I’ve been haunted for years by a public service poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, If this i...
Exercise for sanity not vanity.
Many assume that offering a reward will help people to jump-start a healthy habit, which will then persist after the reward fades away. Not so. Often, as soon as the reward stops (and sometimes before...
One day, I’d stop twisting my hair, and wearing running shoes all the time, and eating exactly the same food every day. I’d remember my friends’ birthdays, I’d learn Photoshop, I wouldn’t let my daugh...
I used to think I was pretty typical, but now I see that I’m extreme. I can’t judge people according to what works for me.
The Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation
Frankl observed, In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. *
Remember, the reason to clear clutter is because, somehow, that clutter is diminishing your happiness. If you don’t care, don’t bother.
Then I wonder if some people need a coach more than a therapist, I said, thinking of Obligers.
He gave his assistant a stamped, addressed envelope with a check he’d written to an anti-charity, an organization whose policies he passionately opposes, with the instruction to mail the check if he h...
In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to...
How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.
It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and als...
I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: I can’t make people change, but when I change, others may change; and when others change, I may change.
I knew I wouldn't discover happiness in a faraway place or in unusual circumstances; it was right here, right now— as in the haunting play The Blue Bird, where two children spend a year searching the...
Discouraging as he’d been, hadn’t actually hit on my real worry about my project: Was it supremely self-centered to spend so much effort on my own happiness?
Progress, not perfection, is the goal. I’m a gold-star junkie,
Moral Licensing Loophole: In moral licensing, we give ourselves permission to do something bad (eat potato chips, bust the budget) because we’ve been good. We reason that we’ve earned it or deserve it...
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: I give myself limits to give myself freedom.
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