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

wasn’t helpful. When Jamie surprised me with a gardenia plant (my favorite flower), I fussed because it was too big. I was deeply annoyed when we came back from the hardware store with the wrong-sized lightbulbs—I just couldn’t let it go.
    It’s easier to complain than to laugh, easier to yell than to joke around, easier to be demanding than to be satisfied. Keeping “a heart to be contented,” I expected, would help change my actions. I hit on several specific aspects of my attitude that I wanted to change.
    First, I wanted to laugh more. Laughing more would make me happier, and it would also make the people around me happier. I’d grown more somber over the last several years. I suspected that I didn’t laugh, or even smile, very much. A small child typically laughs more than four hundred times each day, and an adult—seventeen times. I wondered if I hit even that number most days.
    Along with a more humorous attitude, I wanted to be kinder. I’d considered kindness a respectable but bland virtue (in the same dull class as reliability and dutifulness), but researching Buddhism, with its emphasis on loving-kindness, had convinced me that I’d overlooked something important. I wanted to practice loving-kindness, but it was such a vague goal—easy to applaud but hard to apply. What strategies would remind me to act with loving-kindness in my ordinary day?
    I decided to start with the basic resolution to improve my manners, which weren’t as good as they should have been—not just my table manners (though those weren’t great either) but my actions to show consideration for others. Perhaps mere politeness wouldn’t engender loving-kindness in me, but acting politely would at least give me the appearance of possessing that quality—and perhaps appearance would turn into reality. I wanted to lose my New York City edge. Whenever I go home to visit my parents, I notice that midwesterners really are more friendly. In Kansas City, people seem less hurried (and they are less hurried—a study showed that New York has the country’s fastest-walking pedestrians), clerks in stores are more helpful and chatty, drivers give pedestrians a lot of space on the street (in New York, they practically nudge you out of the way with their bumpers). Instead of moving fast and speaking curtly, I wanted to take the time to be pleasant.
    Also, I wanted to stop being so critical, so judgmental and finicky. When I was growing up, my parents placed a lot of emphasis on being positive and enthusiastic—to the point that my sister and I sometimes complained that they wanted us to be “fake.” Now I’d grown to admire my parents’ insistence on banning sarcasm and pointless negativity; it made for a much nicer household atmosphere.
    Finally, as a way to help myself stay serene and cheerful, I resolved to discipline myself to direct my thoughts away from subjects that made me angry or irritable.
    I wondered whether working on my attitude should occupy an entire month’s worth of resolutions, but reading Schopenhauer (oddly enough, given that he’s so well known for his pessimism) convinced me of the importance of a cheerful disposition: “Whoever is merry and cheerful has always a good reason for so being, namely the very fact that he is so. Nothing can so completely take the place of every other blessing ascan this quality, whilst it itself cannot be replaced by anything. A man may be young, handsome, wealthy, and esteemed; if we wish to judge of his happiness, we ask whether he is cheerful.” This month was all about cheerfulness.
    LAUGH OUT LOUD.
    By now I had no doubt about the power of my Third Commandment: “Act the way I want to feel.” If I want to feel happy and lighthearted, I need to act that way—say, by laughing out loud.
    Laughter is more than just a pleasurable activity. It can boost immunity and lower blood pressure and cortisol levels. It increases people’s tolerance for pain. It’s a source of social bonding, and it helps to reduce conflicts and cushion social stress within relationships—at work, in marriage, among strangers. When people laugh together, they tend to talk and touch more and to make eye contact more frequently.
    I vowed to find reasons to find things funny, to laugh out loud, and to appreciate other people’s humor. No more polite smiling; no more rushing to tell my story before the laughter has died after a friend’s funny story; no more reluctance to be joshed and teased. One