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

alighthearted tone, “I’m part of a movement without knowing it. I missed the dot-com boom, I barely know how to use an iPod, I don’t watch Project Runway, but for once I managed to tap right into the zeitgeist.” I forced myself to laugh, and I instantly felt better. Jamie started laughing too; he also looked quite relieved that he wasn’t going to have to try to jolly me out of a funk.
    “Laughing out loud” went beyond mere laughter. Responding with laughter meant that I had to give up my pride, my defensiveness, my self-centeredness. I was reminded of one of the climactic moments in Saint Thérèse’s life, a moment when she decided to “Laugh out loud.” Typical of the extraordinarily ordinary nature of Thérèse’s saintliness, she pointed to a seemingly unremarkable episode as a turning point in her spiritual life. Every Christmas, she delighted in the ritual of opening the presents left in her shoes (the French version of hanging up stockings), but one year, when she was fourteen, she overheard her father complaining, “Well, fortunately, this will be the last year!” Accustomed to being babied and petted by her family, the young Thérèse burst into tears at any cross or critical word, and this sort of unkind comment would ordinarily have caused her to dissolve into sobs. Instead, as she stood on the stairs, she experienced what she described as her “complete conversion.” She forced back her tears, and instead of crying at her father’s criticism, scorning his gifts, or sulking in her room, she ran down and opened the presents joyfully. Her father laughed along with her. Thérèse realized that the saintly response to her father’s exasperation was to “Laugh out loud.”
    USE GOOD MANNERS.
    As part of my research, I’d taken the Newcastle Personality Assessor test, which I’d found in Daniel Nettle’s book Personality , and my results reminded me that I needed to work harder to use good manners. This test is short—just twelve questions—but purportedly provides an accurate assessment of an individual’s personality using the “Big Five” model that has emerged, in recent years, as the most comprehensive, dependable, and useful scientific framework. According to this five-factor model, people’s personalities can be characterized by their scores in five major dimensions:
Extroversion: response to reward
Neuroticism: response to threat
Conscientiousness: response to inhibition (self-control, planning)
Agreeableness: regard for others
Openness to experience: breadth of mental associations
    I’d always thought “extroversion” was basically “friendliness,” but according to this scheme, a high extroversion score means that people enjoy very strong positive reactions, so that they consistently report more joy, desire, excitement, and enthusiasm. And although I’d often thrown around the word “neurotic,” I hadn’t quite grasped what it meant. Turns out that people with high neuroticism scores have very strong negative reactions—fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, disgust, sadness—very often directed at themselves.
    After answering the twelve questions, I totted up my score:
    Extroversion: low-medium
    Neuroticism: low-medium
    Conscientiousness: high
    Agreeableness: low (for a woman; if I were a man I’d be low-medium )
    Openness to experience: high
    The result struck me as quite accurate. As I’d acknowledged to myself on that subway ride back in April, when I’m in “neutral,” I’m neither particularly joyful nor particularly melancholy; I’m low-medium. I’m very conscientious. I was pleased to see that I scored high on openness to experience; I wasn’t sure how I’d do there. Most significant, I wasn’t surprised by my low agreeableness score. I knew that about myself. When I mentioned to some friends that I’d scored low on agreeableness, like true friends, they all cried as one, “Surely not! You’re very agreeable!” I suspect that my friends, as evidenced by their loyal reaction, are more agreeable than I.
    “Nothing,” wrote Tolstoy, “can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” Kindness, in everyday life, takes the form of good manners, and one way that my low agreeableness showed itself was in my thoughtless habits: I rushed past people on the sidewalk, I didn’t often check to see if anyone needed my subway seat, I wasn’t careful to say “You first,” “No, you take it!” or “Can I