After reading a ton of books about happiness and devoting quite a bit of time to thinking about it, author Gretchen Rubin has this encouraging realization for us: Just asking yourself how you could be happier starts generating more happiness. It's like a warm little engine that revs up when you so much as look at it.
We here at HumanKind have this same belief about all possibilities -- just bringing your attention to it makes an impossible thing more possible. So of course, as soon as we discovered Gretchen, we had to share her with you! Gretchen is at work on a memoir about her yearlong quest to understand happiness, and she blogs daily at The Happiness Project. We're so happy she's here.
HK: So what got you interested in happiness in the first place?
GR: I was finishing up one of my previous books; I think it was "Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill," and I was looking out the window of a cab, and I thought, "What do I really want out of life?" It was one of those weird moments of self-reflection. I thought, "Well, I want to be happy." And it struck me for the first time that I never spent any time thinking about what it meant to be happy, or whether I was happy, or what I could do to be happier, even though I thought it was the final goal of my life. And I am definitely one of those people who needs lists and structure, so I thought, "I should write a book called The Happiness Project," and then I can get paid to clean out my closets -- which in fact has happened!
It was perfect because it's really one of these things you have to give a lot of thought. I needed to read a bunch of books, so I started to do the research way before. Then I sort of had to think about what was working and what wasn't working in my life, and that took longer than you would think! One of the themes of my blog is how hard it is to know yourself. One of my first commandments is be Gretchen, and that is definitely the biggest challenge that I have.
The more I got into it, the more I just started taking notes and reading. There's this huge proliferation of scientific books about it, and then there's this huge library of great thinkers from the past. A lot of times they come at it from very different ways. It cracks me up! For Ben Franklin, one of his is to use venery "as least as possible," to have as little sex as you could stand. But now, that is not what people advocate for happiness. Times have changed.
Now, I'm just this huge crusader. I think everyone should have a happiness project. I really think if you just ask yourself about it, you can make yourself a lot happier without having to change that much in your life. Tiny changes can make huge differences.
HK: So what's your theory behind that, this idea that you don't have to revamp your entire life?
GR: I think some people are inclined to do a huge shift. This is Elizabeth Gilbert moving to India, this is Thoreau moving to Walden Pond, this is the guy that Jon Krakauer wrote about going on his trek to Alaska [Ed. note: "Into the Wild"]. I think those people need a huge spiritual renewal, but they also can. For most people it's not possible to do that; they have jobs, or they have kids. Even if I could have, I don't think I would have; it's not my nature. You can make small changes in your everyday life that just dramatically affect how happy you are.
This is so Pollyanna-ish and I really would not have believed it would work, but it has worked -- this concept of reframing something. You change the way you look at something. It really works, uncannily. For example, my husband and I used to play this game, without saying a word about it, which was, who was going to make the bed today? Whoever got up last had to make the bed. But then you'd sort of have these instances like, maybe one person was in a hurry, so it became this thing. Then I thought, I love making the bed, and I'd always loved making the bed. I just hadn't allowed myself to realize that. It's that easy -- that little thing in my day that bugged me, it's gone.
HK: That's a huge philosophy of ours at HumanKind, that idea of reframing. Just changing how we talk about the world ends up changing what's possible.
GR: Exactly.
HK: Have you heard any stories from your readers about how they changed what was possible for their own happiness?
GR: I had an idea that people really liked which was the one-sentence journal. I think a lot of people have this impulse to keep a journal, but it seems so overwhelming. You go back and forth between really wanting to keep one and then feeling guilty because you're not.
Then this guy wrote to me and he had what I thought was an even better idea. He traveled a lot for work. He kept his journal in his briefcase and he only wrote in his journal while on a plane waiting for other people to board. and the minute the plane took off, he stopped. It's such a brilliant idea because he changes time that's just lost, wasted, frustrating time into this useful thing, and he enjoyed it. It was very limited, so it never got overwhelming, and because he traveled a lot, he got a fair amount done. His idea is he wanted to keep these journals and give them to his children, because his father had died when he was young, and he had these journals, and it was really important to him.
So it was this whole thing -- it was a gift to his children, and it was a creative expression. It was claiming lost time, it was manageable. I was like, that's brilliant!
HK: Genius!
GR: And it's not hard. It was just a matter of somebody thinking, How can I do this in a way that I can actually stick to my resolution?
HK: A happiness project is something that requires looking in, and self-reflection. Both Chris and I believe that's a way to make yourself a healthier part of the world: You're sending out something good by going in. So ... would you put that in your words? Why do we think that?
GR: Yes! First of all, there's a conception about people who are happy that they're superficial and shallow and self-absorbed. But in fact, science says that people who are happy are actually more inclined to help others, they're better able to empathize, and they're better able to intervene in a useful way.
What happens when people who are unhappy see suffering in the world, they tend to make it about themselves. They get overwhelmed and they can't intervene. As a happy person, you're better able to help, and you're more likely to help. People who are happy at work are more likely to help their co-workers. It doesn't correlate with a sense of complacency. A person can be very happy and very motivated towards social justice.
I think a lot of people pride themselves on being unhappy because they think it shows that they appreciate the suffering of the world. But that's like finishing what's on your plate because there are starving children in India. It doesn't help the children in India, and actually you're probably more likely to help them if you feel happier.
There's also this circularity that I call my second splendid truth: One of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make other people happy, and one of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy yourself. Because people do feed off of other people's happiness, and they get energy from it and they get lifted up by it. I think happy people are better able to make people follow them, and they're perceived to be better leaders.
There's a strong theme in happiness philosophy that constantly thinking about it takes it away. For me, it's 100 percent not true. The minute I started thinking about it, that's all I needed to be happier.
HK: I wanted to also talk to you about connection, because you're reaching out to people every day. How is it different writing a book about happiness now as opposed to 10 years ago, before blogging created a community?
GR: It's huge! I didn't think that once I had a blog, people would be talking back to me. I thought of it more as a challenge for myself: Could I master the technology of it?
Everybody identifies with happiness. They have a lot of their own experiences to share. I could have definitely had a blog on my first book, "Power Money Fame Sex." That would have been a great blog! But Winston Churchill -- it doesn't have the same revelatory aspect for people. For example, this person randomly wrote me out of the blue to ask, "Do you want me to set up a Facebook group?" Then I meet her, and it turns out she's this high-paid consultant in the field.
HK: And now there's 700 people in the group!
GR: Yes! It's crazy!
At first, I was just reporting what was happening to me. Then I understood that it was implicit in my happiness project that other people could learn from it. When I look at the things I've read that have been most useful to me, it's usually one person's story of their struggle.
I started to think I should talk about how people think about their own happiness project because people seem to be wanting to do this. Someone started a blog very explicitly modeled on The Happiness Project. They're helping me, because I just see how people react. Take clutter, for example. You see home magazines and television shows devoted to clutter. Yet this is something that happiness experts never even talk about. Every time I post about it, people go wild with their own ideas and how it's important to them.
HK: Yeah, cleaning my room does make me happy. Not the actual doing of it, but at the end I think, "I'm capable of so much more!"
GR: It's weird. I'd be interested to hear a scientist talk about it.
HK: Any surprises for you as you've been blogging?
GR: Well, this whole wanting to be an evangelist and say to people, "You need to do this, and this is how. You should make a resolution chart, and here's an example. You should ask yourself this series of questions." And just sort of the success of the blog surprised me a lot.
HK: It's just sort of grown organically, right? It's resonating with people, partly because you care about it so much.
GR: That's another thing -- this is the thing about "Be Gretchen." I love the subject and I love doing the project. People are always like, "You're so disciplined," but it doesn't feel that way, because I love doing it. I would be doing it anyway. This is what I would be doing for fun.
HK: Why is it so hard for people to find what works for them, what's fun for them?
GR: I don't know! But it's so, so hard.
HK: People I've talked to for HumanKind who have done amazing things, like start huge non-profit organizations, they've done it by focusing on one thing. There seems to be something healing about doing something specific. They see it and they say, "That's mine, that's my cause." They stop feeling bombarded by all suffering.
GR: I in my life have always loved libraries. I go to them, I check out books, I hang out in them. I'm much better at volunteering my time there. I think sometimes people try to pick a cause intellectually: This thing is as good as that thing. But then you don't have that passion. How do you stay engaged?
HK: How do you get people to start thinking about what would make them happy?
GR: This is my first splendid truth. You have to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.
You have to think about how you can have more feeling good in your life. Part of that is knowing yourself. You have to think about what's fun for you, what's really going to make you feel good, and you have to make time for that.
In my happiness project, it was much more important that I think about feeling bad. I had too much guilt, too much anger, too much irritation, and then because I felt guilty, bored, and irritated, I would behave worse, which made me feel more guilty, more bored. I had to think, well, maybe you feel guilty and irritated because you're overwhelmed by clutter. If you could make your environment more serene, you would feel more serene. Or maybe you're losing your temper with your children too much, and that's making you feel guilty because you're not the kind of parent you want to be, and if you change those behaviors, you remove the source of feeling bad.
If you can do that, it's like getting your head above the water. It doesn't lift you very far, but it's important.
Sometimes you do things that make you feel bad because they're important to feeling right. Let's say you have a really long commute. Scientists have shown that a really long commute is one of the worst things you can have. It's a bad way to start your day and a bad way to end your day. But this commute often is in conflict with other values. Maybe you want to live in a certain school district. To feel right abut being the kind of parent you want to be, you have to do something that makes you feel bad. Feeling right is very important; it's worth a lot of sacrifices.
The atmosphere of growth is something that puzzled me for a long time. It's inherent in the idea of happiness that there are projects and growth, which is why happiness is kind of an elusive quality. Studies show that people always think they're going to be happier in a year or five years than they are now. You have to accept that it's not a plateau that you get to; it's a process of moving forward.
I think that's when people do things like house renovations. People in the United States overly interpret human patterns as being very consumerist-driven, and they don't look for other underlying motivations. Is the only reason someone is renovating their house because they want to show off to the neighbors? I don't think so. I think some people are kind of compulsive renovators because they're looking for this atmosphere of growth. That's how they channel it. But if you don't feel great about it, maybe you want to find that in your life in a different way.
HK: This idea of creating an atmosphere of growth -- at HumanKind we would call that healing. You do end up asking yourself, where am I going to put this energy and these resources of mine? What are my values, what else could I do with all this?
GR: Yes, exactly. Maybe you say, I'm really caught up spending my money and my time this way, and I really want to make a shift.
It's interesting that you say that about healing. I think that's another reason it's really important to try and be happy, because it's so much easier to be kind and forgiving and to put time and energy into things that aren't to your direct benefit when you're feeling happy. It's just easier. There are things that, when you're happy, you don't give them a second thought, and when you're unhappy or irritated or bored, they drive you crazy. And that is not a healing frame of mind to be in.
HK: What's been your own state of happiness since you've been working on this project?
GR: I was pretty happy to start with. And in a way, I thought, "I have every reason to be happy; why am I not happier than I am?" I felt ungrateful. And now I just feel much happier because I think about it all the time. I've done things that make me happier, but also I'm just much more appreciative about things that make me happy because I stop and think about them more.
It's easy to focus on the negative, on the things that aren't working, just not feeling grateful for how many things are working. Like with your spouse: It's easy to focus on the things that bother you, and then completely take for granted all the things that a person is contributing, or all the things that you love about them.
I think the most important thing is just to know yourself, and I don't know why that is so hard. It's on the Temple of Athena: Know thyself. Why is that so hard? I don't know. It's a mystery.
HK: Thanks so much, Gretchen.
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