The Way to Happiness

Proven tips to help you feel content with yourself and your life.

A Wonder Drug

In a taxicab on a rainy day in New York City, Gretchen Rubin, 41, suddenly asked herself what she wanted most in life. "I realized I wanted to be happy," she recalls. "It was a lightning-bolt moment because I'd never even thought about it before."

A couple of years ago, this wife, mother and former lawyer for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor launched a full-time happiness project to test-drive traditional and newly minted approaches toward her life goal. She kept a daily gratitude journal, read a poem every day and had regular date nights with her husband, among other strategies. Now she swears she's cheerier.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the get-happier bandwagon. Happiness is making headlines, selling books, inspiring scientific studies and spawning laughter clubs and joyology workshops. The reason? As the burgeoning field of positive psychology has shown, happy people thrive. They're more creative and productive, earn more money, attract more friends, enjoy better marriages, stay healthier and even outlive their grumpier peers.

"Imagine a drug that causes you to live eight or nine years longer, make $15,000 more a year, be less likely to get divorced," says Martin Seligman, PhD, who started the positive psychology movement almost a decade ago. "Happiness seems to be that drug."

But others wonder, Is this just one more thing we feel pressured to achieve in our overscheduled, overmeasured lives? How could there be one path to happiness for all people? And if we aren't feeling blissful, are we failures at happiness? Some skeptics dismiss "happichondria" as the latest feel-good fad. "The notion that behavior modification can bring about true happiness is as bogus as can be," says psychiatrist Charles Goodstein, MD, of New York University.

But happiness researchers, backed by thousands of studies, say happiness is measurable and buildable. If you're willing to take a chance on the upside of life and shoot for your bliss, in spite of the naysayers, here's help laying the groundwork.

Genetics, as research on 4,000 sets of twins has demonstrated, accounts for about 50 percent of your happiness quotient. But even if you inherited the family frown instead of joy genes, you're not fated to a life of gloom. Just don't pin your hopes on advantages like health, wealth, education and good looks -- those bring only somewhat greater happiness than what those who are less blessed feel. Unless you're extremely poor or gravely ill, life circumstances account for only about 10 percent of happiness. The other 40 percent depends on what you do to make yourself happy.

That's the tricky part. Most of us assume that external things -- a bigger house, a better job, a winning lottery ticket -- will brighten our lives. While they do bring temporary delight, the thrill invariably fades. "After 18 years of studying happiness, I fell into the same trap as everyone else," says psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky, PhD, author of The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. "I was so excited to get a new car, a hybrid I'd wanted for a long time, but within two months, driving it became routine. Happiness is like weight loss. We all know how to take off a few pounds; the trick is maintaining it."

In their research, Lyubomirsky and her colleagues found that the key to enduring joy is to look beyond fleeting pleasures, to the other pillars of what Seligman calls authentic happiness: engagement with family, work or a passionate pursuit, and finding meaning from some higher purpose. "Different methods are a better fit for different people," Lyubomirsky explains. "Keeping a daily gratitude journal seems hokey to some people, but writing a letter of gratitude may be very meaningful." Timing and "doses" also matter. Performing five acts of kindness on one day, she found, yielded a significant increase in well-being, while acts of kindness on different days didn't. "To sustain happiness," she emphasizes, "you have to make the effort and commitment every day for the rest of your life.

The long run generally brings greater contentment, according to studies that chart the trajectory of happiness over a life span. After even the most joyous childhood, happiness typically declines in the teens through the early 20s, but, believe it or not, increases as we age. "Young people tend to pay more attention to the bad," explains neuropsychologist Stacey Wood, PhD, of Scripps College. "As we get older, we learn to regulate and overcome this reaction."

In fact, some experts say, happiness seems to rise even into old age. "Older adults don't react as intensely to life events, and they report fewer negative emotions and more positive ones," says Wood.

Not everyone agrees. Nora Ephron, author of I Feel Bad
About My Neck, says that, yes, after a certain age you tend to factor the realization that life is short into your decisions. "And you try to eliminate people and things (like bad meals) that don't make you happy," she says. "But of course, all this is overlaid by a certain sadness because this is the time when people start to get sick, and that absolutely cuts into the happiness quotient."

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• Happiness
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• • Depression
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