you each day or keep a mood chart on yourself or anything like that?”

  “Nope.”

  “So maybe you aren’t any happier, you just think you are.”

  “Well,” I conceded, “maybe it’s my imagination…but no. I know I’m happier.”

  “How?”

  “I feel happier!”

  It was really true.

  My First Splendid Truth says that if I want to be happier, I need to look at my life and think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth. I’d worked on all these elements, and it had made an enormous difference.

  For me, it turned out, the most significant prong was the feeling bad. My biggest happiness boosts had come from eliminating the bad feelings generated by my snapping, nagging, gossiping, being surrounded by clutter, eating fake food, drinking, and all the rest. In particular, it made me happier to be in better control of my sharp tongue. Nowadays I often managed to pause and change my tone, just a second before I started to rant, or to change my tone in midsentence. I’d even managed to laugh while chiding Jamie—about not dealing with the insurance forms or not looking for his missing library book.

  At the same time, I was having more feeling good—more laughing with my family, talking about children’s literature with my book group, listening to music I liked. I’d learned a lot of ways to get more bang for my happiness buck.

  Feeling right had been very important to my happiness when I was struggling with the question of whether to switch from law to writing, but it hadn’t been the source of many of my resolutions over the past months. At the start of December, however, I was hit by the idea for a goal I wanted to undertake to “feel right” in the coming year: I wanted to get involved in the issue of organ donation. We all hoped that Jamie would never need a liver transplant, of course, but his hepatitis C had made me much more interested in the issue. If I could figure out some small way, myself, to help boost the number of organ donations in the country, I’d feel as though I’d been able to transform an unfortunate personal situation into some larger good. I’d already started gathering a list of names and resources that I wanted to check out. I didn’t particularly enjoy this work, but I could see that this project would make me feel right.

  But what had surprised me most about the First Splendid Truth was the importance of the final prong, the atmosphere of growth. I hadn’t ascribed much weight to it, even when I’d identified it as the fourth element of happiness. My happiness project had proved to me, however, that the atmosphere of growth was a huge contributor to happiness. Although my instinct was to shy away from novelty and challenge, in fact they are a key source of happiness, even for an unadventurous soul like me. In particular, I’d seen how the atmosphere of growth provided by my blog had become an enormous source of happiness. My successful mastery of that skill had given me feelings of gratification and mastery that in turn had energized me to push myself even harder.

  There was another question that people kept asking me: “What about Jamie—has he changed, is he happier?” One thing I knew: Jamie wouldn’t be very happy if I pestered him to provide a comprehensive analysis of his emotional state. Even so, one night I couldn’t resist asking him, “Do you think my happiness project has made you happier? Do you think you’ve changed at all?”

  “Nope,” he answered.

  But he had changed. Without any nagging on my part, he was taking on tasks, such as doing holiday shopping or putting our finances on Quicken, that he’d never done before. He was much better about doing little chores like answering my e-mails and emptying the diaper pail now than he’d been a year ago. Not only did he remember my birthday this month—he wished me “Happy Birthday” the minute we woke up that morning—he organized a family party, got me a present, and took photos (he never takes photos).

  He’d absorbed more of my happiness talk than I’d realized, too. One day when we were out doing errands, I overheard him say to Eliza, “When we get to the Container Store, you’re going to see something very interesting. Mommy is going to buy something for $5 that’s going to make her extremely happy. Very little things can make a person happy, it doesn’t matter how expensive something is.” The item in question? A sponge holder that fastens to the side of the sink with suction cups. I’d coveted one ever since I spotted this device in my brother-and sister-in-law’s apartment. And Jamie was right, I was made extremely happy by that purchase—but he would never have made an observation like that last year. But of all the happiness-boosting things he did, my favorite was the e-mail he sent me after I was angry that he hadn’t made a phone call that he’d promised to make:

  From: Rubin James

  To: Gretchen Rubin

  Subject: don’t be mad—see below

  I confess that when I started the happiness project, I feared that if I stopped nagging and complaining, Jamie would leave all the work to me. That didn’t happen. Now, correlation is not causation, so maybe my happiness project had nothing to do with the ways in which he changed—but for whatever reason, the atmosphere in our house was happier. That’s not a very scientific standard of measurement. Maybe I was seeing what I wanted to see. Maybe, but who cares?

  If I think I’m happier, I am happier. That’s the Fourth Splendid Truth. The Fourth Splendid Truth may have been the last Splendid Truth I identified, but in fact I’d understood it on some level from that first moment on the bus, when I had the idea for my happiness project. I’m not happy unless I think I’m happy—and by pushing myself to be mindful of my happiness, I can truly experience it.

  Although the First Splendid Truth was extremely valuable in showing me how to change my life to be happier, the Second Splendid Truth was more important to my understanding of the nature of happiness.

  One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy.

  One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.

  The Second Splendid Truth made clear to me why working to be happy isn’t a selfish goal and why, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” When I was feeling unhappy, I felt dispirited, lethargic, defensive, and uninterested in other people; even worse, when I felt angry or resentful, I searched for excuses to feel even more angry and resentful. On the other hand, when I felt happy, I was more likely to be lighthearted, generous, creative, kind, encouraging, and helpful.

  December was a crazy time for my sister, Elizabeth. She and her writing partner were writing a pilot for a network TV show (one of the most important work opportunities she’d ever had), she and her fiancé, Adam, had just bought a house, she was planning their wedding, and she was dealing with her recent diagnosis of diabetes. I really wished that I could do something for Elizabeth—then I thought of something I could do.

  I called her up. “Hey, guess what?”

  “What?” she said, sounding harried.

  “I’ve been feeling bad about all the stress you have right now, so I’ve decided”—I paused for effect—“to do your holiday shopping for you!”

  “Gretch, would you really?” she said. “That would be so great.” Elizabeth’s stress must have been as bad as I’d thought; she didn’t even pretend to resist the offer.

  “I’m happy to do it!” I told her. And I was. Hearing the relief and happiness in her voice made me very happy. Would I have offered to do her shopping, as well as mine, if I’d been feeling unhappy? No. Would it have even occurred to me to try to help her out? Probably not.

  The Third Splendid Truth was a different kind of truth. “The days are long, but the years are short” reminded me to stay in the moment, to appreciate the seasons, and to revel in this time of life—December’s yuletide atmosphere, the girls’ little matching cherry nightgowns, the elaborate bath-time routine.

  Most nights, I spent the time before bed racing around, trying to get organized for the morning, or cra
shed in bed with a book. But Jamie has a lovely habit. We call it “gazing lovingly.” Every few weeks, he’ll say to me, “Come on, let’s gaze lovingly,” and we go look at Eliza and Eleanor as they sleep.

  The other night he pulled me away from the computer. “No, I’ve got too much to do,” I told him. “I need to finish a few things before tomorrow. You go ahead.”

  But he wouldn’t listen, so finally I went with him to stand in Eleanor’s doorway. We “gazed lovingly” at her small figure flung across the huge pile of books that she insisted on keeping in her crib.

  I said to him, “Someday we’ll look back and it will be hard to remember that we ever had such little kids. We’ll say, ‘Remember when Eleanor still used her purple sippy cup or when Eliza wore ruby slippers all the time?’”

  He squeezed my hand. “We’ll say, ‘That was such a happy time.’”

  The days are long, but the years are short.

  During the year, when people had asked me, “So what’s the secret to happiness?,” at different times I’d answer “Exercise” or “Sleep” or “Do good, feel good” or “Strengthen your connections to other people.” But by the end of December, I’d realized that the most helpful aspect of my happiness project hadn’t been these resolutions, or the Four Splendid Truths I’d identified, or the science I’d learned, or all the high-minded books I’d read. The single most effective step for me had been to keep my Resolutions Chart.

  When I’d started, I’d viewed my chart as just another fun thing to experiment with, like the gratitude notebook. But it had turned out to be tremendously important. Making the resolutions wasn’t the hardest part of the happiness project (though it was harder than I expected, in some cases, to identify the appropriate resolution); following through was the hardest part. The desire to change was meaningless if I couldn’t find a way to make the change happen.

  By providing an opportunity for constant review and accountability, the Resolutions Chart kept me plugging away. The phrases “Lighten up,” “Give proofs of love,” and “Cut people slack” flashed through my consciousness constantly, and I often changed my actions in consequence. When I was annoyed when the woman working next to me at the library kept sighing noisily, I tried to “Imitate a spiritual master” Saint Thérèse tells the story of how she once broke into a sweat at the effort to conquer her annoyance when a fellow nun made maddening clicking noises during evening prayers. Even if I didn’t do a perfect job with my resolutions, I did do better, and the more I kept my resolutions, the happier I was.

  I’d noticed idly that a lot of people use the term “goal” instead of “resolution,” and one day in December, it struck me that this difference was in fact significant. You hit a goal, you keep a resolution. “Run a marathon” makes a good goal. It’s specific, it’s easy to measure success, and once you’ve done it, you’ve done it. “Sing in the morning” and “Exercise better” are better cast as resolutions. You won’t wake up one day and find that you’ve achieved it. It’s something that you have to resolve to do every day, forever. Striving toward a goal provides the atmosphere of growth so important to happiness, but it can be easy to get discouraged if reaching the goal is more difficult than you expected. Also, what happens once you’ve reached your goal? Say you’ve run the marathon. What now—do you stop exercising? Do you set a new goal? With resolutions, the expectations are different. Each day I try to live up to my resolutions. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but every day is a clean slate and a fresh opportunity. I never expect to be done with my resolutions, so I don’t get discouraged when they stay challenging. Which they do.

  With each passing month, too, I realized the importance of my First Commandment, “Be Gretchen.” As great minds throughout the ages have pointed out, one of our most pressing concerns should be to discover the laws of our own nature. I had to build my happiness on the foundation of my character; I had to acknowledge what really made me happy, not what I wished made me happy. One of the biggest surprises of the happiness project was just how hard it was to know myself. I’d always been slightly exasperated by philosophers’ constant emphasis on what seemed to me to be a fairly obvious question, but in the end I realized that I would spend my whole life grappling with the question of how to “Be Gretchen.”

  It’s funny; only once it was December and my happiness project was drawing to a close did it occur to me to wonder why I’d had the urge to do my happiness project in the first place. Sure, I’d had a bus-ride epiphany about wanting to be happier, and it had been a relief and a thrill to step out of my ordinary life to contemplate transcendent matters—but what had motivated me to stick with it for the whole year?

  Jamie told me what he thought. “I think this happiness project is all about you trying to get more control over your life,” he said.

  Was that true?

  Perhaps. The feeling of control is an essential element of happiness—a better predictor of happiness than, say, income. Having a feeling of autonomy, of being able to choose what happens in your life or how you spend your time, is crucial. Identifying and following my resolutions had made me feel far more in control of my time, my body, my actions, my surroundings, and even my thoughts. Getting control of my life was definitely an aspect of my happiness project, and a greater feeling of control gave me a major boost in happiness.

  But something deeper was going on as well. I’d begun to understand that, although I hadn’t quite recognized it when I started, I was girding myself for some awesome, dreadful challenge, or working to meet some Judgment Day deadline for virtue. My Resolutions Chart is really my conscience. I wonder if one day I’ll look back on this year of my happiness project with wonder at my…innocence. “How easy it was to be happy, then,” I might think on some dark, distant morning. How glad I’ll be that I did everything within my power to appreciate the life I have now, just as it is.

  The year is over, and I really am happier. After all my research, I found out what I knew all along: I could change my life without changing my life. When I made the effort to reach out for them, I found that the ruby slippers had been on my feet all along; the bluebird was singing outside my kitchen window.

  AFTERWORD

  Jamie joined the clinical trial for the hepatitis C drug VX-950. The bad news: the treatment proved ineffective for him. The good news: his liver continues to hold steady.

  My sister’s diabetes is under control.

  On the anniversary of my blog, I made a book of the year’s blog posts on Lulu.com.

  When my children’s literature reading group hit twenty members, we had to close the group to newcomers, and I started a second children’s literature group with more enthusiasts.

  I did two one-minute Internet movies: The Years Are Short (www.theyearsareshort.com) and Secrets of Adulthood (www.secretsofadulthood.com).

  In addition to Jamie and my mother-in-law, I also convinced my father-in-law and eight friends to join my weight-training gym.

  To “Show up,” “Make three new friends,” and “Be a treasure house of happy memories,” I volunteered to be one of two house parents for Eliza’s class at school.

  I contacted several people active in the field of organ donation and, after a long period of self-education, joined the board of the New York Organ Donor Network. Remember to join the organ donor registry yourself: www.donatelife.net.

  Inspired to emulate J. M. Barrie’s brilliant, strange book The Boy Castaways of Black Lake Island (in the collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale), which tells a story through photographs of the Llewelyn Davies boys, a friend and I did an elaborate project in which we wrote a skeleton story, gathered costumes, and took photographs of our children in Central Park. Now we’re working on publishing this project in some form.

  After successfully giving up fake food, I eventually also gave up Tasti D-Lite, the delicious and very fake frozen yogurt sold by the ubiquitous chain in New York.

  I started getting up at 6:15 A.M. instead of 6:30 in order to make the mornin
g go more smoothly.

  Working with the cartoonist Chari Pere, I created a short comic, “Gretchen Rubin and the Quest for a Passion.” Drop me a note through www.happiness-project.com if you’d like a copy.

  To help other people to do a happiness project, I created the Happiness Project Toolbox, www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com, to pull together on one site all the tools that I found most helpful for my happiness project.

  I also created a “starter kit” for those who would like to form a group for people doing happiness projects. Sign up through my blog if you would like to receive a kit.

  My blog was picked up by the online magazine Slate (www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/happinessproject).

  I did indeed meet book reviewer David Greenberg at a cocktail party, and we had a very nice converstation.

  The blind date I set up in June culminated in a wedding.

  I sold the proposal for a book about my happiness project.

  And now I’m off to live happily ever after.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although one of the most important principles I learned during my happiness project is the importance of giving thanks, I can’t thank everyone who helped me with my project, because practically every person I know has given me some insight into happiness. I couldn’t possibly list them all by name.

  Certain people, however, played particularly important roles during the year of my happiness project. Freda Richardson and Ashley Wilson, of course. Lori Jackson and everyone at Inform Fitness. The members of my first children’s literature book group: Anamaria Allessi, Julia Bator, Ann Brashares, Sarah Burnes, Jonathan Burnham, Dan Ehrenhaft, Amanda Foreman, Bob Hughes, Susan Kamil, Pamela Paul, David Saylor, Elizabeth Schwarz, Jenny Smith, Rebecca Todd, Stephanie Wilchfort, Jessica Wollman, Amy Zilliax, and especially Jennifer Joel; and also my second children’s literature book group: Chase Bodine, Betsy Bradley, Sophie Gee, Betsy Gleick, Lev Grossman, Caitlin Macy, Suzanne Myers, Jesse Scheidlower, and especially Amy Wilensky. My working writers’ strategy groups: Marci Alboher, Jonathan Fields, A. J. Jacobs, Michael Melcher, and Carrie Weber. My book group for adult literature predates the official start of my happiness project but was an unusually helpful source of ideas and happiness: Ann Brashares, Betsy Cohen, Cheryl Effron, Patricia Farman-Farmaian, Sharon Greenberger, Samhita Jayanti, Alisa Kohn, Bethany Millard, Jennifer Newstead, Claudia Rader, Elizabeth Schwarz, Jennifer Scully, Paula Zakaria, and particularly Julia Bator.