The Happiness Project

Happiness interview with Marci Alboher.

From time to time, I post short interviews with interesting people about their insights on happiness. During my research, I’ve noticed that I often learn more from one person’s highly idiosyncratic experiences than I do from sources that detail universal principles or cite up-to-date studies.

Today’s interview is with Marci Alboher. Marci has brilliant insight into how to navigate the world of careers to achieve both the most success, and also the most happiness. I know Marci, and she is truly someone who practices everything she preaches. A mutual friend of ours told me, “If Marci suggests that you do anything for your career, DO IT. She’s never wrong.” And in fact, she has given me many pieces of useful advice, all of which I've followed slavishly, to my great benefit.

She writes about work in her excellent New York Times blog, Shifting Careers, all about the changing nature of work. Her book, One Person, Multiple Careers, is a fascinating look at “slash” careers and how people manage to move from one career to another -- something that is happening more and more frequently.

Marci has done a lot of thinking about happiness, especially about the relationship between work and happiness.

Gretchen: What's a simple activity that consistently makes you happier?
Marci: Talking a long walk in the early morning hours.

Gretchen: What's something you know now about happiness that you didn't know when you were 18 years old?
Marci: That people really do have a natural happiness setpoint, and that I am one of the lucky ones in that I generally wake up each day able to see the light, even in life's darker moments.

Gretchen: Is there anything you find yourself doing repeatedly that gets in the way of your happiness?
Marci: Eating or drinking things that don't agree with me -- like coffee and red wine.

Gretchen: Is there a happiness quotation that has struck you as particularly insightful?
Marci: I don't really remember quotes and call upon them when I need them, but the quote I chose for my high school yearbook -- from the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young anti-war song, "Wooden Ships," still works for me:
“If you smile at me, I will understand, because that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language."

Gretchen: If you're feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost?
Marci: I wake up very early, go outside, and take a long walk. This works wherever I happen to be, but it's especially effective when I'm near the water. When I'm at home in New York, I walk near the Hudson River every morning, and when I'm near a beach, nothing beats a barefoot walk on the sand. Music also has the ability to transform my mood, so listening to something upbeat during my walk can instantly clear my head and take me somewhere else.

Gretchen: Is there anything that you see people around you doing or saying that adds a lot to their happiness, or detracts a lot from their happiness?
Marci: As you've written about so many times, I believe that negative memories tend to have a tendency to linger -- so it's important to do the work of celebrating and memorializing the positive moments. When I see people recognizing achievements and milestones they want to remember, it reminds me to do the same. Taking and sharing photographs seems to be one of the easiest way to do this. I don't have especially vivid memories of my early childhood years -- but I do remember any event where there are photos documenting it or where there is an often-told story around it.

Here's where technology can help us. My brother lives in Florida and he has a son that I don't see nearly as often as I'd like to. Each day, my brother takes a photo of my nephew, usually doing something silly like covering his arms in little pieces of cheese. I open the photos on my iphone wherever I am and they instantly lift my mood.

Gretchen: Do you work on being happier? If so, how?
Marci: I do. I read a lot about positive psychology. I track what makes me feel good and what doesn't and try to do more of the former and less of the latter. I have done a lot of therapy to better understand myself. And of course, I read your blog every day (really). [Ah, thanks, Marci!]
One thing I have increasingly started to notice is that I'm very much affected by the people around me. So I have become fairly vigilant about avoiding spending time with people who are relentlessly negative.

Gretchen: Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn't – or vice versa?
Marci: One thing that repeatedly surprises me is that achieving a professional goal or completing a project gives me a happiness boost, but the emotional uptick tends to be short-lived. On the other hand, the daily details and rhythms of life -- like being in a strong relationship, getting regular exercise, being near my dog, keeping the fridge stocked with good ingredients so that I can cook healthy/tasty meals, doing a favor for someone -- really provide me with a deep sense of happiness. It's just like what you say, Gretchen, about how the things you do every day matter more than the things you do once in a while.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

On reading a new memoir of catastrophe: TO LOVE WHAT IS.

One of my happiness-project resolutions is to Read memoirs of catastrophe.

I just finished Alix Kates Shulman’s To Love What Is. When Shulman's 75-year-old husband fell from a nine-foot sleeping loft in July 2004, he suffered a brain injury that keeps him from having a short-term memory. Her memoir covers the accident and the aftermath, and in flashbacks, the period during which they met, went separate ways, and years later, married.

Her husband’s condition is unusual, because certain parts of his mind and personality are almost untouched, but in other ways, he has changed tremendously. And, of course, he is utterly incapable of taking care of himself, even for short periods.

It is a fascinating, haunting book – all about the nature of love. Shulman doesn’t sugar-coat her emotions or her reactions to what’s happening, and her honesty, and her greatness of spirit, make the book a compulsive read. I read it in one day. Her story had special resonance for me, because so much of it takes places in areas of New York City that I know well.

To Love What Is gave me a lot to think about. Gratitude, and the importance of appreciating the ordinary day. Accepting the changes that time brings. Sacrifice. Loyalty. Patience. Marriage. Taking pleasure in little things.

On a more mundane level, as usually happens when I read memoirs of catastrophe, I found myself making mental notes to myself, to learn from someone else’s disaster. In this case: don’t let yourself get overtired. Always know what medications a person is taking. Always know how to call for emergency help. I know I’m making my own mistakes, and that it’s a delusion to think that covering every base will prevent catastrophe, but I can’t help it.

For a quick preview: Shulman also wrote a piece, Help Wanted: Other Woman, about her experiences with her husband for last Sunday’s "Modern Love" column in the New York Times.

I've read lots of memoirs of catastrophe, and this one is one of the best. Especially if you’re struggling to find happiness in a situation where something very bad has happened, you’ll find this account enormously interesting and helpful.

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A thoughtful reader send me the link to a fascinating post on the blog Why Does Everything Suck?, in which one of my happiness gurus, Nancy Schulman, author with Ellen Birnbaum of the fantastic parenting book, Practical Wisdom for Parents, is quoted saying, “Kindergarten is becoming more like regular school, but I think regular school and life should become more like kindergarten.” I think this is absolutely true, and I spend a lot of time, as a parent, trying to figure out how to make that happen in my own apartment. The push to "enrich" children is so strong -- and so well-intended -- to what degree should parents step back and let their kids do what they feel like (within the bounds of good health, schoolwork, manners, etc)?

A major theme in my Happiness Project is to try to push myself to do more playing, more wandering, more experimenting. This is harder than it sounds.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Happiness quotation from Joseph Addison.

"The important question is not, what will yield to man a few scattered pleasures, but what will render his life happy on the whole amount." -- Joseph Addison

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Your Happiness Project: Conquer a device.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you should have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes feel overwhelmed by technology. I need to learn how to use new gizmos for my blog, but it’s not just that. Even devices that used to be easy to use – like TVs, irons, dishwashers – can now be challenging.

Adding to that complexity in our house is the fact that the Big Man is what I call an “incomplete upgrader.” Last year, he bought a new video camera, but still hasn’t quite figured out how to use it. Or other times, if he does figure out how to use a new thing, he won’t have the patience to show me, and I don’t have the patience to sit down with the manual.

We don’t go out and buy much stuff; we don’t accumulate much tech apparatus. But even so, somehow I’ve allowed myself to become surrounded by several common household appliances that I don’t quite know how to use. I’m pretty slow with TiVo. I don’t know how to use the “mute” function on our phone. I’m still figuring out my Flip camera (though that really is pretty easy). A friend burned a bunch of photos onto a disk, but I can’t get them to display.

Recently, to celebrate starting a new job, the Big Man bought a coffeemaker that, weeks later, I still hadn’t figured out how to use. I just made tea for myself instead; I couldn’t face learning a new machine.

I realized, though, that feeling ignorant and incompetent was weighing me down. Last weekend, I mastered the coffeemaker (and it wasn’t that hard). Slowly but surely, I’ve vowed, I’m going to master every useful device in my apartment.

The First Splendid Truth holds that to be happy, we need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

The “atmosphere of growth” element is far more important that I realized when I came up with the First Splendid Truth. The feeling that you’re growing is a KEY to happiness. Even a very little step toward growth – like learning to use a new coffeemaker – gives a boost.

Now, some folks might say, “I don’t buy or use those devices.” You might think such things are wasteful, or time-wasters, or replace other activities that are more valuable. But in my own case, for the devices that I want to use, I DO think it would be useful and valuable to learn how to use them better. So I’m making my list.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Yesterday was a good bad day.

Yesterday, I was feeling sad and anxious. I did the usual things to try to boost my mood: I went to the gym; I got a decent amount of work done; I made sure not to let myself get too hungry, and I ate healthy food; I crossed a nagging task off my to-do list; I cleaned off my desk; I met someone for lunch; I put two people who had a common interest in touch with each other; I spent some good time with my husband and my two children.

But nothing really worked. I felt sad and anxious for a reason, and that reason didn’t go away.

At the end of the day, I climbed in bed at 9:30 p.m. (if all else fails, I go to sleep as soon as I’m sleepy, because everything does look brighter in the morning, on a good night’s sleep). As I lay in bed, it occurred to me, “Well, I did have a sad, anxious day. But I also had a good day.”

The First Splendid Truth holds that to think about my happiness, I should think about feeling good, feeling bad, feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

Some people assume that feeling good and feeling bad operate in a kind of see-saw balance, as opposites along a single continuum. In fact, research has shown that positive affect and negative affect (fancy words for feeling good and feeling bad) operate independently of each other. It’s possible to feel very good and very bad.

That’s the kind of day I had.

The nice thing about trying to ameliorate a bad mood by taking constructive steps like spending time with friends and family, tackling a nagging task, exercising, and all the rest is that even if a day is bad, it has bright spots, and I can look back on it with satisfaction.

Other ways of trying to boost a bad mood, tempting as they are, don’t work very well. Splurging on “treats,” like shopping, drinking, or ice cream, can cheer you up for a minute, but then make you feel worse when regret and guilt set in. Indulging in a bad mood by yelling or sulking deepens bad feelings, because, as research shows, you tend to feel the way you act – so acting in an unhappy or angry way strengthens those emotions. Withdrawing from the world, though tempting, can make you feel worse. People – even introverts – are cheered by contact with other people, so isolating yourself intensifies the blues.

When I woke up this morning, I felt better. The reason for my sadness still existed, but it didn't upset me as much. And yesterday wasn't too bad. I had a bad day, but it was a good bad day.

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The great blog Productivity 501 just joined the LifeRemix network.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Happiness and productivity: 12 quick tips for boosting your happiness and productivity at work.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: 12 quick tips for boosting your happiness and productivity at work.

Of course, being happy at work depends mostly on how much you like your job. But there are also smaller steps that can boost your happiness, as well. Some of these steps are VERY small, but the fact that you’re taking steps to improve your situation itself boosts happiness.

1. Check for eyestrain by putting your hand to your forehead in a salute. If your eyes feel relieved, your work space is too bright.

2. Sit up straight with your shoulders down — every time I adjust my sitting position, I instantly feel more energetic and cheerier.

3. Get a phone headset. I resisted for a long time, because it looks so preposterous, but it’s really much more comfortable. Also, it lets me pace while I talk on the phone, which also looks preposterous, but is energizing.

4. Don’t keep candy on your desk. Studies show that people are much more likely to snack when a treat is within easy reach, and a handful of M&Ms each day could mean a weight gain of five pounds by year’s end.

5. Never say “yes” on the phone; instead, say, “I’ll get back to you.” When you’re actually speaking to someone, the desire to be accommodating is very strong, and can lead you to say “yes” without enough consideration. Along the same lines…

6. When deciding whether to say “yes,” imagine that you’re accepting a job that you’ll have to do next week. Don’t agree to something just because it seems so far off that it doesn’t seem onerous.

7. Don’t let yourself get too hungry. The Big Man goes without eating for hours and hours at a time, so once, trying to be helpful, I bought him a big bag of granola to keep in his desk. He ate the whole bag in one day and ended up sick as a dog. Lesson: eat regularly.

8. Take care of difficult calls, tasks, or emails as quickly as possible. Procrastinating makes them harder; getting them done gives a big boost of relieved energy.

9. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, think hard about how you spend your time. Be honest. How much time do you spend surfing the internet, looking for things you’ve misplaced, or doing a task that’s really someone else’s job? Also…

10. Let yourself stay ignorant of things you don’t need to know.

11. Go outside at least once a day, and if possible, take a walk. The sunlight and activity is good for your focus, mood, and retention of information.

12. Say “Good morning” to everyone. Social contact is cheering, and if you feel that you’re on good terms with all the people in your office, you’ll be happier each day. Also, it’s polite.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

New blog feature -- the True Rules series! Plus video clips!

My father often talks about “True Rules.” For example, when I started working after college, he said, “It’s one of the True Rules – if you’re willing to take the blame, people will give you responsibility.” And in my experience that rule has certainly turned out to be true.

I love True Rules, and I recently started writing them down whenever I heard them. These aren’t general rules for living, like “Enjoy every day.” They’re more specific and concrete.

My sister spouts these rules regularly. “People succeed in groups.” “Everyone who moves from New York to Los Angeles gains ten pounds.” “You don’t get a writing job in L.A. until you’ve lived here for three years.” “Everything you’ve heard about L.A. is more true than you could possibly imagine.”

Just yesterday, a friend mentioned a rule to me, “When I was studying ballet, we said that for every week we took off from training, we needed a week to get back to our previous condition.” Another friend has a very controversial rule, “Every guy deserves a second date.”

So I’m going to start a new series, the True Rules series. We can all learn from each other. And I find these rules illuminating and deliciously interesting.

It’s going to be a VIDEO series. To figure out how to do this, I had to remind myself of several happiness-project resolutions: “Learn to do something new,” “Enjoy the fun of failure,” and “Ask for help.”

A friend who writes the fascinating blog In Case of Emergency, Read Blog told me that posting video clips was easy. I got a Flip camera and fiddled around with it. Then I called him to get his advice. He was right, it is easy! (Assuming I pull this off, see below.)

Then I asked another friend, Michael Melcher – author of the terrific book The Creative Lawyer – to provide the first video clip. I love his two True Rules.

You can see that I'm just getting the hang of this camera -- I'll have better production values next time. I'm just so pleased with myself that I figured out how to post the clip!

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Why I decided to put together a photo album that wasn't as good as it could have been.

One of my happiness-project resolutions is “Be a treasure house of happy memories.” Thinking back on happy times elevates mood; research has shown that although depressed people have as many nice experiences as other people, they don’t remember them as well. By helping my family to recollect happy times from the past, I’m boosting their happiness in the present – and photographs are a particularly good way to recall happy memories.

On the other hand, one of my Secrets of Adulthood is “Photo albums and houseplants are a lot of trouble.”

I’ve been experiencing this conflict for weeks now. On the one hand, I wanted to make a lovely album of photographs from our summer – all carefully arranged, with lengthy, well-written captions to remind us, in future years, of all our adventures.

But whenever I thought about undertaking this project, I felt overwhelmed and panicky. It filled me with dread. We had so many photographs, and it was going to take a huge amount of time and energy to complete the album, even using an online service as I planned to do. As summer vacation receded into the past, and photos started to pile up from the fall (the Big Girl getting her ears pierced, the first day of school, my father-in-law’s birthday), the task loomed ever more ominously in my mind. I already had so much work to do. I didn’t want to labor over a photo album, too.

So I reminded myself of another Secret of Adulthood, this one lifted from Voltaire: “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” My desire to create the perfect summer album was preventing me from working on it at all. I needed to do a good-enough job and get it done – or else I might end up never doing an album at all.

I used another happiness-project technique to get the task finished: I set a specific time to do it. I’d been telling myself that I’d organize the album “in my free time,” but the fact is, I don’t have any free time. I’m never aimlessly wandering around the apartment, looking for something to do. Because making the album was a priority for me, I wrote it on my calendar as a real appointment, and I worked on it yesterday while the Little Girl took her nap.

As it turned out, making the album wasn’t such an awful task. Once I actually sat down to do it, I got it done in one sitting. I didn’t spend a lot of time arranging the pictures, I didn’t write captions, I didn’t do a lot of things that would have made it nicer, but I got it DONE.

Now I have the happiness of anticipating the arrival of the album.

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I found Friday Playdate after a nice reader mentioned The Happiness Project in the comments section. In her post, the writer describes a moment very much like the moment that led me to start my Happiness Project. I was on a crowded bus on a rainy day, rather than at my kitchen table with my children, but her thoughts remind me very much of my thoughts.

John Stuart Mill wrote, “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.” In my experience, this is quite incorrect. Asking myself whether I was “happy,” as the writer of Friday Playdate did, was the first step in a process that led me to A) recognize that I was already much happier than I realized and B) take steps to boost my happiness.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Happiness quotation from Colette.

“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” --Colette.

Coming across this quotation was one of the things that most inspired me to start my Happiness Project.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.

Your Happiness Project: Throw away other people’s trash.

I’m working on my Happiness Project, and you should have one, too! Everyone’s project will look different, but it’s the rare person who can’t benefit. Join in -- no need to catch up, just jump in right now. Each Friday’s post will help you think about your own happiness project.

The subject of self-esteem is a topic that has generated a fair amount of controversy over the last few decades, but one thing seems clear: you don’t get healthy self-esteem from constantly telling yourself how great you are, or even from other people telling you how great you are. You get healthy self-esteem from behaving in ways that you find estimable.

In other words, the best way to feel better about yourself is to do something worthy of your own respect: keep a difficult resolution, meet a challenge, solve a problem, learn a skill, cross something unpleasant off your to-do list. And one of the best ways to feel better about yourself is to help someone else -- do good, feel good.

I had a friend who went through a period of tremendous rejection: she was fired from her job, she didn’t get into the graduate program to which she’d applied, and her boyfriend broke up with her. Everything worked out fine in the end, and I asked her how she got through such a tough time. She said, “I was practically addicted to doing good deeds for other people. It was the only way I could make myself feel like I wasn’t a total loser.”

I recently performed a very small action that gave me a big boost: throwing away other people’s trash. I’ve always been careful to throw away my own litter, but it never occurred to me to do anything about random litter lying around.

The other day, though, I was in the subway, where an empty Snapple bottle was rolling around to the great annoyance of everyone in the car. The bottle rolled back and forth, back and forth, and I thought, “Someone should pick that up.” Then I thought – “Someone like me! Why shouldn’t I be the one to pick it up?” So I did.

I was astonished by the surge of good feeling I got, quite disproportionate to such a minor action. I also thought I could feel a palpable wave of approval from the other people on the subway – which I was probably projecting, but which also shows the effect that my tiny good deed had on me.

Since then, I’ve looked for chances to throw away other people’s trash. In a coffee shop, I threw away the coffee cup someone left on a table. I threw away a plastic cup that was rolling down the sidewalk. Etc.

So try it yourself; throw away someone else’s trash. "Do good, feel good" is a happiness truism that really is true. Act like a considerate citizen of the world, and you’ll boost your self-esteem.

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Interested in starting your own Happiness Project? If you’d like to take a look at my Resolutions Chart, for inspiration, just email me at grubin, then the “at” sign, then gretchenrubin dot com. No need to write anything more than “Resolutions Chart” in the subject line.