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

benign, of other people’s anguish. But the feeling of happy relief that came from recognizing my good fortune (for the moment) was something most of these writers had sought to create. Over and over, they emphasized the importance of cherishing health and appreciating ordinary life. (Other themes: keep up with your doctor’s appointments, don’t ignore big changes in your body, make sure you have health insurance.)
    That said, I don’t think these memoirs would cheer me if I’d had more brushes with serious illness; I don’t think I’d be able to stand reading them. Jamie, for one, would never read these books. He’s had too many unpleasant experiences in hospitals to want to visit voluntarily, even through the lives of other people.
    KEEP A GRATITUDE NOTEBOOK.
    Reading catastrophe memoirs made me extremely grateful for the fact that I wasn’t experiencing a catastrophe. Research shows that because we measure ourselves relative to others, our happiness is influenced by whether we compare ourselves to people who are better or worse off. In one study, people’s sense of life satisfaction changed dramatically depending on whether they completed sentences starting “I’m glad I’m not…” or instead, “I wish I was…” In the days after September 11, 2001, the emotion people most commonly experienced—after compassion—was gratitude.
    Gratitude is important to happiness. Studies show that consistently grateful people are happier and more satisfied with their lives; they even feel more physically healthy and spend more time exercising. Gratitude brings freedom from envy, because when you’re grateful for what you have, you’re not consumed with wanting something different or something more. That, in turn, makes it easier to live within your means and also to be generous to others. Gratitude fosters forbearance—it’s harder to feel disappointed with someone when you’re feeling grateful toward him or her.Gratitude also connects you to the natural world, because one of the easiest things to feel grateful for is the beauty of nature.
    But I find it hard to stay in a grateful frame of mind—I take things for granted, I forget what other people have done for me, I have high expectations. To cure this, following the advice repeated by many happiness experts, I started a gratitude notebook. Each day, I noted three things for which I was grateful. Usually I logged my gratitude entries at the same time that I made my daily notes in my one-sentence journal. (These various tasks were making me happier, but they were also keeping me busier.)
    After keeping the notebook for a week, I noticed something: I never thought to mention some of the most important bases of my happiness. I took for granted that I lived in a stable, democratic society; that I could always count on my parents’ love, support, and general lack of craziness; the fact that I loved my work; the health of my children; the convenience of living right around the corner from my in-laws—not to mention the fact that I loved living right around the corner from my in-laws, a situation that many people might consider undesirable. I loved living in an apartment instead of a house: no yard work, no shoveling snow, no going outside to get the newspaper in the morning, no carrying out the trash. I was grateful that I would never again have to study for an exam or a standardized test. I tried to push myself to appreciate better the fundamental elements of my life, as well as the problems that I didn’t have.
    For example, one morning after Jamie had one of his regular appointments with his liver doctor, he still hadn’t called me by lunchtime. Finally I called him. “So what did the doctor say?”
    “No change,” he said absentmindedly.
    “What does that mean, ‘No change’?”
    “Well, nothing has changed.”
    Usually I wouldn’t have given this report much thought, but pondering gratitude and reading catastrophe memoirs made me realize—what a happy day. No news is fantastic news. It got a starred entry in my gratitude notebook. I was mindful of being grateful, too, for all the bad fortune thathad narrowly passed me by: the near miss on a bridge on an icy road, the time Eliza dreamily walked out into busy traffic before I could stop her.
    Blog readers recounted their experiences with their own versions of a happiness notebook:
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    I started a journal of my own a few months ago, in the form of a private blog on my own computer. I’ve