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

example, I didn’t expect picking Eliza’s birthday cake to turn into a “project.” I figured that I’d ask, as I’d asked before, “Chocolate or vanilla? Flower decorations or princesses?” and Eliza would choose. Instead, as Eliza’s birthday approached, she became utterly preoccupied with her cake. The guest list, the decorations, the activities—all these considerations paled in comparison to the question of the composition and decoration of the cake. Before my happiness project, I would have pressed her to decide quickly, so I could get the item crossed off my to-do list. But my research revealed that a key to happiness is squeezing out as much happiness as possible from a happy event.
    We’ve all heard of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. By contrast, I realized, happiness has four stages. To eke out the most happiness from an experience, we must anticipate it, savor it as it unfolds, express happiness, and recall a happy memory.
    Any single happy experience may be amplified or minimized, depending on how much attention you give it. For instance, if I call my parents to tell them about a funny thing that happened in the park that day, I relive the experience in my mind as I express it. Although it’s true that taking photographs sometimes makes it hard to savor a moment when it’s happening, in the future, having pictures will help me recall a happy time.
    Eliza’s birthday cake gave us plenty of opportunities to enjoy the “anticipation” stage. She asked me to bring home a Baskin-Robbins brochure, and we went over every word. We visited the Baskin-Robbins Web site, where Eliza pondered the list of ice cream flavors. We made a pilgrimage to the Baskin-Robbins store, so Eliza could sample the flavors and pore over the book of possible cake decorations. At last, I thought, she’d made her decisions. Nope.
    “Mom,” she asked a few days later, “can we go back to Baskin-Robbins to look at the cake book again?”
    “Eliza, we spent an hour in there already. Plus your birthday is still a month away.”
    “But I want to look at the book!”
    Before the happiness project, I would have resisted, but now I understand now that this errand isn’t birthday party inefficiency but the very fun itself. It’s my Sixth Commandment: Enjoy the process. Eliza will enjoy eating the cake for only five minutes, but she can have hours of enjoyment from planning the cake. In fact, in what’s known as “rosy prospection,” anticipation of happiness is sometimes greater than the happiness actually experienced. All the more reason to revel in anticipation.
    “Okay,” I relented, “if you want, we can stop off after school on Friday.”
    Doing these kinds of projects showed me another way that children boost happiness: they reconnect us with sources of “feeling good” that we’ve outgrown. Left to my own devices, I wouldn’t work on homemade Mother’s Day gifts, pore over Baskin-Robbins cake designs, memorize IsYour Mama a Llama?, or go to the Central Park boat pond on Saturday afternoons. I wouldn’t watch Shrek over and over or listen to Laurie Berkner’s music. I wouldn’t visit amusement parks or the Museum of Natural History. I wouldn’t use food coloring to make Rainbow Yogurt Surprise in a shot glass. Nevertheless, I honestly do enjoy these activities with my children. I don’t just enjoy their pleasure—which I do, and that also makes me happy—I also experience my own sincere enjoyment of activities that I would otherwise never have considered.
     
    On the last day of April, as I did at the end of every month, I paused to evaluate my progress before gearing up for the next month’s resolutions. Soul-searching seems like an activity that should be undertaken by a woodland stream or at least in a quiet room, but this particular session of self-evaluation took place as I was riding the subway downtown. As we slowly lurched through the local stops, I asked myself, “Well, am I feeling any happier? Am I really ?”
    I happened to be in a blue mood that morning. “If I’m honest with myself,” I thought dejectedly, “the fact is, I’m no different. Same old Gretchen, no better and no worse, nothing new and improved. I’ve been telling myself I’m happier, but I haven’t really changed.” Studies show that people who go to psychotherapy or to programs to lose weight, stop smoking, start exercising, or whatever