The Happiness Project (36 page)

These comments reminded me that the joy of the joyous ones wasn’t inexhaustible or unconquerable. I started to make a real effort to use my good cheer to support the joyous ones I knew.

To keep my resolution to “Give positive reviews,” I resolved to employ the intensive approach I’d used during the Week of Extreme Nice and the Month of Novel Writing. Maybe a week of playing Pollyanna would help accelerate my move toward the positive. In Eleanor Porter’s enormously successful 1913 novel,
Pollyanna,
Pollyanna plays the “glad game”: whatever happens to her, she finds a reason to be glad about it. My own game, “Pollyanna Week,” would be a solid week of
no negative comments.
I knew I should “Act the way I want to feel,” and if I wanted to feel enthusiastic, warm, and accepting, I wasn’t going to get there by constantly making sniping comments.

I woke up the first morning, deep in thought about Pollyanna Week, and by 7:00
A.M
., I’d already broken it. Practically the first thing I said to Jamie was to chide him: “You
never
answer my e-mails, and you didn’t answer my e-mail yesterday, so I couldn’t get any of those scheduling issues settled. Do we need a babysitter for Thursday night or not?”

The next day, I did the same thing. We were all sitting around before
school when Eleanor started pointing to her mouth, in what we thought was a cute way, until she started making gagging noises.

“Quick, get a towel, she’s going to throw up!” I yelled.

Eliza darted into the kitchen, but she still hadn’t emerged when Eleanor began heaving half-digested milk all over herself, me, and the furniture.

“Jamie, go get a towel!” He’d been sitting, mesmerized by the sight. By the time they both rushed back from the kitchen with dish towels, Eleanor had finished throwing up, and she and I were wallowing in a big, yucky mess.

“Folks, that was
not
the fastest action we could’ve had,” I scolded. “We could’ve saved a lot of trouble if you’d been faster with those towels.” Why did I throw out a negative comment? It added to the general loss of morale without making any useful point.

One lesson that Pollyanna Week taught me was that I could usually make my point, even if it was critical, in a positive way. For example, I broke Pollyanna Week during a game of “Finders, Keepers” with Eliza. The point of Finders, Keepers is to accumulate the most tiles.

“Can I trade my baseball cap tile for your butterfly tile?” Eliza asked after one round.

“Okay.”

We played another round.

“Can I trade my globe for your flower?”

“Okay.”

We played another round.

“Can I trade my football for your ice cream sundae?”

I’d been getting increasingly annoyed. “Eliza, it’s tiresome when you keep trading tiles,” I told her. “Just keep what you get, and you can trade them at the end. ‘You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.’”

“All right,” she said cheerfully.

Only later did I realize that I could have phrased my request without criticism: “The game is more fun when we keep it moving fast. Can we trade at the end?”

That night I did a better job, largely because I was so tired that I went to bed at nine. Being asleep is a great way to avoid being critical. But when I said to Jamie, “I’m so exhausted that I’m going to bed now,” was that a complaint or a statement of fact? It counted as a complaint. I should’ve found a positive way to phrase it: “Going to bed sounds so great to me that I think I’m going to turn out the light early.”

One big challenge of Pollyanna Week was remembering to keep my goal uppermost in my mind. During the activities of the day, I forgot my resolution. So, borrowing from some of the mindfulness strategies I had tried in October, on the third morning, I started wearing a wide orange bracelet for the rest of Pollyanna Week, as a constant reminder of my goal to make only positive comments. The bracelet worked fairly well—except that once I caught myself complaining to a friend that the bracelet was too heavy and clunky! So much for reminding me to make only positive comments. But I did have moments of triumph. I didn’t complain about our loss of Internet ser vice. I didn’t grouse when Jamie baked three rich desserts in three nights. When Eliza accidentally ran Eleanor’s stroller into the kitchen wall, where it made a dark mark, I let it go without making a fuss. And when Eleanor grabbed my lipstick off the counter, then dropped it into the toilet, I said, “Well, it was an accident.”

During Pollyanna Week, I never did manage to go an entire day without a negative comment, but I nevertheless declared it a successful exercise. Though 100 percent compliance was an impossible ambition, making the effort jolted me into an awareness of my usual attitude. The effect of Pollyanna Week lingered long after the week was up.

FIND AN AREA OF REFUGE.

One fact of human nature is that people have a “negativity bias”: we react to the
bad
more strongly and persistently than to the comparable
good.
As
I’d learned in February, within a marriage, it takes at least five good acts to repair the damage of one critical or destructive act. With money, the pain of losing a certain sum is greater than the pleasure of gaining that sum. Hitting the best-seller list with
Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill
thrilled me less than a bad review upset me.

One consequence of the negativity bias is that when people’s minds are unoccupied, they tend to drift to anxious or angry thoughts. And rumination—dwelling on slights, unpleasant encounters, and sad events—leads to bad feelings. In fact, one reason that women are more susceptible to depression than men may be their greater tendency to ruminate; men are more likely to distract themselves with an activity. Studies show that distraction is a powerful mood-altering device, and contrary to what a lot of people believe, persistently focusing on a bad mood aggravates rather than palliates it.

I’d often noticed my own tendency to brood, and to counter this effect, I invented the idea of the “area of refuge.” Once when I was back visiting my former law school, I noticed a sign by an elevator that declared that area an “area of refuge.” I guess it’s where a person in a wheelchair or with some other difficulty should go in case of fire. The phrase stuck in my mind, and I decided that if I found myself dwelling on bad feelings, I’d seek a mental “area of refuge.”

As an area of refuge, I often think about Churchill’s speeches—in particular, his eulogy for Neville Chamberlain. Or I think about some of the funny things Jamie has done. Years ago, when we were first married, Jamie came into our bedroom in his boxers and announced, “I am LORD of the DANCE!” and hopped around with his arms straight at his sides. I still laugh every time I think about it. A friend told me that she thinks about her children. Another friend—not a writer—makes up short stories in her head. When Arthur Llewelyn Davies, the father of the boys who inspired
Peter Pan,
was recovering from an operation that removed his cheekbone and part of the roof of his mouth, he wrote a note to J. M. Barrie:

Among the things I think about

These phrases mean nothing to an outsider, but for him, they were areas of refuge.

By the end of November, I’d realized that one of the most important lessons of the happiness project is that if I keep my resolutions and do the things that make me happier, I end up feeling happier
and
acting more virtuously. Do good, feel good; feel good, do good.

Over the course of the month, I noticed that a frequent subject of my negative comments was Eliza’s hair. Jamie and I thought it looked cutest when it hung right above her shoulders, but she begged us to grow it long. “You can grow it long only if you promise to keep it brushed nicely and out of your face,” I threatened, repeating the words that untold millions of parents have uttered, to no avail. She promised, but of course, her hair constantly hung in her face.

“Eliza, brush your hair, it’s all messy.”

“Eliza, you’ve got the dreaded middle part, part your hair on the side.”

“Eliza, get a ponytail holder or a barrette, you need to pull your hair back.”

“Eliza, you can’t possibly tell me you’ve already brushed your hair.”

This criticism was no fun for her and no fun for me. I wanted to change this pattern. So the next time I wanted to fret about her hair, I said, “Bring me a brush,” and I started to brush her hair—not fast and rough, as I sometimes did when I was impatient in the morning, but gently. “I love seeing your hair smooth and shiny,” I said. “Your hair looks beautiful.”

Eliza looked a little surprised.

The next time I tried the same thing. “Let me brush your hair,” I told her. “I love brushing your hair.”

She didn’t get any better about keeping her hair tidy, but it didn’t bother me as much.

Boot Camp Perfect

H
APPINESS

Boot Camp Perfect

F
or eleven months, I’d been piling on the resolutions, and for this last month of December, I wanted to try Boot Camp Perfect. I would follow all of my resolutions, all the time. I would aim to see nothing but gold stars glittering on my Resolutions Chart. This goal of perfection was daunting, because following my resolutions took a huge amount of mental discipline and self-control—not to mention, it took a lot of
time.

So, for the month, I tidied, I cleared, I organized, I turned off the light. I sang in the morning, I laughed out loud, I acknowledged people’s feelings, I left things unsaid. I blogged, I asked for help, I pushed myself, I showed up, I
went off the path. I wrote in my one-sentence journal. I met with my writers’ strategy group and my children’s literature reading group. I listened to my hypnosis tape. I didn’t eat any fake food. I bought needful things.

Of course, I also failed to do these things. As hard as I tried during Boot Camp Perfect, I still didn’t manage to keep all my resolutions. Resolutions! After all these months, I was still astonished at how effectively they worked to make me happy, whenever I did faithfully keep them. I thought often of the 1764 journal entry of Samuel Johnson, who, as an inveterate resolution maker and resolution breaker, is one of the patron saints of the process:

Did I have even one single perfect day during December? Nope. But I kept trying. One helpful consequence of my happiness project was that even when I had a bad day, it was a good bad day. If I was feeling blue, I’d run through my mood-boosting strategies: go to the gym, get some work done, keep myself from getting too hungry, cross a nagging task off my to-do list, connect with other people, spend some time having fun with my family. Sometimes nothing really worked, but the nice thing about trying to ameliorate a bad mood by taking those kinds of constructive steps was that even when a day was bad, it had bright spots, and I could look back on a good bad day with satisfaction.

One development had given me a huge shot of encouragement: after I’d posted an offer to send people my Resolutions Chart in case they wanted to see a model as they formulated their own resolutions, I’d started to get e-mails from people describing their happiness projects. Several people had even started their own blogs to track them. I was
gratified to think that I’d convinced some readers to try the method and resolutions that had worked for me.

It made me very happy to think that my blog had helped contribute to the happiness of people I’d never even met. Of course, that was the purpose of the blog—but I was thrilled to discover that it was actually working.

“Your year is almost up,” friends kept saying to me. “So, are you happier?”

“Absolutely!” I answered.

“But how do you really know?” one scientist friend asked. “Did you do any kind of systematic measurement over the course of the year?”

“Well, no.”

“You didn’t have Jamie score you each day or keep a mood chart on yourself or anything like that?”

“Nope.”

“So maybe you aren’t any happier, you just
think
you are.”

“Well,” I conceded, “maybe it’s my imagination…but no. I
know
I’m happier.”

“How?”

“I
feel
happier!”

It was really true.

My First Splendid Truth says that if I want to be happier, I need to look at my life and think about
feeling good, feeling bad,
and
feeling right,
in an
atmosphere of growth
. I’d worked on all these elements, and it had made an enormous difference.

For me, it turned out, the most significant prong was the
feeling bad.
My biggest happiness boosts had come from eliminating the bad feelings generated by my snapping, nagging, gossiping, being surrounded by clutter, eating fake food, drinking, and all the rest. In particular, it made me happier to be in better control of my sharp tongue. Nowadays I often managed to pause and change my tone, just a second before I started to rant, or to change my tone in midsentence. I’d even managed to laugh while chiding Jamie—about not dealing with the insurance forms or not looking for his missing library book.

At the same time, I was having more
feeling good
—more laughing with my family, talking about children’s literature with my book group, listening to music I liked. I’d learned a lot of ways to get more bang for my happiness buck.

Feeling right
had been very important to my happiness when I was struggling with the question of whether to switch from law to writing, but
it hadn’t been the source of many of my resolutions over the past months. At the start of December, however, I was hit by the idea for a goal I wanted to undertake to “feel right” in the coming year: I wanted to get involved in the issue of organ donation. We all hoped that Jamie would never need a liver transplant, of course, but his hepatitis C had made me much more interested in the issue. If I could figure out some small way, myself, to help boost the number of organ donations in the country, I’d feel as though I’d been able to transform an unfortunate personal situation into some larger good. I’d already started gathering a list of names and resources that I wanted to check out. I didn’t particularly enjoy this work, but I could see that this project would make me
feel right.

But what had surprised me most about the First Splendid Truth was the importance of the final prong, the
atmosphere of growth.
I hadn’t ascribed much weight to it, even when I’d identified it as the fourth element of happiness. My happiness project had proved to me, however, that the atmosphere of growth was a huge contributor to happiness. Although my instinct was to shy away from novelty and challenge, in fact they are a key source of happiness, even for an unadventurous soul like me. In particular, I’d seen how the atmosphere of growth provided by my blog had become an enormous source of happiness. My successful mastery of that skill had given me feelings of gratification and mastery that in turn had energized me to push myself even harder.

There was another question that people kept asking me: “What about Jamie—has he changed, is
he
happier?” One thing I knew: Jamie wouldn’t be very happy if I pestered him to provide a comprehensive analysis of his emotional state. Even so, one night I couldn’t resist asking him, “Do you think my happiness project has made you happier? Do you think you’ve changed at all?”

“Nope,” he answered.

But he
had
changed. Without any nagging on my part, he was taking on tasks, such as doing holiday shopping or putting our finances on Quicken, that he’d never done before. He was much better about doing
little chores like answering my e-mails and emptying the diaper pail now than he’d been a year ago. Not only did he remember my birthday this month—he wished me “Happy Birthday” the minute we woke up that morning—he organized a family party, got me a present, and took photos (he never takes photos).