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...
I'd always vaguely expected to outgrown my limitations.
I don't want to reject my life. I want to change my life without changing my life.
I did, however, vow to stop reading books that I didn’t enjoy. I used to pride myself on finishing every book I started—no longer.
Boredom can be important. That’s when you have to figure out what you want to do.
It was my interest in happiness that led me to the subject of habits, and of course, the study of habits is really the study of happiness. Habits are the invisible architecture of everyday life, and a...
—Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography
Couldn’t just jump into this happiness project. I had a lot to learn before I was ready for my year to begin. After my first few weeks of heavy reading, as I toyed with different ideas about how to se...
The fact is, changing a habit is much more challenging if that new habit means altering or losing an aspect of ourselves.
Sprinters are pleased with their work product, because sprinting is how they do their best work. Procrastinators aren’t pleased with their work product; they know they could’ve done a better job if th...
People have an inborn disposition that's set within a certain range, but they can boost themselves to the top of their happiness range or push themselves down to the bottom of their happiness range by...
One flashy kind of commitment device is the nuclear option. A friend who enjoys experimenting with strategies of personal productivity used this approach to quit drinking for sixty days. He gave his a...
Maintaining a healthy weight requires us not to follow a temporary diet, but to change our eating habits forever.
It’s easy to assume that we should undertake a particular clutter-clearing task. When we’re very clear about why we’re doing it, it’s easier to use our time and energy productively—and also to recogni...
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Make sure the things we do to make ourselves feel better don’t make us feel worse.
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Hugging relieves stress, boosts feelings of closeness, and even squelches pain. In one study, people assigned to give five hugs each day for a month, aiming to hug as many different people as they cou...
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
Generally, I’ve observed, we seek changes that fall into the Essential Seven. People—including me—most want to foster the habits that will allow them to: 1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sug...
Epicurus wrote, We must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it....