The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun

lightheartedness, enthusiasm, and tenderness.
    When I’m listening to other people speak, I will listen intently, so that I follow up their comments, laugh at their jokes, engage deeply. No more interrupting or waiting impatiently for my turn.
    I’ll stop overusing the phrases “you know” and “like” and slang. When I hear myself talking that way, I’ll take a deep breath, slow down my speech, and choose my words more carefully.
    After dinner, I’ll turn out the lights in the kitchen and not return. No snacking, no picking at one thing or another. When I’m hungry, I will reach for fresh fruit and vegetables.
    He counted backward and suggested that I’d wake up feeling “refreshed.” The whole instruction took about twenty minutes, and Peter had recorded it on an old-fashioned cassette tape. “Listen to this tape each day,” he instructed. “You should be relaxed, attentive, and not sleepy—before bed is the worst time to do it.”
    “Does it really work?” I couldn’t resist asking.
    “I’ve seen extraordinary results,” he assured me.
    I dug out my old Walkman and bought an extra pair of AA batteries. I listened to the tape each day, and, as instructed, each time I heard it, I imagined myself acting according to the goals I’d set.
    Jamie enjoyed making fun of me; he thought the entire exercise was ridiculous. He made a lot of jokes of the “What’s going to happen if I tell you to quack like a duck?” variety. It was easy to laugh off his teasing, but I got a bit discouraged. I’d hoped to find hypnosis an easy, passive shortcut to self-improvement, but it was a struggle to concentrate on the tape.
    But I did my best, and I do think it helped. For example, one day I felt enraged because after I had spent about five hours putting together an online photo book on Shutterfly, when I logged into my account to complete the finishing touches, it was gone. All I found was “Empty Folder.” I was ready to yell, but as I dialed customer ser vice, I heard a soft voice in my ear: “I’ll establish a friendly, cooperative tone.” And I did. (Of course, it helped that the file popped back into existence before too long.) I also stopped eating brown sugar out of the jar. Gross, but something that I did do quite frequently. To me, the effectiveness of hypnosis seemed less a result of hypnotic suggestibility and more a result of mindfulness. My hypnosis tape made me more aware of my thoughts and actions, and I was able to change them through a sort of mental practice. But that was fine, as long as it worked.
    For my next experiment, I decided to try laughter yoga. Founded by an Indian doctor, this combination of yoga and laughter has spread rapidly around the world, and I kept running into references to it as a happiness-inducing activity. Laughter yoga combines clapping, chanting, breathing, and stretching exercises drawn from yoga to calm the mind and the body, and the simulated laughter provoked by the exercises often turns into real laughter.
    One joy of living in New York City is that everything is on offer. I easily located a laughter yoga class near my apartment and showedup one Tuesday evening in the basement conference room of a physical therapy office. Twelve of us were led through exercises of yoga breathing and simulated laughter. We did the lion exercise, the ho-ho-ho ha-ha-ha exercise, the cry-laugh exercise, and several others, and I could tell that many other practitioners were really feeling a boost in mood. Two people, in particular, collapsed in fits of real laughter. Not me. The leader was kind and knowledgeable, the other people were pleasant, and the exercises seemed purposeful, but all I felt was a horrible self-consciousness.
    As I’d walked into the class, I’d vowed that I’d try it at least three times, but by the time I left, I decided that, as much as folks praised laughter yoga and as valuable as novelty and challenge were to happiness, and even though an exercise in mindful laughter sounded like an excellent idea, laughter yoga wasn’t for me.
    I moved on to drawing. I hadn’t done any drawing or painting since high school, so taking a drawing class would awaken a part of my mind that had long lain dormant. Also, if cultivating mindfulness meant striving to develop nonjudgmental awareness, I suspected that drawing would be a good challenge: it would be hard not to judge my (nonexistent) drawing skill.
    I’d read about a “Drawing on the Right Side of the