Category: Living Your Best Life

Tuesday Tip: Choose not to complain

Leading a joyful life does not mean always trying to be happy, or pretending that we don’t sometimes feel annoyed, disappointed, irritated, or hassled. These days, I try not to fake happiness…ever.

At the same time, I’m not really one for complaining. When I was in my twenties, I complained nearly constantly. My best friend used to make bets with me that I couldn’t go even one month without complaining about the weather in Chicago. He was right — I couldn’t do it, even though that was the year that I’d landed a dream job and had every reason I needed NOT to complain constantly. But complaining was a bad habit that was easy, and in a weird way, rewarding. I could always find something to say by complaining about the weather (because in Chicago, it is always too hot or too cold to us Californians).

But complaining is a bad habit that threatens our health, happiness, and success. Consistent complainers get sick more often and don’t do as well in their jobs as their more positive counterparts — and their relationships tend to be shorter and less satisfying. Perhaps because they are so miserable to be around!

Complaining trains your brain to see something negative as the most relevant thing to be commented on, and this negative filter can lead to greater and greater pessimism. Complaining can make your brain feel like you are doing something about a problem, when in fact you aren’t taking action at all.

Want to get out of a complaining habit? I created a little action plan for Self.com here that you might be interested in. In addition, it isn’t too late to start my free 90-day coaching program which aims to help you get into a new habit that sticks.

Photo by Kevin Spencer via flickr.

by Christine Carter

Tuesday Tip: Stop Compulsively Checking Email

I have a full and rewarding career, and four teenagers who go to four different schools. I couldn’t have the life I do without email. I am certain of this.

But email is also a disaster. It’s mostly a giant to-do list that other people create for you — people (and companies) who don’t know and probably don’t give a damn about your highest priorities — or the other things you’re hoping to get done today.

This is why I aim to spend 45 minutes or less reading and responding to emails a day. This frees up hours and hours to do my most important work, and to do the things that I value the most, like hang out with my children.

There are real challenges to managing the amount of time we spend on email, mostly because email is so satisfying and stimulating and easy to check constantly. It can feel enormously gratifying to delete emails in rapid succession. Checking email excites our brain, providing the novelty and stimulation it adores. In fact, your brain will tell you that you are being more productive when you are checking your messages than when you are disconnected from email and actually focusing on something important.

But checking is not the same as working. While it certainly feels productive to check email or answer a text, constant checking actually reduces our productivity. All that checking interrupts us from accomplishing our more vital work; once we are deep in concentration, each derailment costs us nearly a half an hour — that’s the average amount of time it takes to get back on track once we’ve been interrupted (or we’ve interrupted ourselves by looking at email).

This point is worth lingering on: how productive we are does not correlate well with how productive we feel. Checking our email a lot feels productive because our brains are so stimulated when we are doing it. But it isn’t actually productive: One Stanford study showed that while media multitaskers tended to perceive themselves as performing better on their tasks, they actually tended to perform worse on every measure the researchers studied.

We humans are weak when it comes to resisting our email. The solution is easy: All we need to do is set our email up in a way that makes it less tempting. This post will give you clear instructions for how I cracked that nut. If you’re serious about making a change, sign up to receive Tuesday Tips straight to your inbox!

by Christine Carter

You Will Never Find Work-Life Balance

All our talk and worry about “work-life balance” is such a bunch of baloney.

I don’t mean to be depressing, but you will never find “balance” between your work and your personal life. That very idea hinges on an implicit belief that there is some perfect ratio between time spent on work (and work-like activities, like checking your email) and time spent on everything else (like sleeping, or eating your lunch away from your desk, or helping your kids with their homework).

Your work and your personal life do not amount to a zero-sum game, where more of one means you’re compromising the other. In fact, the quality of your work and your productivity–your ability to create something of value and meaning for yourself and for others–is utterly dependent on the quality of your personal life.

How happy you are profoundly influences how well you do your job. Reams of research shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we do outside of work thoroughly influences the energy, motivation, focus, creativity, persistence, insight, and raw intellectual power we bring to a given project or task at work. The better your personal life is, the higher your potential to do great work.

The better your personal life is, the higher your potential to do great work #TheScienceOfFindingFlow Click To TweetThe better your personal life is, the higher your potential to do great work.” username=”raisinghappines”]

I can hear the war cries from Silicon Valley and Wall Street now. “But no one in tech or at a start-up or who is brokering a billion dollar deal has a life!!! And THOSE people are rich and successful!!” you protest.

Hah. While those professions are certainly rigged so that the [mostly male] people at the top take home more money, their success is deeply subjective. Are they wealthy in the things that matter to you? Brigid Shulte reminds us to “remember that the wolves of Wall Street bragging about those long hours at the office got us into a global financial crisis, and that 95 percent of startups fail.”

Our sense that the most successful and productive people –“ideal workers”– put in an insane number of hours is just wrong. But what does the real “ideal worker” ACTUALLY look like?

I’ve been pondering this question for five or six years now, and I’ve come to see that the real ideal worker has seven core qualities or skills, listed below. But before I lay them out for you, let’s remember: Those of us who cultivate these qualities are more than workers, of course.

We are the joyful people who are working toward fulfilling our potential for creativity, productivity, intelligence, and–most importantly–meaning, fulfillment, and connection in our lives. We are the people who actually enjoy the lives that we’ve worked so hard to create. We also happen to be very good at our jobs.

We can attribute our happiness and success at work to the following seven skills and abilities:

We are able to do our most important work first. We work hard to decide what our priorities are. We seek to understand what work and relationships bring us meaning and fulfillment, and we schedule our time and our tasks accordingly. We understand the positive impact we are having on the world and other people, and this provides a tremendous source of energy and motivation.
We command our own attention. In a world where corporations pay by the eyeball to capture our concentration and interest, we are able to build a fortress against all that interruption. We know how to handle temptations. We use our computers and tablets and smartphones strategically rather than compulsively, as tools that make us more efficient, effective, connected, and creative–not more distracted and drained.
We think deeply. Business writer Eric Barker calls this “the superpower of the 21st century.” Georgetown professor Cal Newport writes in his treatise on focus, Deep Work, that “the ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive.”
We effortlessly generate creative insights. We love to find innovative solutions to real-world, unpredictable problems. We value the activities that lead to creativity in a world that thinks we are behaving like children and slackers. We have the courage to nap, play, and stare into space while everyone else skips their lunch break in order to check their email.
We are authentic and emotionally courageous. We are willing to feel what we feel, and this gives us access to the wisdom of our hearts. We are tapped into the power of our intuition, which speaks to us in emotions and bodily sensations. And because we are willing to experience difficult emotions, we are gritty–we are able to persist despite difficulty toward our long-term goals. We are able to take risks, have difficult conversations, and stay true to what we know is right.
We are flourishing. We understand that cynicism is a marker of fear, not intelligence, and that when we prioritize positivity in our lives–when we consciously cultivate gratitude and love, happiness and peace, awe and inspiration, optimism and faith — we broaden our perception in the moment and build resources over time. Our ability to foster positive emotions allows us to access our most high-functioning, creative, and intelligent selves. We are more engaged with our work, our friends, our families, and our communities than our less positive peers.
We are connected. We understand the transcendent importance of our relationships, and so we cast the net of our real-life friends and family both wide and deep. We are less likely to experience sadness, loneliness, low self-esteem, and problems with eating and sleeping than people who keep others at a distance. We are the strangers on the street who smile at you. We are the people you ask for favors, because we love to help out. We are your best friends, because we know how to build–and repair–our relationships.

The “real ideal worker” is not a mythical, unattainable ideal. There are successful people all around you who aren’t working themselves to the brink of exhaustion and burnout. We aren’t perfect, but we’re dedicated to seeking the most joy possible out of our lives, including our lives at work. We are the people who know how to find flow. Personally, I’m hoping you will join our tribe. Aren’t you ready to reset your vision for what you want for yourself?

If you enjoyed this article, I encourage you to join me for my free, 20-minute webinar, 5 Ways to Get More Done in Less Time. In this webinar, I share my top five science-based productivity tips that are all designed to help you create more time in your life and schedule for the things that matter most to you. Sign up or learn more here.

by Christine Carter

3 Surprising Ways to Feel More Loved

Are you focused on romantic love this Valentine’s Day? If so, you’re missing an opportunity! Building stronger connections with those around us can lead to a happier, healthier, more successful, and easier life. Our relationships help us live and work from our sweet spots by bringing us both strength and ease.

Love and the similar emotions that we experience when we feel connected socially—like affection, warmth, care, fondness, and compassion—are a powerful force for a rich and rewarding life. In Love 2.0 author Barbara Fredrickson’s words:

Love is our supreme emotion: its presence or absence in our lives influences everything we feel, think, do, and become. It’s that recurrent state that ties you in—your body and brain alike—to the social fabric, to the bodies and brains of those in your midst. When you experience love . . . you not only become better able to see the larger tapestry of life and better able to breathe life into the connections that matter to you, but you set yourself on a pathway that leads to more health, happiness, and wisdom.

Similarly, the longest running study of human development, The Harvard Grant Study, makes it clear that “the most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love,” as one of the researchers behind the study, George Vaillant, put it in Triumphs of Experience.

So if our happiness and our success are best predicted by the quantity and quality of our relationships with others, the question remains: How can we increase the amount of love we get in our lives? Here are a few of my favorite ways to feel more connected:

Talk to strangers — or at least smile at the barista.

A half dozen recent studies demonstrate the power that a simple positive interaction with a stranger has to make us happier. In one study, researchers randomly assigned volunteers to talk to the stranger who sat down next to them on the train during their morning commute. Pretty much no one thought that they were going to enjoy giving up their morning solitude to make small talk with someone they didn’t know and would probably never see again. But guess what? The volunteers enjoyed their commute more than the people in the study who got to read their books and finish their crossword puzzles in silence. What’s more, not a single study participant was snubbed. Other research indicates that the strangers being chatted up in public spaces similarly think they won’t want to talk, but then end up enjoying themselves.

The takeaway is that often the easiest way for us to connect with others is to slow down just enough to make eye contact with someone, smile, and, if we’re feeling brave, start a little conversation. Research shows that even just acknowledging someone else’s presence by making eye contact and smiling at them helps people feel more connected.

Just send loving thoughts to others.

When Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues want to study what happens when people increase their daily diet of love, they simply ask people to do a loving-kindness meditation once a day. This is a private, quick, no-contact-with-others way to give. Also called metta, loving-kindness meditation is the simple practice of directing well wishes toward others. Loving- kindness meditation isn’t complicated — it really isn’t anything more than using your imagination to send love and well wishes to others.

This stuff is more effective than Prozac for many people.If you are going to do only one thing today to bring more love and connection into your life, I recommend you do this.

Even if you aren’t likely to sit in meditation everyday sending good thoughts to yourself and others, you can use metta throughout the day as a tactic to increase your feelings of well-being, compassion, and connection. Perhaps put a sticky note on your bathroom mirror or refrigerator door or car dashboard — wherever you tend to be most exhausted or overwhelmed or isolated — to remind you to pause and cultivate a loving thought or two.

Master the most important relationship skill in the history of the universe.

Perhaps the most useful skill we can master for building strong connections with others is the ability to deliver an effective apology. When a relationship starts to break down, the best repair, bar none, is almost always an apology.

Think about it: if a relationship is dented or sputtering, someone probably made a mistake. Perhaps it was a benign comment (a well-meaning but poorly understood suggestion) or maybe it was more toxic (you got caught in a lie, or didn’t follow-through on a commitment).

People make mistakes in relationships all. the. time. Not just bad people, or weak people. All people. Our mistakes are what make us human. And even when we don’t think that we’ve made a mistake, other people will often find errors in our ways. We human beings are walking offenders.

So if we’ve done something that offends someone else — whether or not we feel we are to blame — we apologize?

YES.

I believe that it almost always serves our highest good to apologize if we’ve hurt or offended someone else — even if we think the offended person’s anger is unjustified, or if we have a perfectly good excuse for what happened. Or if our intentions were all good.

But all apologies aren’t created equal, of course. (All parents have watched children spit out a forced “SORRY!” and known it was worthless.) So what makes a good apology? After studying that question extensively, Aaron Lazare developed perhaps the most robust criteria to date for effective apologies. Drawing on Dr. Lazare’s work, I’ve created this three-step method for making a good apology.

This post is a little tidbit from my latest eCourse: The Science of Finding Your Flow: How to Create Happiness and Maximize Productivity (launching later this Spring) . If you’re invested in bringing more ease and flow into your life this year, you will love this eCourse! And if you pre-order this eCourse now, you’ll get a FREE hardcover copy of my book The Sweet Spot and $50 off! This is a steal, friends. Plus, if you want to, you’ll get to help me test out the content before the launch. Click here to pre-order The Science of Finding Flow eCourse.

Image by Benjamin Lehman

by Christine Carter

Tuesday Tip: Never Say Never

Never say never, because limits, just like fears, are just an illusion.” — Michael Jordan

If you’re working through your New Year’s resolutions, you’ve probably faced your fair share of temptations. When temptation is right in front of you, it’s hard to turn down. But when we tell ourselves “no,” we often increase the urgency of a temptation by making it forbidden fruit.

Success will depend on your ability to plan a little here. What types of things related to your resolution do you tend to make forbidden fruit? Rather than deny, try to postpone. Instead of telling yourself that you can’t have that cookie or you can’t watch TV, tell yourself you’ll have the cookie in a few hours if you are still interested, or you’ll record the show and watch it after you’ve gone for a walk. And then go distract yourself!

One of my temptations is the snooze button. Rather than tell myself, I can never, ever, ever hit the snooze button, I try to plan for one cheat day per week. Another approach will be to plan a power nap on a day when I know I need some catch up rest.

Think about your challenges and sticking points. Is your challenge or sticking point when you’re tired? Do you need to plan around when you get home at the end of the day? What can you tell yourself besides never? I’ve created this Worksheet (.pdf file) to help you brainstorm.

If you haven’t started a new habit this year, it’s not too late to start. Sign up for my FREE 90 day coaching program to help you make and keep resolutions that stick. It is a text, email, and Facebook based program; you’ll also get a free workbook and access to a live online Q&A with me, Dr. Christine Carter.

Photo by Stuart Burns

by Christine Carter

Why Entrepreneurs Should Look for Meaning, Not Happiness

By Damon Brown

IMAGE: Getty Images

If you’re looking for happiness as an entrepreneur, then you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. JetBlue Airways has a new, fun short film, HumanKinda, exploring how little enjoyment we get out of our over-scheduled lives. The elusive feeling of happiness, though, seems inversely proportional to the time we set aside to create it. And business owners don’t have a lot of time.

Instead, we should be looking for meaning in our lives, argues Dr. Christine Carter, the featured sociologist in HumanKinda and author of The Sweet Spot. I talked with Carter about how meaning leads to happiness, what tech does to our focus and why it may have been easier for our entrepreneurial ancestors to have balanced lives.

Read the full post.

by Christine Carter

3 Surprising Ways to Feel Less Busy

Busyness stinks.

Although people tell me all the time they like feeling busy — perhaps because it makes them feel important and significant — I’m not buying it. Would you ever choose busyness over a more relaxed form of productivity? When life starts to feel hectic, here are a few ways to dial back the overwhelm.

Give yourself a shot of awe. When researchers induced feelings of awe in people — by showing them video clips of people next to vast things like whales or waterfalls, it altered their perception of time such that they — those people felt like they had more time on their hands. So much time on their hands, in fact, that awe-struck people become likely to give away their time by volunteering to help someone out. They also report fewer feelings of impatience.
Not sure where to find yourself some awe? Look no farther than YouTube. Try searching “awe” and “whales,” or just watch this oldie but goodie video clip — it makes me feel awestruck every time. If the concept of “awe” feels too abstract, try thinking about things that amaze you. What makes you feel a childlike sense of wonder? Makes you feel elevated or inspired? Now take five minutes to let one of those things work their magic on your busy brain.
Create an anti-busyness ritual. Researchers believe that the brains in both humans and animals evolved to feel calmed by repetitive behavior, and that our daily rituals are a primary way to manage stress. This is especially true in unpredictable environments or situations where we feel pressured, a lack of control, or threatened in some way.
When the pace of life seems to be taking off without you, create a ritual to help you feel more in control. What counts as a ritual? Something you do repetitively in certain situations — usually a series of behaviors done in the same order. Think of your favorite ball player’s pregame ritual.

When I start to feel pressured for time, my own “busyness ritual” kicks in: I stretch my neck (first by looking to the left, and then to the right, and then by tipping my left ear to my left shoulder and my right ear to my right shoulder). I exhale deeply with each stretch, and then center my head, and straighten my posture. On my last exhale, I think to myself: “I have plenty of time.” The stretching and deep breathing may be what helps me feel calm, but also having and using a ritual — any ritual — can help us feel more in control and less overwhelmed.
Find “flow.” Dropping into “the zone” or finding flow is the opposite of feeling busy. Time seems to stand still — if we are aware of time at all. Finding flow isn’t as elusive a state as you might think, but it does require that we stop multi-tasking, and that we build a fortress against interruption around ourselves. (I also have a “get into the flow” ritual that I use before I write).

I know, I know. You don’t have time to foster awe, or create an anti-busyness ritual, or stop multi-tasking. You’re too busy!

Listen: You don’t have time NOT to do these things. Busyness is a mark of what neuroscientists call “cognitive overload.” This state impairs our ability to think creatively, to plan, organize, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, resist temptations, learn new things easily, speak fluently, remember important social information, and control our emotions. In other words, it impairs basically everything we need to do in a given day. So if you have important work to do, please: Take five minutes to dial back your busyness.

***

If you liked this post, you’ll love this short and funny documentary, HumanKinda. The premise is that busyness robs us of our humanity, making us only “kinda” human.

Photo credit: Gemma Correll commissioned by JetBlue for Humankinda.

by Christine Carter

The Three Parts of an Effective Apology

People make mistakes all the time.

Not just bad people, or weak people. All people. Our mistakes are what make us human. And even when we don’t think that we’ve made a mistake, other people will often find errors in our ways. We human beings are walking offenders.

Here’s the real question: If we’ve done something that offends someone else — whether or not we feel we are to blame — should we apologize?

Often, the impact of our actions is not what we intended. But here’s the thing: Impact matters more than intention. Our happiness is best predicted by the breadth and depth of our social connections — our relationships with friends, family, partners, spouses, neighbors, colleagues — and so broken or fraying connections are usually worth repairing.

We don’t repair a fissure in one of our relationships by ignoring it. (We have a saying in our family: You can sweep sh*t under the rug, but it is still going to smell.) And we don’t repair it by blaming someone else, or defending our actions. We initiate a repair by apologizing.

But all apologies aren’t created equal, of course. (All parents have watched children spit out a forced “SORRY!” and known it was worthless.)

So what makes a good apology? After studying that question extensively, Aaron Lazare developed perhaps the most robust criteria to date for effective apologies. Drawing on Dr. Lazare’s work, I’ve created the following three-step method for making a good apology.

Step 1: Tell them what you feel. (Just the remorseful feelings, please.)
Usually, we start by saying “I’m sorry” to express remorse. “I’m sorry” is more effective when we elaborate on our remorseful feelings. For example, “I’m so sorry and saddened to hear that my lack of communication has made you so angry and resentful.” Or, “I’m so sorry and embarrassed and ashamed that my comment caused such an uproar.”

What is not constructive is succumbing to–and sharing–feelings of resentment or defensiveness, like, “I’m sorry… you’re being so petty and critical.”

Step 2: Admit your mistake AND the negative impact it had.
This is the hardest part because it requires admitting responsibility for our actions or behavior. This can feel impossible if we don’t really think we did much wrong, or if our intentions were good.

Ask yourself: How is the other person feeling? What did I do that caused that feeling? Could I have done something differently? Then acknowledge these things. Empathize with the offended person; the most important thing is that you demonstrate that you know how they feel. (Don’t apologize until you truly do understand how they are feeling; if you can’t put yourself in their shoes, your apology will ring untrue.)

For example: “I can see that my comment hurt your feelings and that you are feeling misunderstood and uncared for.” Or to your partner you might say, “I know that it was wrong of me to call you out in front of the whole family and that you are angry because I’ve hurt your credibility with the kids. I’m sure that was embarrassing, and it was a mistake for me to do that.”

This is where most of us are tempted to offer an explanation for our behavior. When in doubt, leave the explanation out; trying to explain away our actions can seem like we’re being defensive, or making excuses. (Remember, the point is to repair the relationship, not make the other person see that you were right.)

If you need to shed light on why you did what you did, be careful to continue to take responsibility for the negative impact you had. Saying, “I really didn’t know that you would be offended” is an excuse, not a good explanation. Whining that you didn’t intend for the other person to be hurt doesn’t shed light on anything. More effective would be saying, “It is no excuse for standing you up, but I want you to know that my stepfather had just had a stroke, and I was so frantic to get to the hospital that I forgot to call you.”

If you do offer an explanation, it can help to reiterate your mistake and again acknowledge how the other person feels: “Again, I’m so sorry that I didn’t call you, and that you were stuck there waiting for me for an hour. I can only imagine how upset, worried, and angry you must be.”

Step 3: Make the situation right.
Good apologies include reparation of some kind, either real or symbolic. Maybe you create an opportunity for the person you embarrassed to regain credibility. Or perhaps you admit your mistake to others, too, as a part of the reparation. In many relationships, a hug is a great reparation.

Often, all we need to do is explain what we are going to do differently the next time so that we don’t repeat the offending action or behavior. This helps us rebuild trust and repair the relationship.

If you aren’t sure how to make it right, just ask, “Is there anything I can do to make this up to you?”

Above all, deliver on any promises you make. When we feel guilty or embarrassed, sometimes we over-correct in our attempt to gain forgiveness. If the person is asking for something that you can’t give, say so, and say that you will give some thought to what you can give to make it up to them.

Knowing how to apologize well is at the top of my Sweet Spot Manifesto. It’s a life skill I want my children to practice and master. And it’s one that I’m still working on myself!

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Trade Expectations for Gratitude

Feeling frustrated or disappointed?

It isn’t that we shouldn’t have high expectations, or that we shouldn’t feel hurt when someone lets us down. But one of the best ways to recover from disappointment is to notice what actually is going well in our lives.

Gratitude is one of the most powerful positive emotions we have — we have reams of research indicating that gratitude is a part of the happiness holy grail. Compared with those who aren’t practicing gratitude, scientists have found that people practicing gratitude:

Are considerably more enthusiastic, interested, and determined;
Feel 25% happier;
Are more likely to be both kind and helpful to other.

And that’s not all. Gratitude studies report long laundry lists of the benefits of gratitude. For example, people who jotted down something they were grateful for online every day for just two weeks showed higher stress resilience and greater satisfaction with life, reported fewer headaches, and a reduction in stomach pain, coughs and sore throats!

Gratitude is a SKILL, like learning to speak German or swing a bat: can be taught, and it needs to be practiced consciously and deliberately. Yet, unlike learning German, practicing gratitude can be blissfully simple: just count the things in your life that you feel thankful for.

Here are a couple of ideas to get started:

Keep a gratitude journal.
This can be a handwritten journal or kept online (there are loads of web-based versions) or even just jotted down in your calendar. I’m not a big journaler, but I’m thinking about using Facebook as a gratitude journal. Every day I’ll record something that makes me happy, something I’m grateful for — either by typing it in or by taking a picture. I can then share my gratitude with my family. (Though I do wonder if this will be annoying to people, or if I’ll get distracted by other people’s posts. Maybe Instagram? What do you think?) As an alternative, try texting your appreciation to people who’ve helped you out.

Start a tradition of writing “appreciations” on place cards at family dinners or on holidays.
Depending on your comfort level for group sharing, make place cards for each person present, and then ask people to write a few adjectives that describe what they appreciate about one another on the inside of the place cards. Don’t ask people to write something about everyone present unless they want to — you don’t want to force the exercise. But do make sure that everyone has at least one thing written inside their place card, so that during the meal you can go around the table and share appreciations.

Join the Discussion: What are you grateful for? How do you express your appreciation? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

by Christine Carter

Break Yourself Off a Piece of Happiness

To celebrate the International Day of Happiness this past Friday, I participated in an interview with Snapchat Stories. Enjoy!

Snapchat: What’s one of the biggest myths about happiness?
CC: We think that happiness is a personality trait, when really it is better thought of as a skill, or a set of skills that we can learn and practice. Obviously we do have genetically-based personality differences, but I think of happiness like learning a language. Some people pick up languages really easily — especially those taught when they are young. Other people have to do more work to speak and write well. But either way, we all need to be taught the basic “grammar” and “vocabulary” of happiness, and we need to practice those things in order to become fluent.

How often should a “normal” person feel happy?
There is no normal; life can be difficult, and when it is, few people feel happy about it. We do know that once a person’s ratio of positive to negative exceeds about 3:1 (three positive emotions or experiences to every one negative) their whole system seems to change — they are said to “flourish.” Flourishing people, who represent less than 20% of the population, are more creative and resilient in the face of difficulty.

Are people generally happier as children or adults?
Happiness levels change throughout the life course. Most research shows that people’s happiness tends to follow a U-shaped curve: it is highest when they are young, and it tends to bottom out between our late 30s and early 50s. Fortunately, happiness levels tend to rebound again around age 60.

Is there a “fake it ’til you make it” factor to getting happy?
“Faking it” only works when we aren’t pretending or performing. Facial expression alone, without first feeling a corresponding emotion, is often enough to create discernible changes in your nervous system. When you lift the corners of your lips and crinkle your eyes, for example, after a couple of minutes your body will release the feel-good brain chemicals associated with smiling. But pretending to feel something that we aren’t makes us feel worse; research shows that inauthenticity is corrosive to our health, especially our cardiovascular system. One way to “fake happiness” fairly effectively, though, is to put a pencil between your back teeth for a few minutes in order to activate your smile muscles. (A word of warning: I’ve found that this technique works for lightening up my mood, but it does make me drool.)

Can money buy happiness? At least a little bit of it?
The old adage is mostly true: Money doesn’t tend to buy much happiness (after our basic needs are met). In our culture, we tend to confuse real happiness — profound joy and authentic contentment — with pleasure and gratification. Money does buy pleasure, but it takes a whole lot of money to increase your overall happiness level just a little tiny bit. And money really can’t buy meaning or fulfillment.

Here are 5 quick (and free) things you can do to find more happiness today:

Smile at the barista and strike up a short conversation. Or with the people sharing your elevator. Or with the crossing guard.
Increase your ratio of positive to negative emotions by watching a silly YouTube video, expressing gratitude to someone, or reading something inspiring. (Yes, you get credit for watching funny animal videos!)
Take a good old-fashioned recess in the middle of the day. For every 60 to 90 minutes that you focus, take a 10 to 15-minute break. Go outside and play! Or at least sit inside and daydream.
Repair a minor crack in an important relationship. Call your mom and invite her to lunch, even though your last conversation with her was tense. Find something nice to say to your spouse, even though he can be frustrating.
Establish a tiny happiness habit. Do a daily crossword puzzle if that does it for you. Read a favorite magazine at lunchtime. Throw the ball for your dog every morning. What would make you really happy if you did it every day?

Photo courtesy of José Manuel Ríos Valiente.