One of the striking facts about happiness is that happy people live longer—about 20% longer. Happy people have better immune function, and they act in healthier ways—for example, they exercise more.

I was thinking about this last night as I fastened my seatbelt after getting in a cab.

Until recently, although I always wore a seatbelt in a regular car, I never bothered with it when I was in a taxi.

Why not?

Maybe because of the “availability bias.” The availability bias is a tendency that causes us to evaluate an event’s probability according to its availability in our memory. However, we might remember something better because it causes more emotion, or because it’s reported in the media, not because it’s very frequent. For example, ask yourself: what kills more Americans–asthma or tornadoes? Turns out that asthma kills eighty times more people than tornadoes.

I’d never heard of anyone being injured in a taxi accident, and of course, I see people taking taxis all the time. Because no incidences of taxi accidents were available in my memory, I assumed that taxi accidents were very rare. (Also, I felt like I was in the hands of a “driving professional” when I was in a taxi.)

But a few weeks ago, at dinner with some friends, it came up in conversation that out of eight people in the room, two people had been in taxi accidents serious enough to put them in the hospital. Zoikes, I realized, these accidents are more common than I thought.

So I vowed to wear my seatbelt in a taxi.

But last night I was feeling blue. I’d had a discouraging day, I had a lot on my mind, I was irritable.

I didn’t tell myself, “How lucky I am to be able to jump into a nice warm cab and go straight home, instead of having to walk in the freezing cold to wait for the subway!” Instead, I collapsed against the seat, feeling listless and sorry for myself.

Fastening the seatbelt seemed like too much effort. I didn’t want to deal with it.

So this is another way that feeling happier can lead a person to act in healthier ways, such as fastening a seatbelt. When you’re feeling unhappy, little efforts can seem overwhelming—or worse, pointless. Making an effort to be happy makes it easier to take a myriad of small steps that bolster happiness.

The day may come when I’ll be very, very, very happy I happened to be wearing a seat belt.

On the last day of the month, I post a list of happiness-themed recommended reading.
Yesterday was Tip Day, however, so I held the list until today.

Human nature, or character, is the subject that interests me most, and I love to read essays, maxims, and aphorisms on this topic. I enjoy the new science research and modern writing on happiness, but I’m always struck by the tremendous and complex insights of someone like Samuel Johnson.

Here are some of my favorites work:

Samuel Johnson: The Rambler, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Francis Bacon, Essays
La Rochefoucauld, Maxims
La Bruyere, Characters
Montaigne, Essays
Samuel Butler, The Note Books
William Hazlitt, Selected Writings
Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
Tolstoy, A Calendar of Wisdom
Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, vols I and II (by the way, does anyone know what those words mean?)
Franklin, Poor Richard’s Almanack

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And mark your calendars! Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows goes on sale at 12:01 on July 21st.

Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday: tips for applying my top-secret happiness formula.

Okay, it’s not really top secret. But I’m convinced that, if followed, this formula will indeed make you happier. Even thought it sounds simplistic, it took me a long time and a lot of research to realize that this was the way to think about happiness.

Here it is: To think about your happiness, you must think about FEELING GOOD, FEELING BAD, and FEELING RIGHT (or, in fancier language, positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction.)

Although you might think that feeling good and feeling bad would operate in a see-saw, in fact, research shows that they are distinct—and so is feeling right.

Studies show that absence of feeling bad doesn’t mean that you feel good, and also, you can feel very good and very bad at the same time. And just because you feel good doesn’t mean you feel right; sometimes, in fact, you might choose to feel bad in order to feel right.

So to boost your happiness, you have to think about all three elements and figure out how to increase your good feelings, decrease your bad feelings, and make sure you’re feeling right:

1. Feeling good
Think of something fun to do this weekend.

Make a plan with a friend.

Make a small purchase that will boost your happiness.
My self-inking home-address stamp had gotten so faint that it was barely legible; I was made ridiculously happy by my purchase of a bottle of ink to replenish it.

2. Feeling bad
Do you start your day on a bad note—nagging your kids, cursing on the subway? Make a change.

Does some task nag at you? Take care of it.
I finally made an appointment to get my teeth cleaned; I’m six months overdue.

Do you feel guilty about something you did or didn’t do? Make amends in some way.

3. Feeling right
Is there a skill that you feel that you should have, but you don’t? Figure out a way to learn it.
A friend of mine learned to type as an adult.

Is there a subject that you feel that you ought to know more about?
I feel that I need to understand more about the Iraq War than I do.

Ask yourself: “Is there some major element in my life that just feels wrong to me?”
Try not to panic if the answer is “yes,” and don’t worry now about doing anything about it this minute. Just consider whether you’re not feeling right because of your job, your city, your relationship, your body, etc. Understanding that something isn’t right is the first step to being able to make it right.

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A friend was raving about a book that’s about to come out–Sharon Moalem’s Survival of the Sickest. Apparently it explains why, in many circumstances, disease can have beneficial effects. Plus, my friend says, it’s full of the kind of interesting information that’s fun to trot out at a dinner party. This is just the kind of thing I love, so I went to check out the blog. Lots of fascinating info there.

Last night, I finished Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. In some ways, her story is very much like the Happiness Project—she decides to change her life to see if she can boost her happiness. Except in her adventuresome case, she moves for several months to Rome to study Italian, then to India to practice meditation in an ashram, then Bali to visit a medicine man, while I’ve stayed parked in my own kitchen.

It’s a great book, and Gilbert has many fascinating adventures and insights. She eats a lot of pasta, travels to many cities, meditates, makes new friends, learns a lot about herself, and in my favorite section of the book, raises money to buy a house for a woman and her children. But boy, her happiness project wouldn’t have made me happy.

More and more, I’m realizing how unique each person’s happiness project must be. The secret to making yourself happier is to realize what’s right FOR YOU (though no matter what your personality, you’d better include a supportive social network in your blueprint). For example, travel makes Gilbert very happy; I’ve never had wanderlust.

Another difference between our happiness projects is our starting point. Gilbert is profoundly unhappy and starts her travel year out of desperation. She’s going through a difficult divorce, plus she’s breaking up with a new love. She cries all the time, she’s taking antidepressants, she can hardly eat. My story is much less dramatic.

I worry that people will find my account boring for that reason, because the stakes are too low—no divorce, no 700-pound weight loss, no dysfunctional, abusive family. Maybe people will find me unsympathetic. “Why is she spending so much time trying to be happier? She admits that she was pretty happy before she even started!”

As it turns out, most Americans say they’re happy. In a recent survey, 34% of Americans described themselves as “very happy” and 50% described themselves as “pretty happy.” That’s 84%, and that’s a lot.

Desperately unhappy folks know they need to make changes. But I hope that my happiness project will show people that it’s worth the effort to make changes, even if you’re “pretty happy” already.

I’ve been surprised by how much work it is to be happy, but I’ve also been surprised by what a boost I got from the steps I’ve taken. And I’ve really come to believe that even if you’re already pretty happy—or if you don’t believe in thinking about your life in terms of “being happy”—it’s worth taking the trouble to be happier.

If not for yourself—for other people. Happier people are more helpful, more flexible, more altruistic, more energetic, and more likeable. Their happiness helps other people feel happier. So by taking the trouble to make yourself happier, you’ll make others happier too.

Elizabeth Gilbert’s transformation is remarkable. I marvel at how much she went through—both before her Eat, Pray, Love adventure, and during it. But you don’t have to wait until you can move to Rome, or live in an ashram, to start a happiness project. The ruby slippers are on your feet right now.

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Many thanks to Tim, who out of sheer generosity fixed the color in my blog photo. Tim, I hope your good deed has made YOU very happy—that’s the “do good, feel good” effect.

Thinking about happiness often means balancing one person’s views against another person’s—I’ve been thinking about kids’ clothing.

The Big Girl has started having definite ideas about what clothes she likes and dislikes. And her tastes and my tastes clash.

I’d love for her to wear classic children’s clothing—Peter Pan collars, wool dresses. But that’s not what she wants to wear.

So who prevails? I’ve decided that clothes, unless actually inappropriate, aren’t important enough to merit a parental veto—within reason, of course, and properly priced. But t-shirts with big designs and sparkles, jeans with embroidered flowers up and down the legs, ugly color combinations…okay.

A parent might feel very strongly that children shouldn’t bow to fashion or fads, so the fact that other kids dress a certain way is itself a reason not to permit it. Or a parent might make an aesthetic judgment and want children to dress according to adult taste, no matter what the other kids are wearing.

In Judith Rich Harris’s fascinating and controversial book, The Nurture Assumption, she argues that childhood is the period in people’s lives when fitting in is most important. Therefore, she suggests, parents should help their children look “normal and attractive”—for example, by dressing them in clothes like those of other kids.

I was very lucky with this issue growing up. I was an odd duck, and desperate to fit in, but so anxious I couldn’t even go about it properly. I remember when my mother said, “Would you like to go shopping for jeans?” I didn’t have a single pair of jeans! I did want a pair, but I dreaded shopping for them so much that I couldn’t bring myself to mention it. I was incredibly grateful to my mother for understanding all this.

Of course I want my children to understand the importance of being able to buck the crowd, to assert themselves to do the right thing, to defend unpopular ideas or preferences. But I’ve decided that clothes aren’t the ground to make the parenting point about the importance of the individual conscience; plus I wonder whether being able to fit in with the crowd is an important step in being able to stand up to the crowd effectively.

Yes, yes, this is a petty issue. That said, I’ve talked to plenty of adults who remember being made miserable by the clothes they had to wear as children.

Was this unhappiness good for them? I don’t think so. As Samuel Johnson observed, “All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.”

And the Big Girl’s taste is actually growing on me.