Happy people generally are more forgiving, helpful, and charitable, have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, d...
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...
How about this, I suggested. Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, ‘I’ll get back on track tomorrow,’ try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoo...
I am living my real life, this is it. Now is now, and if I waited to be happier, waited to have fun, waited to do the things that I know I ought to do, I might never get the chance.
Note: people weigh their highest on Sunday;14 their lowest, on Friday morning.)
Pushing myself, I knew, would cause me serious discomfort. It's a Secret of Adulthood: Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy. When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself,...
We all know the secret of dieting—eat better, eat less, exercise more—it’s the application that’s challenging. I had to create a scheme to put happiness ideas into practice in my life.
I think adversity magnifies behavior. Tend to be a control freak? You'll become more controlling. Eat for comfort? You'll eat more. And on the positive, if you tend to focus on solutions and celebrate...
Six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: • Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). • Hid...
I was surprised to learn from my research, however, that the well-known notion of anger catharsis is poppycock. There’s no evidence for the belief that letting off steam is healthy or constructive. In...
To achieve greater clarity in my actions, I often invoke a bright-line rule, a useful concept from law. A bright-line rule is a clearly defined rule or standard that eliminates any need for interpreta...
Unlike a reward, which must be earned or justified, a treat is a small pleasure or indulgence that we give to ourselves just because we want it.
In an interview in the Paris Review, novelist and Rebel John Gardner made an observation that I’ve never forgotten: Every time you break the law you pay, and every time you obey the law you pay.
In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a...
In fact, novelty lovers may do better with a series of short-term activities—thirty-day challenges, for instances—instead of trying to create an enduring, automatic habit.
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...
In the Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don’t particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It’s not a reward, it’s not a t...
I’m not getting any sleep, she said. I’ve already given up caffeine. What else can I do? Lots of things, I said, prepared to rattle off the tips that I’d uncovered in my research. Near your bedtime, d...
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...
Jamie has a transition habit when he comes home from work. He gives everyone a hello kiss, then disappears for twenty minutes or so. He changes out of his suit, sends one last round of emails, glances...
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