I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing.
How I Like to Spend My Time At what time of day do I feel energized? When do I drag? Do I like racing from one activity to another, or do I prefer unhurried transitions? What activities take up my tim...
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have better self-control, and are more tolerant of frustration than unhappy people, while unhappy people are more often withdrawn, d...
Happiness doesn’t always make you feel happy. Activities that contribute to long-term happiness don’t always make me feel good in the short term; in fact they’re sometimes downright unpleasant.
Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a significant element of happiness. If we have habits that work for us, we’re much more likely to be happy, healthy, productive, and creativ...
Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It (New York: Anchor Books, 2010). For an expanded discussion of Taubes’s arguments, see Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversi...
For work: I bought some pens. Normally, I used makeshift pens, the kind of unsatisfactory implements that somehow materialized in my bag or in a drawer. But one day, when I was standing in line to buy...
By giving something up, I gain.
Besides clarity of values, another kind of clarity supports habit formation: clarity of action.
Behind our unremarkable front door waits the little world of our own making, a place of safety, exploration, comfort, and love.
As Samuel Johnson said, To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.
Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending a weekend cleaning out the basement.
A reader posted about a more modest change: I dreaded my dentist appointment because I knew they’d ask how often I floss. It occurred to me that I could just floss every day, and then that question wo...
«Живите в реальном мире.Закройте электронную почту, отключите телефон и интернет.
Book Happier, Tal Ben-Shahar
A quotation from Lewis’s brilliant essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children: When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fif...
Thoreau admonished, Our life is frittered away by detail.… Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! This longing for simplicity is so powerful and complex that it needs its own term, much like nostalgie de...
This Doesn’t Count Loophole: We tell ourselves that for some reason, this circumstance doesn’t count.
They’re perceived to be more friendly, warmer, and even more physically attractive. A study showed that students who were happy as college freshmen were earning more money in their midthirties—without...
The reward for a good habit is the habit itself.