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

help?”
    In particular, to be more agreeable and kind, I needed to use better manners as a conversationalist. I was a know-it-all: “A really interesting feature of Angela Thirkell’s novels is that she sets them in Barsetshire, the imaginary English county described by Trollope.” I was a “topper”: “You think you had a crazy morning, let me tell you about my morning.” I was a deflater: “You liked that movie? I thought it was kind of boring.”
    So, to try to cure these tendencies, I looked for opportunities to make comments that showed my interest in other people’s viewpoints:
    “You’re right.”
    “You have a good memory.”
    “Tell everyone that story about how you…”
    “I hadn’t thought about that before.”
    “I see your point.”
    “What do you think?”
    Once I started focusing on my conversational style, I realized I had one particular characteristic that I urgently needed to control: I was too belligerent. The minute someone made a statement, I looked for ways to contradict it. When someone happened to say to me, “Over the next fifty years, it’s the relationship with China that will be most important to theUnited States,” I started searching my mind to think of counterexamples. Why? Why argue just for the sake of disagreeing? I know very little about the subject. Going to law school had intensified this inclination. I was trained to argue, and I prided myself at being good at it—but most people don’t enjoy arguing as much as law students do.
    In daily life, my argumentativeness wasn’t much of a problem, but I’d noticed that drinking alcohol made me far more combative than I usually was, plus it weakened my (not very strong) instinct for good manners. Because I never did drink much and had given up drinking twice while pregnant, and because of my metabolism, I’d developed a very low tolerance for alcohol. Again and again, I lay in my bed after some social event, thinking “Was I as obnoxious as I think?” “Why did I make my point in such a negative way?” And Jamie usually wasn’t very reassuring about how I’d behaved.
    During this month, I was determined to get control of my combativeness. I might not have thought to accomplish this by quitting drinking, except that when Jamie stopped drinking because of his hepatitis C, I’d cut back even further on my drinking to keep him company in abstinence.
    I found it such a relief to be drinking less that I decided to give up drinking practically altogether (a decision that was actually somewhat predictable, because, as I knew from my February research, the fact that Jamie gave up alcohol meant that I was five times as likely to quit drinking). Not drinking made me much happier. I’d never particularly enjoyed the taste of beer or wine—I can’t stand real liquor—I’d never enjoyed the “buzz” of alcohol, and I’d much rather spend the calories on eating rather than drinking. I did miss the idea of drinking. That’s one thing I love about Winston Churchill; I love his zest for champagne and cigars. But as one of my Secrets of Adulthood says, “What’s fun for other people may not be fun for you.” I had to accept the fact that no matter how much other people enjoyed alcohol, and despite the fact that I wished I enjoyed it, drinking wasn’t fun for me. To the contrary—it was a source of bad feeling.
    Once I gave it up, mostly, I discovered another reason that drinkinghad made me rude: it made me sleepy. It was much easier to be polite and agreeable when I wasn’t in an agony of exhaustion. As I’d noticed in earlier months, it’s easier to feel happier and use good manners when I make the effort to stay physically comfortable: to dress warmly (even when people make fun of my long underwear, double sweaters, or mugs of hot water), to snack more often (I seem to need to eat far more frequently than most adults do), to turn off the light as soon as I feel sleepy, and to take pain medication as soon as I have a headache. The Duke of Wellington advised, “Always make water when you can,” and I followed that precept too. It was much easier to behave pleasantly when I wasn’t shivering, scouting for a bathroom, or on my second glass of wine.
    GIVE POSITIVE REVIEWS.
    I wanted to laugh more, I wanted to show more loving-kindness, and I also wanted to be more enthusiastic. I knew that it wasn’t nice to criticize—but it was fun. Why was it so deliciously satisfying to criticize? Being critical made