Negative emotions like loneliness, envy, and guilt have an important role to play in a happy life; they're big, flashing signs that something needs to change.
Life is too short to save your good china or your good lingerie or your good ANYTHING for later because truly, later may never come.
Work done by other people sounds easy. How hard can it be to take care of a newborn who sleeps 20 hours a day? How hard can it be to keep track of your billable hours? To travel for one night for busi...
We need to have intimate, enduring bonds; we need to be able to confide; we need to feel that we belong; we need to be able to get support, and just as important for happiness, to give support. We nee...
'Potato-chip news' is news that's repetitive, requires little effort to absorb, and is consumable in massive quantities: true crime, natural disasters, political punditry, celebrity gossip, sports gos...
Do once in a while.
I’d asked myself, Why do habits make it possible for people to change? and now I knew the answer. Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.
I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.
Day three days a week for six weeks,
We manage what we monitor.
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal...
Nature is impersonal, awe-inspiring, elegant, eternal. It's geometrically perfect. It's tiny and gigantic. You can travel far to be in a beautiful natural setting, or you can observe it in your backya...
Habits eliminate the need for self-control.
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.
For Rebels, the ability to choose is so important that sometimes they make a choice—even when it’s against their own self-interest or it’s not what they prefer—just to reassure themselves that they ca...
Sprinters call Marathoners plodding, and Marathoners call Sprinters irresponsible, but there’s no right way. Procrastinators, however, are happier when they change their work habits to work more stead...
Scheduling makes us far more likely to convert an activity into a habit (well, except for Rebels), so for that reason, I schedule even some slightly ridiculous habits, such as Kiss Jamie every morning...
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...
I can DO ANYTHING I want, but I can’t DO EVERYTHING I want.