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

usually believe they’ve changed a lot but in fact show only a modest benefit; apparently, after spending so much money, time, and effort, people think, “Wow, I must have changed for the better,” even if they haven’t changed that much. “That’s probably why I’ve been telling myself that I’m happier,” I thought, “when in fact my project hasn’t been working at all.” As I got off the subway, I couldn’t shake my feelings of futility and gloom.
    After a two-hour meeting, I was back on the subway and headed home in a more cheerful mood (thus confirming happiness research that shows that people get a mood boost from contact with others). I resumed myargument with myself. “Am I happier?” This time my answer was a little different: “ No, but also yes. ” True, my fundamental nature hadn’t changed. It wasn’t realistic to think that I could bring about that kind of change in just four months or even by the end of the year. Yet something had changed. What?
    Finally I put my finger on it. In moments when I was in “neutral,” as when riding the subway, I was the same familiar Gretchen. The difference was that, although my nature was unchanged, I had more happiness in my life each day; my resolutions had added more sources of fun, engagement, and satisfaction and had also eliminated some significant sources of bad feelings, such as guilt and anger. Through my actions, I was successfully pushing myself to the high end of my inborn happiness range.
    I could tell that my happier mood affected the household atmosphere. It’s true that “if Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” and it’s also true that “if Daddy ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy” and that “you’re only as happy as your least happy child.” Each member of a family picks up and reflects everyone else’s emotions—but of course I could change no one’s actions except my own.
    On a less sublime note, after evaluating my progress I decided to give up wearing the pedometer. It had been a useful exercise, but I was getting tired of strapping it to my waistband every morning, and I’d almost dropped it in the toilet several times. The pedometer had served its purpose of helping me to evaluate and improve my walking habits, and it was time to put it into retirement.

5
MAY
    Be Serious About Play
    L EISURE
    Find more fun.
    Take time to be silly.
    Go off the path.
    Start a collection.
     
    M ay, the beginning of springtime, seemed like the right time to work on my play —that is, the activities I did in my free time because I wanted to do them, for their own sake, for my own reasons, and not for money or ambition. In an irony that didn’t escape me, I prepared to work doggedly at fun and to be serious about joking around.
    The writer Jean Stafford scoffed, “Happy people don’t need to have fun,” but in fact, studies show that the absence of feeling bad isn’t enough to make you happy; you must strive to find sources of feeling good. One way to feel good is to make time for play—which researchers define as an activity that’s verysatisfying, has no economic significance, doesn’t create social harm, and doesn’t necessarily lead to praise or recognition. Research shows that regularly having fun is a key factor in having a happy life; people who have fun are twenty times as likely to feel happy.
    I had two goals for the month: I wanted to have more fun, and I wanted to use my leisure to cultivate my creativity. Play wasn’t merely idle time but an opportunity to experiment with new interests and to draw closer to other people.
    I was very fortunate that the activities that I did for work were, for the most part, versions of the same activities that I did for fun. There were many persuasive arguments against taking busman’s holidays, but I always wanted to do the same things on the weekend that I did during the week. I knew exactly what the photographer Edward Weston meant when he noted in his daybook that he’d spent the day in “a holiday of work, but work which was play.”
    As I saw in March, novelty is an important source of happiness; it’s also an important element in creativity. I tend to stick to the familiar, so I wanted to push myself toward new experiences and new ideas that attracted me.
    I needed to take my leisure more seriously. I’d always assumed that having fun was something in my life that would flow naturally, so I didn’t think about shaping it or getting the most out of it—but