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

had a benefit in this circumstance; because the pedometer gave me credit for making an extra effort, I wasmore likely to do it. One morning I’d planned to take the subway to my dentist’s appointment, but as I walked out the door, it occurred to me, “Walking to the dentist will take the same amount of time, and I’ll get credit for the steps!” Plus, I think I benefited from the “Hawthorne effect,” in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting. In this case, I was the guinea pig of my own experiment.
    Walking had an added benefit: it helped me to think. Nietzsche wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and his observation is backed up by science; exercise-induced brain chemicals help people think clearly. In fact, just stepping outside clarifies thinking and boosts energy. Light deprivation is one reason that people feel tired, and even five minutes of daylight stimulates production of serotonin and dopamine, brain chemicals that improve mood. Many times, I’d guiltily leave my desk to take a break, and while I was walking around the block, I’d get some useful insight that had eluded me when I was being virtuously diligent.
    TOSS, RESTORE, ORGANIZE.
    Household disorder was a constant drain on my energy; the minute I walked through the apartment door, I felt as if I needed to start putting clothes in the hamper and gathering loose toys. I wasn’t alone in my fight against clutter. In a sign that people are finding their possessions truly unmanageable, the number of storage units nationwide practically doubled in one decade. One study suggested that eliminating clutter would cut down the amount of housework in the average home by 40 percent.
    To use the first month of my happiness project to tackle clutter seemed a bit small-minded, as if my highest priority in life were to rearrange my sock drawer. But I craved an existence of order and serenity—which, translated into real life, meant a household with coats hung in the closet and spare rolls of paper towels.
    I was also weighed down by the invisible, but even more enervating, psychic clutter of loose ends. I had a long list of neglected tasks that made me feel weary and guilty whenever I thought of them. I needed to clear away the detritus in my mind.
    I decided to tackle the visible clutter first, and I discovered something surprising: the psychologists and social scientists who do happiness research never mention clutter at all. They never raise it in their descriptions of the factors that contribute to happiness or in their lists of strategies to boost happiness. The philosophers, too, ignore it, although Samuel Johnson, who had an opinion about everything, did remark, “No money is better spent that what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”
    By contrast, when I turned to popular culture, discussions of clutter clearing abounded. Whatever the happiness scientists might study, ordinary people are convinced that clearing clutter will boost their happiness—and they’re “laying out money for domestic satisfaction” by buying Real Simple magazine, reading the Unclutterer blog, hiring California Closets, and practicing amateur feng shui. Apparently, other people, like me, believe that their physical surroundings influence their spiritual happiness.
    I paced through our apartment to size up the clutter-clearing challenge I faced. Once I started really looking, I was amazed by how much clutter had accumulated without my realizing it. Our apartment was bright and pleasant, but a scum of clutter filmed its surface.
    When I surveyed the master bedroom, for example, I was dismayed. The soft green walls and the rose-and-leaf pattern on the bed and curtains made the room calm and inviting, but stacks of papers were piled randomly on the coffee table and on the floor in the corner. Untidy heaps of books covered every available surface. CDs, DVDs, cords, chargers, coins, collar stays, business cards, and instruction booklets were scattered like confetti. Objects that needed to be put away, objects that didn’t have a real place, unidentified lurking objects—they all needed to be placed in their proper homes. Or tossed or given away.
    As I contemplated the magnitude of the job before me, I invoked myTenth Commandment: “Do what ought to be done.” This commandment distilled into one principle a lot of different strands of advice my mother had given me over