THE HAPPINESS FILES Insights on Work and Life

ARTHUR C. BROOKS

HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW PRESS

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

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© 2021–2024 by Arthur C. Brooks, as first published in The Atlantic.

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ISBN: 979-8-89279-226-4

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To my grandsons Joseph and Charles,
who are the secret to my happiness

INTRODUCTION

Happiness and Your Start-up Life

I am a behavioral scientist, and I teach at Harvard Business School. I don’t cover traditional businesslike subjects, though, such as finance and accounting. I teach happiness from a scientific perspective. My classes cover a lot of neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics to help my students build happier lives and understand how happiness science can serve them in their management careers.

You might be wondering how this is a “business” topic, and that’s a fair question. Here’s my answer: Your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake. It is, in fact, like a start-up, where you are the founder, entrepreneur, and chief executive. And if you treat your life the way a great entrepreneur treats an exciting start-up enterprise, your life will be happier, more meaningful, and more successful than it otherwise would be.

Successful business entrepreneurs generally have experience in their industry and have had a few significant setbacks, from which they have learned and grown, leading to two key insights. The first is that one must be willing and able to take more risks than nonentrepreneurs do. Second, they do so in search of big returns, generally denominated in financial terms. Life entrepreneurs—all of us who want to be fully alive—can benefit from these insights. We need to be good self-managers, willing to take and manage appropriate risks in an effort to build a life of outsize rewards.

The key word from the preceding paragraph is “rewards”—specifically, in what denomination should we seek rewards in an entrepreneurial life? Your grandmother told you that money doesn’t buy happiness (research shows that she was right, mostly), so that’s not the right denomination. Nor is power, or pleasure, or fame, or prestige. Research over many decades—as well as almost every reputable religious and philosophical tradition—has warned against chasing these rewards beyond our ordinary needs, noting that focusing unduly on them will ruin personal relationships and impoverish the sense of life’s meaning.

Of course, these worldly rewards are the ones we naturally seek, though. Why would we go after something that doesn’t make us happy? The answer is certainly evolution: Mother Nature urges us to accumulate the resources that give us a better chance at survival and gene propagation. Meanwhile, we seek more happiness and make the incorrect assumption that following our natural urges will help us do so. This is a cognitive error, however. Mother Nature doesn’t care about our happiness; that’s our responsibility.

The right denomination of rewards for the start-up life is happiness itself, with a focus on love, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. The objective is to live and work in such a way that brings more of these things. Since we are naturally distracted by worldly resources instead, this task requires that we live in a fully awake way, alert to the mistakes we naturally make and putting forth the effort to live the way we intentionally want, not just according to how we feel.

The focus of business school is one’s career, obviously, and upon graduation from Harvard Business School my students are almost all going to work long hours—and, indeed, generate prodigious worldly rewards like money, power, pleasure, fame, and prestige. So I focus a lot in my teaching about how their careers can be a generative, positive part of a happy, start-up life, and not something that harms it. This, in fact, is how I see my own professional life, to which I owe a great deal to Harvard Business Review (HBR) and its related volumes on various aspects of work and leadership, which I have read for many years dating back to my time as an assistant professor.

One particular HBR volume that influenced my career and life is titled On Managing Yourself, which inspired my start-up life approach and research, culminating in the essay series “How to Build a Life” that I write weekly for The Atlantic (now almost 300 columns strong). This book, The Happiness Files, features some of the most popular essays from that series, organized into five aspects of a career at the center of a start-up life: managing yourself, building your career, communicating and connecting with others, keeping a work-life balance, and crafting the right professional goals.

Part 1, “On Managing Yourself,” picks up the themes of that famous HBR volume. It emphasizes the fact that in leadership over your life, you are your most important employee. You need to set rules and boundaries for yourself, treat yourself with respect, and learn how to act in the way that you want to act, not at every moment how you feel. The essays in part 1 show you how to do this.

Once you have a firm foundation on how to manage yourself, you can use this to build a career at the center of your start-up life. The key insight behind a career that consistently raises your well-being (besides not letting it take over your entire life) is progress. Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination, but rather from making tangible progress toward it. Indeed, one of the great errors people make in their careers is assuming that hitting a particular goal—a sum of money, a particular title, retirement—will give them the happiness they seek. The right approach is to set up a work life in which you create more and more value for yourself and others. That’s part 2, “On Jobs, Money, and Building Your Career.”

Rare is the individual who works entirely alone; rarer still is the individual who can be happy doing so. As you build your career, you must cultivate the key skills of part 3, “On Communicating and Connecting with Others.” Learning how to maintain a good relationship with colleagues with honest, open communication is not always straightforward—especially today, in a rapidly changing world of remote and hybrid work. But there are principles everyone can learn to improve communication and connection at work and help others do so as well.

Of course, the relationships that need tending the most for your life enterprise are not those at work; they are family and friends. For busy, ambitious people, these are often the relationships that become desiccated and malnourished, leading to a great deal of unhappiness. Thus, a core work competency in a start-up life is what most people call “work-life balance,” which is covered in part 4, “On Balancing Work, Life, and Relationships.” In truth, the challenge is more one of work-life integration. But no matter what we call it, the key skill is to understand that the returns on life come from the strength of your intimate ties.

The progress principle in your career requires that you have purpose and direction in your work and life. That’s where part 5, “On How You Define Success” comes in. What does “success” mean and what role do goals play? This is a tricky subject, where there has been a lot of disagreement in the business literature in the past. Some say you should have rock-solid, clear goals that stretch far out into the future; others say it is better to let the future take care of itself and to focus more on the present to do good work you enjoy. The approach in the essays in this book treats professional goals like a rhumb line—a navigational term for the straight course toward a destination, with the full knowledge and acceptance that circumstances will change that course and maybe even the destination itself. But without the rhumb line, progress is not possible to see and measure.

Each essay in this volume has two main sections to it. The first is the science and evidence behind my main assertion. I am an academic researcher by background, and my craft relies on ideas grounded not in what I might suppose, or even those that just seem to make sense; rather, they rely on what peer-reviewed scholarship has found to be empirically true. You will get a lot of information in this book about the research going on in several fields that is based in top-quality survey data and experiments using human subjects. This is meant not just to give you confidence but also to raise your understanding on an intellectual level. And I hope you will also find this work as fascinating as I do! But intellectual information isn’t enough. The second section of each essay is practical applications: lessons you can put to use right away in your work and life. These are ways you can practice new ideas and change your habits starting today.

Some readers might be tempted to cut right to those practical lessons, but do try to fight that temptation. There is a lot of research on the best way to learn and use new ideas. What the evidence shows is that you absorb, retain, and use ideas best when you understand them intellectually and then change your habits on the basis of your understanding. This is why, for example, surgeons learn about surgery and watch it being done before they ever get into the operating room to practice. And why athletes play better when they have an intellectual understanding of the game.

After understanding the science and changing your habits, there’s still one last step in using the material in this book. If you truly want to master these ideas—or any ideas, for that matter—you need to share them. The class I teach at Harvard Business School is called “Leadership and Happiness,” because I know full well that if my students use the happiness science in their work as leaders—effectively, becoming happiness teachers themselves in their own way—they will never forget the lessons, and will benefit as a result.

So here’s my appeal to you: Once you learn the concepts in this book, practice them, and upon deciding which ones you find most beneficial personally, teach them to others. The world will be better with happier leaders and professionals in it, and you can be one of them, and, as teacher, you can help create that world.

PART ONE ON MANAGING YOURSELF

1 How to Succeed at Failure

You wanted it and you worked for it, but all your effort was for naught.

Maybe your relationship collapsed, your company went under, or you got fired. Maybe you failed your exams even though you’d studied hard, or couldn’t find a publisher for your book, or dropped what would have been the winning touchdown pass.

This is not a case of regret, in which you wish you had tried harder. It’s much worse than that: You did your very best, and it simply wasn’t good enough. This kind of failure is especially painful, and can be hard to shake. If the book, the game, or the job was important to your identity, you might start to see your defeat as part of who you are, too.

So what do you do now? You can just hunker down and hope that time will heal the wound. But perhaps you would prefer to deal with your pain and actively manage it. Doing so won’t just lessen your discomfort; with a little knowledge and practice, you can turn your failure into a source of growth, and even happiness.

A professional or personal setback that sends you spiraling into self-doubt might not seem so tragic to someone else. You say you had an ugly breakup after trying to make the relationship work? Who hasn’t? Early in my career as a chief executive, I once made a strategy error that resulted in humiliating treatment by the press. I told my neighbor—a grizzled D.C. political veteran—that I felt like a failure because of the incident. He listened and said, “On a 0–10 scale of problems, yours ranks about 0.25.”

But even if it’s only a 0.25, your failure, like mine, may still feel bitter, especially if you did your best. In the absence of easy excuses, you might look and look for explanations for your downfall that simply aren’t there. This is a bad idea: Ruminating over a failure keeps it front and center and can lead to catastrophizing. You might imagine a cascade of events leading to permanent ruin and misery: “I got fired from my job. Now no one will want to hire me, I’ll be permanently unemployed, and I might even lose my house. My life is ruined.”

Emotional suffering after failure might have once helped us learn not to try the same thing twice. In the Pleistocene, feeling the unhappiness of failure after unsuccessfully going mano a mano with the big hominid in the next cave was probably lifesaving. But in today’s safer world, such misery is maladaptive. The same emotion honed by nature to kick in after your ancestors failed to bag a mastodon afflicts you today because you got rejected from Penn State. That negative feeling doesn’t make you any likelier to survive—and can even lead to depression and anxiety disorders.

Rather than protecting you from future disappointment, a cycle of rumination after failure can set you up for more failure, or at least missed opportunities to succeed. Brooding over a defeat has been found to lead to avoidance and reluctance to try something new. After you have been hurt by a failed relationship, for example, rumination can make you focus on the past instead of the future, so you are less likely to get out there and try again. You’re frozen in your moment of failure as you turn defeat over and over in your mind. You become fearful, lose confidence, and miss your opportunities for new success.

To find strategies to overcome the worst suffering after failure, I consulted Xiaodong D. Lin, a professor of cognitive studies at Columbia University. For years, Lin has studied the inevitable failures of scientists, athletes, and ordinary people. Here are the strategies she recommends to move forward after failure—and maybe even benefit from it.

1. Think about others’ past failures (as well as your own)

Doctors and therapists who treat fear have long known that exposure to the object of fear can make it seem more ordinary and thus less threatening. Exploring this idea, Lin and her colleagues set up an experiment several years ago in which students learned either about famous scientists’ successes and failures or about only their successes.¹ The researchers found that studying the failures motivated students to better handle their own defeats and helped them obtain significantly higher grades than students who learned only about those scientists’ successes.

Studying your own failures as well can make them seem less earth-shattering. One researcher suggested in a 2010 article in Nature that people maintain a “CV of failures,” a written list of the things that haven’t worked out in life.² This might sound like rumination, but a CV of failures is very different because it is written. Rolling things around in your head keeps them in the murky realm of emotions, which are hard to manage. Putting them on the page may force you to employ more cognitive processing, which gives you a clearer, more logical perspective on the events—and can even help you see their positive side.

2. Stop angling for success

One of the reasons failure can be so crushing is that we set goals of success, instead of improvement and learning. Chasing success might seem like the right path, but it’s a mistake—and an especially easy one to make in a world obsessed with résumés. Lin noted in an email that the value we create in work and life has a lot less to do with our accomplishments than with our knowledge and experience, which include the education we derive from falling short.

The evidence is clear that failure is a powerful force for improvement. Scholars who recently reviewed the careers of applicants for research-grant funding from the National Institutes of Health found that those who had been narrowly rejected early in their careers went on to outperform, in the long run, those who enjoyed early success.³

To make the benefits of your disappointments tangible, on your CV of failures, add a line for lessons learned. For example, next to “Did not get job as skyscraper-window washer,” you might write, “Learned I am afraid of heights.” This practice will train you to see the progress in each setback and remind you later that the sting of a rejection is temporary, but the learning you gain can be permanent.

3. Keep your ideals front and center

Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion and hunger to discover the truth about a problem. Winning a Nobel Prize was never these people’s motive for their hard work.” This isn’t just a moral principle; it’s also a practical one. Unlike dreams of winning accolades, our core, intrinsic values are “resistant to disillusionment,” as researchers put it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.⁴

Furthermore, focusing on your core values helps you understand why you took a risk in seeking a goal in the first place. “I am a loving person—I make myself vulnerable and therefore can be hurt” is both more constructive and probably more accurate than “Someone hurt me, and the pain has no meaning.” It also balances the cost of experiencing failure with the reward of remembering the person you seek to be.

Some people face more losses and disappointments than others, due to luck, circumstances, judgment, or even a tendency to take a lot of risks. But no matter who you are, failure will find you. The question is not whether you will fail but how you will use your failures.

People who seek higher well-being find meaning and purpose in their setbacks and thus get stronger and more effective in their aftermath. Thomas Edison gives us perhaps the greatest example of this attitude. Once, a young laboratory assistant despaired at having performed experiment after experiment without results. “No results?” Edison replied. “Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” Whether you’re making a light bulb, applying for a job, or pursuing romance, this perspective on failure is the right one.

Originally published January 13, 2022.

2 Stop Spending Time on Things You Hate

The other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cost of a thing,” he wrote in Walden, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play—he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost-benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time.

This argument is hard to refute. Many of the pastimes on which we while away huge portions of our lives feel good in the moment but bring us anxiety and regret when we manage to tear ourselves away. The average American spent three hours and 43 minutes every day watching live TV in the first quarter of 2020, according to Nielsen. That’s a lot, but still less time than the three hours and 46 minutes people spent staring at their smartphones.

I am not arguing that nonwork activities are necessarily a waste of time; quite the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that time spent daydreaming and enjoying nonwork pursuits can lead to not just happiness but also better work performance and higher creativity. There are really only two ways that time can be truly “wasted”: when you engage in something that crowds out more productive or edifying activities, and when you deliberately engage in something that, on balance, you don’t actually even like. These instances of wasted time can be a source of anxiety and regret, but in reality, they are a valuable resource: If we train ourselves to avoid wasting our minutes, we will have discovered a new reservoir of time that we can use in joyful and productive ways.

We all have frittered away time on one thing at the expense of another, more valuable thing and kicked ourselves for it later. I once stayed up until 3 a.m. watching Howard the Duck—critically assessed as one of history’s worst movies—the night before an important morning interview. (To add insult to injury, I still remember the plot of the movie.)

I wasted that time because I misestimated the opportunity cost of watching the movie—that is to say, I didn’t accurately weigh the value of everything else I could have been doing instead (like sleeping). If humans were perfectly rational creatures, we would be able to calculate the costs and benefits of every activity well enough to avoid such mistakes, or at least not repeat them over and over. But most people know from their own lives that things don’t work out that way. Even experts mess this up: In one experiment on professional economists, nearly 80 percent of the participants failed to correctly estimate opportunity costs.

These errors occur because, without prior planning, the impulsive toddler in our heads who has no concept of tomorrow dominates our executive function. That leads us to overestimate the value of a little short-term pleasure and underestimate the value of our long-term well-being. The outcome can be fairly trivial, like playing Angry Birds for 10 more minutes, or more serious, like smoking for one more day—every day.

I only realized how much I hated Howard the Duck when it was over, but we humans also, perplexingly, waste plenty of time doing things we already know we don’t want to do. Take the case of the smartphone: It is convenient and helpful as a tool. Yet despite its benefits, in a 2015 survey nearly one in three smartphone owners said it is more of a “leash” than a source of “freedom.” This leash has serious consequences: Psychologists have linked excessive smartphone use to “digital addiction,” which in turn can lead to loneliness, anxiety, and depression.

So why do millions still submit to the leash? Like any other addiction, heavy smartphone use hooks us by stimulating the brain’s reward system. This gives us immediate, but very short-lived, gratification, which quickly wears off and leaves us with regret as we crave yet another hit. Even if it doesn’t rise to the level of addiction, any compulsive time wasting that doesn’t make us happier in the long run—whether it takes the form of solitaire or cat videos—can similarly harm our well-being.

For the sake of happiness and productivity, our goal should not be to squeeze every second of distraction and leisure out of our days. Rather, it should be to manage our days in accordance with our priorities, by distinguishing between the time wasters we like and those we don’t—and ridding ourselves of the latter. Here are two ways to get started.

1. Schedule your downtime

The best way to deal with the opportunity-cost problem is not to leave time-use decisions to the moment we begin an activity, when our decision making might be distorted by short-term comfort-seeking (especially if it’s 1 a.m., when Howard the Duck is likely to air). In his book Deep Work, the writer Cal Newport recommends a productivity strategy called time blocking—making decisions about how to use time in advance, and sticking to the schedule.

Time blocking doesn’t have to be limited to work. For many people working from home, job and life have commingled in frustrating ways because there is no exoskeletal time structure imposed by a formal workplace. My answer is to block everything, including hobbies, leisure, and even daydreaming. For example, you might write “Goof off” on your planner from 1:30 to 2 p.m. tomorrow. Since goofing off is no longer an uninvited guest in your schedule, it doesn’t throw off your rhythm, and your odds of being back to work at 2 p.m. rise dramatically.

2. Give your bad habits a monetary value

In 2012, two management scholars at the University of Toronto conducted a series of experiments in which they asked participants to think of their incomes in terms of an hourly wage, as well as to assign a monetary value to the time they spent on leisure activities.¹ For example, participants were asked to consider their (nonworking) time on the internet in terms of forgone wages. Thinking this way reduced the happiness people derived from their leisure activities.

The researchers interpreted this finding as a negative consequence of monetizing leisure, but such a method can be of great value for dissuading us from engaging in addictive pastimes we dislike. Say, for example, that you find yourself bingeing on social media, which research has clearly found lowers happiness when overused, especially for young people. If you consume the average amount of social media in America (about 142 minutes per day) and earn the average hourly wage (about $29.92), you are effectively “spending” about $71 worth of time per day on this activity.

Remember your hourly wage at the beginning of each day, and get in the habit of reminding yourself of it as you start something that might ordinarily gobble up your time. You’ll be more likely to make a cost-effective decision to use social media to quickly catch up on your friends’ lives and the news, and not to feed your brain’s reward system through a costly hour of mindless scrolling.

There is a particularly winsome passage in Walden in which Thoreau compares time to a stream. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in,” he writes. “I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.” To fish in the river of time—even without catching anything—is no waste. It can be a special kind of reverie.

The problem is if you fish when you should be hunting, or fly-fish if you prefer bait casting. And so it is with any pastime—even reading Walden, I realized. It is a lovely book, full of insight. But at a certain point, one has to put the book down and get back to work.

Originally published April 29, 2021.

3 Feeling Burned Out? Here’s What to Do

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha, the novel’s central protagonist, asks his father for permission to join a monastery, where he seeks to purify his soul and sanctify his work. Cynical and half-drunk, Alyosha’s father makes a prediction about what monastic life will do to the saintly youngster: “You will burn and you will burn out.”

Not until nearly a century after the novel’s 1880 appearance did social science come up with a definition of what that phrase, burn out, meant. In 1974, the German American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger supplied a definition of the noun burn-out as the state of being “exhausted by making extreme demands on energy, strength, or resources” from one’s job, which would cause one “to become ineffective in achieving the intents and purposes.”

If you are feeling burned out in your work, you are far from alone. In 2015, 51 percent of American corporate workers surveyed said that they had experienced burnout more than once in their current job, according to the consulting firm Deloitte. The coronavirus pandemic made this worse: Researchers writing in the Harvard Business Review in 2021 reported that 89 percent of their survey respondents said that their work life was getting worse during the pandemic.¹ More than three in five admitted to “struggling to manage their workloads” and said they’d experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.

When you are feeling like a desiccated husk of a human being, everything seems like an insurmountable task. Ordinary work is extraordinarily taxing; it is hard to see how you can ever make things better, and you want to just give up—to quit, to run away. But you don’t have to be overwhelmed. If you understand how the burnout cycle works, you can disrupt and reverse it with a few simple changes.

Psychologists studying workplace burnout find that it tends to manifest through three dimensions: emotional exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization, and a negative view of personal effectiveness. When you are burned out, you feel a weariness about being able to face work demands (sometimes bleeding into a sense of actual physical exhaustion). You lose enthusiasm for your work or its quality, and start to doubt your own ability and competence. If you think this syndrome might be affecting you, many self-evaluation surveys are available online, such as “The Burnout Test” available at Psychology Today’s website.²

Burnout is not merely a problem of the mind; it also affects the brain and body. For example, being burned out is associated with a high degree of fragmented sleep and with dysfunction of the sympathetic adrenal medullary axis, which both relate to an overproduction of the hormone cortisol. In lay terms, you feel stressed out. Because of this physiological effect, sustained burnout can lead to systemic inflammation, immunosuppression, metabolic syndrome (and its relative obesity), cardiovascular disease, and even premature death.

Certain job characteristics tend to cause burnout. Surveying the scientific literature in 2022, Spanish researchers identified work overload, “emotional labor” (which includes having to control or hide negative emotions), a lack of autonomy, ambiguity or conflict about one’s role, inadequate supervision, lack of social support, and working hours that impinge on personal life.³ In other words, people burn out when their employers work them into the ground and don’t support them and when the employees have no say in the matter.

Certain workplaces and industries are more liable than others to burn out their workers. In 2022, Gallup polled employees across the economy and found that the highest burnout levels occurred in K–12 education, universities, professional services, and government or public-policy jobs.⁴ Significantly lower levels were found in manufacturing, utilities, and construction. This helps make sense of another finding from a large survey of workers conducted during the coronavirus pandemic, which showed that one of the most glaring sources of burnout is meeting fatigue.⁵ The occupations that typically suffer the worst burnout rates are the ones that function as meeting factories, something I’ve seen firsthand (see chapter 17 of this book, “Meetings Are Miserable”).

Burnout is an especially obdurate happiness problem to solve because once you are in the dreaded vortex of exhaustion, cynicism, and self-criticism, even what would once have made you happy at work now makes you unhappy. This was the conclusion of research published in The Journal of Psychology in 2016.⁶ The authors found that employees who were engaged and not burned out met their personal needs and stayed happy when they did their core work, met clients, and interacted with colleagues. This was in contrast, the researchers found, to their very burned-out colleagues, who reported that these same activities made things worse. The finding explains how two people doing the same job can have such different happiness experiences.

For employers, my advice to avoid burnout happening in your workplace is straightforward. First, don’t ask people to sacrifice all of their time and their relationships for their job. Let people say what they feel at work within rational limits, and give them control. Also, make sure they know what their job is and that they feel supported. And finally, for God’s sake, get rid of as many meetings as possible.

My advice to employees is more challenging to put into practice: It is more abstract and depends on the feedback loop that causes even normal work to burn you out, which in turn lowers your ability to engage in the normal work. The key is to disrupt this loop—by creating more “space” between your life and your job so that they don’t drag each other down and there is a chance to reverse the cycle. As the Dalai Lama advises, “If you feel ‘burnout’ setting in, if you feel demoralized and exhausted, it is best, for the sake of everyone, to withdraw and restore yourself.”

The easiest way to achieve this is to work only in defined hours. With the spread of mobile technologies, for many people, work can creep into almost every waking moment, from when you receive your first text of the day at 5 a.m. to the last email you send at 10:30 p.m. Working like this doesn’t just occupy your time; it also hijacks your thoughts, so that you get virtually no relief from professional concerns. One associate of mine told me that as devices have facilitated the sprawl of his work across his life, he thinks less about friends, family, and hobbies, and finds himself even dreaming about work.

Set times when you resolve not to write or check work email. If necessary, you might consider getting a personal phone so that you can leave your work devices behind when you exercise, sleep, and spend time with family and friends. You might even make a rule with loved ones not to talk about work during certain hours and days, or while on vacation. These breaks are like little sabbaths, which can be very effective in helping you refresh and renew your engagement with work. And lest you worry that this habit will hurt your productivity, research has shown that people who use this technique can maintain, and even improve, their productivity and work quality.

Separation of life and work was a particular problem throughout the pandemic for people who work from home. Burnout is extremely high for remote workers. According to 2022 survey data from the recruiting firm Zippia, 86 percent of fully remote workers experience some degree of burnout in their job, as opposed to 81 percent among hybrid workers, and a 70 percent rate for those working fully in person.⁷ Of course, this finding does not account for the fact that some jobs—notably, the ones that Gallup found to be low in burnout—can be performed only in person, so we don’t yet know how much of this discrepancy is attributable to remote working per se. But what the data does suggest is that moving to remote work is by no means a solution to burnout—to work from home is the antithesis of creating space between life and work.

For many people, sorting work from life might seem nigh impossible—without its being the fault of their boss or company. These people are burning themselves out through their own need to work more, accomplish more, and achieve more success.

If that is you, the monastery that Alyosha’s father maligned might actually hold the key to your recovery. One writer researching a 2022 book on work burnout asked a group of Benedictine monks about how they avoid the problem. He found that, following Saint Benedict’s nearly 1,500-year-old rules, the monks limited working at chores to three or four hours a day and never let their labors infringe on their time for prayer.⁸ The writer asked what they did if that wasn’t enough time to finish their tasks. “You get over it,” they said.

If you are a burned-out workaholic, a little Benedictine spirit might be just what you need. Stop working, get over it, and say a prayer instead.

Originally published September 21, 2023.

4 Procrastinate This, Not That

Are you putting something off by reading this article? Maybe it’s finishing your Christmas shopping. Or making a confrontational phone call. Or writing your fall term papers.

Social scientists define procrastination as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time,” and it bedevils almost all of us. One study found that more than 70 percent of university students procrastinate on their schoolwork.¹ More than 20 percent of adults in a 2005 survey were found to be “chronic procrastinators.”²

Procrastination gets a bad rap. And indeed, putting off necessary, routine responsibilities will make your work pile up and is almost always detrimental to your well-being. But deployed strategically with certain creative tasks, a little procrastination can actually be beneficial. So pay your electric bill and do the dishes right now. But you might want to put off that writing assignment for a day or two.

Procrastination is typically thought of as a time-management issue. But Timothy Pychyl, a psychologist at Carleton University, in Canada, argues that it’s more an issue of emotion management. He notes that many people cope with negative feelings surrounding a task or responsibility by simply avoiding the task, at least temporarily. You have probably experienced this if you have put off a difficult conversation and justified it by saying, “I can’t deal with this right now.”

Whether it’s a failure to manage time or emotions, in this view procrastination is still painted as a negative. And in many cases it is: Approximately 7 million Americans fail to file their taxes in an average year, for example, which can be financially and legally ruinous. Or consider that many employers think of procrastination as a professional liability, which is why you are unlikely to crack a joke about your tendency to miss deadlines during a job interview.

However, research shows that in certain circumstances, procrastination can improve the quality of our decisions and work. As Adam Grant notes in his book Originals, in ancient Egypt, procrastination was described with two different words: “One denoted laziness; the other meant waiting for the right time.” In this view, procrastination could indicate the vice of sloth or the virtue of prudence.

In fact, you can suffer from not procrastinating at least a little in many situations, and doing things in too much of a hurry can reflect its own form of maladaptive emotional management. Sometimes people “pre-crastinate,” rushing into tasks because they are impatient to lower their cognitive load. In other words, they want to get something off their plate, even at the risk of making mistakes and expending more effort in the end to correct them.

Procrastination and pre-crastination are not mutually exclusive. In one experiment from 2015, M.B.A. students at the University of Chicago got to choose between immediately collecting a check for a certain amount of money or waiting two weeks to collect a check for a larger amount.³ Most of the participants who chose the lower amount then procrastinated more than two weeks before cashing the check, thus nullifying the benefit of getting it sooner.

Probably the greatest cost of pre-crastination—and, conversely, the greatest benefit of moderate procrastination—comes in creativity. Scholars have found that putting off tasks that require innovation and research in order to mull them over can lead to better performance.⁴ In a study published in 2021, two psychologists asked participants in an experiment to solve various business problems, while tempting them to procrastinate. They found that those who procrastinated moderately (an average of almost 8 minutes) had ideas that were more creative than those of the participants who performed the task after procrastinating for just a bit longer than 1 minute or for 12 minutes.

Procrastination can be slothful or prudent, a vice or a virtue, depending on your habits and the tasks at hand. Here are five tips for putting off the right things in the right way.

1. Diagnose yourself

While strategic, occasional procrastination can be beneficial, chronic procrastination is a problem. To find out if you suffer from it, ask yourself whether the way you delay tasks makes you feel out of control or unhappy. Do you skip time with friends and family on the weekends to do work that you should have done during the week? Are you pulling all-nighters when you have plenty of time during the day to finish your work?

2. Work on your mindfulness

If you answered yes to the questions above, try working on your mindfulness. Researchers have found that being mentally present, as opposed to thinking about the future, is associated with better attention to tasks at hand and less tendency to put them off. Shifting your thinking to the here and now doesn’t require a month-long retreat at a Himalayan monastery, but rather a few practical techniques, such as separating yourself from distractions (more on this below) and making an effort to notice what you are doing.

3. Deploy procrastination strategically

“Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just as well,” Mark Twain wrote in an 1870 satirical essay. Twain may have been joking, but he hit on a very serious fact about creativity: It needs a little time. Not too much—just a little procrastination to let the ideas ferment. I have adopted the practice of waiting a day to start writing after having the initial idea for a project. I jot down my idea, think about it, sleep on it, go for a walk, and then start on it. If the writing is hard, I do the same thing all over. I don’t put it off for a week—just a day or two. Usually it flows nicely at that point; if it doesn’t, then I have to use a bit more force and just write.

4. Don’t fritter away your stalling

Remember that putting off creative tasks is useful because it allows you to interrogate the ideas in your mind. It won’t work if you spend your period of procrastination doomscrolling. Mindless social-media and internet use not only wastes our procrastination time, it also feeds the habit. Research from 2018 shows that procrastination and internet use can become a vicious cycle: When you procrastinate, you go to a screen; the more you look at the screen, the more you procrastinate. If you are going to put off a task, go for a walk instead—an activity that has been shown to boost creativity.

For people who use the internet to work, avoiding useless procrastination can be an especially acute challenge, like trying to quit smoking while working in a cigarette factory. One solution some have put to good effect is to plan extended stretches of work that involve the screen but don’t rely on the internet—writing, for example. During these periods, leave your phone in another room and, if you can, turn off your internet connectivity, so that a wandering mind doesn’t wind up costing you 45 minutes in cat videos.

5. Leave tasks unfinished—but not stuck

The biggest danger of procrastination is that a task will become permanently unfinished. I have a book manuscript that has been half-written since 2008. I paid back the advance long ago, when I realized that the publication date was never.

The key to avoiding this trap is to leave projects in a particular state of incompletion, such that picking them up again is easy. “The best way is always to stop when you are going good and when you know what will happen next,” Ernest Hemingway once told an interviewer about his writing process. “If you do that every day when you are writing a novel you will never be stuck.” Research confirms that this is excellent advice. One study by Japanese researchers in 2018 showed that students who clearly saw the end of a task were more motivated to finish than those who didn’t.⁵

To put this into practice, try the following: Instead of aiming to complete a full task each day, finish at approximately the 90 percent mark. Start the next day by finishing up and moving on to the next task, and repeat the pattern.

One more thing to consider: Perhaps you procrastinate on a particular task over and over, such as cutting your grass or writing Christmas cards, and none of this advice seems likely to help. In such a case, procrastination might not actually be your problem—you might simply hate this task because it makes you unhappy.

Your best option may be to avoid procrastination by avoiding the task entirely. You might be able to pay someone to cut your grass for you. You’ll lose some money, but the time you save will make you far happier, if you use it wisely. If you find that you really, truly hate writing Christmas cards, maybe you should just resolve to kill the whole tradition and connect with your loved ones in a way that feels more rewarding to you. Your procrastination, maladaptive as it may be, is actually giving you hints as to how you can be happier. It’s up to you to listen.

Originally published December 16, 2021.

5 Overwhelmed? Just Say “No”

If you feel you are struggling to stay on top of things and are worried about organizing your time and being productive, the internet offers hundreds of aids and techniques such as virtual assistants and apps that make to-do lists. But if you find yourself more and more distracted and harried, struggling to pay attention to what really matters and baffled by how whole days seem to simply disappear, you might be missing the single most effective way to free up time and focus attention: saying no more to all the demands bombarding you.

This is more than just a way to increase your productivity. Psychologists have shown that the feeling of being harried and having insufficient time because of busyness is linked to less happiness. Almost everyone knows the sensation that comes when commitments pile up and deadlines bear down. A seemingly innocuous yes to a request is just one more thing added to the pile already weighing on you and making it impossible to pay attention to what you really want or need. The strategic use of no can truly change your quality of life.

But using it isn’t easy, especially for certain people—including you, perhaps. Saying no might feel practically violent. Fortunately, you can get a lot better at it and reap the benefits of a happier life spent more on your own priorities.

Saying no too little—and thus yes too much—has always been a problem for me, especially if someone is asking me to do something new. I am highly motivated by novel experiences and adventures, and if you ask me to do something I’ve never done before, my brain’s locus coeruleus will spray dopamine onto my dorsal hippocampus like a fire hose. “Yes,” I will say, my heart racing, “I would love to talk about happiness while making balloon animals at your granddaughter’s birthday party in Fairbanks!” Later, I may regret it. (No offense to your lovely granddaughter.)

My problem is twofold. The first is not valuing the future properly compared with the present. Economists and psychologists have long studied the phenomenon of discounting, according to which we value something right now more highly than we value the idea of having the same item in, say, a year’s time. This is one of the reasons we demand interest on money we put away in a savings account, and also why lottery winners will accept a lower lump-sum payout today over staggered payments that will amount to a larger sum in the future.

A bit of such discounting won’t wreck my decision making and mess up my life, but many people suffer from a common bias called “hyperbolic discounting,” which, as the name suggests, is the same phenomenon but to an extreme degree. This explains addictive behaviors, in which the likelihood of future damage—from drug use, for example—is ignored in favor of the momentary present pleasure. Hyperbolic discounting also can help explain my habitually saying yes to some upcoming task: Future inconvenience is overlooked in favor of the joy available right now of saying you will take it on.

The second problem is the fear of future regret. Humans have astonishing mental time-travel abilities. We are able to imagine ourselves in a future state, feeling chagrin for a decision we’re making right now—which in turn affects that decision. Researchers have shown that this concern can lead to risk avoidance.

For example, you might consider buying a house in the current, highly uncertain housing market: You really want the house but envision yourself in a few years, having bought right at the top of the market, just before a real-estate bubble burst; then you imagine yourself struggling with the equity in your home being worth less than the value of your mortgage. So you rent for another year, then another, and so on. Risk avoidance can therefore inhibit you from saying yes to something important: owning your own home and the long-term prospect of building equity in it. As the author Daniel Pink notes in his book The Power of Regret, a common source of regret is inaction: saying no when a yes might have led to something wonderful.

But the fear of future regret can also lead you to say yes to too many things if you’re worried about missing an opportunity. For neophiliacs like me, you never know when you will find the next amazing thing, so saying no always feels like a big potential missed opportunity.

Perhaps neither hyperbolic discounting nor regret phobia haunt you, but you still say yes too much. In that case, the problem may be that you easily fall prey to a sense of obligation or guilt. This is not necessarily a character flaw; it may simply be the cost of being a kind person. But saying yes can be costly indeed if people around you know they can ask you nearly anything and you’ll accede.

If that describes you, you urgently need to know about a recent body of research: Scholars have devised experiments to show that those who struggle to turn down requests from others typically overestimate the negative consequences of turning them down.¹ In other words, your colleague will be less put out than you expect if you say no to helping with her project. You just have to get the knack for saying no instead of yes.

Whether you are a faulty-discounter, a regret-fearer, or a guilt-feeler, you need tools to help you manage your yes bias. Here are three that many people have found effective.

1. Start a No Club

In 2022, four scientists shared with one another their discomfort about their overstuffed schedules and overwhelming correspondence, much of which was due to their own poor discipline in failing to refuse professional tasks and opportunities, such as going to conferences and reviewing articles for scholarly journals.² Knowing that individually they would probably lack the willpower to improve, they pledged to one another to start saying no to large and small requests. By disclosing these decisions to the group, they found a way to make themselves accountable. They even started a little challenge to see how soon they could collectively chalk up 100 work-related nos. You might want to start your own No Club.

2. Make no easier

You may have noticed that you are constantly being added to email spam lists; to get off them, you have to scroll to the bottom of a message and search for a tiny link that says “unsubscribe.” That’s called an opt-out approach to complying with the law that requires the sender to give the receiver the means to get off the email list. Marketers obviously like that approach much better than the opt-in one by which you continue to get the emails only if you click a link saying, in effect, “I love your spam; please keep clogging up my inbox.” We all find it much easier and faster to delete an email than to opt out, so the mail keeps coming—if only with your implicit permission.

But when it comes to saying yes or no, you can make this behavioral principle work for you by framing any decision about whether to take on a new task as opting in instead of opting out. So when someone asks you to do something, your default response should be a no, never a yes. If you can internalize this practice, you make no the easier decision.

3. Make yes harder

Along with making no easier, you can also make saying yes harder. This is, in fact, how my colleagues have saved me from myself. Harvard has put a set of steps in place before I say yes to anything; these involve both the time and the judgment of others. Waiting a day at least, or even a week, helps get me out of my dopamine-saturated hot yes-state. Then, when a colleague reminds me that the Fairbanks birthday party is the same week as the Miami bar mitzvah I already agreed to, my discounting becomes less hyperbolic. You can institute your own decision-making process; just make sure that getting to a yes involves plenty of friction.

One last thing to keep in mind if you are feeling pecked to death by constant requests: It might not be you; it could be them. If a particular person in your life is constantly asking you for favors, consider that researchers have demonstrated that two common characteristics of people with narcissistic personality disorder are exploitativeness and entitlement. They are exploitative because they believe that if you’re willing to be taken advantage of, that’s your problem. They’re entitled because they think they deserve whatever they are asking for.

If this sounds like your situation, the easiest way to reduce the problem is not by perfecting techniques to say no more, but simply by avoiding this person to the extent that you can. If they won’t take no for an answer, just try not to let them ask the question. Succeeding at this will certainly raise your happiness, and you might find that, in reality, you have no no problem at all.

Originally published February 29, 2024.

6 How to Worry Less and Be Happier

Everybody has worries. In early 2023, according to the market-research firm Ipsos, the five most common worries of people worldwide were inflation, poverty and social inequality, crime and violence, unemployment, and corruption (financial and political).¹ Such surveys ask respondents to choose from a list of typical global problems. In that regard, they no doubt diverge from your personal worries, which might be even greater: a perceived change in your partner’s affections, perhaps, or your child’s rather mixed performance in school, or that sore spot on the back of your leg.

Although worrying a bit is normal, for some people, worrying can be a dominant element of a generalized anxiety that steals their peace and sucks up valuable time. “I have been worrying and fretting myself, and I don’t know what I am doing,” says Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. “Yesterday and the day before yesterday and all this time I have been worrying myself.” If you too are a chronic worrier, this will ring familiar.

Your loved ones have probably offered you all kinds of true but unhelpful advice, such as “Worrying won’t help”—as if that insight would make you slap your forehead and become worry free. Maybe you have at times despaired that this condition of anxiety is simply your lot in life. But the cause is not lost: With some knowledge and a bit of practice, you can worry less and thus be happier.

Worrying is a recursive mental attempt to resolve a situation that has an uncertain, possibly negative outcome. As a mental operation, it is similar to rumination in that both are repetitive and self-focused and feature an inability to shift attention from negative thoughts. Both activities also harm attention, erode problem-solving, and worsen mood. The distinction between them is that rumination typically involves brooding on trouble in the past, whereas worry usually focuses on events that, to your knowledge, have not yet occurred. You ruminate on a bad conversation you had yesterday; you worry about the conversation you need to have tomorrow.

A number of psychological theories have been advanced to explain chronic worry. One of the most prominent is called the avoidance model, which explains how worry can become obsessive and intrusive in our lives. This model argues that inveterate worriers replace thoughts of clear outcomes of problems, especially potentially catastrophic ones, with a hazy sense of negativity that’s harder to act upon. In support of this idea, subsequent research has shown that when people prone to worry are shown negative images, the parts of the brain normally associated with processing stimuli—the parietal cortex and the insula—are relatively disengaged.² In other words, worrying seems to mute the vividness of our mental picture, interfering with some of the pathways that could help us devise real solutions.

Second, the avoidance model suggests that worriers hold a belief that if they think enough about a threat, they will manage to avoid it. Research has revealed that worriers believe that their worrying will help them learn how to handle a situation better or increase their control of it.³ This conviction also contains an element of superstition, as if worrying per se could somehow ward off negative events and prevent them from occurring. For some people, therefore, worrying is like wearing a pair of lucky socks or carrying around a rabbit’s foot. This is similar to the belief that you can “jinx” something by talking about it, and equally inefficacious.

Some evidence suggests that chronic worrying actually has a genetic component. The so-called worrier/warrior gene determines how well catecholamines—neurotransmitters and hormones released into the body in response to stress—are broken down.⁴ Worriers have a gene variant that allows them, researchers presume, to process excess dopamine efficiently in areas of the brain associated with working memory. The warrior variant has a different genetic characteristic that may enable superior absorption of neurotransmitters in regions that handle negative information; a person with this variant seems better equipped to be calm under fire.

Chronic worriers tend to be people who deal poorly with uncertainty, who struggle with narrowed focus, are self-conscious, and have social anxiety. The good news is that, generally, the susceptibility to worry declines as we age. According to a 2009 Gallup poll, 37 percent of people in their 40s report experiencing worry “a lot of the day yesterday”; for people in their late 60s, this falls to 23 percent, and to 15 percent for nonagenarians and older. We know that people tend to become less neurotic as they age, but it is also possible that they simply have less to worry about at 90 than they did at 40. (All the more reason to look forward to getting old.)

A seeming exception to the downside is that worry is positively correlated with high performance—but only among people with unusual levels of ability. You might interpret this as evidence that worrying is good for top-notch performers, but much more probable in my view is that such people tend to be in extremely stressful situations anyway, which leads to a lot of apprehension—and, in fact, these talented individuals might do even better if they could control their worrying. For them, too, as for everyone, worry is terrible for well-being: It is linked to depression, it increases the perception of pain, and it’s associated with procrastination and perfectionism.

On top of everything else, worrying is not based in reality most of the time. As the stoic philosopher Seneca noted, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” His assertion bears up under empirical scrutiny. According to research from 2020 in the journal Behavior Therapy, 91 percent of the things studied participants worried about did not come to pass.⁵ This means that for every bad thing that happens, chronic worriers suffer for 10. If nothing else, this is a colossal waste of valuable time, and we should all find ways to avoid it.

Easier said than done. If you are a worrier, simply willing it away is something you have probably tried—unsuccessfully—many times. The science gives us a better strategy, based on worry’s component parts.

1. Write your worry down

Anxiety, of which worry is a component, is essentially just unfocused fear. Without a true focus, fear is a phantasm that you will struggle to deal with adequately. Much better to focus the fear by articulating it to yourself. You can do this by making a list: When you are worried about a bunch of things, take a sheet of paper and write down the five that you’re most anxious about. This is an effective metacognitive technique—thinking about thinking—that defines and puts limits around the sources of your discomfort. Naming them in a list makes them emotionally manageable.

2. Focus on outcomes, not problems

Remember that worry generally focuses on problems but avoids actual outcomes. So you worry about an upcoming medical test but don’t admit to yourself what the “bad” outcome you fear actually is. If you could voice that fear, you would give yourself a chance to think about what you could actually do in that case. So, on your worry list, write down the best outcome for each problem, the worst outcome, and the most likely outcome. Then add what you would do in each instance. This makes the source of worry specific and gives you a management plan. With that, you’ll be able to park the problem mentally and experience relief from worry.

3. Fight your superstition

Give up the magical thinking that if you torture yourself enough about some uncertainty, you will somehow improve the situation. Perseverative worry will not give you some unique insight, nor will you alter the universe through the power of your thoughts. This is what your loved ones mean when they tell you “Worrying won’t help.” Make this more helpful by telling yourself, “My worrying will not change the course of events,” and use the social science outlined in this article to reinforce this rational resolve.

4. Seize the day

Worry robs you of valuable time in your life. When you wake up in the morning, declare your intention to stop spending time this way. Here’s what I say: “I don’t know what this day will bring, but I am alive to experience it and will not waste it worrying about things I cannot control.” (Another good one is the Serenity Prayer.) Will you still worry some? Probably, but this statement of intent can set you on a better course. Research does in fact show that this type of mental exercise—which involves identifying specific alternate, goal-oriented behavior—promotes goal achievement.⁶

One more point: Worriers often beat themselves up for their habit, as if worrying were a purely personal failing. One possible countermeasure for a chronic worrier is to ask yourself whether something or someone might be encouraging this in you for some gain of their own. Major economic interests, for example, reside in maintaining a worried population. In addition, activists, our political system, and news media foment anxiety to capture support, votes, or attention. That’s why doomscrolling—obsessively reading bad news—is good for business but bad for you.

The one profiting from your worry might be closer still. One of the hallmarks of a toxic relationship is one in which you are purposely and systematically made to feel anxious and fretful, making you more pliable and easier to manipulate.

No one is responsible for making your tendency to worry go away, but you in turn have no responsibility to give your support, votes, attention, or affection to someone who will use your anxiety to their advantage. If someone or something is prospering from your worries, it might be time to declare independence.

Originally published January 1, 2024.

7 Why a Bit of Restraint Can Do You a Lot of Good

The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has described our times as the “Age of Authenticity,” meaning an era when people are willing to publicize their secrets and indulge their urges, even if such a drive for personal truth involves transgressing traditional boundaries of self-control. Once, this type of exhibitionism was the preserve of a few celebrities, but now anybody can get in on the act: The quest for authenticity has spawned salacious memoirs, reality-TV shows of escalating disinhibition, and cathartic self-disclosure on social media.

Such revelations are supposed to be good for us, because suppressing our thoughts and desires is considered unhealthy and unnatural. In psychology, this way of thinking is sometimes called self-determination theory, according to which we are happiest when we obey our inner drives.

I would grant that living inauthentically and being repressed do not sound like a recipe for well-being. But the age of authenticity does not seem to have made us happier, either. Quite the reverse. Some scholars, such as Taylor and the historian and theologian Carl R. Trueman, have argued that American society has become far more expressively individualistic over the past few decades. Yet the average level of happiness has consistently fallen, even as reported levels of depression and anxiety have exploded.

One possible explanation for this paradox is that the lowering of self-control was an understandable but significant error in our collective thinking, and it took us in exactly the wrong direction where happiness is concerned. Although understanding how this happened won’t turn our whole culture around, it can help you be happier in your own life.

From a psychological perspective, a useful hypothesis of how self-management works is that two systems in the brain govern it: the behavioral activation system and the behavioral inhibition system. The first one excites the desire for rewards and other positive stimuli and arouses your interest in doing things. The second one creates an aversion to punishment and negative consequences and tells you not to do things.

Generally, you can think about each system in this way: If the activation system rises or the inhibition system falls, self-control may decrease. Alternatively, if the inhibition system rises or the activation system falls, self-control may increase. And what works for an individual also scales by analogy for the group or community.

So which combination makes us happier overall—more of the behavioral activation system and less of the behavioral inhibition system, or the other way around? The answer is that both combinations are effective. A team of eight psychologists showed this in a 2018 study on self-control in the Journal of Personality. The team fielded a series of undergraduate surveys. The researchers found that low levels of self-control were associated with the lowest levels of subjective well-being.¹ Moving to a higher level of self-control increased the undergraduates’ happiness.

Interestingly, in a separate study within the paper, the researchers also found that low-to-moderate levels of self-control—that is, a slightly below-average level of self-control—were associated with the lowest levels of momentary well-being. Yet a complete lack of self-control was associated with slightly higher momentary well-being. This is no wonder: Letting completely loose is commonly associated with very short-term bouts of pleasure.

This implies that if you are a somewhat reserved, self-controlled person, you can raise your sense of well-being in one of two completely contrasting ways: by being more authentic and impulsive or by being more punctilious and modest. Given that choice, the former sounds a lot more fun. The idea that most people would choose disinhibition and that authenticity would become the spirit of the age makes intuitive sense.

The trouble is that the let-it-all-hang-out approach is restricted to momentary well-being, and has consequences for others. In 2011, scholars at Arizona State University studied the correlation of low self-control with irresponsible behavior that makes life worse for others. They found that low self-control, although potentially enjoyable to the one shedding inhibitions, is associated with criminal offending, academic fraud, binge drinking, drunk dialing, public profanity, and (weirdly) public flatulence.² All of these behaviors have negative social consequences, some more serious than others, but any will affect the well-being of others.

I would hazard this as a partial explanation at least for our national happiness funk: American culture has gone the wrong way about getting happier—by encouraging each of us to relax self-control to get happier, the unfortunate result is that we have become unhappier as a whole and are now stuck that way. By seeking the short-term mood payoff that comes from disinhibition, we have become unapologetic, drunk-dialing, cussing, farting fraudsters who make one another miserable.

That is a broad statement, and not intended to be taken literally. But if you think the characterization is preposterously extreme, have you looked at your social-media feed lately?

For your own well-being, and everyone’s, increasing self-control might be much better than lowering it. To propose this at a societal level is nothing new; writers have been doing so for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, for example, exhorted “all well-bred people” to “forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.” But he had a broader vision, too, for how to realize greater collective happiness. “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will,” he advised, “and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”

As Franklin suggests and the aforementioned research shows, even if others don’t mend their ways, controlling yourself more is a strategy that will raise your individual well-being.³ It can be hard to go against unfortunate social trends, so here are a couple of helpful things to keep in mind.

First, be aware of the forces around you that may lower the activity of the inhibition system in your brain and thus push you toward lower self-control. According to scholars at the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, three bad influences to watch out for are excess alcohol, anonymity, and social power. None of these necessarily leads to antisocial behavior, but they easily can—and so take you in the wrong direction for happiness. (For instance, have you ever come across someone who’s happy to have said or done something drunk that they would have been embarrassed to say or do sober?)

Similarly, who expects to find people being their best, most magnanimous selves when posting anonymously on social media? In fact, scholars who have studied anonymity on social media have found that although most users behave benignly, a small subset may demonstrate antisocial, even psychopathic, behavior. If you’re seeking to boost your self-control, shun any social-media forum where your identity is hidden. Instead, accept responsibility for everything you say.

Social power—meaning, your capacity to influence others—is a trickier subject. If you possess, say, an ability to publish material that many other people will read, see, or hear, you should ask yourself whether your desire to attract and retain an audience is leading you to abandon your privacy. Does what you reveal about yourself evoke in people a frisson of interest but also lead them to hold a low opinion of your taste and manners? How much better to err on the side of self-control.

And consider the social influence we invest in leaders. We reduce our own well-being when we hand power to vulgarians. Just as it feels freeing to shed self-control but ultimately leads to negative consequences, so following leaders who act without constraints and break norms might feed our id but inevitably takes us individually and collectively down a dark path.

You might think that because I am arguing that the happiest path is one in which we sublimate our true feelings and desires through greater self-control, I am advocating in effect for inauthenticity. But that’s not my intention; rather, I am arguing for authentic self-improvement. The choice to act in a particular way boils down to a choice of who we will be as people—the famous “As If Principle” in psychology shows that you become a certain way by acting as if you already are that way.

This is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that “virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions.” One important choice we have is to behave with either controlled grace or uncontrolled entitlement. Neither option is in reality more authentic than the other because, in becoming who we are through our choices, both paths are equally authentic; both embody who we’ve chosen to be as people. But only one path, that of controlled grace, leads to greater happiness for one and all. So the beautiful truth is that we can elect to become authentically better than we were—and happier to boot.

Originally published May 2, 2024.

8 Your Money Worries Might Be Hiding Something Deeper

Money is one of the things Americans worry about most in the world. Even in 2018, when the economy was expanding, a survey by the life-insurance company Northwestern Mutual found that more than half of Americans felt anxious or insecure about money sometimes, often, or all the time.¹ And during the pandemic, another survey found that workers were almost five times more likely to worry about money than their health.²

That’s not to say that so many of us need to worry about money: A far smaller portion of Americans—11.4 percent, according to 2020 data from the U.S. Census Bureau—live in poverty. And yet, according to a 2015 survey fielded by the financial-management firm UBS, more than half of Millennials with a net worth greater than $1 million feared losing their wealth “a great deal” or “somewhat,” as did more than a third of similarly wealthy Baby Boomers.³

For millions of people, then, worrying about money is not a reflection of whether their basic needs are being met. In fact, this anxiety reflects deeper concerns that money can’t solve.

Worry has a nearly infinite ability to make our lives worse. In his 1948 book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie wrote, “Those who do not know how to fight worry die young.” The data supports his claim: Researchers have found that psychological distress from sources including worry is associated with early mortality.⁴ Daily worrying can also lead to clinical anxiety, depression, and physical ailments such as lower-back pain, breathing difficulties, and stomach pains.

By contrast, money has only a limited power to make our lives better. Consider the hierarchy of needs proposed in 1943 by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow believed that people tend to focus on meeting their needs in a particular order of urgency. We start with survival needs such as food, shelter, and safety. Once these have been met, we turn our attention to social and emotional needs, such as love and belonging. Finally, we focus on higher-order needs such as self-actualization and transcendence—in other words, looking for life’s meaning.

Of these three levels, money is only truly helpful for the first. This is why economists often find that well-being doesn’t improve much once a person reaches the relatively modest financial means that meet those needs. The “middle needs” of love and belonging—family, friends, romance—can’t be met with money, and pursuing money with too much gusto can even cause people to neglect their relationships. Focusing too much on money is also actively opposed to Maslow’s highest-level needs, because doing so can lead people into a trap that researchers call “financial contingency of self-worth,” which happens when a person’s self-esteem is conditional on their financial success.

Not surprisingly, basing your self-image on your bank account can lead to unhappiness. In a 2020 study, my colleague Ashley Whillans and four co-authors asked a sample of 345 adults to react to statements such as “My self-esteem is influenced by how much money I make,” and “I feel bad about myself when I feel like I don’t make enough money.”⁵ Those who agreed were more likely to be lonely and socially disconnected. They also, not surprisingly, spent more time working alone than average.

Perhaps financially contingent self-worth is one reason stress is high both when money is tight and after people reach a higher income threshold. A 2018 survey conducted by LinkedIn found that stress at work falls when people earn more than $50,000 but then starts to rise significantly when people earn above $200,000.⁶ One 2016 study in China showed that unhappiness follows a gradual U-shaped curve, declining with moderate income and then increasing again as income rises to higher levels.⁷

At low income levels, worrying about money can be perfectly rational. As I write in chapter 12 of this volume, “How to Buy Happiness,” insufficient income to meet one’s material needs is a major source of unhappiness. Sometimes, spending less time on family, friends, and faith is necessary in order to support yourself. In such situations, money still can’t buy happiness—but it can remove sources of unhappiness.

But what if, after assessing your life circumstances honestly, you find that you have passed through the zone of low-income worry and are still worried about money? Perhaps you have some extenuating circumstances, such as a lot of other people who depend on you for support or a high level of debt. But if these cases don’t apply, your focus on money might be disguising other anxieties.

Perhaps your parents always put a lot of pressure on you to succeed financially, or you tend to be insecure about your self-worth and rely a lot on social comparison. One way or another, you might be measuring yourself in money and implicitly hoping that at some point you will be “expensive” enough to earn others’ love and respect. Your instincts might be telling you to earn more, more, more in order to find peace and satisfaction. Your instincts are lying, and you could get much happier by reassessing your priorities.

One practice that can help in this project is to give more of your money away, instead of accumulating it or spending it on conspicuous goods. You can find no end of good causes competing for your generosity. The voluntary act of giving is a way of demonstrating to yourself that you are not your money, that money is merely a means by which you can create value in your life and others’. Giving is an act of rebellion against your grasping, attached self.

You could also try working less while redirecting your time toward nonremunerative activities that give you benefits that are further up on Maslow’s hierarchy. Many hardworking people work constantly, including on their nights and days off. If that describes you on Saturday or Sunday, for example, start dedicating one of those days to self-actualization instead by reading works of wisdom, walking in nature, or engaging in meditation or prayer. Find a good cause and volunteer your time. Attend worship services. At first you might feel like you don’t have time for this. Soon you will find that you can’t afford not to do these things.

Backing off on your financial ambitions may feel like closing the door on prosperity, which might be a lifelong dream. But actually, it doesn’t mean that at all. “He who knows he has enough is rich,” Lao Tzu said in the Tao Te Ching. In other words, you’ll be happiest if you’re rich in what really matters. Maybe that means you wind up with a lot of money, and maybe it doesn’t. The key is to remember that money can never be what makes you truly prosperous.

Originally published December 9, 2021.

PART TWO ON JOBS, MONEY, AND BUILDING YOUR CAREER

9 The Happiest Way to Change Jobs

A survey from the job-search firm Monster.com showed that an eye-popping 96 percent of American workers were looking for a new job at the end of 2022.¹ And yet, most probably didn’t make that change: One Pew Research Center study found that only about 30 percent of workers changed jobs at least once in 2022, which was roughly on par with the level of turnover in 2021.²

What accounts for the 66-point difference between aspiration and action? Psych Central, a mental-health website, notes that a common reason people stay in jobs they want to leave is fear of the unknown: Will the new job be worse than the old one?³ This is a powerful emotion, liable to dominate other ones because evolutionarily it was so important to our survival. Our ancestors passed on their genes because they did not say, “I don’t know what kind of mushrooms those are, but I bet they’re delicious!”

You may know that you’d like to do something else for work, but your options look like mushrooms of unknown origin. Thus “the devil you know” wins out, and you stay put. This can lead to a lot of frustration and dissatisfaction. But research about changing jobs illuminates trends that can guide your decision making, help lower the uncertainty, and manage your expectations.

Research across many industries and countries has established that very distinct patterns occur in people’s happiness when they change employment. The good news is that job satisfaction usually does indeed rise. Writing in a recent edition of the Journal of Organizational Behavior, scholars found that job changers rated their satisfaction with their old job at roughly 4.5 on a scale of 1 to 7; that changed to about 6 when they started their new job, and this rating held at six weeks in.⁴

That’s how long the honeymoon lasted. At this point, satisfaction started to fall for about the next five months. At the six-month mark, on average, an inflection occurred, depending on the “career orientation” of the job changer. Those with a self-centered orientation—defined as those who see themselves as independently responsible for managing their careers and mostly think about their own benefit—stayed at this lower level (about 5.5) of satisfaction. This contrasted with those who had an organization-centered orientation—defined as prioritizing loyalty and security and envisioning their career as part of a greater whole—as they started to see their satisfaction rise again after that six-month point.

The researchers did not track what happened after that, but it is reasonable to assume that the self-oriented folks continued to feel less satisfaction, and the organization-oriented to feel more. After all, we know that the first group reported an intention to leave the new job at significantly higher rates than the second. Self-oriented careers have more churn and less job satisfaction than organization-oriented careers.

A second pattern in the research from around the world is that those who are happier people in general are more adaptable in their careers.⁵ In fact, happiness—more than perceived social support or a positive attitude about the future—is the most significant predictor of being able to cope with, and make the best of, professional changes such as greater responsibilities and skill demands. In other words, people who are happier overall are more satisfied when they change jobs than unhappier people. Researchers also note that thriving in a career can be closely related to maintaining a healthy work-life balance, which is of course a key to personal fulfillment.⁶

A third pattern in the data concerns the “push” versus “jump” factors in employment. Scholars writing in 2017 in The International Journal of Aging and Human Development found that people were happier with their career changes if they had made a shift of their own volition, as opposed to being laid off and having to find a new job.⁷ This isn’t too surprising, but it underlines that people may have a choice about being proactive in the labor market when their job situation is uncertain.

If you are considering a change of job or career but feel paralyzed by fear of the unknown, the research offers a few practical lessons to help assuage your anxiety yet keep you from unrealistic wishes and rash decisions.

1. Manage your expectations

We’ve already seen that a job change usually increases satisfaction, but that much of this can wear off fairly quickly—within months, especially if you are not an especially organization-centered person. So coach yourself to be realistic: The change most likely won’t make you worse off, but don’t romanticize it. If your expectations are too high, you will be disappointed; then you might find yourself on the job market over and over again, stuck in a cycle of unmet hopes.

2. Look for happiness outside of work first

Remember that the biggest predictor of work happiness is nonwork happiness. I have witnessed this throughout my own career, in myself and in others: When things are good in the rest of your life, they seem more stable and less bothersome at the job. Conversely, when we look for our overall well-being in what we are doing to earn a living, it places too much emphasis and pressure on the job, making it into a kind of religion. (And actually practicing a real religion probably brings greater happiness.)

3. Jump before you are pushed

Humans crave control over their environment. One of the most common correlates of depression is feeling that your life is out of your control—that external forces are determining what happens to you. Getting fired or laid off from work commonly provokes frustration, guilt, embarrassment, and anger—and is likely to coincide with less satisfaction when you find a new job. Sometimes, losing your job comes as a complete surprise, but advance warning can take such forms as a change of management, a hiring freeze, or a switch in product line. If you stay alert, you have a better chance of leaving on your own terms.

People generally talk about moving jobs as a dramatic occurrence, a major life upheaval akin to getting married or divorced. And it can be that significant for people who have spent many years with a specific employer or who prize stability and security. But for most people, such adjustments happen many times. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that for people born in the later years of the baby boom, a man with a higher education will, on average over the course of a lifetime, hold nearly 12 different jobs; a similarly qualified woman will hold more than 13 jobs. That frequency of career change is hardly comparable to how often people marry and divorce—except possibly for a few Hollywood celebrities.

In other words, keep it all in proportion: Most people change jobs multiple times in their career. So the best practical advice, if you are sitting year after year in a frustrating gap between aspiration and action, wanting to change but fearing uncertainty, is simply this: It’s really not that big a deal to try something else, so you might as well do it. Just bear in mind that the happier you are outside of work, the happier you are likely to feel in work.

Originally published June 8, 2023.

10 Why You Should Trust Your Gut

If you are looking for a job right now, you’re not alone. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in mid-2024, 6.8 million Americans were not employed but looking to be. Many more people were in a job but interested in making a change: The Pew Research Center reported in 2022 that about one worker in five was either very likely or somewhat likely to look for a new job in the next six months.

Depending on your industry, skills, and the strength of the labor market, you might have some choices if you are job hunting. If that’s the case, the problem is not finding a job; it’s finding the job.

The next step is to get it. In interviews, potential employers ask you a lot of questions about your habits, skills, and ambitions. Research suggests that what they might really be looking for is a gut feeling of enthusiasm about you.¹ So you need to be good at eliciting those feelings.

But the excitement needs to go both ways. To find the job that gives you the best chance of loving your work, you need to be attentive to your own gut sense. These feelings contain a lot of information that you need but to which you might not have conscious access.

Three specific feelings should command your attention as you evaluate your opportunities, because these emotions can strongly predict your future work satisfaction: excitement, fear, and deadness. The meaning of those first two is self-explanatory, and I’ll say more about the third shortly. The trick is to be able to tell which of them is most present in that inchoate gut feeling and use that knowledge to decide whether a job is the job.

The connection between decision making and gut feelings has become a hot field for research. Our understanding of the mechanisms of “gut” and brain is still incomplete, but tests of the quality of decisions made from feelings as opposed to conscious analysis yield strongly suggestive and useful results.

For example, researchers writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 asked survey participants to make car-buying decisions that varied in complexity. Those decisions were based either on their intuitive feelings about the options or solely on reasoning about the details at hand. The researchers found that for simple decisions, it didn’t matter which method they used to reach a verdict.² But for complex decisions, a feeling-based decision was more than twice as likely to lead to an optimal outcome as one based on an analysis of the details.

This finding suggests that it doesn’t matter how you decide something straightforward, such as whether to take the one job available when you have been unemployed for a long time. But when you have multiple professional options, using your gut to evaluate the choices may be the best course.

This is where being able to recognize which of those three key feelings your gut is trying to communicate comes in. The one that should never be absent when you’re considering a job is excitement. Another way of defining this sort of excitement is prospective happiness, or joy about having a better future in sight. If you don’t have that sense of excitement when you hear about an opportunity, your subconscious is telling you something important—that this opportunity is unlikely to provide enjoyment, a sense of accomplishment, and especially meaning. Researchers have run experiments that illustrate how central excitement about the future is to an activity’s ultimate satisfaction. Psychologists writing in 2019 in the Journal of Happiness Studies showed that anticipated meaning, which is crucial for well-being, and excitement about the future are closely linked.³

The second feeling to track as you evaluate a professional opportunity is fear. This comes in two varieties: danger and dread. In the right dose, the first of these is positive, but the second sort is always negative. Fear founded on a reasonable degree of danger when taking an opportunity provokes an increase in the brain’s dopamine regions in anticipation of a possible victory while facing risk. This matters because it indicates that you’re sensing an imminent challenge of a difficult but doable task. No danger means no real challenge; boredom is the likely result.

When I was hired as a professor at Harvard some years ago, I felt a positive fear of a somewhat dangerous challenge. If I had been, say, drafted into the NBA instead, the feeling would have tipped into dread (the anticipation of something entirely negative), because I would have failed at that with 100 percent certainty. Dread is so destructive of well-being that in experiments, some people who know for sure that they are going to get a painful electrical shock will accept a higher voltage immediately rather than experience dread of the future pain.

You probably would not take a job at which you were certain to fail (this would take us back to deciding a simple choice). But faced with a more complex evaluation of a professional opportunity, dread may arise when your gut tells you that the position will leave you feeling hollow and devoid of meaning.

This brings us to the third feeling to watch out for in your gut reaction: deadness (which some scholars alternatively refer to as emptiness). Researchers have found that this sensation is associated with such feelings as boredom, loneliness, numbness, despair, and hopelessness.⁴ So if you feel dread, ask yourself whether it portends this deeper deadness—because this living death is exactly what you should avoid in a job, notwithstanding whatever pay, power, or prestige it seems to offer.

There is no way to get perfect information about a professional opportunity in advance. You might make a mistake in seeking a position—I have, more than once in my career. But a reliable way to raise the odds of making a good choice is to look for a lot of excitement, a little fear of danger, and as close to zero deadness as possible.

In my work advising graduate students on their way into the workforce, I have devised a brief questionnaire for evaluating opportunities. I can’t claim that it’s been exposed to academic peer review, but I find that it works well to give my charges the basic insights they need. The survey is made up of three sets of three questions. Each question should be answered as a value from 0 to 4, where 0 = “completely disagree” and 4 = “completely agree.”

Excitement

This job sounds fun and interesting to me.

If I take the job, next year I anticipate being happier than I am today.

I think I will look forward to going to work most days.

Add your scores across these questions. To move forward on the opportunity, the target range to look for is 9–12.

Fear

There is a chance that I might not succeed in this job.

Success is going to take hard work and maybe some good luck as well.

If I do succeed, I will be very proud of the accomplishment.

The target range for these questions is 5–8.

Deadness

The idea of this job does not inspire me.

I have trouble focusing on this job’s day-to-day tasks.

I might hate it, but this job is only temporary.

The target is zero, or as close to zero as possible.

Evaluating professional opportunities is just one area of uncertainty in life that can cause a lot of stress, of course. Consider, for example, choosing a spouse—a case in which the decision-making stakes are much higher than judging the labor market correctly. Yet the same principle can apply to any complex life choice: Organize your thinking in such a way that you are paying systematic attention to your gut feelings.

For example, if you are considering a wedding proposal—either making or accepting one—ask yourself if the prospect excites you because of the greater meaning you’d anticipate in life. (Right answer: Yes, in a big way.) Is it a little frightening because the partnership will be full of unknowns and new challenges? (Right answer: Yes, but not in a “We met last night in Vegas” kind of way.) And, of course, ask if a future with this person for the rest of your life makes you feel a little dead inside. (Only acceptable answer: No.)

Life never offers any guarantee of success. But your heart—and your gut—will usually steer you in the right direction.

Originally published July 18, 2024.

11 Give Your Money. Give Your Time. Don’t Tell Anyone

The end of the year isn’t just the holiday season; it’s also charity season. Estimates of charitable giving indicate that at least 20 percent of all gifts are made in December, when our holiday love for humankind conveniently converges with the end of the tax year.

Giving is never a one-way transaction. Donating publicly to a prominent charity might bolster your reputation. Sending a gift to a friend or family member who’s struggling strengthens your relationship and increases the chances that you’ll get help the next time you need it. At the very least, you might get a thank-you, which feels good.

But if you really want to reap the benefits of giving to others, you need to forgo all these perks. Sure, the thanks, admiration, or praise might give you a quick hit of pleasure. But you’ll get deeper, lasting happiness from a good deed that no one knows you did.

As hard as giving is at times, the fact that it raises our well-being is hardly a new finding. Voluntary giving is one of the fastest and most reliable ways to improve your mood; making it part of your lifestyle can have long-term effects on your life satisfaction.¹ Giving charitably has been shown to stimulate brain activity associated with pleasure and reward.² The correlation goes the other way too: In one experiment, artificially raising gift-givers’ blood-oxytocin levels made them 48 percent more generous.³

To some thinkers, though, the happiness you derive from giving is meaningless compared with the virtue you create. Maimonides, a Sephardic sage born in Córdoba, Spain, in the 12th century, taught that charity existed on eight levels, arranged by order of virtue. The top level was creating opportunity for others through investment or a job offer. Just below this, however, was “double-blind” charity: giving when you do not know the recipient, and the recipient does not know you. That gift is almost as virtuous if you know who’ll receive it, but not vice versa. Any situation in which the recipient knows the donor’s identity fell lower on the list.

In other words, for Maimonides, private giving was superior to public giving. And because philosophers of his age, influenced by Aristotle and Plato, saw happiness as defined by virtue, you might say Maimonides’s ladder of giving was an assertion that private giving brought more authentic happiness than its public counterpart.

One modern study on the matter shows that Maimonides was right, at least sometimes. Writing in the International Journal of Research in Marketing in 2015, two scholars undertook experiments to see whether publicized or unpublicized donations to charitable causes brought more happiness to the donor.⁴ They found that among people with “high moral identity”—people who strongly base their self-definition on their moral values—unpublicized gifts brought roughly 16 percent greater happiness than publicized gifts. For those on the other end of the moral-identity spectrum, there was no significant happiness difference.

The researchers hypothesized that one reason for the difference may be that publicized gifts, in enhancing the donor’s reputation in the eyes of others, can make a self-reflective donor doubt their own motivations, extinguishing the warm glow. This is a secular version of the biblical injunction “Be careful not to practice your righteousness in front of others to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven.”

The implications of all of this are pretty obvious: The many causes asking for your support right now are offering you a quick and easy way to buy some happiness. Take it. But do so privately, or even anonymously. And follow these two tips to make sure your giving really will make you happier:

1. Give more than money

Cold, hard cash is almost certainly not the only resource you value and can share. Giving away your expertise, energy, and affection can provide large happiness benefits too; for example, researchers have found that volunteering directly improves happiness across cultures and countries.⁵ Of course, volunteering anonymously is harder than secretly giving away money. At the very least, however, you can refrain from bragging about it on social media.

Volunteering might even make you more likely to give money, and get happier by doing so. My colleague David Van Slyke and I found in 2005 that, on average, a volunteer can be expected to give $4,000 more in monetary donations each year than a nonvolunteer.⁶ If you can afford it, volunteer and donate, and don’t take credit for the latter.

2. Use your giving to express yourself

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also,” the scripture teaches. Self-expression is a driver of happiness; the more our work allows us to self-express, for example, the happier we tend to be. Furthermore, researchers have shown that granting people an opportunity for even a little bit of self-expression by offering them a choice (for example, by asking whether they prefer cats or dogs) increases generosity.⁷

If you want to boost both your giving and the happiness it brings, you should look for causes that truly express your values and sentiments, and pass on those that don’t. With roughly 1.54 million nonprofit organizations and at least 331,000 houses of worship, the U.S. alone has plenty to choose from. No studies have looked specifically at self-expression through anonymous giving, but there is no reason to believe that it would not be beneficial too, especially if it reinforces your own values to yourself. Moral self-identity is crucial for well-being.

By now, you might have picked up on a loose thread in the idea that anonymous giving is the surest way to happiness through charity: If you know the connection, your happiness-seeking motive—like the reputation enhancement from public giving—could theoretically eviscerate the purity of giving, and thus wipe out the well-being effect. In other words, have I ruined charity for you by writing this column, kind of like explaining the sleight of hand behind a card trick?

Good news: Even when you know the secret, it still works. As my colleague Michael Norton and his co-authors have shown in their research, “becoming aware of the emotional benefits of prosocial spending [does] not undermine its impact on happiness.”⁸ Generosity truly is a win-win.

Originally published December 30, 2021.

12 How to Buy Happiness

In 2010, two Nobel laureates in economics published a paper that created a tidal wave of interest both inside and outside academia.¹ With careful data analysis, the researchers showed that people believe the quality of their lives will increase as they earn more, and their feelings do improve with additional money at low income levels. But the well-being they experience flattens out at around $75,000 in annual income (about $92,000 in today’s dollars). The news materially affected people’s lives—especially the part about happiness rising up to about $75,000: In the most high-profile example, the CEO of a Seattle-based credit-card-payment company raised his employees’ minimum salary to $70,000 (and lowered his own salary to that level) after reading the paper.²

In 2021, another economist published a paper on the subject that found that even beyond that income level, well-being continues to rise.³ That’s not to imply (as much of the popular press did) that money can buy happiness off into infinity. The new study simply suggests that the drop-off occurs, on average, at higher income levels. I graphed the raw income data from the study and found that happiness flattens significantly after $100,000; at even higher levels there is very little extra well-being to be had with more income.

The lesson remains the same as it was a decade ago: At low levels, money improves well-being. Once you earn a solid living, however, a billionaire is not likely to be any happier than you are. Yet for the most part, this truth remains hard for people to grasp. Americans work and earn and act as if becoming richer will automatically raise our happiness, no matter how rich we might get. When it comes to money and happiness, there is a glitch in our psychological code.

Understanding this can help us build happier lives. Even further, it uncovers strategies for using income at all levels to raise well-being. Just because most people generally don’t get happier as they get richer beyond a certain point doesn’t mean that they can’t. In fact, no matter where we sit on the income scale, with a little knowledge and practice any of us can use money to bring more happiness.

Below a certain degree of financial prosperity, seeking more money is a sensible way to pursue happiness. As economists have repeatedly shown, well-being rises with income at low socioeconomic levels because it alleviates the problems of poverty. People can erase calorie deficits, educate their kids, and go to the doctor—in other words, they can lower their unhappiness. Even if you live above the poverty line in a rich country, you might have experienced this sort of transition in early adulthood. When I could finally afford to see a dentist at age twenty-five after ignoring my cavities for six years, it was a huge relief. (My lack of dental care might also have been partly due to misplaced spending priorities, however—I don’t recall ever being without cigarettes during those lean years.)

Raising positive emotions and lowering negative ones involve independent neurological processes, but few of us recognize the difference. All we know is that we didn’t have enough money, then we got more, and then we felt better. The (incorrect) lesson that money buys happiness, especially programmed into us early in life or when we are vulnerable, can be hard to shake. Over the rest of our lives, like Pavlov’s dogs, we figuratively salivate in anticipation of good feelings when the bell of money rings.

But after a while, the good feelings don’t come, because there’s no more material deprivation to relieve. For the most part, remediating the small size of your TV screen or the low horsepower of your car has no effect on your unhappiness whatsoever. This is not to say that people who make more than six digits should stop working hard—earning success through work has been shown to bring happiness at all financial levels.⁴ But beyond a certain income, working harder simply to have more money to buy things is pointless, since we find that none of life’s biggest problems—which typically involve our relationships—are solved. Quite the contrary, as spending more time fruitlessly chasing well-being up the income curve often means spending less time on love.

You might be tempted to throw up your hands in exasperation at these findings. It’s easy to be discouraged by the fact that we are driven instinctively toward a goal that doesn’t actually satisfy us.

Luckily, there is a loophole. Research shows that how the wealthier among us spend their money makes all the difference for their well-being.⁵ Specifically, spending money to have experiences, buying time, and giving money away to help others all reliably raise happiness. Thus, if you have a little excess income, it’s best to use it on those three things.

The key factor connecting all those approaches is other people. If you buy an experience, whether it be a vacation or just a dinner out, you can raise your happiness if you share it with someone you love. Friends and family are two key ingredients in well-being, and fun experiences with these people give us sweet memories we can enjoy for the rest of our lives—unlike the designer shoes that will wear out or go out of style.

Likewise, if you pay someone to do something time-consuming that you don’t like to do (for example, cutting your yard) and don’t waste the time you gain on unpleasant things like doomscrolling on social media, you can get a happiness boost by spending those extra hours with others. As an added bonus, you might be able to convert your excess capital into earned income for someone who is still climbing the well-being curve.

And if you use your money to charitably support a person or a worthy cause, your brain will respond with boosts in dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, elevating your mood. Charitable giving is also linked to higher earning, which you can then spend on relationships, experiences, and charity.

Left to our urges and natural desires, we can get stuck in a cycle of dissatisfaction, in which we work, earn, buy, and hope to finally get happier. But we don’t have to play that futile game. Anyone who acquires money can use it to buy some happiness, and do a little self-improvement in the process. If we don’t have much, we can spend any extra cash on removing some of the stressors in our daily lives. When we have enough to meet our basic needs, we can fight our materialistic impulses and spend time enjoying the people around us. And if we are lucky enough to have extra income, we can make it into a source of happiness, by transforming it into a means to share and to love others better.

Originally published April 15, 2021.

13 The Two Choices That Keep a Midlife Crisis at Bay

The dirty secret of social scientists is that a lot of research is actually “me-search.” Many of us tend to study aspects of life that affect us personally, looking for solutions to our own issues. In that spirit, I celebrated my 58th birthday not with a toupee or red sports car, but rather by investigating how to have the best possible midlife crisis.

The midlife-crisis phenomenon has taken on almost mythic proportions in the American psyche over the past century. The term was first coined by the Canadian psychoanalyst Elliott Jaques, who noticed a pattern in the lives of “great men” in history: Many of them lost productivity—and even died—in their mid-to-late-30s, which was midlife in past centuries. The idea entered the popular consciousness in the 1970s when the author Gail Sheehy wrote her mega–best seller Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life. Sheehy argued that around the age of 40, both men and women tend to descend into a crisis about getting old, running out of time to meet their goals, and questioning life choices. She based her work on in-depth case interviews with 115 individuals, the most famous of whom was the auto entrepreneur John DeLorean. He went on to become infamous in 1982, when, at the age of 57, he was arrested for attempting to sell about 60 pounds of cocaine to undercover federal agents.

For years, scholars mostly didn’t challenge the conventional wisdom that a traumatic midlife crisis was normal, if not inevitable. More recently, however, many have found that a “crisis” is not our unavoidable fate. With knowledge and effort, you (and I) can make two crucial choices that can lead to harnessing the changes and difficulties of aging to instead design a midlife transcendence.

The timing of midlife is very subjective. As the psychologist Daniel J. Levinson aptly defined it 30 years ago (and as others have since validated), middle age is when “one is no longer young and yet not quite old.”¹ This leaves a lot of room for perception. In a 2000 survey by the National Council on Aging, nearly half of the respondents ages 65 and older considered themselves middle-aged, as did a third of Americans in their 70s.² For me, 58 feels just about right: My life-insurance company tells me that I can expect to live to 98, given my health and personal habits. I started my adult life at 19, when I left school and started working full-time. So the halfway point of adulthood for me is 58.5.

Whether it becomes a crisis or not, midlife is indeed a difficult time for many. One common reason is what psychologists have called “sandwiching”: As you raise your kids, you are also saddled with the care of aging parents. According to findings from the 1995 National Survey of Families and Households, about 40 percent of people in their early 40s have both parents alive; about 80 percent of people in their late 60s have no parents alive. During the intervening years, adults spend an average of 2.5 hours a day in unpaid care of a family member. The burden of caregiving can be even more overwhelming for those with little time or limited financial resources.

These challenges are compounded by a strange and very personal shift that starts around your 40s: The skills you honed in early adulthood start to wane. If you don’t focus on the abilities that grow as you get older, you might perceive aging as an unmitigated loss, which will be a source of suffering. But you can work to avoid that fate by making two wise decisions about how to think about midlife.

The first decision: Choose to focus on what age gives you, not what it has taken away. The developmental psychologist Erik Erikson believed that midlife presents a crossroads with two paths forward, which he called generativity and stagnation. My own research bears this out and shows that the path you take is largely up to you.³ Stagnation, which can lead to a crisis, happens when you try to fight against time, whether you’re desperately trying not to look older or struggling against changes in your skills and strengths. Generativity comes from accepting your age and recognizing the new aptitudes and abilities that naturally develop after age 40 and get stronger through your 50s and 60s. These include the growing ability to see patterns clearly, teach others, and explain complex ideas—what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence.”

The second decision: Choose subtraction, not addition. Early in life, success usually comes from addition: more money, more responsibility, more relationships, more possessions. Life in early adulthood is like filling up an empty canvas. By midlife, however, that canvas is pretty full, and more brushstrokes make the painting worse, not better. This explains why studies find that the most common concerns reported by middle-aged adults involve getting everything done in their busy life, their energy level, job complications, and insufficient sleep.⁴

Midlife is the point at which your medium of choice should change from a canvas to a sculpture, in which the work of art appears as a result of chipping away, not adding. This is hard to do when you have accepted a lot of responsibilities at work and at home. But I have found that in many cases, the most important impediment to chipping away is a belief that success = more. In middle age, this is bad math. Work to change your objective by stepping away from voluntary duties and responsibilities and making more time to think, read, love, and pray—the work that you need to do to reengineer you.

You can take these steps on your own if you want or get assistance from the growing number of organizations designed to help you along this path, such as the entrepreneur Chip Conley’s Modern Elder Academy or Harvard’s Advanced Leadership Initiative, two programs I have personally participated in. But even if you do nothing at all, a terrible “crisis” is hardly inevitable, nor even especially likely for most people. Writing in the journal Motivation and Emotion in 2000, the Cornell sociologist Elaine Wethington found that 90 percent of Americans are familiar with the idea of the midlife crisis and describe it pretty accurately from a psychological standpoint.⁵ But only 15.5 percent of men and 13.3 percent of women reported suffering one.

In fact, for most people, life gets better starting in middle age. Over the years, people tend to get happier, more creative, less neurotic, more agreeable, and more conscientious. On average, research suggests that people get steadily psychologically healthier after 30 and well into old age.⁶ Most likely, there will be no full-blown crisis even if you just let nature take its course. Pursuing generativity and subtraction will make the second half of life that much better.

Looking for joy in middle age might sound like putting lipstick on a pig, looking for a few scraps of happiness in an obviously unhappy period of life. But midlife is not a pig (unless you like pigs), and no lipstick is necessary. You will inevitably face hardships and challenges, just like at any other point in your life. But if you make the right choices, midlife may just be the best opportunity and biggest adventure you have had in decades.

Originally published May 26, 2022.

14 Schopenhauer’s Advice on How to Achieve Great Things

“How do you write a book?” Like most authors, I get this question often. Sometimes, I find that the person is asking about overcoming specific obstacles, such as getting started (answer: first spend three months talking about your idea to anyone who will listen) and how to deal with writer’s block (answer: lower your self-imposed standards and just get words down). But sometimes, underlying the question is a more general curiosity or concern about how to do a really big thing requiring a great deal of time and intense personal discipline. A similar question might be “How do you run a marathon?” or “How do you play the piano?”

People want to know how to do a big thing because in a life full of quotidian trivia, a major project—even if it isn’t necessary to support oneself—conveys significance and permanence. It can be proof to oneself of being able to accomplish something out of the ordinary. To paraphrase John F. Kennedy’s reason for the U.S. space program, many people want to do something not because it is easy, but because it is hard.

Whether you want to write a book, run a marathon, or play a Beethoven sonata, here are three rules that can supercharge your effort—inspired by the 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer and backed up by modern social science.

Schopenhauer knew a thing or two about big projects: He published hefty books such as Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation)—two volumes, comprising hundreds of pages—filled with dense theory about our inability to perceive reality directly. But Schopenhauer was also an applied philosopher, one who was determined to show through dozens of essays how philosophy could provide practical life advice. These were not his most popular works, nor are they much remembered today, but I would argue that they constitute some of his most valuable writing.

An example of his applied work is “Our Relation to Ourselves,” one of his Counsels and Maxims published in 1851, when he was 63 years old. In this essay, Schopenhauer offered rules for living that stand up remarkably well when compared with the findings of modern research; they provide what has come, for me, to be the best guidelines for doing the big thing. Indeed, they are what I think about when I begin writing a book.

Schopenhauer loved metaphor, and his counsel starts with the example of a mason: The man is “employed on the building of a house” but “may be quite ignorant of its general design.” Because of this arrangement, Schopenhauer suggested, the mason was stuck in the daily details of his work instead of seeing it as part of a grand design. And so it is with any aspect of existence: “It is only when we come to view our life as a connected whole that our character and capacities show themselves in their true light.” The mason can take greater satisfaction in his work and stay motivated if he is able to envision the entire house while he works on the details.

Keeping the big picture in view enhances the success of any task requiring significant time and effort. One typical experiment from 2020 showing this involved having a group of undergraduate students set specific goals for their grades, as opposed to others who did not. By doing so, they were induced to see their class performance across the semester in its totality, not just in terms of specific exams or homework assignments. The researchers found that the goal-setting students performed significantly better than their peers.¹

Having the whole project in mind does not mean having to focus constantly on the future. You need to know where you are going, but Schopenhauer argues that “another important element in the wise conduct of life is to preserve a proper proportion between our thought for the present and our thought for the future.” He goes on to observe, “It is seldom that a man holds the right balance between the two extremes.” For most of us, the problem with finding that balance comes from not being present in the here and now but getting stuck thinking about what is to come. If we’re not mindful in this way, that hurts our ability to focus and make tangible progress in the immediate present, and creates an incentive to procrastinate on big projects.

To think that this was written more than a century before Westerners began to see the well-being benefits of mindfulness is extraordinary. In his interest in Eastern spirituality, Schopenhauer was far ahead of his time; on occasion, he even called himself a Buddhist.

As Schopenhauer knew, mindfulness is a skill crucial for the execution of big projects. Indeed, modern scholars studying procrastination—the bane of book-writing, marathon-training, and piano-learning—have found that mindfulness significantly predicts the ability to avoid procrastination.² Mindfulness training can also make people more productive in their work, as researchers have shown.³

We should work to see the whole project, but we should also limit our vista to that—and, in general, resist distraction from diversions that go outside our project. “We are happy in proportion as our range of vision, our sphere of work, our points of contact with the world, are restricted and circumscribed,” he wrote. “We are more likely to feel worried and anxious if these limits are wide.” The recent work of scholars suggests that he was spot on: Overload of unnecessary information can lower well-being. A classic case of this is, of course, social media, which beckons with terabytes of distracting nonsense that can eat your time and leave you feeling empty, guilt-ridden, or on edge.

Such overload also distracts you from your big projects. After all, what are you likely to be doing when you procrastinate? For many, it is scrolling amusing videos and irrelevant news. This could be the most obvious yet understudied reason for falling productivity in the years since millions of Americans’ jobs shifted more toward virtual work: If your employment involves a screen that forms a window into the vast wilderness of the internet, then it is always imploring you to drift away from what you are supposed to work on.

Schopenhauer’s advice might seem contradictory: Keep the big picture in mind but stay in the here and now. True to his Eastern proclivities, this is really just an invitation to live and work in a balanced way. Envision the cathedral you are building, but then focus on the brick you are laying; don’t be thrown off by unrelated projects. Here are three practical rules for applying this advice to your big goal.

1. Keep the grand plan in mind

Some special days—your wedding day, the birth of a child—have a profound impact on the whole of your life. Most days, however, are fairly unremarkable. You see your colleagues, family, and friends; do your work; eat; watch a little TV; and try to get to bed on time. Yet these days are the building blocks in a project that takes a long time to accomplish. Each ordinary day, you have a choice: You can build your house up a little, tear it down a bit, or neglect it entirely. To choose the first option, start each day by envisioning for a minute your whole purpose and your desire to complete it. Then resolve to live this day in alignment with that desire. In the evening, briefly survey the day, notice where you perhaps fell short of your goal, and make a few resolutions to tighten things up tomorrow.

2. Live in day-tight compartments

A daily focus on the big picture is different from living in the future. Although you need to keep the end in mind as you think about the whole project, it is too easy to spend too much time in what is known as prospection—mentally living at the finish line. This subjects you to the arrival fallacy, which means that you imagine meeting a specific goal as the be-all and end-all (provoking frustration and disappointment when it isn’t as sweet as anticipated). Prospection also leads you to miss the only moment you can actually use to make progress: this one. After you envision your completed project, back up to focus on today and only on what you need to do here and now to make progress. Make a schedule and a list for the day, and then—as the self-improvement author Dale Carnegie liked to say—live in “day-tight compartments,” rather than daydreaming or worrying about the future (or, for that matter, ruminating on the past).

3. Block out the noise

When you learn to drive, you are taught to maintain a level of situational awareness that is wide enough to help you anticipate problems but not so wide that it distracts you. So you watch your mirrors but don’t read and answer texts. (You don’t do that, do you?) The same goes for your project. You need to know what’s going on around you that might affect your life and work, but not what is irrelevant to these things. I am not advocating a “full ostrich” model of ignoring the outside world entirely. Rather, I mean to recommend ordering your information intake so that extraneous stuff doesn’t eat up your attention. Schedule your time in a way that relegates distracting activities, such as news consumption and social-media scanning, to prescribed times. Perhaps you could decide to read the news for 30 minutes in the morning and vegetate on social media for 30 minutes at the end of the day. If time-tabling activities like that works for your schedule, then stick to it permanently.

Perhaps you’ve spent years wishing you could do something challenging and significant and have concluded that you just don’t have it in you. I once knew a famous intellectual who had written hundreds of short articles but no books. I asked him why that was, and he said, sounding regretful, “Long ago, I figured out that I am just not a book writer.” I believe this wasn’t true in his case, and it doesn’t have to be true in yours, either—whatever your big project might be. All you need is a little Schopenhauer.

Originally published February 2, 2024.

PART THREE ON COMMUNICATING AND CONNECTING WITH OTHERS

15 How to Take—and Give—Criticism Well

We live in the age of popular criticism. Search a doctor’s name on the internet, and you will quickly find patient assessments of their abilities and bedside manner. Before buying an item even as humdrum as paper clips on Amazon, you can find hundreds of reviews, some extensively detailed, others succinctly vitriolic. You can post on social media that a celebrity’s haircut is bad, and you stand a decent chance that they will actually see your snark.

In my own business, student evaluations are taken with deadly seriousness. As one academic colleague quips, professors today are treated like a Denny’s on Yelp. Google yourself and your professional rep, and you may find that opinions are … mixed.

We all love to criticize. Unfortunately, we also hate being criticized. That leads to a happiness problem in the giant, constant, panoramic review that is the experience of modern life. We post and comment on others with abandon, but feel aggrieved at the way others assess us, both online and in person. The world seems unlikely to change anytime soon. Fortunately, though, each of us can change how we give and take criticism, in ways that will make us less likely to harm others, more immune to taking offense, and better able to benefit from feedback—even when it is negative.

Criticism is defined as judgment of the merits and faults of something or someone in written or spoken form. Technically, this can include compliments, but that isn’t what concerns us here. What vexes us is criticism of the negative variety, even when well-intentioned—so-called constructive criticism, which means to provide guidance so we can improve. Worst of all is destructive criticism, which aims to hurt or damage.

Criticism of either type is intrinsically hard to accept because of the way our brains process it. In 2013, a team of neuroscientists writing in the journal PLOS One showed that criticism stimulates the regions of the brain involved in social cognition more than those involved in cognition control itself.¹ In other words, the recipient of criticism might be attempting to understand the beliefs and feelings of the critic rather than assessing the criticism itself. When someone says your work isn’t good enough, your natural first thought may be They must not like me, rather than What can I do to improve it?

Some people react more negatively than others to criticism. People most sensitive are those who score low in self-esteem and high in neuroticism, who are fearful of negative evaluation, and who are generally pessimistic. This isn’t too surprising, in that those already high in negative emotion will feel worse than average about being confronted with negative feedback. Competitiveness turns out to matter a lot as well: Research from 2012 showed that highly competitive people tend to work harder after receiving destructive feedback, but their performance suffers.² One explanation for this may be that competitive people angrily want to prove the critic wrong, as opposed to carefully trying to better themselves.

One interesting finding from the research relates to narcissists, whom psychologists commonly classify as overt or covert. Overt narcissists are loud and aggressive; they demand a lot of feedback—with a strong preference for the positive kind because they like to have their egos stroked and usually disregard criticism when it is negative. Covert narcissists are just as self-involved, but more insecure; instead of dominating the people around them, they tend to be passive-aggressive and vengeful (and thus quite destructive). And as psychologists discovered in 2008, these covert narcissists are highly sensitive to criticism—more than nonnarcissists—which leads them to ruminate more than average and experience more negative emotion.³ Based on this finding, one way to detect a covert narcissist in the workplace could be by an outsize negative reaction to normal criticism—such as, say, a need to go home for the day after a mixed performance review.

The culture of criticism, abetted by new technology, isn’t going away. The only way to flourish in it, and despite it, is to adopt new habits of getting and giving critical feedback. The research offers us several rules for doing just that:

1. It’s not personal (even when it’s personal)

When we receive criticism, we make it personal in two ways. First, we may naturally analyze the critic rather than the criticism. Second, we tend to consider the criticism a judgment on our inherent abilities, rather than on our performance. Interestingly, even among young children, research shows that viewing criticism as a judgment on one’s abilities can lead to lower self-worth, lower positive mood, and less persistence at tasks.⁴ The solution is to set up an internal affirmation such as: “I don’t care what this feedback says about the person giving it, and I choose not to see it as a personal attack on me. I will assess it on its face about the matter at hand—nothing more, nothing less.” This won’t save your feelings entirely, of course, but it is a helpful metacognitive approach—one that moves the focus from emotion to analysis. That enables you to judge the information on its merits (or lack thereof), as you would if it were about someone else.

2. Treat criticism like insider information

Once you depersonalize criticism in this way, you can start to see it for what it is: a rare glimpse into what outsiders think about your performance, and thus a potential opportunity to correct course and improve. Studies of student performance have shown that those who learn to use feedback actively tend to get better grades and have better study habits.⁵ If this doesn’t come easily to you, one way to develop the grit to do so is to ask friends or colleagues whom you like and trust to form a critics’ circle, reviewing one another’s work and giving honest suggestions. I did this early in my public-speaking career, assembling a trusted “murder board” to give me feedback on speeches. Because I had empowered them to criticize my performance, I found it didn’t hurt when they did. I got much better quickly—and lost much of my fear of critics.

3. Make criticism a gift, never a weapon

We all have to dispense criticism from time to time. For some—bosses, for example—doing so is part of the job, and failing to deliver criticism appropriately is evidence of malfeasance or incompetence. The key to criticizing to best effect is to remember the gift/weapon rule: If I am criticizing to help, I am doing it right; if I am doing it to harm, I am doing it wrong. To keep critical feedback in the first category, the research tells us that it should have five elements: the care of the recipient in mind; respectful delivery; good intentions; a pathway to improvement; and appropriate targeting of the recipient’s needs. This is a lot to hold in your head. One CEO I know tries to remember how best to execute this before a tough employee evaluation by praying for the well-being of the recipient.

4. Praise in public, criticize in private

This rule is commonly attributed to the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, who used it to motivate players. Research suggests that his intuition was correct: Scholars writing in 2014 showed that positive feedback given to students in public was 9 percent more motivating than when given privately, while negative feedback in private was 11 percent more motivating than in public.⁶ So what does that mean for your snippy Amazon reviews? Send them to the author directly, if you dare. Or better yet, don’t send them at all—unless you truly intend them to be constructive.

If taking some of this advice—especially about how to accept criticism better—is particularly hard for you, you are in excellent company. Many of the most successful people in the world were laid low by run-of-the-mill criticism. Consider Isaac Newton. In 1672, at age 29, he published a paper on light and colors of which he was probably quite proud. Most critics received it favorably, save for one: Robert Hooke, a well-regarded scientist and inventor, who wrote a condescending critique of Newton’s paper. As legend has it, Newton was so angry at Hooke that he slashed every portrait of Hooke he could find, which is why, per the tale, none exist today.

Most sources believe that the portrait-slashing part of the story is apocryphal. What rings true, however, is that taking criticism badly is more humiliating, ultimately, than the criticism itself. As with the enraged Newton, so it is for all of us: If instead we do the work to learn to accept negative feedback, our well-being will surely improve.

Originally published June 13, 2024.

16 How to Give a Great Compliment

In the previous chapter, I wrote about how to give and take criticism well. As important as that is for getting along with others, one skill does supersede it: the ability to give compliments. The quality of our relationships, in fact, depends on the ratio of praise to criticism that is exchanged. The people we deal with, at work and at home, will not only flourish if we provide a good proportion of positive feedback along with occasional corrections but are also more likely to perform well, succeed—and like us.

Researchers have found, for example, that on the highest-performing corporate teams, members gave 5.6 compliments for every criticism of their peers.¹ On the lowest-performing teams, that ratio was upside down, with 2.8 criticisms per compliment. This effect seems to apply not just in a business environment but in personal partnerships. According to the Gottman Institute, a project by two academic psychologists to improve relationships, happy couples’ “magic ratio” of positive to negative interactions (a negative interaction being one involving critical, dismissive, or defensive behavior) is 5 to 1.²

However, just as giving constructive criticism is no straightforward matter and requires skills and knowledge, so it is with compliments. Done well, words of praise can be a soothing balm of Gilead for human relations at home and at work. But done poorly, compliments can be ineffective, even destructive. What follows is a research-based guide to giving compliments right.

Most compliments in our culture follow a very predictable pattern. According to the research of J. César Félix-Brasdefer, a professor of Spanish and linguistics at Indiana University, they are generally directed toward another person’s appearance, performance, or possessions.³ By his reckoning, about two-thirds of compliments in the United States are made using just five adjectives: nice, good, beautiful, pretty, and great. In addition, about 80 percent of compliments follow three templates. So if I liked a book you wrote and wanted to say something positive about it, my compliment would probably follow one of these basic patterns: “Your book is great,” “I love your book,” or “That is a terrific book.”

What we choose to compliment depends on certain demographic patterns. For example, in 2011 a scholar showed that women in unstructured settings both give and receive far more compliments than men—at a higher rate of nearly three to one.⁴ About three-quarters of women’s compliments to other women in an unstructured, informal setting (such as a party) involved appearance; in a goal-oriented, formal setting (such as work), 68 percent of praise statements were about performance. Men, by contrast, overwhelmingly complimented one another not on appearance but on performance in all settings.

Whether the compliment is effective in uplifting the other person depends on whether it is believable, appropriate, and unqualified. To begin with, a good compliment must not clash with its recipient’s self-conception. If you tell me my hair looks good, I will dismiss it and suspect your motives, because I am bald. More generally, people with low self-esteem don’t usually receive compliments well. As researchers have shown, in people with high self-esteem, a compliment stimulates parts of the brain responsible for self-referential thinking.⁵ This occurs significantly less for people who have low self-esteem, probably because the compliment does not ring true with their negative view of themselves, and so they discount it. Other reasons some people resist compliments include simple modesty and a desire not to appear superior.⁶

Even if a compliment agrees with one’s self-conception, scholars writing in 2022 in Current Psychology concluded, it must meet three criteria to be accepted by its object.⁷ The praise must come from a person with credibility to give it, it must be sincere and unscripted, and it must occur in the appropriate context.

Consider, for example, how you’d respond to a fulsome compliment from a salesperson you’d never met about how smart and discriminating you are when you’re leaning toward a particular purchase. You’d probably find that kind of compliment off-putting, because the person doesn’t know you well enough to judge your true qualities and is simply buttering you up to make a sale. The compliment fails on all three counts: the praiser lacks credibility, their sincerity is suspect, and your willingness to spend money in a store is not a meaningful context for grading your intelligence.

Some compliments are not just ineffective; they actually cause harm. My Harvard colleagues Alison Wood Brooks and Michael Norton, with co-authors Ovul Sezer and Emily Prinsloo, have conducted research into backhanded praise, which implicitly puts someone down by comparing their good quality with a negative standard.⁸ An example of a destructive compliment would be “You look pretty good for a bald guy”—not that I’m insecure or anything—because this sets such a low ceiling on the praise.

Other ways to give negative praise include comparisons with past failure (“This draft is certainly better than the last one”), with poor expectations (“Your work is better than I expected”), and with a derogatory stereotype (“This work isn’t bad for a Yale grad”). In their experiments, the authors found that the complimenters thought these backhanded comparisons were positive, but both recipients and third-party observers disagreed.

Given all of this research, it might sound as though giving a compliment that can be accepted and beneficial is difficult and fraught. In truth, praising well is really quite simple if you follow three simple rules.

1. Be honest

Remember that compliments generally get rejected when they are not credible or sincere; in other words, when they are perceived as dishonest. This is not to say that you are a dishonest person—just that you might be motivated to dole out praise strategically or perhaps because you have a habit of flattering people. Either way, your compliments are unlikely to be believed by a well-adjusted person, and that will hurt your believability overall. Before delivering a compliment, ask yourself: Do I truly believe what I am going to say to this person? If not, refrain. If so, proceed to the second rule.

2. Make your compliment a pure gift

A common reason to compliment someone is to induce them to reciprocate in some way. Psychologists have shown that it works: When people participating in an experiment were complimented by a stranger and then asked for a favor, they were more likely to comply than when not complimented, because, the researchers posited, of the human urge for reciprocity.⁹ People recognize what is going on, however, because the same experiment showed that the compliment did not increase any liking for the stranger or induce a positive mood in the recipient. So, for a compliment to be honest, make it with nothing asked or expected in return. (And when you are praised by a stranger and then asked for a favor, don’t reward this disingenuousness.)

3. Avoid qualification

After he turned a certain age, an older friend told me that he tended to get two kinds of compliments: either “You’re looking well for your age” or “You look a lot better than [some mutual acquaintance who was also elderly].” He hated both. The first meant he looked old; the second put him above someone else. This encapsulates well what the research confirms: Comparing a person with someone else or with a standard benchmark is perilous at best and destructive at worst. A favorable comparison will make someone who is humble feel uncomfortable. And if the comparison appears unfavorable, the compliment will backfire.

One last idea for giving good compliments: Break the conventional patterns from time to time, moving beyond other people’s appearance and performance. One quality people rarely compliment—but should—is what the psychologist Rhett Diessner calls “moral beauty,” a characteristic that is reflected in acts of charity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, courage, or self-sacrifice. With his co-author, Rico Pohling, Diessner finds that witnessing such beauty elicits moral elevation, which is experienced as “pleasant feelings of warmth in the chest, feeling uplifted, moved,” which in turns leads to being more “optimistic about humanity.”¹⁰

Moral beauty is deeply praiseworthy, yet we easily let it pass unremarked. In a complicated and conflict-filled world, saying “Nice tie!” or “Good job!” is fine, I suppose. But making a habit of recognizing and complimenting true acts of love and kindness can help us all get more of the uplift we need.

Originally published August 15, 2024.

17 Meetings Are Miserable

The Washington Post columnist George Will was once asked to explain his long-standing distaste for American football. The sport is, he responded, “violence punctuated by committee meetings.” To my mind, this is a savage condemnation not so much because of the violence, but because of the meetings.

If you, like many people, think work meetings are a huge waste of time, that might be because most meetings keep employees from, well, working: One survey of 76 companies found that productivity was 71 percent higher when meetings were reduced by 40 percent.¹ Unnecessary meetings waste $37 billion dollars in salary hours a year in the U.S. alone, according to an estimate by the software company Atlassian.² And in case you’re wondering, COVID made things worse: The number of meetings required of employees has risen by 12.9 percent on average since the coronavirus pandemic began.³

But the real problem with meetings is not lack of productivity—it’s unhappiness. When meetings are a waste of time, job satisfaction declines. And when job satisfaction declines, happiness in general falls. Thus, for a huge portion of the population, eliminating meetings—or at least minimizing them—is one of the most straightforward ways to increase well-being.

According to user data from Reclaim.ai, a calendar-app company, the average full-time white-collar professional in the U.S. spent 17.8 hours a week in meetings.⁴ According to scholars who specialize in the topic (who no doubt have research meetings about their research on meetings), work meetings generally center on one or more of four purposes: to “share information,” “solve problems and make decisions,” “develop and implement organizational strategy,” or “debrief a team after a performance episode.”

I should clarify that these are all potentially good reasons to have meetings. You have probably attended many that didn’t fit into any of these categories. For example, many meetings occur during a regular time slot as a matter of routine, without a specific reason. Another motive for meetings is what some scholars call the Mere Urgency effect, in which we engage in tasks—such as a meeting where each person recites what they’re working on, whether others need that information or not—to help us feel like we are accomplishing something tangible. If your spouse asks you, “What did you do at work today?” and you answer, “I had six meetings,” this might be why.

Excessive and unproductive meetings can lower job satisfaction for several reasons. First, they generally increase fatigue as well as our subjective sense of our workload. You have probably experienced a day of meetings after which you are exhausted and haven’t accomplished much—but where you have gotten a bunch of new assignments. Second, people tend to engage in “surface acting” (faking emotions that are deemed appropriate) during work meetings, which is emotionally draining and correlated with the intention to quit.⁵ Finally, researchers have found that the strongest predictor of meeting effectiveness is active involvement by the participants.⁶ If you are asking yourself, “Why am I here?” you are not likely to think that the meeting is a good use of your time—which is obviously bad for your work satisfaction.

Taken together, the research on meetings shows that if you want to be happier at work (or want your employees to be happier), you should fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity. And when they actually are necessary and unavoidable, there are a few steps you can take to make them less draining and more useful.

1. Ruthlessly avoid and cancel meetings

If you are plagued by unnecessary meetings where little is accomplished, find ways to avoid them if you can. Schedule work trips or important client calls to coincide with them, for example. In many cases, you can skip very large gatherings without anyone noticing. If you are the convener, cancel all meetings that don’t have a clear agenda or purpose.

Take this advice with caution if you are an employee, of course. It is not likely to be helpful, if your boss asks you why you are skipping all the staff meetings, to say, “Because I read a provocative book chapter.” If it’s too risky for you to skip meetings, maybe your boss will schedule fewer to begin with if you slip a copy of this chapter under their office door.

2. Create meeting-free days

If possible, bosses should create a policy of guaranteeing whole days without meetings. According to scholars writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, productivity and workforce engagement are maximized at four meeting-free days per week; stress is minimized at five meeting-free days.⁷ (In other words, stress is minimized when there are no meetings at all.) In an era when many are working in a hybrid format, if people come to the office three days a week, a good policy might be to hold all meetings on just one of those days.

3. Keep meetings to half an hour or less

In 1955, the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined what he called—and which has since been known as—Parkinson’s law: We expand a task in order to fill the time available to complete it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in staff meetings. How many times has a meeting started with the words “This shouldn’t take the full hour” only to take the full hour?

So, what is the right meeting length? Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, famously held micro-meetings that lasted 10 minutes. One productivity expert says that 25 minutes is ideal, based on what research says is the optimal amount of time for people to focus.⁸ But the point is clear: Make meetings more efficient by having a tight focus and getting right to the point, and make a commitment to finishing within a short window.

4. Don’t invite everybody

According to what is called the Ringelmann effect (named after the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann), as the size of a group increases, the average individual effort falls. Scholars differ on the ideal number of people in a meeting, which no doubt depends on the meeting’s goals. If the boss has a huge announcement such as “We’re bankrupt,” perhaps all staff is appropriate. (Then again, an email might suffice for that.) For making decisions and discussing strategy, many management scholars recommend seven or fewer people in a meeting. People are less likely to fully participate beyond this number, and accountability can become confusing. Try to invite to your meetings the minimum number of people necessary to accomplish the task at hand.

If there is one rule to remember about work meetings, it might be that they are a necessary evil. They are necessary insofar as organizations need them for proper communication, but they are evil in that they are almost never inherently desirable and should thus be used as sparingly as possible for the sake of productivity and happiness.

Under ideal circumstances, meetings would be unnecessary. But circumstances are never ideal, at least on this mortal coil—which, come to think of it, might give us something to look forward to in the afterlife. As the poet Edgar Albert Guest wrote in 1920,

When over me the night shall fall,

And my poor soul goes upwards winging

Unto that heavenly realm, where all

Is bright with joy and gay with singing,

I hope to hear St. Peter say,

And I shall thank him for the greeting:

“Come in and rest from day to day;

Here there is no committee meeting!”

Originally published November 17, 2022.

18 The Trouble with Zooming Forever

“If, as it is said to be not unlikely in the near future—the principle of sight is applied to the telephone as well as that of sound, earth will be in truth a paradise, and distance will lose its enchantment by being abolished altogether,” the British author Arthur Mee wrote in 1898.

So, fellow Zoomers, how do you like paradise? It turns out that in nirvana, the customary greeting is “I think you’re on mute” and your colleagues may or may not be wearing pants.

Zoom and related technologies were necessary during the COVID-19 shutdowns. At a time when more than 40 percent of the U.S. labor force was working full-time from home, videoconferencing arguably saved the economy from much worse collapse. Even as workplaces have opened back up, these technologies have allowed some workers to increase their productivity and given businesspeople options if they want to avoid the appalling state of commercial air travel.

But these technologies are not costless in quality of work, or in quality of life. Videochatting may promise the benefits of face-to-face meeting without germs and commuting. But it can provoke burnout for many, and even depression. When it comes to human interaction, it is like junk food: filling and convenient, but no substitute for a healthy diet.

By now, you have no doubt heard of “Zoom fatigue,” the range of maladies, including exhaustion and headaches, that are associated with hours and hours of virtual meetings. Survey data from October 2020—when 71 percent of people who could perform their job from home were doing so all or most of the time—revealed that among those using videoconferencing often, more than a third were worn out by it.¹ Not surprisingly, Zoom fatigue rises with the frequency and duration of meetings.²

Before 2020, very few scholars were focused on the effects of virtual interaction, so research on what Zoom life is doing to us—and why—is in its infancy. One review of the emerging literature in the journal Electronic Markets found that Zoom fatigue has six root causes: asynchronicity of communication (you aren’t quite in rhythm with others, especially when connections are imperfect); lack of body language; lack of eye contact; increased self-awareness (you are looking at yourself a lot of the time); interaction with multiple faces (you are focusing on many people at once in a small field of view, which is confusing and unnatural); and multitasking opportunities (you check your email and the news while trying to pay attention to the meeting).³

Scientists have found that videoconferencing affects many different kinds of brain activity. Among other things, it mutes mirror neurons (which help us understand and empathize with others) and confounds our global positioning system neurons (which code our location). In the latter case, virtual interaction creates confusion and burnout by placing the Zoomer simultaneously in one physical space and another—perhaps very distant—virtual space. Think of what happens to your phone battery when it is on Waze trying to figure out where you are. It might feel a lot like what happens to your mental energy when your brain is trying to figure out where you are—and it might help explain why an hour on Zoom can feel like four hours in person.

Although having virtual interactions may be better for well-being than having no social interactions, using videocalling to the point of fatigue has been shown to predict high rates of depression, anxiety, stress, and dissatisfaction with life.⁴ Virtual interaction is notably problematic for students, which helps explain the disastrous learning outcomes during the pandemic, especially for at-risk youth.⁵ This principle extends to college students: One 2021 study in the journal NeuroRegulation found that almost 94 percent of undergraduates had “moderate to considerable difficulty with online learning.”⁶

At work, virtual interactions appear to cause two main problems (besides basic unpleasantness): lower performance and suppressed creativity. In a 2021 report in the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers who monitored 103 virtual workers’ fatigue during meetings found that when workers used their camera (versus having it turned off), they were less engaged during meetings that day and the one after as well.⁷ Scholars writing in Nature in 2022 found that videoconferencing inhibits the production of creative ideas.⁸ Virtual work may also lead to more siloing in the workplace as worker networks become more static. I have heard these complaints constantly in my field of academia, which relies on creativity and sharing ideas. As one friend who started teaching at a new university at the beginning of the pandemic told me, “Even after a million faculty meetings on Zoom, I still couldn’t pick three of my colleagues out of a police lineup.”

The balance of evidence to date suggests that some people suffer a lot more from Zoom fatigue than others, but that for millions it likely deteriorates well-being, and for some—especially young people—this can be catastrophic for learning and mental health. For happiness and productivity, virtual interactions are better than nothing. But in-person interactions are better than virtual ones for life satisfaction, work engagement, and creativity.

Like most things, the right amount of virtual interaction is not zero. But for many of us, the amount we’re getting presently is too high. Each of us should think about virtual interaction more or less like nonnutritious food: In a pinch it’s okay, but we shouldn’t rely on it for regular social sustenance, because it will hurt our health.

Accordingly, employers, teachers, and friends should use the technologies as judiciously as possible, keeping virtual meetings, classes, and conversations short and to the point. And each of us should practice good Zoom hygiene by insisting on boundaries around our use of the technology. When possible, turn off your camera during meetings; use the old-fashioned phone with friends; agree with colleagues before meetings to an absolute, drop-dead end time, ideally after 30 minutes or less. Also, pay attention to the creeping effects of Zoom fatigue, such as burnout and depression, and make sure you have regular breaks from the technology, such as no-Zoom weekends and a complete moratorium during your summer vacation, if you take one. Finally, on your Zoomiest days, program in some time with at least one real live human.

What bothers me the most about video-based technologies is that they make the realest part of life—human interaction—feel fake. If you are a fan of futurism, you know that some would say that such a feeling could be close to the truth of our situation: Many scientists and philosophers have suggested that we all might be living in a simulation of some advanced civilization. As fantastic as it sounds, Scientific American reported in 2020 that the odds of this are probably about 50–50.⁹

I don’t know how to assess this hypothesis, but I don’t want it to be true. I want my life to be “base reality”—my temporal body to be genuine flesh, and my soul to be something that is authentic and eternal. I want happiness and love to be real. This is, I suppose, a philosophical objection to our sudden move into virtual space with one another: Virtual interaction is a simulation of real human life. The images on the screen are not other humans; they are digital icons representing humans in a way that makes me interact with them like fellow humans.

Just as I want to be real, I want you to be as well. I want you to be something more than a two-dimensional pixelated image, assembled from a series of ones and zeroes through cyberspace. So, if it’s all the same to you, let’s meet in person.

Originally published July 14, 2022.

19 The Case for Mindful Cursing

Americans are profligate cursers. Of every 1,000 words we speak, some linguists have said, an average of five are swears.¹ If you account for the fact that many people don’t swear in ordinary speech—one study of university students found that nearly half did not curse at all in natural conversation—swearers conceivably utter 9.43 dirty words per 1,000.² Though men were responsible for 67 percent of public swearing in 1986, it was down to 55 percent by 2006—presumably not because men were cursing less in public.³

And if you’re like a lot of other Americans, you’ve become a bit more of a potty mouth over the past two years. Use of the most common swear words on Facebook went up by 41 percent from 2019 to 2021; on Twitter it rose by 27 percent.⁴ Children seem to be swearing more.⁵ People are swearing more at work.⁶ People I know who never cursed before the pandemic are now using a little profanity, and my friends who were once moderate cursers have become expletive geysers.

This might seem bad on its face—like evidence of rising unhappiness, or of general cultural degradation, or of all the other things that drive us to curse. Or just maybe, dirty words are simply the way we find a little relief in hard times. That wouldn’t be so bad, after all. In truth, swearing can be bad or good for you and for society. The key is to learn how and when to curse, and when you’re better off keeping things clean.

Cursing encompasses a lot of different words and intentions. It can be a mild modifier (“I’m tired as hell.”), a joke (“My wife says I cuss too much, but I say that’s bullshit.”), or an abusive obscenity that ends a career or marriage (no examples here; I want to stay employed and married). Taxonomies of bad words—such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s classic text The Anatomy of Swearing—distinguish among swearing (“damn it”), curses (“damn you”), and oaths (“by God”).

Swearing can be voluntary or involuntary. According to research published in 2006, more than half of the voluntary cursing that people do follows anger and frustration.⁷ Nine percent of it follows humor, and 6 percent follows pain. Truly involuntary swearing—not controllable by the swearer—is much rarer and is associated with neurological disorders such as aphasia (in which the language center on the brain’s left side is usually damaged), Tourette’s syndrome (a dysfunction in neural circuits connecting parts of the brain, which causes involuntary motor movements and, in some cases, unintentional obscene vocalizations), and some neurodegenerative and autoimmune disorders.

According to the psychologist Timothy B. Jay, cursing out of hostility is a defining feature of people with the so-called type-A personality, which is typically associated with being competitive and aggressive. Swearing is negatively correlated with conscientiousness and agreeableness. Researchers have found that doctors who curse in front of patients are seen as less trustworthy and less expert than those who don’t.⁸ But lest you be tempted to conclude that swearing is correlated only with unpleasant personality traits, I should mention that it is also associated with honesty. Researchers writing in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science in 2017 found, across three studies, including one that analyzed almost 74,000 social-media interactions, that “profanity was associated with less lying and deception.”⁹

Profanity also simply feels good and provides swearers with a measure of emotional relief. In the words of the linguist John McWhorter, the author of Nine Nasty Words, “What you need is a nice, crisp eruption to allow you to blow off a certain amount of steam.”¹⁰ Academic literature shows, for instance, that swearing alleviates the discomfort of social distress.¹¹

It can even lessen physical pain. In 2020, British psychologists asked 92 human subjects to submerge their hands in painfully frigid water.¹² Some were told to use profanity, others to exclaim a nonprofane neutral word to describe a table, such as solid, or an invented curse word like twizpipe. The cursers tolerated more pain and found more humor in the experience than those using the invented curse, but even the invented curse gave more emotional relief than saying the neutral word. Not surprisingly, some scholars have suggested that cursing might have a place in improving patient outcomes.¹³ Perhaps at some point your doctor will tell you to drop two F-bombs and call her in the morning.

Swearing can hurt others or make them laugh. It can make you seem less knowledgeable, but it might help others think you are honest. Uncontrolled, it is evidence of a neurological problem; controlled, it can give you relief from social and physical pain. All in all, it is neither an unalloyed good nor bad, by most people’s standards. When it comes to your well-being, I offer three rules to keep in mind while honing your cursing technique.

1. Do it on purpose

Even for those who don’t have aphasia or Tourette’s, swearing can become a habit, something like an uncontrolled verbal tic. This is an example of failing to be metacognitive, that is, failing to manage one’s feelings and reactions and instead being managed by them. Happiness is associated with self-management, which is not consistent with unthinkingly blurting out a stream of curses everywhere you go. If you need to break the habit, you can turn to one of many tried-and-true methods. For example, the “swear jar”—a jar or box that you put money into every time you cuss—has been around since at least the 16th century, as expressions from the Middle Ages such as sard and swive became naughty words.

2. Ration your curses

When you decide to swear on purpose, make it rare. If there is one law in social science more powerful than any other, it is the law of diminishing marginal utility: Each unit of anything desirable brings less enjoyment than the last. If you choose to drop F-bombs, treat them like bowls of ice cream: Savor them once or twice a week, not all day long, and don’t go in for seconds. This will keep your expletives nice and fresh, and the benefit of each one for your mood high.

3. Don’t abuse or harass

Scholars find that curse words are more offensive when they’re used to attack or abuse someone. That might contribute to why using social media, where people swear more than in ordinary speech, can be such an unpleasant experience. Even if you don’t mean any harm, offending others’ sensibilities and beliefs by cursing can lead to hot-mic embarrassments or even lost jobs. Think twice before you let it fly.

One last suggestion: If the temptation to curse is just too great, consider creating a swearing “safe space.” Years ago, when my oldest son was little, he came back from a sleepover at a friend’s house, full of admiration for the other boy’s father. The family had a strict rule against swearing, except in the car, where the son and his friends were allowed to curse a blue streak with total immunity. It was like a kid version of Vegas: What you say in the minivan stays in the minivan.

That seemed ridiculous until I thought about it a bit and realized it was genius. The family got the cathartic benefits of swearing while limiting its social downsides. This is what Mark Twain was talking about when he said, “There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It’s dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.” I don’t have a minivan, but I have taken to doing just that in my soundproof basement Zoom studio. When I am frustrated, I just shut the door and say “twizpipe”—hey, I’m still new at this—and feel better.

Originally published June 9, 2022.

20 How to Speak Truth Without Fear

What is your most controversial opinion—something you wouldn’t dare divulge publicly? Perhaps you are from a devout religious community and secretly don’t believe in the most sacred doctrine. Or perhaps you love your activist friends but think their views are based on pious nonsense. Maybe you don’t actually support the troops. Or you doubt that climate change is such a big problem.

As a social scientist, I like to ask people about their most unspeakable view. I am genuinely unvexed by others’ opinions, including those that are orthogonal to my own. And I am really interested in what people keep bottled up. What I have found over the years is that nearly everyone has beliefs they feel they cannot share. Sometimes this is a way to survive under an authoritarian system (where you can’t say what you believe) or a totalitarian one (where you must say something you don’t believe). Such systems can be de jure, as is the case with tyrannical political regimes, or de facto, as with college campuses where dissent from political orthodoxy is liable to incur substantial punishment.

Even under systems that are truly free, which at least nominally permit full and frank expression, you may still be reluctant to divulge certain secretly held beliefs for fear of being ostracized by those you care about. Such shunning is, for normal people, excruciatingly painful. This fear does not mean you are weak or a fraud. Good evolutionary reasons account for your harboring this caution. But if you feel a need to come clean—to say what you really think—you don’t have to be bound by that fear. Understanding how ostracism works, and how you can manage it, will set you free.

For your ancestors, conformity meant survival. When humans clung to one another against the elements, predators, and warlike rival tribes, to go against the group was to risk being cast out and dying alone in the wilderness. We’ve come a long way since those primitive days, of course, and you know logically that you won’t literally be devoured by wild beasts, be clubbed by another clan, or freeze to death for openly disagreeing with a DEI statement or refusing to go to church. But your limbic brain has not caught up with this reality; it is still terrified of social rejection. Indeed, you have a piece of neurological hardware on board called the anterior cingulate cortex, which is dedicated to detecting rejection and making it acutely painful.

Ostracism threatens at least four psychological needs: belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning. If you are rejected by your friends or family, you lose the identity of belonging to a particular group and the meaning this brings to your life; you feel diminished by disapproval; and you lose control of your social situation. For example, I have talked with scientists who have spoken out against recent orthodoxies in the academy. They told me how they were attacked by opponents, isolated and undefended by their institutions, and shunned by valued colleagues.

Disagreements among scholars are normal: sticks and stones, right? Think again: These academics disclosed to me the real harms that had ensued—how they fell into a depression, in some cases for the first time in their life, and even contemplated suicide.

Some people truly don’t care about ostracism, of course. But before you envy them, note that psychologists believe such seeming immunity may actually be evidence of a pathology called antisocial personality disorder. Neuroscientists have found evidence that people with this disorder have reduced activity in certain parts of the brain, including our friend the anterior cingulate cortex. To envy someone who doesn’t care about rejection might be like envying someone with defective nerve endings who can’t feel anything when they touch a hot stove.

None of this means you are doomed to a life of either silent moral compromise or terrifying isolation. Some people without compromised limbic systems are able to stand up for their beliefs even in the face of group disapproval. They possess a special virtue: moral courage.

Moral courage, which involves acting in accord with one’s convictions despite a natural fear of retaliation or punishment, is not easy to muster. “It is curious,” Mark Twain wrote, “that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.” Fortunately, moral courage isn’t just a virtue; it is also a skill that can be developed. Here are four steps to help you do so:

1. Make the threat real

Fear of ostracism is difficult to deal with because it is a form of worry—a focus on an uncertain but probably negative event. Research shows that our worries tend to be hazy because our brains tend not to process the most likely real outcomes (see chapter 6, “How to Worry Less and Be Happier”): So we broadly imagine ostracism as really bad and something to be avoided. But when we make our fears specific, we can prepare ourselves and devise defenses. To help you do that, aim to answer the following questions as precisely as possible:

What do I believe that I’m not stating because I’m afraid?

Why exactly do I hold this controversial belief?

What good could it do if I spoke up?

Realistically, what would happen if I did?

2. Don’t go in hot

A lot of the time, people get in trouble for their opinions because they bottle them up and then finally explode with the truth at an inopportune moment or in a way that is especially disadvantageous. For example, if you don’t like how your sister-in-law treats your brother but have held it in, you might find yourself yelling about it in a hostile, unplanned way at the Thanksgiving table. Learn how to manage the best time and manner to share your concern by answering these questions:

When is it best to share this information with as little emotion as possible?

What is the most favorable venue for doing so?

To gain support, or to blunt opposition, who needs advance warning that this is going to happen?

What form of retribution can I anticipate and thus eliminate? (For example, you could consider canceling social-media accounts if they might provide a means for online retaliation.)

3. Practice, practice, practice

An extraordinary facet of human intelligence is our ability to practice future scenarios we have never experienced in order to eliminate errors we have never made. Early in my professorial career, I delivered my economics lectures twice before ever getting in front of the class. I would imagine students getting confused about a hard point of theory, so I’d find different ways to explain it without getting flustered. Similarly, you can practice different ways of saying your hard truths, envision the reaction of the people concerned, and make adjustments. When you confess your contrary belief publicly, make it the tenth time you have heard yourself say the words.

4. Tell it slant and with love

As you practice telling the truth in different ways, consider the advice that Emily Dickinson gave in her poem “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.” In other words, find a way to divulge your belief subtly—indirectly or bit by bit. “The Truth must dazzle gradually,” she advises, “or every man be blind.” Maybe this involves standing up for someone else who holds a controversial view without stating it as your own or suggesting that an issue can be seen in more than one way. Perhaps you can own your view over a period of time rather than dramatically, all at once—like soaking and gently working at a Band-Aid, rather than ripping it right off. Above all, remember the admonition of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, to speak “the truth in love,” not with hate.

Perhaps after reading all this, you are wondering whether saying what you really think is worth the trouble. That is something you must decide for yourself. Moral courage does not come without risks, and the path of least resistance in our world may be to just swallow your views—or change them to agree with the masses.

But you may feel that conformity comes at a price too. Consider Polonius’s famous words of advice to Laertes in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “This above all: to thine own self be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” That describes a peace you can gain only through personal integrity, a peace that requires honesty with yourself and others. It is not the easy path. But that’s the point.

Originally published September 19, 2024.

PART FOUR ON BALANCING WORK, LIFE, AND RELATIONSHIPS

21 Jung’s Five Pillars of a Good Life

In the world of popular psychology, the work of one giant figure is hard to avoid: Carl Jung, the onetime associate of Sigmund Freud who died more than 60 years ago. If you think you have a complex about something, the Swiss psychiatrist invented that term. Are you an extrovert or an introvert? Those are his coinages, too. Persona, archetype, synchronicity: Jung, Jung, Jung.

When it comes to happiness, though, Jung can seem a bit of a downer. “ ‘Happiness,’ ” he wrote, “is such a remarkable reality that there is nobody who does not long for it.” So far, so good. But he does not leave it there: “And yet there is not a single objective criterion which would prove beyond all doubt that this condition necessarily exists.”

Clearly, this observation should not discourage any serious student of happiness. On the contrary, Jung is stating the manifest truth that we cannot lay hold of any blissful end state of pure happiness, because every human life is bound to involve negative emotions, which in fact arose to alert us to threats and keep us safe. Rather, the objective should be progress—or, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, my co-author on our book, Build the Life You Want, “happierness.”

If Jung was a happiness skeptic in some sense, however, he was by no means a denialist. In 1960, as he neared the end of his long life, Jung shared his own strategy for realizing that goal of progress. Refined with the aid of modern social science, Jung’s precepts might be just what you’re looking for in your life.

Jung believed that making progress toward happiness was built on five pillars.

1. Good physical and mental health

Jung believed that getting happier required soundness of mind and body. His thesis is supported by plenty of research. For example, the longest-running study of happiness—the Harvard Study of Adult Development—has shown that four of the biggest predictors of a senior citizen’s well-being are drinking alcohol moderately if at all, maintaining a healthy body weight, exercising, and not smoking excessively. Even more important for well-being is good mental health. Indeed, one study from 2013 showed that poor mental health among Britons, Germans, and Australians predicted nearly two to roughly six times as much misery as poor physical health did.¹

This raises what might seem like a nitpick with Jung’s contention: Good health practices seem not to raise happiness, but rather to lower unhappiness. Today, many emotion researchers have uncovered evidence of a phenomenon that Jung did not conceive of: Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each. Furthermore, researchers have identified how activities such as physical exercise can interrupt the cycle of negative emotion during moments of heightened stress, by helping moderate cortisol-hormone levels. I have found in my own work that this helps explain why people with naturally low levels of negative emotion tend to struggle with staying on a regular exercise regimen: They may feel less benefit to their well-being from going to the gym than people naturally higher in negative feelings do.

2. Good personal and intimate relations, such as those of marriage, family, and friendships

The intertwined notions that close relationships are at the heart of well-being and that cultivating them will reliably increase happiness are unambiguously true. Indeed, of the four best life investments for increasing personal satisfaction, two involve family and friendships (the others are in faith or philosophy, and meaningful work; more on these in a moment). And as for marriage, an institution that has taken a beating over recent decades, more and more evidence is piling up from scholars that being wed makes the majority of people happier than they otherwise would be, as the University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox has argued. This research seemed so conclusive to Wilcox that he titled his recent book, simply, Get Married. Jung himself was married to his wife, Emma, for 52 years, until her death at the age of 73.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development comes to one conclusion more definitively than any other. In the words of my Harvard colleague Robert Waldinger, who has directed the project for nearly two decades, and his co-author, Marc Schulz, “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.” Waldinger’s predecessor running the study, George Vaillant, was just as unequivocal about the evidence: “Happiness is love. Full stop.”

3. Seeing beauty in art and in nature

Jung believed that happiness required one to cultivate an appreciation for beautiful things and experiences. Although this might sound intuitively obvious, the actuality is more complicated.

Long before I focused my scholarly life on happiness, I was dedicated to art and beauty. My earliest memories are of painting with my artist mother; I learned to read music before written language; I made my living as a classical musician from ages 19 to 31. News flash: Artists are generally not the world’s most blissfully satisfied people. In a 1992 study from Britain, researchers found that performing artists reported depression at higher rates than the control group. At some point, I will write a book not on the art of happiness but on the very troublesome happiness of art.²

Among nonartists, however, the issue is somewhat simpler and in line with Jung’s thinking. First, a big difference exists between beauty in nature and beauty in art. Specifically, engagement with nature’s beauty is known, across different cultures, to enhance well-being. Second, with aesthetic experience, happiness depends on the artistic mood. For example, experiments have shown that if you listen to happy music on your own, it makes you feel happier; if you listen to sad music while alone, it makes you feel sadder.³

4. A reasonable standard of living and satisfactory work

As with physical and mental health, employment and income seem tied more to eliminating unhappiness than to raising happiness. For one thing, scholars have long shown that unemployment is a reliable source of misery: Depressive symptoms typically rise when people, both men and women, are unemployed. This cannot be explained simply by the lack of material and social resources that typically accompanies joblessness; rather, work itself helps protect mental health.

But if we can upgrade “satisfactory work” in Jung’s list to “meaningful work,” then positive gains in happiness do come into play. The two elements that make work meaningful for most people are earned success (a sense of accomplishing something valuable) and service to others. These can be achieved in almost any job.

The relationship between money and happiness is a hotly contested topic; older studies show that well-being tops out at relatively low income levels, but more recent studies show that such contentment continues to rise for much higher incomes (see chapter 12, “How to Buy Happiness”). My own assessment of the evidence is that money alone cannot buy happiness, nor can spending money to acquire possessions make one happy; but having the money to pay for experiences with loved ones, to free up time to spend on meaningful activities, and to support good causes does enhance happiness.

5. A philosophical or religious outlook that fosters resilience

Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective. The son of a pastor, Jung was deeply Christian in his worldview, as his own words published many years ago in The Atlantic make clear: “For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man.”⁴ He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one—“I do not imagine that in my reflections,” he wrote, “I have uttered a final truth”—and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have some sense of transcendent belief or higher purpose.

Research clearly backs up Jung’s contention. Religious belief has been noted as strongly predictive of finding meaning in life, and spirituality is positively correlated with better mental health; both faith and spiritual practice seem protective against depression. Secular philosophies can provide this benefit as well. Recent papers on stoicism, for example, have demonstrated that this ancient way of thinking and acting can yield well-being benefits.⁵ Many books have been written on the subject, including the psychotherapist Donald Robertson’s Stoicism and the Art of Happiness.

Taken together, Jung’s ideas about happiness and his five pillars of well-being stand up solidly to modern research findings. I propose this practical seven-point summary:

Do not fall prey to seeking pure happiness. Instead, seek lifelong progress toward happierness.

Manage as best you can the main sources of misery in your life by attending to your physical and mental health, maintaining employment, and ensuring an adequate income.

If you’re earning enough to take care of your principal needs, remember that happiness at work comes not from chasing higher income but from pursuing a sense of accomplishment and service to others.

Cultivate deep relationships through marriage, family, and real friendships. Remember that happiness is love.

If you have discretionary income left over, use it to invest in your relationships with family and friends.

Spend time in nature, surround yourself with beauty that uplifts you, and consume the art and music that nourish your spirit.

Find a path of transcendence—one that explains the big picture in life and helps you comprehend suffering and the purpose of your existence.

Beyond the scientific research that supports this strategy, we also have the evidence of its effectiveness in the example of Jung’s life. He made his list to mark his 85th birthday, which was to be the last one he celebrated. By all accounts, he made progress toward happiness over his life, had a long and devoted marriage, died surrounded by the people he loved, and was satisfied that he had used his abilities in a meaningful way that served others. In this world, that sounds pretty good to me.

Originally published April 11, 2024.

22 How to Influence People—and Make Friends

Tertullian, a second-century North African theologian, is often called the “father of Latin Christianity.” A prolific author, he was the writer credited with first using the Latin term trinity for the belief in the oneness of God, Jesus, and the holy spirit. He also chronicled the everyday lives of ordinary Christians in the Roman empire, critically commenting on how their powerful pagan overlords regarded them:

It is mainly the deeds of a love so noble that lead many [Romans] to put a brand upon us [Christians]. See, they say, how they love one another, for [they] themselves are animated by mutual hatred; and how they are ready even to die for one another, for they themselves will sooner put [others] to death.

Tertullian’s fellow Christians didn’t just love one another, of course. They followed the teachings of Jesus, who had enjoined them to love their enemies as well.

This love was seen as stupid and weak by many Romans at the time, but it eventually won out: The once-fledgling faith gradually drew converts from all over the empire and in the end became the official religion of Rome. If those early Christians had been violent and hate-filled, the faith would probably have come and gone like any number of cults over the centuries.

No matter what your religious views, if you want to persuade others to consider a better way through the strong disagreements of these tumultuous times, you can take a valuable lesson from these early Christians. Amid a contentious election, unrest on campuses and in cities, and a world full of conflict, you may find that if left to your instincts, lashing out is all too easy.

If you succumb to rage, you are likely to end up wielding your most sincerely held values as a weapon. Doing so will influence no one who doesn’t already agree with you. Worse, it will provoke equal-but-opposite angry dogmatism. If, however, you fight such reflexive inclinations and learn instead to offer your values as a gift, others might actually change their mind and follow your lead.

Humans have a need to share their beliefs and values with other people. When you feel strongly about something, positively or negatively, it’s hard not to talk about it; opinions feel as though they were made for sharing. This has a solid logic: Sharing emotions and opinions can lead to imitation, which can in turn create coalitions and reinforce relationships. When you share a feeling about something and someone agrees in both their behavior and expression, social psychologists have found, you may become more emotionally attuned to one another and have more positive social interactions.¹

The emotions and opinions we share with others to build a relationship are as likely to be negative or critical as not. Think of a conversation you had with a work colleague when you complained about your idiot boss—how your colleague sympathetically adopted your attitude of bitter disdain and how that exchange reinforced the bond between you. Researchers have shown that gossip is a common way to promote trust among members of an in-group, even if it involves reckless calumnies about others.²

Positive emotions, though, may be better at eliciting mimicry than negative emotions. In one 2007 experiment, people were shown videos of people laughing, yawning, frowning, or maintaining a neutral expression. They found that viewers were 83 percent more likely to emulate laughter than frowning (and they were even more likely to mimic yawns).³ Similarly, in 2015, psychologists writing in the journal Emotion found that people tend to imitate the behavioral mannerisms of people who intentionally helped them.⁴

Besides creating a bond, another reason you might want to induce someone to model themselves on your feelings is to get them to modify their views. To achieve that result, you can usually choose whether to frame your views positively or negatively. So you might tell someone either that you’re voting for a particular presidential candidate because you believe this person will make the country stronger and fairer and you want that better future, or that the other candidate will ruin democracy forever and anyone who disagrees is a fool.

The angle you choose is important, and that choice will depend on your goal and your interlocutor’s disposition. If the intended audience—say, your carefully curated silo of social-media followers—already agrees with you, then your negativity can raise the intensity of their views. In particular, as the psychologist Ronald W. Rogers demonstrated in the 1970s with his influential “protection motivation theory,” people can be very effectively influenced when an appeal focuses on the noxiousness of a threat, the probability that it will occur, and the potential efficacy of a response. For example, you might try to fire people up by saying, “If we don’t all work for Candidate X, this will probably be the last democratic election in U.S. history,” or, “If we don’t turn out to vote for Candidate Y, immigrants will bring crime to our town and take our jobs.”

Of course, this kind of negative framing won’t work for someone who isn’t already inclined to think the way you do. If I don’t think the opposing candidate actually is a threat to democracy, I will simply judge your statement to be hyperbolic and biased—and you won’t get me to mimic you at all.

To an even greater degree, if I disagree with you and your views contain hatred and anger toward opponents, what you say will harden my values against yours. This is the so-called boomerang effect, demonstrated in the 1960s by two psychologists who showed that when people are insulted over the opinions they hold, they are much more likely to dig into their position against that of the insulter.⁵

The boomerang effect can be hard to observe when we’re dealing with a complex social interaction involving such abstractions as opinions and feelings. To give a more concrete instance: Imagine I came to your house with a beautiful bunch of flowers to share with you, but when you opened the door, I hit you with the bouquet. Obviously, the gesture would hardly make me a persuasive person or recommend my views to you; all you’d want is to get me off your porch. This is essentially what happens when you use your values as a weapon, not as a gift.

If you suspect you’ve been inflicting your views and feelings on others as though you were walloping them with what you wanted to share, that imaginary scenario may be worth reflecting on. On a larger scale, this kind of behavior may be why every debate in America today seems to go straight to DEFCON 1, a level of alarm and vigilance on the brink of outright war. So, if you want to be more persuasive, consider a few new ways to understand and manage your own feelings and share them more positively—in other words, turn them back into a gift, rather than wielding them as a weapon.

1. Focus on what we agree on

Agreement in beliefs can be quite hard to come by when all that you and those around you have been focusing on is your disagreements. But this can be done. Consider the words of President Barack Obama. After his hard-fought reelection victory in 2012, a campaign that was at times bitter and vituperative, he could have reinforced the ideological differences he had with Republicans and said that their views were inferior, dangerous, and rejected by all right-thinking people. But that would have simply boomeranged the losing side in that election even more into greater bitterness.

Instead, Obama focused on unity, on “the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth … love and charity and duty and patriotism. That’s what makes America great.” Even more impressive, perhaps, in their magnanimity were the words of concession from Mitt Romney, the defeated candidate. After congratulating Obama on his victory, Romney exhorted the country to unite behind the president. “We look to Democrats and Republicans in government at all levels to put the people before the politics,” he said. “I believe in the people of America.”

2. Stop talking

The easiest way to turn your values from a weapon to a gift is to close your mouth and listen when someone disagrees with you. This was the fundamental conclusion from two scholars in 2016 writing in the journal Science. The scholars were seeking to understand how people might change their views on sensitive topics, such as minority rights. What they found was that it did not involve forceful arguments, righteous anger, or overwhelming data.⁶ In fact, people were most likely to shift their sympathies when they were prompted toward “perspective taking”: Canvassers asked respondents to talk about a time when they felt judged negatively for being different, and then, after listening to the respondents’ answers carefully, the canvassers encouraged them to apply that experience to how they might think about other people considered different. True listening is a gift—and people find it very persuasive.

3. Refuse to be used

I have my own version of the old saying “If you’re playing poker and don’t know who the sucker is, it’s you.” Here’s mine: “When you hate for ideological reasons, someone is profiting—and it isn’t you.” In today’s controversies, many people are eager to conscript you into a culture war in order to gin up political support, increase their power, build television viewership, gain greater social-media following, or boost their ego. This year, declare your independence from the Outrage Industrial Complex in politics, in media, and on campus by offering your views as a source of hope and love.

If weaponized values are not effective in persuading others, why do we persist in using them this way? The answer is simple: It feels satisfying, like scratching an itch. But the ultimate effect is more like scratching a poison-ivy exposure: It’s devilishly hard to resist and momentarily feels wonderful, but the result gets worse and worse as the itch turns into a festering wound.

We can realize far greater happiness in the long run when we resist that immediate urge. In the Apologeticus, Tertullian makes this point when he speaks of “the joy of the people in our trouble.” Such a cheerful display of love and acceptance in the face of persecution seemed “utterly reasonless” to non-Christians, but Tertullian’s fellow believers were making a gift of their faith in a way that eventually overcame the hostility.

Similarly, if you decide to share your values as a loving gift and turn your back on hate, you will probably, at first, hear harsh words from some former allies that your new outlook is reasonless. Smile, listen, and answer them with kindness and more listening.

Originally published on August 29, 2024.

23 Why You Should Stop Worrying About Your Parenting

When one of my now-adult kids was in middle school, I had a small epiphany about parenting. I had been haranguing him constantly about his homework and grades, which were indeed a problem. One night, after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation, and came to a realization: I didn’t actually care very much about his grades. What I wanted was for him to grow up to become a responsible, ethical, faithful, well-adjusted man. From that day forward, I stopped talking about his grades and started talking about values. It was a relief for both of us.

But then I got to wondering: If bugging him about grades didn’t change anything, why would talking about values make a difference? Did it really matter what I said about anything?

If you have children—or plan to have them—you probably share my concerns. According to a survey last year by the Pew Research Center, the No. 1 desire of parents for their children (which 94 percent of those surveyed say is extremely or very important) is that their kids turn out to be honest and ethical. Meanwhile, the No. 1 worry (which 76 percent of parents said was extremely-to-somewhat worrisome) is that their kids might struggle with depression or anxiety. In short, we want them above all to be good and happy people.

But just wanting these things isn’t enough. How do we achieve these goals? This question is at least as ancient as human civilization. Should we talk about these things with our children a lot, or not? Be strict with them, or lax? Or perhaps everything is genetics anyway, so maybe we should just hope and pray for the best. Fortunately, recent research has offered ways to help answer some of these difficult questions—and make us better parents.

A foundational question about raising children revolves around nature versus nurture: how much of a child’s development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing. When I was a child, nurture theories had the upper hand. The common belief was that kids are a blank slate, or are nearly so, and that parenting is what really matters to mold who they will become as adults. Latterly, however, this view has been turned upside down, after study upon study has shown that a huge amount of personality is biological and inherited. For example, one 1996 study involving 123 pairs of identical twins (who share 100 percent of their genes) and 127 pairs of fraternal twins (who, like any other pair of siblings, share about 50 percent) estimated that 41 percent of neuroticism may be inherited, as well as 53 percent of extroversion, 61 percent of openness to experience, 41 percent of agreeableness, and 44 percent of conscientiousness.¹

You might be thinking that parenting may make up the other half or so, but that’s not seemingly the case. Researchers in 2021 examined over time the correlation between the personality traits of progeny and parenting measures, and found that, in most aspects, parenting mattered about as much as birth order—which is to say, its effect was little to none.²

The exceptions were in two dimensions of personality: conscientiousness and agreeableness. Children were more conscientious when parents were more involved in their lives and worked to provide cultural stimulation (such as taking them to museums); and children were more agreeable when their parents raised them with more structure and goals.

Genetics also matter a great deal for children’s happiness. One study of fraternal and identical twins found that the genetic component discernible from analyzing the subjects’ various self-reported ratings of personality traits and life satisfaction was about 31 percent.³ In contrast with the possibly limited influence of parenting style on most personality traits, however, parental behavior does appear to significantly affect the roughly half of children’s happiness that may not be genetically determined. Specifically, one factor—parental warmth and affection, with slightly more weight to that of fathers—has been shown to make up about a third of “psychological adjustment” differences in their children, a holistic measure that includes markers of happiness.⁴

Parenting involves both words and actions. Even if parents like to say to their children, usually with little effect, “Do what I say,” most parents come to notice that kids pay attention to everything their parents do, rather than what they say. And research backs up the idea that actions speak louder than words. For example, a 2001 study of parental religiosity among Catholics found that the behavior of a father (even more than the mother) who acts upon faith and is practicing will most affect the likelihood of his children growing up to be religious as well.⁵ Similarly, an investigation of substance use among adolescents discovered that among those who had tried alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs, 80 percent said their parents would say they disapproved of their teenager’s behavior, but 100 percent did not say explicitly that their parents abstained from substances—suggesting that these children likely had at least one parent who used them to a lesser or greater extent.⁶

This tour through the research provides a set of parenting rules to act upon—one that I could very much have used when my kids were little. Better late than never, and I can still try to follow these rules now that I am a grandfather. Try them out and see if they make parenting easier and better for you. If your goal is virtue and happiness for your kids, keep these three things in mind.

1. Even a hot mess can be a good parent

It is easy to despair at being a parent—or to give yourself a pass—if you struggle with your own happiness or with a troublesome personality. I have heard many young adults say they’re afraid to have kids because they don’t want to pass on their own problems. True, much of your personality is transmitted to your offspring without your volition. As noted above, you may not be able to do much about their degree of extroversion, which seems largely a genetic given. But when it comes to conscientiousness and agreeableness (which, again, are what we really want for our children), parenting choices to be involved in their lives and provide structure and goals, make a significant difference. And parenting does have a huge impact on their happiness.

2. When you don’t know what to do, be warm and loving

For happiness, the parenting technique that truly matters is warmth and affection. As my wife used to say when we were at wit’s end with our son, “I guess we should just love him.” This might sound like a hippie recipe for disaster, but it isn’t. Your kids don’t need a drill sergeant, Santa Claus, or a helicopter mom; they need someone who loves them unconditionally, and shows it even when the brats deserve it the least. Especially when they’re at their most brattish. Remember: That is what they will remember and give to your grandchildren (who will never be brats) when they themselves become parents.

3. Be the person you want your kids to become

The data doesn’t lie, but as parents we do. Kids—who are walking BS-detectors—always notice when we say one thing and do another. Of course, deciding how to act to create the right example for them to follow isn’t always easy. A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself how you’d like your son or daughter to behave as an adult in a given situation—and then do that yourself. When you’re driving and get cut off in traffic, you would like it not to bother them—so don’t let them see it bothering you. You would prefer they don’t get drunk, so don’t drink too much yourself. You’d like them to be generous to others, so be generous too.

For young and future parents reading this, one last note: You will make a lot of mistakes, but mostly they won’t matter. I can think of my selfishness and blunders as a father, and on some sleepless nights the instances roll around in my head and fill me with regret. But then I look at my son. So how did all my hectoring about grades and values work out?

He skipped college and joined the U.S. Marine Corps, in which he spent four years as a mortarman and sniper. Now 23, he is happily married and works in a job he loves as a manager at a construction company. He won’t see this column because, well, he doesn’t have time to read my stuff. But he loves me and I love him; we talk every single day; and despite all of my missteps, he turned out just fine. And most likely, so will your child.

Originally published April 4, 2024.

24 How to Know Your Frenemy

There are many different kinds of friends. Aristotle distinguished among friendships based on utility, pleasure, and virtue. Michel de Montaigne wrote about true friendship, which “grows up, is nourished and improved by enjoyment, as being of itself spiritual, and the soul growing still more refined by its practice.” I have written about the difference between real friends and deal friends.

And then there is the frenemy. This portmanteau of friend and enemy first appeared as long ago as the late 19th century. It signifies a discordant relationship in which someone appears to be your friend or has a superficially friendly demeanor toward you but behaves in ways that real friends wouldn’t and shouldn’t. Perhaps the frenemy undermines you, manipulates your feelings, gaslights you, or says mean things about you behind your back.

Identifying frenemies isn’t always easy, because the behavior can be designed to go undetected, or perhaps to be so subtle that you wonder if you’re being paranoid. Or sometimes you just don’t want to face the truth: This person actually does not wish you well. But looking for the telltale signs of a frenemy and taking action to distance yourself from the person are very worthwhile for your own health and happiness.

Frenemies comprise a broad category, because outwardly friendly people can find a lot of ways to do unfriendly things to you. Even so, three basic frenemy types, which can occur together or in isolation, emerge from the research.

1. The competitive frenemy

In 2022, a group of scholars identified three common characteristics of the frenemy relationship: competitiveness (in which the relationship is marked by rivalry, at work or in personal lives), jealousy (due to envy of social connections, material possessions, or some other advantage), and distrust (because animus prevents honesty).¹ This dynamic might occur between you and a co-worker with whom you seem to be on amiable terms but who, say, is willing to take credit for your work. Or they might be someone who would very much like to supplant you with your romantic partner. You may be on good terms at one level, but your spider-sense tells you to stay vigilant because betrayal feels like a possibility.

2. The two-faced frenemy

And betrayal is not just a possibility with the frenemy; it is a real threat. This person is supportive and friendly to your face but is all too ready to trash-talk you behind your back. Scholars in 2019 identified this kind of frenemy in research on bullying behavior. They interviewed adults who had been bullied and found that they typically spoke of a supposed friend who, in the researchers’ words, was “pro-victim when alone with the victim” but turned “neutral or pro-aggressor when surrounded by members of the bullying circle.”² This might be a co-worker who listens with earnest sympathy when you talk about your problems with your boss and later tells the boss what you said and yuks it up with her about what an incompetent loser you are.

3. The manipulative frenemy

Adult bullies in the workplace and similar contexts tend to use relational aggression, such as social exclusion, gossip, and rumors. These tactics create actual enemies. Frenemies are generally subtler, relying on less overtly aggressive means to get what they want from another person. One typical strategy is emotional manipulation, which researchers studying same-sex female friendships have found is particularly prevalent when one partner believes in its effectiveness.³ The two most common are called “worsening strategies” (undermining confidence, either through direct criticism or by sharing negative feedback from others) and “inauthentic strategies” (sulking or going silent to get one’s way). These qualities characterize Machiavellianism, a personality pathology characterized by low empathy and high cynicism. In surveys, these manipulative frenemies—the ones who score high in Machiavellianism—tend to agree with such statements as The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear.

All three types of frenemy sound pretty awful. Still, people tend to put up with known frenemies for a long time without taking action. This seems like paradoxical behavior: If someone undermines you, betrays you, and manipulates you, why on earth would you maintain any relationship with them? In one recent scholarly article, three authors investigated this question, asking people why they maintain “frenemyships” instead of keeping their distance, as one would with an actual foe. They proposed at least three primary reasons: saving face by avoiding a conflict, maintaining a social network, and because the relationship is useful.⁴ In other words, breaking away from a frenemy might seem too costly or inconvenient.

Still, you should avoid frenemies whenever you can, because, as researchers have argued, their ambivalent effect on you may net out as more negative than positive owing to forces such as cardiovascular stress, blood pressure, depressed mood, and interpersonal conflict.⁵ Frenemies are worse for you even than out-and-out foes, according to psychologists writing in the journal Health Psychology. The researchers tested the physiological effects of dealing with people with whom we have an ambivalent relationship—in which, for example, we don’t really like or trust the other person but are outwardly friendly nonetheless. They showed that blood pressure tends to rise more in such interactions than in encounters both with real friends and with actual enemies.

If you’re now questioning a few of your ambivalent relationships, you might be wondering how to test for whether someone actually fits the frenemy description. To answer this, we need first to establish what a true friend is. Researchers at McGill University broke the role of friendship into six basic dimensions.⁶ In 2007, researchers in the Journal of Happiness Studies used this test to verify the positive impact of real friends on our happiness:⁷

Companionship: Real friends do things together that they enjoy, and they like being together.

Help: Real friends offer assistance and aid that truly benefits the other.

Intimacy: Real friends can honestly confide in each other and share private information without fear of betrayal.

Reliable alliance: Real friends can count on each other to be there for them, no matter what.

Self-validation: Real friends support and encourage each other, genuinely hoping for the other’s happiness and success.

Emotional security: Real friends comfort and reassure each other through difficult times.

Based on this rubric, I offer my own quiz. You can take it online at arthurbrooks.com/know-your-frenemy or adapt from below to evaluate a relationship you might suspect of involving a frenemy. On the scale, a 1 means “very slightly or not at all” true, and a 5 means “extremely” true, to give a total of between 5 and 25.

When I do things for fun with this person, I tend to feel uncomfortable or ill at ease, because I can’t relax with them.

When this person helps me, I often feel that the advice or help is not genuine or in my best interest.

I wouldn’t trust this person to keep my secrets.

This person may not be there for me when I need them.

This person doesn’t consistently support or encourage me, so I suspect that they don’t truly want me to be happy or successful.

Although my test has not been validated in peer-reviewed research, I find it a handy way to assess relationships. When, after careful consideration, someone scores above about 20 for me, I judge that this must surely be a frenemy and let the relationship fade away. All of my longtime, true friends are at 10 or less. When someone comes in between these scores, I am watchful and wary. With a little thought and practice, you can figure out what the scores mean for you.

The premise of this article is that you will know people who are frenemies to you, whom you should avoid when possible. But one more important question—a slightly uncomfortable one—remains. If you feel ambivalence toward someone, is that possibly because for them you represent a frenemy?

Ask yourself how some people in your life might assess you on the quiz, and why your score for them might be higher than it could be. Perhaps you have fallen into unhealthy patterns in a friendship; perhaps you bear some grudge or harbor resentments that are secretly poisoning your relationship with this person. You could even be mutual frenemies.

This year, beyond shedding the frenemies you can clearly identify, you might also resolve to be a better friend to others—and a real source of companionship, help, intimacy, alliance, validation, and security. If you want scholarly evidence, good research shows that this will raise your well-being.⁸ But you probably don’t need that to know that loving others is a unique source of joy.

Originally published January 18, 2024.

25 Don’t Be Deceived by First Impressions

Every spring around graduation, I dispense a lot of advice to my graduate students, most of whom are on the job market. I get questions such as “How do I find a job that perfectly matches my strengths?” (A: You won’t, so stop worrying about it.) Or “Should I take a job and live in a different city than my spouse?” (A: No.) And very typically, “How do I make a good impression in an interview?” (A: Read on.)

I find that some young people are extremely anxious about this last one, especially if they are naturally introverted and know it. They worry that their shyness makes them seem standoffish or uninterested; in an interview, of course, those traits can be deadly, so they are concerned that their introverted personality will hamstring their efforts.

Undeniably, first impressions are extremely powerful—in work, romance, friendship, and almost every other part of life. People make judgments based on information they process in a split second, below the level of consciousness. That does not mean, however, that anyone is doomed by a naturally serious demeanor, a taciturn disposition, or plain old nervousness. On the contrary, a little understanding of the science of first impressions can help anyone improve the ways they affect the brains of people they meet, and better understand others as well.

Over millions of years, our biological ancestors evolved the ability to form first impressions in a fraction of a second. Neuroscientists have determined that people can by sight decide consistently in as little as 39 milliseconds whether someone is a threat or not.¹ In other words, about three times faster than you can blink, your optical and limbic systems decide if another person might cause you harm. For humans to develop this ability through natural selection is logical; almost nothing rewards survival more than effective threat perception.

Close behind in speed, at 100 milliseconds, comes a consistent estimation of trustworthiness.² Once again, this makes sense: You might not kill me outright, but I should still figure out if you’re trying to take advantage of me before I interact with you. (This rapid processing also involves, for example, how your brain decides whether to make direct eye contact with that person staring at you on the subway.) This aspect of threat perception reveals a significant difference between the sexes; when surveying a face that people generally judge to look trustworthy, women rate other women, in particular, as significantly more trustworthy than men do.³

Honing our accuracy of perception for other traits such as competence, likability, aggressiveness, and attractiveness takes us longer, because we need more time to be confident in our judgments; quite commonly, our rapid initial judgments may be inconsistent with what we later decide. But when given enough time to consider observed behavior, some judgments, such as assessing a person’s competence, tend to update more slowly—especially when compared with how long we need in order to judge such traits as benevolence and integrity.

In sum, at an initial encounter between two people—which could be a job interview or a date—each person’s brain assesses the other person by answering at least three questions: Are you a threat? Can you be trusted? Are you competent? Within seconds, before either of you is even conscious of the fact, you might be ruled out as an employee or as a potential mate. No pressure!

You might be thinking that judgments made this quickly are open to a lot of error. After all, evolution should favor speed over accuracy and tends to reward a negative snap judgment because it errs on the side of caution. The potential cost of incorrectly seeing someone as a threat is low, but the price of mistaking them as not a threat could be enormous.

Given this bias, it’s no surprise that first perceptions tend to be inaccurate. Researchers in 2010 asked participants in an experiment to view photos of strangers and, based on initial impressions, to judge aspects of their personality. The researchers found that their subjects claimed confidence in their judgments 70 to 80 percent of the time, but their actual accuracy was either modest or statistically nonexistent.⁴

People may arrive at erroneous judgments about you for many different reasons. For example, if you’re nervous when first meeting, your facial expression and demeanor might not fairly represent your true character, intent, and competence. Tension might make you frown when you’re actually excited, or you might fumble your words when talking about a topic you know cold. This can elicit what is known as a fundamental attribution error, which occurs when an interlocutor attributes to your personality behavior that is conditioned more by the circumstances.

So much for how first impressions are formed, but what about how to control the impression you make? To come off well in an interview, the first objective is to project an expression and manner that is nonthreatening, trustworthy, and competent. Fortunately, a handy way to do just this is simply to look happy. Neuroscientists have shown that facial expressions interpreted as fear or anger will stimulate an observer’s amygdala, which arouses their alarm and suspicion.⁵ Scholars have likewise demonstrated in experiments that people with expressions seen as happy are judged to be more trustworthy and competent than those seen as disgusted.⁶

So smile. By this advice, I do not mean that you should grin like Jack Nicholson in The Shining—that will light up your interviewer’s amygdala like a Christmas tree. The goal is to model what researchers call the Duchenne smile, which is associated with actual happiness. Not only does smiling like this denote a positive mood to others, but it also, scholars have shown, can reduce stress in you.⁷

If this demeanor doesn’t come naturally, here’s a trick: Before your interview, spend a few seconds in the restroom with a pencil gripped horizontally between your molars. This will flex the muscles around your eyes, where happiness is actually perceived when you smile (rather than by the shape of your mouth).

This is not a global solution to a successful first impression, however. Research shows that although a relaxed smile is great for interviewing, it does not necessarily work for dating. Scholars writing in the journal Emotion in 2011 found that although straight men judge a happy expression as the most sexually attractive way for a woman to look, women say that it is one of the least attractive looks for a man. At a first meeting, then, men need to be sure whether they’re after a job or on a date.⁸

There’s one more piece of advice I like to give my students. They may be interviewing for a job now, but before too long, they will be interviewing other people for a job. I recommend that they not trust their gut too much. Instead, I advise them to recall that first impressions evolved to be fast, not accurate. That’s great in an environment where strangers might pose a threat of violence or exploitation. But in a modern job interview, that inaccuracy simply means you’re likely to rule out a lot of great potential recruits.

In general, when first meeting someone, interrogate the signals you’re getting from your brain about the interviewee. You can still pay attention to what your gut says; you just don’t have to take it at its word. If something feels off, specifically ask yourself whether this person might be nervous or shy. Giving that extra consideration is the right thing to do—and you might discover a star whose reserved manner made others overlook their talent.

Originally published May 9, 2024.

26 What to Do If the Course of True Love Is Not Running Smoothly

Teaching at a business school, I meet a lot of 20-something aspiring entrepreneurs. They are well trained, smart, ambitious, and energetic. They generally have a good idea and know people who want to help them. But one particular quality distinguishes the ones whom I’m most bullish about: They fully hope, and intend, to succeed, but they understand the significant likelihood of failure and face it in a healthy way. They know that their Big Idea is just the first one; if necessary, they will come up with more ideas, which will be better than the first. These are the entrepreneurs to watch—not their specific start-ups.

This attitude toward failure is the same one that can lead to success in the greatest entrepreneurial venture anyone has in life: romantic love. I have written previously that the most successful relationships closely resemble mature start-ups (as opposed to mergers), in that their success depends on not waiting too long to get committed. But romance also mirrors business creation both in the likelihood of early failure and in the learning benefits that failure delivers, which can improve the chances of a subsequent happy relationship.

If you are suffering from heartbreak, you might be able to take comfort in this idea: Even a failed romance—and the sadness it brings—can help you make this sort of entrepreneurial progress toward true happiness in love.

The idea that failure is part of spectacular success is not new. A classic example, from baseball, is the legendary slugger Babe Ruth—who was not just the home-run king but the strikeout king as well. The same year he hit 60 homers, 1927, he was also fanned 89 times; over his career, he had more strikeouts than anyone else in pro baseball at that time. In sports, business, and life, big hits require big swings, which also means plenty of big misses.

In business, failure is even more common than in baseball: More than three in four tech start-ups are calculated never to turn a profit for investors, and some estimates suggest failure rates above 90 percent. A common rule of thumb we often use in business schools is that it takes the average entrepreneur four tries before the odds of success get better than even. However, the likelihood of failure in business is not constant across attempts if entrepreneurs prove able to learn from their mistakes. This has been called a failure-learning orientation, which results in improved performance with successive business attempts. This learning comes in many areas: discovering how to pick partners, understanding the behavior of markets, developing skill in looking for investors.

The essence of business entrepreneurship is taking significant risks to create something wonderful that has potentially explosive rewards. Which, when you think about it, sounds a lot like falling in love. A great deal of personal risk is involved in giving someone your heart. You can be rejected at the outset; even if you aren’t, the relationship is more likely than not to fail—after all, according to one source, on average a person has about five relationships before marrying.¹

The risk is not trivial. Romantic failures can be incredibly painful, affecting us at a profound level. This pain is especially sharp if your beloved breaks up with you—a common example of social rejection and exclusion. The feeling of exclusion involves the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a brain region implicated in the experience of both physical and emotional pain. The reason you risk intense misery is twofold: The short-term rewards can be exquisite—that heady feeling of being in love—and when the relationship is permanent, it can be one of the biggest sources of happiness in your life.

As with failed business start-ups, painful breakups are important for learning if you take the opportunity. Indeed, one 2018 study involving 160 daters in their early 20s showed that among those who broke up around age 22 and felt they understood the reasons for the breakup, subsequent relationship satisfaction (from ages 23 to 25) was higher and relationship conflict was lower.² Those who didn’t understand their breakup at that age—and thus didn’t learn—did not realize as large a benefit in the next relationship.

The potential learning from failed relationships generally falls into three areas, according to researchers: social cognitive maturity (the ability to balance your needs with your partner’s), romantic agency (coping with the negative emotions that come with a romance), and coherence (understanding that romantic involvement has both positive and negative aspects).³ Common skills that people who have broken up learn are how to balance their relationships with friends and the relationship they have with their partner, how to trust with caution, and the importance of being a friend, as well as a lover, to their partner.

Altogether, the research tends to confirm what most of us probably know intuitively: You typically enter early relationships with a lot of unrealistic attitudes and expectations, and so make mistakes that lead to breakups, which can be painful and ugly. But if you carefully take stock and learn from those errors, love will get easier and better and create the potential for each subsequent relationship to be more successful than the previous—with the proviso that I’m not recommending you constantly quit one romance in favor of another. As I’ve discussed previously, in matters of the heart, lasting friendship trumps fleeting passion. Here are three rules to keep in mind.

1. Don’t get stuck in the doom loop

Not everyone learns from relationship failures—or any kind of failure, for that matter. Researchers have demonstrated that most people are very good at reframing or denying failures because they are ego-threatening.⁴ The easiest thing to do after a nasty split is to try to forget that your ex ever existed. But this is a big mistake because it wastes the information that would improve the odds of greater relationship success later. You have probably met people who appear to be in a doom loop of love, in which they make the same mistakes over and over again, choosing the wrong partner or sabotaging their relationship. That is a sign that they’re not learning from their failures.

2. Study your last breakup like a scientist

This takes emotional energy to get started, but once they start to analyze their romantic failures through a forensic lens, many people tell me that what was a painful experience becomes less emotionally freighted and more clinically useful. Write down the errors you may have made, according to the three categories of learning listed above. Did you smother your beloved? Were you unable to cope with jealousy? Did you fail to see warning signs that the other person was a bad match for you? After you have done this, make some resolutions that will help you avoid similar mistakes when you meet your next partner. Not only will this wire in the learning; it will also probably make you emotionally easier to understand—which, scholars have shown, can make you more attractive.⁵

3. Don’t give up on love

If you have had several bad breakups, you can easily get dispirited and conclude that you’re not cut out for the romance game. But remember what business schools like mine teach their students about start-ups: The average hit tends to be preceded by roughly four flops. Here’s a plausible adage: If you haven’t had your heart truly broken once, broken someone else’s, and had at least a couple of relationships fizzle out unceremoniously, you probably don’t have enough experience of love to build the dream romance that you want. Get up, dust yourself off, get back out there, and collect some more data.

A side benefit of the entrepreneurial approach to failure in love is that it can help you avoid one of the great pitfalls of a star-crossed romance: hanging on too long. As Silicon Valley people like to say, “Fail fast”—in other words, don’t stick with a losing proposition longer than it takes to learn the valuable lessons of the loss.

Perhaps you have stayed in a doomed, unhappy romance because the prospect of being single scared you. Researchers find that the fear of singlehood may be a very powerful motivation that increases people’s willingness to settle for less in their relationships.⁶ This can result in a lot of unnecessary unhappiness.

Remember that you can’t learn from a breakup unless you actually break up. Then you can apply your experience and knowledge to a new relationship in what will most likely be a better situation than the last. You don’t have to fall in love with an entrepreneur, but if you can fall in love like an entrepreneur, true romance awaits you.

Originally published February 14, 2024.

27 10 Practical Ways to Improve Happiness

Here’s some very bad happiness advice based on very solid happiness research: Feel important. Be happily married. Be Danish.

Depending on how happiness is measured, all of these things really are associated with a happier life. But they’re unhelpful because they are not actionable in any practical way. Very few people slap their foreheads and say, “It all makes sense now—I thought a tense, angry marriage was the secret to happiness, but it isn’t!”

This is the big weakness of a lot of the social-science research to which I have dedicated my academic life. Much of it is descriptive and explanatory but doesn’t necessarily help us live better lives. It can even drag us down when the secret to happiness is unattainable. I am very unlikely to become a Dane, for example (although my grandfather was one, so maybe I have a little hygge sitting somewhere in my genome).

Every once in a while, people in my profession need to get practical. Based on what they see in the data from experiments and surveys, what should we do that is both effective and feasible for increasing our happiness, starting today?

In 2020, an international team of scholars tried to find out. They came up with 68 ways that people are commonly counseled to raise their own happiness and then asked 18 of the most distinguished and prolific academic experts on the science of happiness to rate them in terms of effectiveness and feasibility.¹ In other words, according to the experts, these ways to get happier both work and are workable.

Here are the top 10, in order, with my own assessments as a happiness researcher added in for good measure.

Invest in family and friends. The research is clear that though our natural impulse may be to buy stuff, we should invest instead in improving our closest relationships by sharing experiences and freeing up time to spend together.

Join a club. The “social capital” you get from voluntarily and regularly associating with other people, whether or not you do so through a formal club, has long been known to foster a sense of belonging and protect against loneliness and isolation.

Be active both mentally and physically. You can make this advice as complicated and expensive as you want. But if you like to keep things simple, just try to walk for an hour and read for an hour (not for work!) each day.

Practice your religion. This might sound impractical if you don’t have a traditional faith or practice it traditionally. However, for the purposes of happiness, religion can be understood more broadly as a spiritual or philosophical path in life. Search for transcendent truths beyond your narrow day-to-day life.

Get physical exercise. This is a slightly souped-up version of No. 3 above: Your daily walk should be supplemented with a purposive exercise plan. This is consistent with the research showing that regular exercise of all different types enhances mood and social functioning.

Act nicely. Agreeableness is consistently found to be highly and positively correlated with happiness, and it can be increased relatively easily.

Be generous. Behaving altruistically toward others rewards the brain with happiness-enhancing boosts of dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin.

Check your health. Of all health issues, those that create the greatest unhappiness are typically chronic pain and anxiety. Don’t neglect your visits to the doctor and the dentist, and seek mental-health assistance if your emotions are interfering with your work, relationships, or social activities.

Experience nature. Studies have shown that, compared with urban walking, walking in a woodland setting more dramatically lowers stress, increases positive mood, and enhances working memory.

Socialize with colleagues outside of work. Data have shown that work friendships increase employee engagement, which is associated with both happiness and productivity for workers. I believe that the move to remote work during the pandemic has inadvertently lowered the true compensation of work for millions, explaining in part the so-called Great Resignation. Bonding with your co-workers is a way to take it back.

This list is quite similar to the advice routinely dispensed by top academics writing for popular audiences, such as the UC Riverside psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky (who was also one of the 18 experts in the study), and by nonacademics who write about the science of happiness, such as Gretchen Rubin. “These ideas are terrific—and familiar,” Rubin told me recently. What impressed her wasn’t their originality (your grandmother might’ve told you most of them); rather, it was the fact that they were both effective and practical. “For many of us, the bigger challenge isn’t knowing what actions would make us happier, but actually doing those things,” she said.

Other common happiness advice is ineffective, infeasible, or both. In the 2020 study, the lowest-ranked ideas included working part-time (infeasible for many people) and building wealth (wealth explains only about 1 percent of happiness differences).² The 18 experts also weren’t fans of creating a “pride shrine”—an area of your home devoted to mementos to your successes and accomplishments. That isn’t surprising: As I show in my recent book From Strength to Strength, reminding yourself of your own past greatness is actually a very good way to lower your current satisfaction.

Debunking common-but-bad happiness guidelines could be a full-time job. Beyond those mentioned above, my favorites are “If it feels good, do it” (which can lure us toward bad habits and away from deep purpose) and “Let your anger out” (which research clearly shows leads to more anger, not relief).³ In my experience as a researcher, nearly all advice to let yourself be managed by your emotions and desires is bad.

If one thing bothers me about the list of happiness ideas above, it is that they are incomplete, insofar as they are disconnected tactics. If you really want to get happier, you need a full-on integrated strategy.

A happiness strategy has three parts to it. First, you need to commit yourself to understanding happiness. That can mean many things, whether it’s learning about the science of happiness, studying philosophy, or immersing yourself in a faith practice. Second, you need to practice good happiness hygiene. That’s where the ideas on the list above come in. Treat them as systematic habits, not occasional hacks, and think consciously about whether each action is consistent with your understanding of happiness. Finally, share your knowledge and progress with others. Beyond being an ethical thing to do, teaching will cement your philosophy and habits into your consciousness.

The most important thing to remember is this: You don’t have to leave your happiness up to chance. No matter where you live or what you do, you can manage your own joy and share it with others.

Originally published April 21, 2022.

PART FIVE ON HOW YOU DEFINE SUCCESS

28 Why Success Can Feel So Bitter

A few days after she became the first female skater to land a quadruple jump at the Olympics, 15-year-old Kamila Valieva fell in her final program, costing her the individual Olympic gold. She wept as she stepped off the ice. Instead of comforting her, her coach berated her. “Why did you let it go?” she asked the young skater. “Why did you stop fighting?”

The skaters who won didn’t seem much happier. After winning the silver medal, Alexandra Trusova was heard screaming that she hated the sport. The gold medalist, Anna Shcherbakova, said that “this has been what I’ve been working toward every day,” but also that she felt “emptiness inside.”

This kind of pressure might seem inconceivable to you; after all, you probably aren’t an Olympic athlete. But have you ever anchored your happiness in some way to a far-off goal that you could attain only at significant personal cost, that you thought would deliver to you the satisfaction you seek or the success you crave? Maybe it’s finishing a degree, publishing a book, or making a certain amount of money. Nothing is wrong with these goals per se, but if you place your happiness in their attainment, you are setting yourself up for your own version of these bitter Olympic moments. Even if you achieve your goal, you are very unlikely to achieve the happiness you’re after. And you just might find yourself less happy than you were before you reached the mountaintop.

Dreams and goals are important because they give us a metric against which to measure progress; you don’t care if you’re getting closer to Rome unless you are trying to get to Rome. But as I have written before, progress, not meeting a goal, is what brings true happiness. Researchers have confirmed this time and again. In their 2011 book, The Progress Principle, my colleague Teresa Amabile and the psychologist Steven Kramer analyzed the day-to-day well-being of 238 employees at seven companies and found that satisfaction was brought about not by big, audacious wins, but rather by forward momentum in meaningful work. Other psychologists have found that in life, not just work, progress consistently beats accomplishment when it comes to well-being.¹ Humans are wired, it seems, for improvement. The end state is fairly subjective and in some cases even arbitrary (for example, I will save $10,000). But progress is clear and unambiguous (I have more in my savings account this week than last week).

Goal attainment can even bring problems. Some researchers have argued that when a goal is a true end point for progress, the cessation of forward motion can lead to a feeling of emptiness, exactly what Shcherbakova described in Beijing. Or as a friend of mine and fellow author told me, “I always thought that there would be no better feeling than the day I saw I had a No. 1 New York Times best seller. And when it finally happened, I felt nothing.”

Worse than feeling nothing, you might subject yourself to what the self-improvement writer Stephanie Rose Zoccatelli calls the “post-achievement hangover,” a feeling of restlessness and mild depression in the days after a major milestone, such as graduating from college or getting married. One plausible explanation for this phenomenon has to do with dopamine, a neuromodulator that gives us a sense of pleasurable anticipation of a reward. Dopamine is elevated before you achieve a goal and depleted afterward. This leads to what you might call “anti-anticipation,” or a sense of emptiness. Some scholars have hypothesized that dopamine depletion underlies the terrible dysphoria experienced by drug abusers when they abstain.

This potentially explains a lot of paradoxical behavior, such as why New Year’s resolutions usually fail in the long run, even after initial success. The imagined sustained bliss after, say, saving more money is a mirage; your prize for success is saving money, forever. The progress gives you little shots of dopamine as your savings increase. But once you hit your goal and look out over the wide expanse of permanent fiscal austerity … it’s a dopamine desert.

To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, that life is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need to understand and pursue them in a different way.

I recommend that you subject your goals to a bit of scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.

1. Are you enjoying the journey?

A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional trouble you will face. Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 years ago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weight lifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press my weight plus my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.

2. Do you like pie?

Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie.

The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal is a lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stopping drinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. is being qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.

3. Can you take one step at a time?

Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point your efforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoy the daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.

Maybe your goals don’t pass this test. Maybe training to climb Mount Everest would be a journey that brings you no joy, or actually working as a lawyer after struggling through law school doesn’t appeal to you. If that is the case, you must then ask yourself one more question: Why is this my goal in the first place? Maybe you internalized your parents’ dream for your future, or you’re still holding on to one that you came up with when you were very immature. If so, it’s time to let the dream go.

Just as a wildly hypothetical example, say that, as a young child, someone told you that you could win a gold medal in figure skating and your life would be wonderful forever. But the journey is onerous, and a few years down the line, you realize that you don’t want the life of a professional skater. In this case, it is time to emancipate yourself from your goal. Walk off the ice and get on with your life.

Originally published February 24, 2022.

29 Why You Might Want to Toss Out Your Trophies

From time to time, I visit a friend who has been enormously successful in business. He has an office in New York City that is decorated top to bottom with memorabilia of his many achievements. On the wall are framed magazine covers with his smiling face—CEO of the Year! On the bookshelves are dozens of knickknacks engraved with the dates of when he bought or sold a company.

His office is like a shrine to past glories, and an obvious source of pride. Recently, however, he surprised me by saying he plans to get rid of all of these trophies. I asked why, and he told me that his business has struggled of late, and the trophies are only making his troubles seem worse. “I feel as if they’re mocking me.”

This phenomenon has been called the “Ozymandias problem,” an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1818 poem about the once-great ancient-Egyptian pharaoh (also known as Ramesses II), who is memorialized by a long-eroded statue—of which nothing recognizable remains after many millennia except the inscription on its base: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; / Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

The Ozymandias problem refers to the futility of our efforts to immortalize our accomplishments. The one who would despair, of course, would be the pharaoh himself, were he alive to see his ruined statue.

Like my friend, almost all of us enjoy commemorating our achievements, but we must also face the inevitable fact that our worldly triumphs will decay with the passage of time. This realization can be a source of bitterness and keep us stuck in the past. Then, as my friend found, our trophies might end up mocking us. But only if we let them. If, instead, we choose to celebrate and remember what truly matters in life, we can enjoy the past and the present, despite what time brings our way.

Your trophies might be a silver cup from winning a pickleball tournament, a Phi Beta Kappa pin, stuffed-and-mounted animals, or pictures of yourself with celebrities. Such awards and mementos might seem like a simple matter, but they’re not. Trophies attempt simultaneously to stop time and to substitute a concrete object for an abstract experience.

Say you win a spelling bee as a kid. The moment of victory is sweet—it stimulates your brain’s ventral striatum, part of the cognitive-reward circuit. But that sweetness is both ephemeral and intangible—a moment marked by your identifying a series of letters more accurately than your competitors. To freeze that feeling of pleasure in time and make it more concrete, you receive a certificate with the inscription Seventh-Grade Spelling Champion, which you have framed and put up on your wall, where it stays for years.

Because we value our victories so highly, we value the associated trophies—even trivial ones—in ways that might seem irrational. Social scientists have demonstrated this trait using clever experiments. For example, in 2014, two German economists administered a simple competitive math test to one group among 76 adults.¹ The winners—those with the highest scores—received a “trophy,” an ordinary pen worth 2.10 euros, and the losers got nothing. They were then asked to name the price for which they would be willing to part with their pens; the average amount was 4.40 euros. Evidently, this plain object was now endowed with some emotional value above and beyond its utility. When the losers were asked how much they would pay for the identical pen, they quoted an average price of 57 cents, suggesting an aversion to someone else’s trophy, which would presumably remind them of their defeat.

Trophies of all types are intended to make us happier by evoking a positive memory. And plenty of research has shown that recalling past happy experiences can improve well-being by lowering stress and reducing feelings of sadness. Not coincidentally, people who are suffering from persistent and intense sadness may struggle to recall positive autobiographical experiences. A good happiness habit is to keep a journal of happy memories, such as fun days with loved ones and moments of peace and tranquility, and then turn to this journal in moments of strife and stress.

But memorializing extraordinary victories is different from recalling sweet moments in ordinary life. Although the latter are happy times you can reasonably hope to replicate—a reminder that life can be good—the former can set you up for an unhappy comparison with your former self.

Suppose you get fired from your job. This can hurt a lot and may temporarily make you feel worthless. Thinking of happy times with friends and family can help you at such a moment, reminding you that there are still plenty of people who love and value you. But looking at your framed Employee of the Month award from better times is probably a bad idea.

Trophy-keeping can be an example of what I call “invidious intertemporal autocomparison” (don’t judge me; coming up with fancy technical terms is one way academics get tenure). In one study showing how this syndrome can hurt you, Eastern European researchers asked people to evaluate what their life was like before the fall of Communism compared with their current circumstances. The researchers found that the better people’s past existence seemed to them in retrospect, the lower their well-being would be in the present.²

Imagine living with someone who went out of their way to remind you every day that you used to be younger and more attractive or that you used to have better ideas and more energy. That would be an abusive relationship. But this is in effect what you are doing to yourself if you adorn your home or workplace with trophies of your past accomplishments.

None of this is to suggest that you should enter your very own witness-protection program and erase your whole past. Personal mementos are fine. The problem with conventional trophies is that where your happiness is concerned, they get the time frame wrong and commemorate the wrong things. Here are three ideas for how to make sure you keep only the trophies that bring you joy—and that never mock you.

1. Get the time frame right

Golfers always complain that they aren’t playing well, because they compare today’s score with their best score ever. Better instead to remember that the only game that matters—if it is supposed to be an enjoyable hobby—is the one you’re playing today. So it is with life. Each day is an adventure with the potential for highs and lows, one full of experiences appropriate to your age and circumstances.

Instead of hanging a medal on the wall that marked some achievement that would be beyond you now, honor the thing that you did today—and that you’ll also be able to do tomorrow. Take a minute each evening to jot down the day’s best moment—maybe it was a conversation or a meal or finishing a project at work. Celebrate it in any way you like (as I’ve confessed before, I like a piece of candy). Put the reminder note about your happy time on the fridge or leave it on your desk. Tomorrow, throw it away and make a new one.

2. Commemorate what matters

If you want to keep trophies of your life’s peak achievements, then at least pick the right ones to hold on to: They should be the moments of greatest intrinsic satisfaction, not of extrinsic adulation. I have met award-winning actors and athletes, but I don’t know a single one who would trade celebrating her child’s birthday for winning an Oscar or Olympic gold. As long as the reminder of your greatest loves is connected to a relationship that is still strong and full, celebrating the highlights won’t mock you. Memorialize the relationship with favorite moments: your wedding photo, for example. These trophies remind you that your victory is not a closed and finished episode in your past but something that you’re still winning.

3. If the trophies mock you, toss them

My friend was finding it hard to clear out the trophy shelf in his office. He is quite attached to all the doodads and pictures of himself, and he fears that he will lose touch with his sense of self-worth without them. But they are interfering with his quality of life, and when he finally gets rid of them, he will feel a lot freer and better—as though he is finally living in the present. You can do the same thing. If a physical object causes you the least bit of chagrin, ditch it.

Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is intended as a cautionary tale that juxtaposes ephemeral human magnificence with the remorseless passage of time. The poem ends with these forlorn lines:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I have been to the Egyptian deserts once ruled by Ramesses II, but I had an entirely different reaction to the sands stretching into the distance: I found them indescribably beautiful, not sad. No doubt, this was the same beauty that Shelley’s traveler, contemplating the great king’s fate, could have marveled at. But reflecting on the illusory glory symbolized by the monarch’s derelict statue, he failed to enjoy the natural glory before his very eyes. Don’t make the Ozymandias mistake and miss the beauty of your present by fetishizing the monuments of your past.

Originally published December 14, 2023.

30 The Magic of a Little Danger

“You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.” This is how Bill Gorton, the hard-drinking veteran in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, describes the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Every year at 8 a.m. on July 7, six full-grown bulls (accompanied by six oxen) chase young local men called mozos (and no small number of foreign tourists, thanks to Hemingway’s popularization of the festival) through the town’s streets to the bullring, where the animals are dispatched in bullfights later in the day.

If this ancient rite sounds dangerous, that’s because it is: Since 2005, at least 78 people have been gored, some fatally. Most of them are foreign tourists, known for partying all night before running bleary-eyed down the unfamiliar cobblestone streets in front of fast, aggressive animals that weigh more than 1,000 pounds. And the danger is precisely the point. To hear Hemingway tell it—and to see the streets fill with approximately 1 million tourists each year—few things are more thrilling than trying to outrun these bulls at the possible cost of your life.

Maybe the running of the bulls sounds ridiculous to you. But the tradition offers each of us a lesson about exposing yourself to a bit of danger—the real kind, not the fake stuff like roller coasters and haunted houses. If you need to feel more alive, or increase your courage, or see what you are made of, doing something that knocks you out of your safety zone might just be the solution. Perhaps that shock to the system doesn’t involve as much danger as running with the bulls; maybe for you, it’s learning to drive a Vespa, saying “I love you,” or giving a speech in public. Either way, a bit of fear and danger, experienced on purpose, can work magic.

Risk taking for its own sake can be a noble cause. For example, scholars in 2012 who interviewed practitioners of dangerous sports, such as hang gliding and white-water kayaking, found that their motives included excitement, achieving goals, strengthening friendships, testing personal abilities, and overcoming fear.¹ Some extreme athletes describe the experience as sacred, or beyond words. They might even enter a “flow state,” an effortless condition of feeling both completely immersed and totally in control.

But sometimes, risk taking can be a sign of trouble. For example, people who find normal activities understimulating might look to dangerous pastimes as sources of stronger sensations, even at the risk of self-harm. These people are known as “high sensation-seekers,” and they tend to have low amygdala reactivity, meaning that their fight-or-flight response is muted. They also exhibit blunted stress and startle responses and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. People with low amygdala activity are more likely than others not just to jump from airplanes or tease dangerous animals but also to engage in dangerous substance use, such as binge drinking.

You can think of people who take risks for the right reasons as brave and those who do so in an attempt to remedy their low arousal as reckless. Scientists have successfully distinguished between the two types using brain scans. Brave people typically have normal limbic systems (where the amygdala is located) and feel fear but work to overcome it. Reckless people, usually with dysregulated limbic activity, fail to recognize danger and thus are heedless of risks. No doubt many people running with the bulls are brave, but many are reckless.

Hemingway wrote about running with the bulls because he had done so in 1923, on the urging of his fellow author Gertrude Stein, and found it completely invigorating. Ironically, Hemingway himself is not a good example of positive risk taking: He was a sensation seeker with a self-destructive history of dangerous binge drinking.

As much as some people enjoy risk—whether brave or reckless—the happiness they derive tends to occur after the fact. In 2019, researchers studying downhill mountain bikers found that the riders said that the sport gave them a lot of happiness; however, their happiness was lower during the activity than before and after.² The thrills seem to come more from having done something risky than actually doing it. In other words, you might be happy to have run with the bulls, but while running you will probably just be really scared.

Done right, engaging in something a bit dangerous can enhance your courage and raise your happiness. Done wrong, it’s just stupid, and you might get hurt or killed. Here are a few guidelines to apply this rubric to your own life.

1. Find your bulls to run with

When it comes to happiness, your extreme sport might not technically be a sport at all. Among my three adult kids, two have gone skydiving to challenge themselves (as have I), while the other thought it was an idiotic idea (as did my wife). But that latter child will be getting married next month at age 24, a decision that to many people his age sounds scarier than anything happening today in Pamplona.

Think about the things you’ve been putting off or feel like you can’t do that might be possible with some real bravery. Maybe the challenge is physical, like bungee jumping, or maybe instead it is social or emotional, like telling someone your true feelings or getting serious about a job change you need to make. Maybe it is to go back to school or to leave a city where you have lived your whole life. If it sounds simultaneously possible and terrifying, you’ll know you’ve found the right thing.

2. Envision bravery—but not recklessness

Nelson Mandela once said, “I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.” These are inspiring words from a man who can teach us all a thing or two about taking a risk for the greater good. But the question remains: How do I conquer my fear?

The first step is to envision yourself doing the thing that scares you, and how you will feel about yourself if you take that risk. This will get you used to the idea and make it less daunting.

Think clearly, however—using your conscious brain to reason, not just your amygdala to feel. In some cases, the odds of failure are so high and the consequences so dire that the act is reckless. If you don’t know how to climb, don’t try to free-solo El Capitan. In many cases, however, visualizing your white whale will lead you to realize that the odds of catastrophe are extremely low (for example, skydiving in tandem with an instructor) or that, even if things do go south, they won’t end in death (for example, confessing your love).

3. Make a sensible plan and follow it

After reading my column about walking the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain, a reader reached out to say that she had decided to go do it—the whole month-long, 500-mile walk, not just the junior week-long version I did. It was a personal challenge for her that went against her long-held self-image of someone incapable of strenuous physical activity and pain.

My advice to her was to plan the trip a year in advance to have time to study up, read about the history and philosophy, and—most important—get in physical shape. If you want to raise your happiness by taking a risk, you need to do it right, and not just by acting on impulse. In fact, the research shows that happiness and impulsivity are largely incompatible.³ Furthermore, making a plan allows you to savor the person you want to become—a person who does a hard thing of her own volition, precisely because it is hard.

Skydiving is fun, but I’ve realized that it isn’t my Pamplona; it didn’t frighten me at all. Come to think of it, I don’t think running with the bulls would scare me much either. It’s not that my amygdala is on the fritz, though; physical harm just isn’t my source of anxiety. Professional failure is.

Changing jobs and careers every decade or so is my own extreme sport. When I left my career as a musician to become an academic, I felt completely insecure and afraid. But the stress strengthened me and ultimately gave me greater confidence in my ability to make the next career change. When I left academia to run a large nonprofit, it wasn’t nearly as scary, because I believed that I could become competent in my new career. After all, I had done it before.

Go ahead and peek through that door you’re afraid to open. You might let out a bunch of angry bulls that have been itching to chase you down uneven streets. But your best self might be in there with them.

Originally published July 7, 2022.

31 How Smart People Can Stop Being Miserable

Last chapter, Ernest Hemingway taught us why a little danger can be thrilling. He was full of useful, point-of-fact statements about life, such as the casual remark of an unnamed character in his novel The Garden of Eden: “Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” You might say that this is a corollary of the much more famous “Ignorance is bliss.”

The latter recalls phenomena such as the Dunning-Kruger effect—in which people lacking skills and knowledge in a particular area innocently underestimate their own incompetence—and the illusion of explanatory depth, which can prompt autodidacts on social media to excitedly present complex scientific phenomena, thinking they understand them in far greater depth than they really do.

The Hemingway hypothesis, however, is less straightforward. I can think of a lot of unhappy intellectuals, to be sure. But is intelligence per se their problem? Happiness scholars have studied this question, and the answer is—as in so many parts of life—it depends. The gifts you possess can lift you up or pull you down; it all depends on how you use them. Many people see intelligence as a way to get ahead of others. But to get happier, we need to do the opposite.

You might assume that intelligence—whether it be the conventional IQ kind, emotional intelligence, musical talent, or some other dimension along which a person can excel—raises happiness, all else being equal. After all, people with higher cognitive ability should logically have more exciting life opportunities than others. They should also acquire more resources with which to enhance their well-being.

In general, however, there is no correlation between general intelligence and life satisfaction at the individual level.¹ That principle does mask a few wrinkles. In 2022, researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and Fordham University looked at the association between well-being and various building blocks of neurocognitive ability: memory, processing speed, reasoning, spatial visualization, and vocabulary. The only components of intelligence that they found to be positively related to happiness were spatial visualization, memory, and processing speed—but those relationships were fleeting and age-related.

More interesting, the researchers also found a strongly negative association between happiness and vocabulary. To explain this, they offered a hypothesis: People with a large vocabulary “self-select more challenging environments, and as a result may encounter more daily stressors and reduced positive affect.” In other words, loquacious logophiles might have byzantine lives and find themselves in manifold precarious situations that lower their jouissance. (They talk themselves into misery.)

The whole intelligence-and-happiness question needs more research, which I suspect it will receive in the coming years. But I think there is a clear reason that something as valuable as intelligence, especially manifested in one’s ability to communicate, doesn’t necessarily lead to a higher quality of life.

One of life’s cruelest mysteries is why we are impelled to pursue rewards that bring success but not happiness. Mother Nature drives us toward the four goals of money, power, pleasure, and prestige with the promise that these rewards will bring happiness. In truth, the correlation might be positive, but the causation is probably reversed: Happier people naturally get these rewards. But seek them for their own sake, for your own gain, and happiness will likely fall (see chapter 33 of this book, “If You Want Success, Pursue Happiness.” Accordingly, if you aspire to use your cleverness for personal benefit—for the praise and admiration of others, or an advantage in work and dating—woe be unto you.

The smarter you are, the better equipped you should be to understand that well-being comes from faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Your intelligence is more likely to bring you happiness if you put it to use by chasing better ways to love and serve others, rather than elbowing others aside and hoarding worldly rewards.

In some ways, you can think of intelligence as a resource just like money or power. We know how to make the latter two sources of joy: Share them with others and use them as a force for good in the world. To make smarts a fount of happiness, too, we can follow the same guide. Here are a couple of tangible proposals.

1. Give your ideas away

It amazes me how many pious philanthropists give generously to charity but are loath to share the secrets of their success. In a world powered by ideas, keeping good ones to yourself is the worst form of stinginess and will surely make you suffer. I am not suggesting that you break any intellectual-property laws, but rather, am posing an ethical question: Are you using your ingenuity freely to help others get ahead?

There are ways to do this in many parts of life. For example, you might often see ways for colleagues to succeed at work or school that are not apparent to them. Make a policy of sharing these ideas. In an effort to take my own advice, when I give a happiness lecture using PowerPoint slides, I offer to make them available for the audiences to employ as they want.

2. Don’t use your intelligence to tear others down

Deploying cleverness for one-upmanship, sarcasm, and snark is easy. After all, our culture rewards this: Insult comedy dominates a good deal of entertainment and punditry, and a biting put-down will go viral faster than you can say “OK Boomer.” But the laughs or followers you gain won’t make up for the misery that such insults cause—to your target and probably you too.

Sarcasm, which research shows intensifies criticism, requires unusually high intelligence.² This is a waste of brainpower, not just because intense criticism isn’t nice, but because it has recently been associated with depression and anxiety for the person using it.³ The direction of causality has never been established, but I can say from personal experience that after I’ve used wit to put someone else down, I never feel better about myself. For your good and others’, use your mental dexterity to lift people up or make them laugh without tearing anyone down.

Acting this way will likely feel unnatural. We are evolved to use every advantage to get ahead in life, and humans often see resources as existing in a zero-sum environment, a bias that some psychologists have called “win-win denial.”

But the idea that if one person has more, someone else must have less is almost always wrong. A sophisticated understanding of human relationships—which, I should note, requires intelligence—reveals that we interact in a positive-sum world when we work together and assist one another. Perhaps you believe that helping others succeed economically raises overall prosperity, including your own. If so, using your intellect to lift up others should be, well, a no-brainer.

Originally published March 23, 2023.

32 Think Twice Before Taking the Top Job

I teach many young adults who aspire to be leaders in the private and public sectors. In their classes, they study inspiring cases of success, but they also learn that a good education is no guarantee that things will go well for them. Indeed, as the Harvard Business Review reminds us, some 50 to 70 percent of new executives in private business fail in their role within 18 months of being hired or promoted.¹ We don’t have comparable numbers for the public and nonprofit sectors, but success is far from assured there as well.

The reasons usually presented for leadership failure are predictable enough: an inability to build a team, poor communication skills, an unwillingness to do hard things, selfishness, misconduct or moral turpitude, and so forth. But one huge reason that I have seen again and again almost never gets serious attention: Leaders fail when they hate being the leader.

People commonly assume that being the boss will bring them a lot of happiness and fulfillment. For most people, it does not—at least not to start with. And for some, being in charge brings misery from beginning to end. The knock-on effect is that when you are unhappy in your job, you will struggle to succeed.

If you are an ambitious person at work and find yourself coveting the corner office, you can save yourself a lot of potential grief by first thinking carefully about whether you really want to be the boss or do the boss’s job. If you can consider coolly whether the pressure, exhaustion, and loneliness that accompany that job might doom your well-being, and thus your ability to succeed, you could save yourself a lot of trouble.

The assumption that leadership increases satisfaction levels in life and work suffers from the “correlation-causation fallacy.” This is the belief that because two things typically occur together, one causes the other. For example, a number of research studies have shown that in workplaces, executives tend to report higher job satisfaction than their employees.² Some studies have suggested a biological explanation for this, finding that stress-hormone levels tend to be lower among higher-status employees, and researchers posit that this is less because of their high status per se than the calming sense of control their status gives them, particularly if it is stable.³ (That, of course, is a big if in the world of business.) These findings are widely seen as evidence that being promoted will make you happy.

But the research does not tell us whether becoming the boss raises well-being. This outcome could very well be a “selection effect,” in which people who like their jobs more tend to get promoted, as do people who naturally deal well with stress. A better way to see how becoming a boss affects happiness is by looking at people before and after their promotions, as two German researchers did recently for an article published in the Journal of Happiness Studies. After examining a decade of career data for nearly 26,000 employees, some of whom were promoted while others weren’t, they were able to assess more accurately how being elevated to leadership tended to affect well-being.

The results were mixed but generally not positive.⁴ Measuring overall life satisfaction, the data showed that people who were moving toward promotion were usually getting slightly happier in the five years before gaining a leadership position. They became unhappier when the promotion occurred, however, and their satisfaction didn’t recover to the pre-promotion level until two years into the new job. Only after that did their happiness resume a gradual upward trend.

A more striking effect occurred with anger, which significantly increased after promotion and did not fully abate for another five years. I have found no research explaining why new leaders might suffer from additional anger for such a long time, but I remember struggling with it myself as a new chief executive when I led a large nonprofit earlier in my career. The reason was simple: I felt completely deprived of control in my job, with the difficult task of herding cats while being held strictly accountable for doing so by a board of directors. Without a lot of emotional fortitude, this anger can lead to career demise. As research has shown, the anger of leaders may be associated with problems such as anxiety among subordinates and the perception of petty tyranny.⁵ Anger decimates the desire of others to follow.

Another problem endemic to leadership is loneliness. The Harvard Business Review has shown that half of CEOs report experiencing loneliness on the job and that many believe that it hurts their performance.⁶ One of the entrance requirements at Harvard Business School is prior work experience; most of my students have already had jobs with significant responsibility. I usually ask how many of them have had the experience of being promoted above their work friends, and most of the hands go up. I then ask who had felt loneliness as a result; most hands stay in the air. If my students succeed in their ambitions, this feeling will probably be part of their future.

So should you seek the corner office? It depends. Maybe you are the outlier who finds perfect bliss in boss life, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Having your eyes open to the costs and not just the benefits of leadership is the wise course. Here are three guidelines to consider as you plan your future.

1. Some people should avoid leadership

If you have trouble with alcohol, you probably shouldn’t become a bartender or work in a liquor store, because your life will be harder in the proximity of so much booze. Similarly, if you are troubled by loneliness or your anger is hard to manage, leading others may well make your issue worse. Not only is this very bad for your well-being; it can make life harder for others around you and compromise your likelihood of success in an executive job at which, as we saw, 50 to 70 percent of new arrivals fail.

2. If you do take the job, be ready

Even if loneliness and anger aren’t particular problems for you, the data suggest that you might experience them at elevated levels. Just as you wouldn’t go into a high-stakes job unprepared professionally, you shouldn’t go in unprepared emotionally. Perhaps this means seeking help before you need it. This isn’t as strange as it sounds; I routinely recommend to executives that they seek therapy before they retire, to prepare for what can be a brutal transition. The same might be worthwhile before your promotion, but you can find many other techniques for emotional self-management, including meditation or prayer. The key thing is to start before you are struggling.

3. Don’t take the top job if you’re not willing to take a temporary hit to your happiness

Even if the average newly minted boss doesn’t have loneliness or anger-management concerns, they can face two years of happiness below their old level. This is baffling if they expected to be happier but completely normal and generally temporary. Still, two years is a long time. Perhaps you are willing to make this sacrifice for the good of others or for your own long-term gain. But you may have plenty of good reasons not to make this sacrifice—maybe you’re ready to wind down your career, for example, or would simply rather opt for the life-is-short school of living. Consider the cons before moving into the corner office.

No matter how compelling the happiness case might be against rising to leadership, the idea of letting it pass might be very troubling. Evolutionary psychologists have long argued that as a social and hierarchical species, humans likely evolved to seek the accumulation of status, power, and prestige, all of which can convert to dominance. If Mother Nature is goading you to try to make it to the top, waiving a big opportunity for those things can feel very unnatural. But remember: Mother Nature doesn’t care whether you’re happy; she just wants you to survive and pass on your genes. Your Pleistocene brain is telling you that if you are the boss, you’ll get more food and mates—so you’d better take the job! But of course, this motivation is anachronistic nonsense in modern life, or ought to be.

If you see that leadership is going to spoil your quality of life, stand up to your animal instincts. Let some other poor sap suffer with the brass ring.

Originally published January 25, 2024.

33 If You Want Success, Pursue Happiness

Without going too far out on a limb, I believe almost everyone would like two things from their jobs and careers: success and happiness. They want to do relatively well financially, receive fair recognition for their accomplishments, enjoy their work as much as one can, and become happier as a person as a result. These are reasonable goals, but they can be a lot to ask—so many people, especially ambitious, hard-working people, simplify them in a logical way: They first seek success and then assume that success will lead to happiness.

But this reasoning is flawed. Chasing success has costs that can end up lowering happiness, as many a desiccated, lonely workaholic can tell you.

This is not to say that you have to choose between success and happiness. You can obtain both. But you have to reverse the order of operations: Instead of trying first to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, start by working on your happiness, which will enhance your success.

Success and happiness are generally positively correlated, as many workforce studies have shown. For example, companies in Fortune magazine’s “100 Best Companies to Work For” list saw an average 14 percent stock-price increase every year from 1998 to 2005, compared with 6 percent for the overall market.¹ And as Gallup data have shown, among business units with employee-engagement levels (that is, employees who reported feeling heard, respected, and intellectually stimulated, and who had a best friend at work) in the 99th percentile, 73 percent perform above the company average, and 78 percent perform above the industry average.²

From this correlation, many assume causation—from success to happiness. During my years as an executive, I found that people strongly believe that pay increases—especially big ones—will have a large and long-lasting effect on their job satisfaction. The data tell us a different story, however: Large wage increases have only a small and transitory effect on well-being. Researchers in 2017 tracked the pay and job satisfaction (measured on a 0–10 scale) of nearly 35,000 German workers over several years. The study found that the anticipation of a 100 percent pay bump increases job satisfaction by about a quarter of one digit in the year before the raise.³ The raise increases that satisfaction bump by another fifth of a digit. By the fourth year, the increase has fallen to less than a fifth in total.

In other words, say your job satisfaction is a six out of 10—not bad, but could be better. If your boss doubles your pay, it will get you to about 6.5, and then it will fall back to about 6.2. Maybe this isn’t the best strategy to help you love your job.

And that doesn’t even take into account the cost that increased job success can have on overall life satisfaction. In 2016, psychologists measured career success by asking 990 college-educated full-time professionals to compare their career achievements to others’. They found that people generally enjoyed the money and status that relative success produced.⁴ However, success did not lead to total contentment: It indirectly chipped away at life satisfaction, likely via time constraints, stress, and impoverished social relationships.

Much stronger and more positive results emerge, however, when researchers reverse the order, looking not at success’s effects on happiness, but happiness’s effect on success. Scholars in 2005 surveyed hundreds of studies—including experiments to establish causality—and concluded that happiness leads to success in many realms of life, including marriage, friendship, health, income, and work performance.⁵

One explanation might be that happiness makes us more attractive, so we are rewarded by others. Alternatively, happiness might make us more productive. Novel experimental research suggests both are true. For example, scholars in 2021 studied Chinese livestream web broadcasters, for whom voluntary viewer tips are the primary source of income. They found that when they showed more positive emotion, their tips immediately increased, suggesting that people who appear happy are rewarded in the market.⁶ Another experiment involved British test subjects engaging in a time-limited arithmetic task and math test. The researchers found that subjects who were shown a clip of a comedy movie beforehand were about 12 percent more productive on the task and test than those who weren’t, and that the funnier they found the clip, the more productive they were.⁷

Whether you are an employee or employer, it is a better investment to increase happiness at work and in life, rather than simply trying to increase measures of success.

The first thing to remember is that happiness requires balance. No matter how much you enjoy your work, overwork will become an obstruction to well-being. Researchers in 2020 studying 414 Iranian bank employees found that workaholic behavior (such as perfectionism and work addiction) strongly predicted workplace incivility (such as hostility, privacy invasion, exclusionary behavior, and gossiping).⁸ Workaholic behaviors also degraded the quality of family life (as measured in disagreement with statements such as “My involvement in work provides me with a sense of success; this, in turn, helps me to be a better person in my family”).

You should guard against workaholism in yourself and help your friends and family who suffer from it. But just as important, employers should not encourage overwork—which will likely require effort and attention on their part, as research shows that executives generally underestimate employees’ struggles with well-being.⁹

Once work quantity is under control, happiness at work requires a sense of meaning and purpose. I have written in this column that the two key aspects of meaningful work are earned success and service to others. Earned success implies a sense of accomplishment and recognition for a job well done, while service to others requires knowledge of the real people who benefit from your work. Lots of research shows the importance of these work aspects. For example, Gallup has revealed that people who serve their communities and receive recognition for it self-report significantly less stress and worry in their lives than those who do not (either because they don’t serve their communities or do not receive recognition).¹⁰

Meanwhile, the most meaningful jobs tend to be those that are the most service-oriented. According to 2016 research by the Pew Research Center, proportionally, more workers in nonprofit and government sectors—that is, work that is generally service-oriented—said their jobs give them a sense of identity than did private-sector workers.¹¹ It’s harder to find the link to service in some professions than others, but it can usually be done. Years ago, I was working with a team of academic researchers creating policies for improved bank regulation. One scholar who was particularly passionate about the project told me he always remembered that his work mattered, because poor people need access to reasonably priced credit, and that requires less bureaucratic red tape.

Even if you struggle to see who benefits, because the people you touch with your work are very far away or your work touches them indirectly, try looking a little closer—maybe even in the next cubicle. You can always enjoy the effects of service by helping your colleagues, and there is clear evidence that supporting co-workers can help ease negative emotions at work.

Ultimately, although success and happiness are linked, the alchemy is mostly one-way—and not in the way that most people think. Working on your success to get happier is inefficient at best, and may blow up in your face and lead you to unhappiness. But working on your happiness gives you the best chance at getting both.

Even if all of this makes sense to you, you may still find yourself falling into old habits of seeking happiness via worldly success at work. Don’t feel too bad—I do it too, even as a specialist in this field. Whenever I notice my hours creeping up to workaholic levels and my dreams of happiness revolving around some accomplishment, I like to reread a short story published in 1922 by Franz Kafka called “A Hunger Artist.” It features a man who starves himself in a cage for a living as a traveling carnival act. He is obsessed with his work and, as a perfectionist, seeks what he calls “flawless fasting.” The hunger artist is proud of his success, although he is always gloomy, and, Kafka writes, “if a good-natured man who felt sorry for him ever wanted to explain to him that his sadness probably came from his fasting … the hunger artist responded with an outburst of rage.”

Over time, the hunger artist’s act falls out of public favor. In desperation to resuscitate his flagging career, he tries fasting longer than he ever has before. Instead, he is utterly ignored, and sits alone in his cage. In the end, the hunger artist starves himself to death. In a twist of absurdism—we might even call it Kafkaesque—the protagonist admits just before expiring that the only reason he had engaged in his art was because he could not find any food to his liking.

I’m not that bad, of course, but I have a bit of a hunger artist in me, and you might too. Here’s my advice: You won’t find happiness by forgoing happiness. Don’t starve yourself. Your odds of success will increase if you eat.

Originally published October 13, 2022.

NOTES

Chapter 1

1. Xiaodong Lin-Siegler et al., “Even Einstein Struggled: Effects of Learning about Great Scientists’ Struggles on High School Students’ Motivation to Learn Science,” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 3 (2016): 314–328.

2. Melanie Stefan, “A CV of Failures,” Nature 468 (2010): 467.

3. Yang Wang, Benjamin F. Jones, and Dashun Wang, “Early-Career Setback and Future Career Impact,” Nature Communications 10, no. 1 (2019): 4331.

4. Ian McGregor et al., “Anxious Uncertainty and Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM),” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 99, no. 1 (2010): 133–147.

Chapter 2

1. Sanford E. DeVoe and Julian House, “Time, Money, and Happiness: How Does Putting a Price on Time Affect Our Ability to Smell the Roses?” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 2 (2012): 466–474.

Chapter 3

1. Jennifer Moss, “Beyond Burned Out,” Harvard Business Review, February 10, 2021, https://hbr.org/2021/02/beyond-burned-out.

2. “Burnout Test,” Psychology Today, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/tests/career/burnout-at-work.

3. Sergio Edú-Valsania, Ana Laguía, and Juan A. Moriano, “Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement,” International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 3 (2022): 1780.

4. Stephanie Marken and Sangeeta Agrawal, “K-12 Workers Have Highest Burnout Rate in U.S.,” Gallup, June 13, 2022, https://news.gallup.com/poll/393500/workers-highest-burnout-rate.aspx?utm_source=alert&utm_medium=email&utm_content=morelink&utm_campaign=syndication.

5. Moss, “Beyond Burned Out.”

6. Arnold B. Bakker and Wido G. M. Oerlemans, “Momentary Work Happiness as a Function of Enduring Burnout and Work Engagement,” Journal of Psychology, 150, no. 6 (2016): 755–778.

7. Abby McCain, “25 Crucial Remote Work Burnout Statistics [2023]: How To Recognize and Avoid Workplace Stress,” Zippia, February 26, 2023, https://www.zippia.com/advice/remote-work-burnout-statistics/.

8. “How Monks Approach Burnout: This Writer Thinks It Might Work for Us Too,” CBC Radio, February 22, 2019, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/how-monks-approach-burnout-this-writer-thinks-it-might-work-for-us-too-1.5028807.

Chapter 4

1. Kui Xie and Sheng-Lun Cheng, “How College Students Can Avoid Procrastinating with Online Work,” OSU.edu, November 28, 2020, https://news.osu.edu/how-college-students-can-avoid-procrastinating-with-online-work/.

2. J. R. Ferrari, J. O’Callaghan, and I. Newbegin, “Prevalence of Procrastination in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia: Arousal and Avoidance Delays among Adults,” North American Journal of Psychology 7, no. 1 (2005): 1–6.

3. Alina Dizik, “Are You Impatient? Then You’re Also More Likely to Procrastinate,” Chicago Booth Review, November 23, 2015, https://www.chicagobooth.edu/review/are-you-impatient-then-youre-also-more-likely-to-procrastinate.

4. Jihae Shin and Adam M. Grant, “When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity,” Academy of Management Journal 64 (2021): 772–798, https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1471.

5. Yoshinori Oyama, Emmanuel Manalo, and Yoshihide Nakatani, “The Hemingway Effect: How Failing to Finish a Task Can Have a Positive Effect on Motivation,” Thinking Skills and Creativity 30 (2018): 7–18, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tsc.2018.01.001.

Chapter 5

1. Jingyi Lu, Qingwen Fang, and Tian Qiu, “Rejecters Overestimate the Negative Consequences They Will Face from Refusal,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied 29, no. 2 (2023): 280–291.

2. Amanda E. Cravens et al., “Why Four Scientists Spent a Year Saying No,” Nature, August 25, 2022, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02325-3.

Chapter 6

1. “What Worries the World—April 2023,” Ipsos, April 27, 2023, https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/what-worries-world-april-2023.

2. Anne Schienle et al., “Worry Tendencies Predict Brain Activation during Aversive Imagery,” Neuroscience Letters 461, no. 3 (2009): 289–292.

3. Mark H. Freeston et al., “Why Do People Worry?” Personality and Individual Differences 17, no. 6 (1994): 791–802.

4. Dan J. Stein et al., “Warriors versus Worriers: The Role of COMT Gene Variants,” CNS Spectrums 11, no. 10 (2006): 745–748.

5. Lucas S. LaFreniere and Michelle G. Newman, “Exposing Worry’s Deceit: Percentage of Untrue Worries in Generalized Anxiety Disorder Treatment Behavior,” Therapy 51, no. 3 (2020): 413–423.

6. Peter M. Gollwitzer, “Goal Achievement: The Role of Intentions” European Review of Social Psychology 4, no. 1 (1993): 141–185.

Chapter 7

1. Christopher W. Wiese et al., “Too Much of a Good Thing? Exploring the Inverted-U Relationship between Self-Control and Happiness,” Journal of Personality 86, no. 3 (2018): 380–396.

2. Michael D. Reisig and Travis C. Pratt, “Low Self-Control and Imprudent Behavior Revisited,” Deviant Behavior 32, no. 7 (2011): 589–625.

3. Wiese et al., “Too Much of a Good Thing?”

Chapter 8

1. “Planning & Progress Study 2018,” Northwestern Mutual, https://news.northwesternmutual.com/planning-and-progress-2018.

2. “Employee Financial Wellness Survey: 2020 COVID-19 Update,” PwC, May 2020, https://www.pwc.com/us/en/industries/private-company-services/images/pwc-9th-annual-employee-financial-wellness-survey-2020.pdf.

3. “When Is Enough … Enough? Why the Wealthy Can’t Get Off the Treadmill,” UBS Investor Watch, 2015, https://www.ubs.com/us/en/investor-watch/2018/still-striving.html?.

4. Tom C. Russ and Mark Hamer, “Association between Psychological Distress and Mortality: Individual Participant Pooled Analysis of 10 Prospective Cohort Studies,” BMJ 345 (2012): e4933.

5. Deborah E. Ward et al., “Can’t Buy Me Love (or Friendship): Social Consequences of Financially Contingent Self-Worth,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 7, no. 12 (2016): 479–486.

6. Paul Petrone, “Stress at Work: See Who’s Feeling it the Most and How to Overcome It,” LinkedIn Learning Blog, April 16, 2018, https://www.linkedin.com/business/learning/blog/productivity-tips/stress-at-work--see-whos-feeling-it-the-most.

7. Bin Li et al., “The Money Buffer Effect in China: A Higher Income Cannot Make You Much Happier but Might Allow You to Worry Less,” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (2016): 234.

Chapter 9

1. “Poll Results: New Year, New Career,” Monster, December 2022, https://learnmore.monster.com/poll-results-new-year-new-career.

2. Rakesh Kochhar, Kim Parker, and Ruth Igielnik, “Majority of U.S. Workers Changing Jobs Are Seeing Real Wage Gains,” Pew Research Center, July 28, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/07/28/majority-of-u-s-workers-changing-jobs-are-seeing-real-wage-gains/.

3. R. Nicholas Carleton, “Fear of the Unknown: One Fear to Rule Them All?” Journal of Anxiety Disorders 41 (2016): 5–21.

4. Wiebke Doden, Julian Pfrombeck, and Gudela Grote, “Are ‘Job Hoppers’ Trapped in Hedonic Treadmills? Effects of Career Orientations on Newcomers’ Attitude Trajectories,” Journal of Organizational Behavior 44, no. 1 (2023): 64–83.

5. Kemal Öztemel and Elvan Yıldız-Akyol, “The Predictive Role of Happiness, Social Support, and Future Time Orientation in Career Adaptability,” Journal of Career Development 48, no. 3 (2021): 199–212.

6. Joo Yeon Shin, Eunseok Kim, and Jina Ahn, “A Latent Profile Analysis of Living a Calling, Burnout, Exploitation, and Work–Life Imbalance,” Journal of Career Development 49, no. 4 (2022): 816–830.

7. Eric M. Vogelsang, Kenneth S. Shultz, and Deborah A. Olson, “Emotional Well-Being Following a Later Life Career Change: The Roles of Agency and Resources,” International Journal of Aging and Human Development 87, no. 4 (2018): 327–346.

Chapter 10

1. Lauren A. Rivera, “Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews,” American Journal of Sociology 120, no. 5 (2015): 1339–1389.

2. Joseph A. Mikels et al., “Should I Go With My Gut? Investigating the Benefits of Emotion-Focused Decision Making,” Emotion 11, no. 4 (2011): 743–753.

3. Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg and Eric R. Igou, “Dreaming of a Brighter Future: Anticipating Happiness Instills Meaning in Life,” Journal of Happiness Studies 20, no. 2 (2019): 541–559.

4. Alessandra D’Agostino et al., “The Feeling of Emptiness: A Review of a Complex Subjective Experience,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 28, no. 5 (2020): 287–295.

Chapter 11

1. S. K. Nelson et al., “Do unto Others or Treat Yourself? The Effects of Prosocial and Self-Focused Behavior on Psychological Flourishing,” Emotion 16, no. 6 (2016): 850–861.

2. William T. Harbaugh, Ulrich Mayr, and Daniel R. Burghart, “Neural Responses to Taxation and Voluntary Giving Reveal Motives for Charitable Donations,” Science 316, no. 5831 (2007): 1622–1625.

3. Jorge A. Barraza et al., “Oxytocin Infusion Increases Charitable Donations Regardless of Monetary Resources,” Hormones and Behavior 60, no. 2 (2011): 148–151.

4. Xia Wang and Luqiong Tong, “Hide the Light or Let It Shine? Examining the Factors Influencing the Effect of Publicizing Donations on Donors’ Happiness,” International Journal of Research in Marketing 32, no. 4 (2015): 418–424.

5. Lara B. Aknin et al., “Happiness and Prosocial Behavior: An Evaluation of the Evidence,” in World Happiness Report 2019, eds. John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, https://gefe.gestoresdefelicidad.com/WHR19.pdf#page=69.

6. David M. Van Slyke and Arthur C. Brooks, “Why Do People Give?: New Evidence and Strategies for Nonprofit Managers,” American Review of Public Administration 35, no. 3 (2005): 199–222.

7. Jacqueline R. Rifkin, Katherine M. Du, and Jonah Berger, “Penny for Your Preferences: Leveraging Self-Expression to Encourage Small Prosocial Gifts,” Journal of Marketing 85, no. 3 (2021): 204–219.

8. Lalin Anik et al., “Feeling Good About Giving: The Benefits (and Costs) of Self-Interested Charitable Behavior,” working paper 10-012, Harvard Business School, Boston, 2009, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1444831.

Chapter 12

1. Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton, “High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but Not Emotional Well-being,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 107, no. 38 (2010): 16489–16493.

2. Jasper Bergink, “A $70k Minimum Wage: A Real-Life Experiment in Happiness Economics,” For a State of Happiness, April 20, 2015, http://www.forastateofhappiness.com/a-70k-minimum-wage-a-real-life-experiment-in-happiness-economics/.

3. Matthew A. Killingsworth, “Experienced Well-being Rises With Income, Even Above $75,000 per Year,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 118, no. 4 (2021): e2016976118.

4. Arthur C. Brooks, “A Formula for Happiness,” New York Times, December 14, 2013, https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/a-formula-for-happiness.html.

5. Lara B. Aknin, “Prosocial Spending and Well-being: Cross-cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 4 (2013): 635–652.

Chapter 13

1. Alexandra M. Freund and Johannes O. Ritter, “Midlife Crisis: A Debate,” Gerontology 55, no. 5 (2009): 582–591.

2. “American Perceptions of Aging in the 21st Century,” National Council on the Aging, 2002, https://www.brown.edu/Courses/BI_278/projects/Aging/perceptions.pdf.

3. Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life (Portfolio, 2022).

4. Margie E. Lachman, “Development in Midlife,” Annual Review of Psychology 55 (2004): 305–331.

5. Elaine Wethington, “Expecting Stress: Americans and the ‘Midlife Crisis,’ ” Motivation and Emotion 24 (2000): 85–103.

6. Constance J. Jones and William Meredith, “Developmental Paths of Psychological Health from Early Adolescence to Later Adulthood,” Psychology and Aging 5, no. 2 (2000): 351–360.

Chapter 14

1. Max van Lent and Michiel Souverijn, “Goal Setting and Raising the Bar: A Field Experiment,” Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics 87 (2020): 101570.

2. Ashwin Gautam, Craig P. Polizzi, and Richard E. Mattson, “Mindfulness, Procrastination, and Anxiety: Assessing Their Interrelationships,” Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice 10, no. 4 (2023): 441–453.

3. Jeremiah Slutsky et al., “Mindfulness Training Improves Employee Well-being: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” Journal of Occupational Health Psychology 24, no. 1 (2019): 139–149.

Chapter 15

1. Michelle Nadine Servaas et al., “The Effect of Criticism on Functional Brain Connectivity and Associations with Neuroticism,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 7 (2013): e69606.

2. Jana L. Raver et al., “Destructive Criticism Revisited: Appraisals, Task Outcomes, and the Moderating Role of Competitiveness,” Applied Psychology 61, no. 2 (2012): 177–203.

3. Gordon D. Atlas and Melissa A. Them, “Narcissism and Sensitivity to Criticism: A Preliminary Investigation,” Current Psychology 27 (2008): 62–76.

4. Melissa L. Kamins and Carol S. Dweck, “Person Versus Process Praise and Criticism: Implications for Contingent Self-Worth and Coping,” Developmental Psychology 35, no. 3 (1999): 835–847.

5. Gavin T. L. Brown, Elizabeth R. Peterson, and Esther S. Yao, “Student Conceptions of Feedback: Impact on Self-Regulation, Self-Efficacy, and Academic Achievement,” British Journal of Educational Psychology 86, no. 4 (2016): 606–629.

6. Matthew T. Seevers, William J. Rowe, and Steven J. Skinner, “Praise in Public, Criticize in Private? An Assessment of Performance Feedback Transparency in a Classroom Setting,” Marketing Education Review 24, no. 2 (2014): 85–100.

Chapter 16

1. Marcial Losada and Emily Heaphy, “The Role of Positivity and Connectivity in the Performance of Business Teams: A Nonlinear Dynamics Model,” American Behavioral Scientist 47, no. 6 (2004): 740–765.

2. Kyle Benson, “The Magic Relationship Ratio, According to Science,” Gottman Institute, last updated September 18, 2024, https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-magic-relationship-ratio-according-science/.

3. César Félix-Brasdefer, “Compliments,” Pragmatics & Discourse at IU, https://pragmatics.indiana.edu/speechacts/compliments.html.

4. Janie Rees-Miller, “Compliments Revisited: Contemporary Compliments and Gender,” Journal of Pragmatics 43, no. 11 (2011): 2673–2688.

5. Charlotte C. van Schie et al., “When Compliments Do Not Hit but Critiques Do: An fMRI Study into Self-Esteem and Self-Knowledge in Processing Social Feedback,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 13, no. 4 (2018): 404–417.

6. Glory K. Singh, “Appreciation and Well Being: Proposing Active Constructive Complimenting (ACC) and Active Constructive Accepting (ACA) to Improve Appreciation,” Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) Capstone Projects, University of Pennsylvania, 2017, https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/129587189.pdf.

7. Jessica S. Morton, Moïra Mikolajczak, and Olivier Luminet, “New Perspectives on the Praise Literature: Towards a Conceptual Model of Compliment,” Current Psychology 41 (2022): 6038–6050.

8. Ovul Sezer et al., “Backhanded Compliments: How Negative Comparisons Undermine Flattery,” Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, August 23, 2019, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3439774.

9. Naomi K. Grant et al., “I’ll Scratch Your Back if You Give Me a Compliment: Exploring Psychological Mechanisms Underlying Compliments’ Effects on Compliance,” British Journal of Social Psychology 61, no. 1 (2022): 37–54.

10. Rico Pohling and Rhett Diessner, “Moral Elevation and Moral Beauty: A Review of the Empirical Literature,” Review of General Psychology 20, no. 4 (2016): 412–425.

Chapter 17

1. Benjamin Laker, “Dear Manager, You’re Holding Too Many Meetings,” Harvard Business Review, March 9, 2022, https://hbr.org/2022/03/dear-manager-youre-holding-too-many-meetings.

2. Sebastian Bailey, “Just Say No: How Your Meeting Habit Is Harming You Forbes,” Forbes, August 8, 2013, https://www.forbes.com/sites/sebastianbailey/2013/08/08/just-say-no-how-your-meeting-habit-is-harming-you/?sh=7ae84b8d1cfa.

3. Evan DeFilippis et al., “Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work,” National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2020, https://www.nber.org/papers/w27612.

4. “Smart Meetings Trends Report (145+ Stats),” Reclaim.ai, April 23, 2024, https://reclaim.ai/blog/smart-meetings-report.

5. Linda R. Shanock et al., “How Surface Acting Relates to Perceived Meeting Effectiveness and Other Employee Outcomes,” University of Nebraska at Omaha Department of Psychology, December 2013, https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1110&context=psychfacpub.

6. Desmond J. Leach et al., “Perceived Meeting Effectiveness: The Role of Design Characteristics,” Journal of Business and Psychology 24, no. 1 (2009): 65–76.

7. Benjamin Laker et al., “The Surprising Impact of Meeting-Free Days,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 18, 2022, https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-surprising-impact-of-meeting-free-days/.

8. Stephanie Vozza, “This Is Exactly How Long Your Meetings Should Last,” Fast Company, April 29, 2022, https://www.fastcompany.com/90746163/this-is-exactly-how-long-your-meetings-should-last.

Chapter 18

1. Kim Parker, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, and Rachel Minkin, “How the Coronavirus Outbreak Has—and Hasn’t—Changed the Way Americans Work,” Pew Research Center, December 9, 2020, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/12/09/how-the-coronavirus.

2. G. Fauville et al., “Zoom Exhaustion & Fatigue Scale,” Computers in Human Behavior Reports 4 (2021): 100119.

3. R. Riedl, “On the Stress Potential of Videoconferencing: Definition and Root Causes of Zoom Fatigue,” Electronic Markets 32 (2022): 153–177.

4. Eric B. Elbogen et al., “A National Study of Zoom Fatigue and Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Future Remote Work,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 25, no. 7 (2022): 409–415.

5. Emma Dorn et al., “COVID-19 and Student Learning in the United States: The Hurt Could Last a Lifetime,” McKinsey & Company, June 2020, https://www.childrensinstitute.net/sites/default/files/documents/COVID-19-and-student-learning-in-the-United-States_FINAL.pdf

6. Erik Peper et al., “Avoid Zoom Fatigue, Be Present and Learn,” NeuroRegulation 8, no. 1 (2021): 47–56.

7. Kristen M. Shockley et al., “The Fatiguing Effects of Camera Use in Virtual Meetings: A Within-Person Field Experiment,” Journal of Applied Psychology 106, no. 8 (2021): 1137–1155.

8. Melanie S. Brucks and Jonathan Levav, “Virtual Communication Curbs Creative Idea Generation,” Nature 605 (2022): 108–112.

9. Anil Ananthaswamy, “Do We Live in a Simulation? Chances Are about 50–50,” Scientific American, October 13, 2020, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-we-live-in-a-simulation-chances-are-about-50-50/.

Chapter 19

1. Timothy Jay, “The Utility and Ubiquity of Taboo Words,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 4, no. 2 (2009): 153–161, https://people.uncw.edu/hakanr/documents/useoftaboowords.pdf.

2. Matthias R. Mehl and James W. Pennebaker, “The Sounds of Social Life: A Psychometric Analysis of Students’ Daily Social Environments and Natural Conversations,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84, no. 4 (2003): 857–870.

3. Jay, “The Utility and Ubiquity.”

4. Anne Marie Chaker, “We’re Cursing More. Blame the #%$ Pandemic,” Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/were-cursing-more-blame-the-pandemic-11640008801.

5. Rumaan Alam, “The Children Are Swearing More During Quarantine,” New Yorker, May 19, 2020, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-children-are-swearing-more-during-quarantine.

6. Jessica Stillman, “Swearing at Work Was Up 60 Percent in 2021, New Report Finds. That’s a *$^%-ing Good Thing,” Inc., February 3, 2022, https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/workplace-culture-swearing-communication.html.

7. Timothy Jay, Krista King, and Tim Duncan,” “Memories of Punishment for Cursing,” Sex Roles 55 (2006): 123–133.

8. Evan K. Perrault et al., “When Doctors Swear, Do Patients Care? Two Experiments Examining Physicians Cursing in the Presence of Patients,” Health Communication 37, no. 6 (2021): 739–747.

9. Gilad Feldman et al., “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: The Relationship Between Profanity and Honesty,” Psychological and Personality Science 8, no. 7 (2017): 816–826, https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550616681055.

10. Ailsa Chang, Justine Kenin, and Jason Fuller, “Author Explains Why Those 4-Letter Words Are So Satisfying to Say Out Loud,” NPR, May 14, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/14/996956077.

11. Michael C. Philipp and Laura Lombardo, “Hurt Feelings and Four Letter Words: Swearing Alleviates the Pain of Social Distress,” European Journal of Social Psychology 47, no. 4 (2017): 517–523.

12. Richard Stephens and Olly Robertson, “Swearing as a Response to Pain: Assessing Hypoalgesic Effects of Novel ‘Swear’ Words,” Frontiers in Psychology 11 (2020): 723.

13. Nicholas B. Washmuth and Richard Stephens, “Frankly, We Do Give a Damn: Improving Patient Outcomes with Swearing,” Archives of Physiotherapy 12, no. 1 (2022): 6, https://archivesphysiotherapy.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40945-022-00131-8.

Chapter 21

1. Richard Layard et al., “Mental Illness and Unhappiness,” IZA discussion paper no. 7620, SSRN, October 5, 2013, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2336397.

2. Susan E. Marchant-Haycox and Glenn D. Wilson, “Personality and Stress in Performing Artists,” Personality and Individual Differences 13, no. 10 (1992): 1061–1068.

3. Jinfan Zhang et al., “Sadness and Happiness Are Amplified in Solitary Listening to Music,” Cognitive Processing 19 (2018): 133–139.

4. C. G. Jung, “Jung’s View of Christianity,” The Atlantic, January 1963, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1963/01/jungs-view-of-christianity/658592/.

5. Satinder Dhiman, “More Than Happiness: A Stoic Guide to Human Flourishing,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Workplace Well-Being, ed. Satinder K. Dhiman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 1433–1472.

Chapter 22

1. Mariëlle Stel et al., “The Consequences of Mimicry for Prosocials and Proselfs: Effects of Social Value Orientation on the Mimicry–Liking Link,” European Journal of Social Psychology 41, no. 3 (2011): 269–274.

2. Miguel A. Fonseca and Kim Peters, “Will Any Gossip Do? Gossip Does Not Need to Be Perfectly Accurate to Promote Trust,” Games and Economic Behavior 107 (2018): 253–281.

3. Sarah Estow, Jeremy P. Jamieson, and Jennifer R. Yates, “Self-Monitoring and Mimicry of Positive and Negative Social Behaviors,” Journal of Research in Personality 41, no. 2 (2007): 425–433.

4. Lile Jia, Li Neng Lee, and Eddie Mun Wai Tong, “Gratitude Facilitates Behavioral Mimicry,” Emotion 15, no. 2 (2015): 134–138.

5. Robert P. Abelson and James C. Miller, “Negative Persuasion via Personal Insult,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 3, no. 4 (1967): 321–333.

6. David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, “Durably Reducing Transphobia: A Field Experiment on Door-to-Door Canvassing,” Science 352, no. 6282 (2016): 220–224.

Chapter 23

1. K. L. Jang, W. J. Livesley, and P. A. Vernon, “Heritability of the Big Five Personality Dimensions and Their Facets: A Twin Study,” Journal of Personality 64, no. 3 (1996): 577–591.

2. Mona Ayoub et al., “Longitudinal Associations Between Parenting and Child Big Five Personality Traits,” Collabra: Psychology 7, no. 1 (2021): 29766, https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/7/1/29766/118998.

3. Espen Røysamb et al., “Genetics, Personality and Wellbeing: A Twin Study of Traits, Facets and Life Satisfaction,” Scientific Reports 8, no. 1 (2018): 12298.

4. Abdul Khaleque, “Perceived Parental Warmth, and Children’s Psychological Adjustment, and Personality Dispositions: A Meta-analysis,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 22 (2013): 297–306, Table 3, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10826-012-9579-z/tables/3.

5. Lori Baker-Sperry, “Passing on the Faith: The Father’s Role in Religious Transmission,” Sociological Focus 34, no. 2 (2001): 185–198.

6. Diana S. Ebersole, Michelle Miller-Day, and Janice Raup-Krieger, “Do Actions Speak Louder Than Words? Adolescent Interpretations of Parental Substance Use,” Journal of Family Communication 14, no. 4 (2014): 328–351.

Chapter 24

1. Jenna S. Abetza, Lynsey K. Romo, and Chandler Marr, “Defining and Exploring Frenemy Relationships,” Southern Communication Journal 88, no. 2 (2022): 172–184.

2. Małgorzata Wójcik and Wojciech Flak, “Frenemy: A New Addition to the Bullying Circle,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 36, no. 19–20 (2021): 11131–11154.

3. Loren Abell et al., “Machiavellianism, Emotional Manipulation, and Friendship Functions in Women’s Friendships,” Personality and Individual Differences 88 (2016): 108–113, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2015.09.001.

4. Carol Bishop Mills, Panfeng Yu, and Paul A. Mongeau, “Frenemies: Acting like Friends but Feeling like Enemies,” Western Journal of Communication 87, no. 5 (2023): 795–815.

5. Abetza, Romo, and Marr, “Defining and Exploring Frenemy Relationships.”

6. Morton J. Mendelson and Frances E. Aboud, “Measuring Friendship Quality in Late Adolescents and Young Adults: McGill Friendship Questionnaires,” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science / Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement 31, no. 2 (1999): 130–132.

7. Melıkşah Demır and Lesley A. Weitekamp, “I Am So Happy ’Cause Today I Found My Friend: Friendship and Personality as Predictors of Happiness,” Journal of Happiness Studies 8 (2007): 181–211.

8. Jill Suttie, “How Kindness Fits into a Happy Life,” Greater Good Magazine, February 17, 2021, https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_kindness_fits_into_a_happy_life.

Chapter 25

1. Moshe Bar, Maital Neta, and Heather Linz, “Very First Impressions,” Emotion 6, no. 2 (2006): 269–278.

2. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, “First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind after a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face,” Psychological Science 17, no. 7 (2006): 592–598.

3. Katia Mattarozzi et al., “Effects of Gender and Personality on First Impression,” PLoS One 10, no. 9 (2015): e0135529.

4. Daniel R. Ames et al., “Not So Fast: The (Not-Quite-Complete) Dissociation between Accuracy and Confidence in Thin-Slice Impressions,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 2 (2010): 264–277.

5. Mark A. Williams et al., “Amygdala Responses to Fearful and Happy Facial Expressions under Conditions of Binocular Suppression,” Journal of Neuroscience 24, no. 12 (2004): 2898–2904.

6. Yoshiyuki Ueda et al., “Forming Facial Expressions Influences Assessment of Others’ Dominance but Not Trustworthiness,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 2097, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02097.

7. Tara L. Kraft and Sarah D. Pressman, “Grin and Bear It: The Influence of Manipulated Facial Expression on the Stress Response,” Psychological Science 23, no. 11 (2012): 1372–1378.

8. Jessica L. Tracy and Alec T. Beall, “Happy Guys Finish Last: The Impact of Emotion Expressions on Sexual Attraction, Emotion 11, no. 6 (2011): 1379–1387, https://ubc-emotionlab.ca/wp-content/files_mf/tracybeall2011emotion.pdf.

Chapter 26

1. Meghan Beverly, “What Is the Average Length of a Relationship Before Marriage,” Marriage.com, updated July 6, 2023, https://www.marriage.com/advice/relationship/average-length-of-a-relationship/.

2. Jessica Kansky and Joseph P. Allen, “Making Sense and Moving On: The Potential for Individual and Interpersonal Growth Following Emerging Adult Breakups,” Emerging Adulthood 6, no. 3 (2017): 172–190.

3. Jerika C. Norona, Patricia N. E. Roberson, and Deborah P. Welsh, “ I Learned Things That Make Me Happy, Things That Bring Me Down: Lessons From Romantic Relationships in Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood,” Journal of Adolescent Research 59, no. 4 (2016): 416–421.

4. Lauren Eskreis-Winkler and Ayelet Fishbach, “Not Learning from Failure—the Greatest Failure of All,” Psychological Science 30, no. 12 (2019): 1733–1744.

5. Silke Anders et al., “A Neural Link between Affective Understanding and Interpersonal Attraction,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 113, no. 16 (2016): E2248–E2257.

6. Stephanie S. Spielmann and Isabel A. Cantarella, “Fear of Being Single Priming Predicts Maladaptive Relationship Pursuits,” Personal Relationships 27, no. 4 (2020): 801–819.

Chapter 27

1. Dan Buettner, Toben Nelson, and Ruut Veenhoven, “Ways to Greater Happiness: A Delphi Study,” Journal of Happiness Studies 21 (2020): 2789–2806, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-019-00199-3.

2. Antje Jantsch and Ruut Veenhoven, “Private Wealth and Happiness,” in Wealth(s) and Subjective Well-Being, eds. Gaël Brulé and Christian Suter (Springer Nature, 2019), 17–50.

3. Alix Spiegel, “Does Getting Angry Make You Angrier?” NPR, March 26, 2009, https://www.npr.org/2009/03/26/102344514/.

Chapter 28

1. Christopher K. Hsee and Robert P. Abelson, “Velocity Relation: Satisfaction as a Function of the First Derivative of Outcome over Time,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60, no. 3 (1991): 341–347.

Chapter 29

1. Christoph Bühren and Marco Pleßner, “The Trophy Effect,” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 27, no. 4 (2014): 363–377.

2. Spasovski Ognen, Kenig Nikolina, and Kim Young-Hoon, “Do Illusionary Positive Memories Cast a Shadow on Current Happiness? Evaluations of the Present and the Past in Relation to Subjective Well-being,” Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis. Studia Psychologica 7 (2014): 69–81.

Chapter 30

1. John H. Kerr and Susan Houge Mackenzie, “Multiple Motives for Participating in Adventure Sports,” Psychology of Sport and Exercise 13, no. 5 (2012): 649–657.

2. Audun Hetland et al., “The Thrill of Speedy Descents: A Pilot Study on Differences in Facially Expressed Online Emotions and Retrospective Measures of Emotions During a Downhill Mountain-Bike Descent,” Frontiers in Psychology 10 (2019): 566, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00566.

3. Maite Garaigordobil, “Predictor Variables of Happiness and Its Connection with Risk and Protective Factors for Health,” Frontiers in Psychology 6 (2015): 1176, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01176.

Chapter 31

1. Ruut Veenhoven and Yowon Choi, “Does Intelligence Boost Happiness? Smartness of All Pays More Than Being Smarter Than Others,” International Journal of Happiness and Development 1, no. 1 (2012): 5–27, https://pure.eur.nl/ws/files/47447529/f871061159132412.pdf.

2. Herbert L. Colston, “Salting a Wound or Sugaring a Pill: The Pragmatic Functions of Ironic Criticism,” Discourse Processes 23, no. 1 (1997): 25–45.

3. Kathrin Rothermich, Ayotola Ogunlana, and Natalia Jaworska, “Change in Humor and Sarcasm Use Based on Anxiety and Depression Symptom Severity during the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Psychiatric Research 140 (2021): 95–100.

Chapter 32

1. Ron Carucci, “4 Things That Sink New Executives, and How to Overcome Them,” Harvard Business Review, February 9, 2016, https://hbr.org/2016/02/4-things-that-sink-new-executives-and-how-to-overcome-them.

2. “The Great Executive-Employee Disconnect,” Future Forum, October 2021, https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-October-2021.pdf.

3. Gary D. Sherman and Pranjal H. Mehta, “Stress, Cortisol, and Social Hierarchy,” Current Opinion in Psychology 33 (2020): 227–232.

4. Eva Asselmann and Jule Specht, “Climbing the Career Ladder Does Not Make You Happy: Well-being Changes in the Years Before and After Becoming a Leader,” Journal of Happiness Studies 24 (2023): 1037–1058, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-023-00630-w#Sec22.

5. Leo Kant, “Beware the Angry Leader: Trait Anger and Trait Anxiety as Predictors of Petty Tyranny,” The Leadership Quarterly 24, no. 1 (2013): 106–124, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.08.005.

6. Thomas J. Saporito, “It’s Time to Acknowledge CEO Loneliness,” Harvard Business Review, February 15, 2012, https://hbr.org/2012/02/its-time-to-acknowledge-ceo-lo.

Chapter 33

1. Steve Cooper, “Make More Money by Making Your Employees Happy,” Forbes, July 30, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevecooper/2012/07/30/make-more-money-by-making-your-employees-happy/?sh=19d0f61f5266.

2. Corey L. M. Keyes and Jonathan Haidt, Flourishing: Positive Psychology and the Life Well-lived (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003).

3. Patric Diriwaechter and Elena Shvartsman, “The Anticipation and Adaptation Effects of Intra- and Interpersonal Wage Changes on Job Satisfaction,” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 146 (2018): 116–140, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2017.12.010.

4. Andrea E. Abele, Tamara Hagmaier, and Daniel Spurk, “Does Career Success Make You Happy? The Mediating Role of Multiple Subjective Success Evaluations,” Journal of Happiness Studies 17 (2016): 1615–1633.

5. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener, “The Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect: Does Happiness Lead to Success?,” Psychological Bulletin 131, no. 6 (2005): 803–855.

6. Yan Lin et al., “Happiness Begets Money: Emotion and Engagement in Live Streaming,” Journal of Marketing Research 58, no. 3 (2021): 417–438.

7. Andrew J. Oswald, Eugenio Proto, and Daniel Sgroi, “Happiness and Productivity,” Journal of Labor Economics 33, no. 4 (2015): 789–822.

8. Fatemeh Taheri, Mohammad Asarian, and Pooyan Shahhosseini, “Workaholism and Workplace Incivility: The Role of Work–Family Enrichment,” Management Decision 59, no. 2 (2021): 372–389.

9. Jen Fisher and Paul H. Silverglate, “The C-Suite’s Role in Well-being: How Health-Savvy Executives Can Go Beyond Workplace Wellness to Workplace Well-being—for Themselves and Their People,” Deloitte Insights, June 22, 2022, https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/leadership/employee-wellness-in-the-corporate-workplace.html.

10. Lindsey Sharpe, “Americans Serving Their Communities Gain Well-being Edge,” Gallup, August 12, 2014, https://news.gallup.com/poll/174785/americans-serving-communities-gain-edge.aspx.

11. “3. How Americans View Their Jobs,” Pew Research Center, October 6, 2016, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2016/10/06/3-how-americans-view-their-jobs/.

INDEX

academic and scientific research, 5–6

burnout, 21, 22, 23–24

charitable giving, 74–75, 76, 77

communications, 107, 109–110, 120, 121–122, 126–127, 149–150, 152

discourse conformity and effects, 132–133

earnings and happiness, 79–82

economics, 34

emotional and professional boundaries, 36, 213–214

failure and recovery, 11–13, 211

financial contingency of self-worth, 54–55

friends, 164–165

health and happiness, 140–145, 179–183, 217–219

intelligence and well-being, 206

intuition and decision making, 68–69

job changes, 62–63

midlife crises, 85, 88

motivation and achievement, 92, 188, 219

neuroscience, 102, 133, 168, 170

parenting, 155–157

procrastination, 27–29, 30, 31–32, 93–94

promotion effects, 212–213

psychology, 34, 109, 121–122, 126–127, 149–150, 194–195

self-control, 48–49, 50–51

speaking truths, vs. fear, 131, 132–133

time management, 18–19

worry, 40–42

achievement and success. See success

adaptability, 63

addictions, 17, 19, 31, 34, 220

aesthetics, 142

age issues

middle age, 86–89

midlife crises, 85–89

sandwiching, 86–87

worry levels, 41–42

“age of authenticity” theory, 47–48, 49, 50

agreeableness, 88, 157, 181

agreement in beliefs, 151–152

anonymous giving, 73–77

antisocial behavior, 49, 50–51, 200

antisocial personality disorder, 133

anxiety

chronic worry as, 39–42, 54

dealing with, 42–45, 54, 181

financial worry, 39, 53–57

time wasting and information overload, 15–17, 30–31, 44, 94, 96

Aristotle, 52, 74, 161

arrival fallacy, 95–96

art and nature appreciation, 142, 145, 181

authoritarianism, 131

avoidance

procrastination, 27–32

task cancellation and delegation, 32, 115

worry, 40–41

backhanded praise, 109–110, 111

beauty, 142

behavioral activation, inhibition systems, 48

betrayal, 162–163, 165

boomerang effect, 150, 151

brain chemistry and activity

altruism, 181

amygdala activity, 200–201

criticism processing, 102

intelligence and well-being, 206

perception and first impressions, 167–169

reward systems, 17, 189, 194

self-management, 48

social rejection, 132, 133, 175

speech and language, 126, 127

stress and burnout, 22

survival, and resource gathering, 80, 81, 215–216

videoconferencing and virtual interaction, 120–121

worrying, 40–41, 133–134

breakups, 175–177, 178

The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 21

Buddhism, 189

bullying, 162–163

burnout, 21–26

causes, 21–22, 23, 24

fixing, 24–26

saying “no” in overwhelm, 33–38

symptoms, 22–23

career building

changing jobs, 61–65, 203–204, 211

happiness outcomes, 4, 211–212, 217–218

material focus mistakes, 2, 4, 79–81

Carnegie, Dale, 54, 96

catastrophizing, 10, 202–203

changing jobs

evaluation tools, 70–71

fear and risk, 68, 69, 71, 72, 203–204

management regrets, 211–216

positive methods, 61–65, 67–68, 167, 203–204

statistics, 61, 62, 65, 67

using intuition, 67–72

charitable giving, 56, 73–77, 82, 181

children

criticism effects, 103–104

development, 156–157, 158

parenting, 155–160

Christian theology, 147–148, 153

communications

biases and division effects, 148, 149–151, 152–153

body language, 120, 168, 169–170

compliments, 107–112

criticism, 101–106, 107–108

cursing, 125–129

listening, 152

meetings, 114, 116–117, 119–123

saying “no” in overwhelm, 33–38

sharing opinions and beliefs, 148–153, 183

skills, and happiness, 206–207

speaking truth despite fear, 134–136

videoconferencing, 119–123

See also personal relationships

competitiveness, 102–103, 126, 162

compliments, giving, 107–112

conformity, 131–133, 136

connections, human. See family; personal relationships; social connection

continuous improvement

failure as positive force, 12

progress principles, 5, 95–96, 140, 188, 190–191

control issues

job change factors, 63, 64–65

job responsibilities, 24, 213

self-control, 47–52

worrying, 41, 44

coronavirus pandemic (2020–)

money-related worry, 53

videoconferencing, 119–123

work life and burnout, 21–22, 23, 25

courage

dangerous experiences, 199–204

moral, and speaking truth, 112, 132–136, 202

personal challenges, 201–204

covert narcissists, 103

creativity

positive habits for, 31

procrastination and, 16, 27, 29, 30–31, 93–94

virtual interaction’s harms, 121–122

criticism, giving and taking, 101–106, 107–108

crystallized intelligence, 87

cursing, 125–129

danger

vs. dread, 69–70

novel experience seeking, 199–204

Danish culture, 179

“deadness”

job factors and decisions, 68, 70, 71, 72

social media effects, 19, 94

declining tasks

delegating and cutting, 32, 82

just saying “no,” 33–38

denial, 176

Diessner, Rhett, 112

digital addiction, 17, 19, 31

discounting, 34–35, 37

disinhibition and inhibition, 47–52

dopamine

altruism, 181

memory processing, 41

novel experiences, 31, 34, 37, 69

rewards and addiction, 17, 19, 189

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 21, 39

dread, 69–70

Dunning-Kruger effect, 205

earned success, 143, 220

See also success

earnings

career-building goals, 2, 4, 79–81

hourly wage valuation, 18–19

job satisfaction assumptions and links, 218

money “buying happiness” concept, 2, 55–57, 79–83, 143

economic stratification, 53

Edison, Thomas, 13–14

emotional boundaries, 35–36, 37–38, 213–215

emotional labor

burnout, 23

romantic relationships, 174–178

sharing beliefs and values, 148–153, 207–208

emotional management

body language, 170

bravery and courage, 200, 202

criticism issues, 101–106

cursing, 126–128, 129

in decision making, 68–69

happiness seeking, 139–145, 182–183

happiness through giving, 73–74, 76–77

happiness through standard of living, 80–81, 140–141

job searches and changes, 61–62, 63, 64, 68, 167, 212–215

memories, 195–196, 197–198

procrastination, 27–28, 29–32, 93–94

risk and danger seeking, 200–204

employment and unemployment, 142–143

See also work-life balance; and specific job entries

Erikson, Erik, 87

excitement

job decisions, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72

novel experiences and danger, 34, 35, 69, 199–204

exhibitionism, 47–48

exposure therapy, 11–12, 43

failure

importance of, 11–12, 13–14, 174

learning and recovery, 9, 11–14, 174, 175–177, 178

professional errors, 10, 211–212, 214

success from or despite, 9–14, 173–174

See also success

family

caregiving, 86–87, 155–160

health and happiness factors, 141, 145, 180

fear

being single, 178

body language, 170

courage for personal challenges, 201–204

job decisions, 68, 69, 71, 72, 203–204

of missing out, 34–35, 37

opinions sharing and influence, 148, 150

ostracism and rejection, 132–136

speaking truth without fear, 131–136

the unknown, 61–62

feedback

giving and receiving criticism, 102, 103–106, 107–108

motivation links, 104, 105

positive, via compliments, 107

feelings. See emotional boundaries; emotional labor; emotional management

financial contingency of self-worth, 54–56

first impressions, 167–171

Franklin, Benjamin, 50

freedom of speech, 131–132

Freudenberger, Herbert, 21

friends

frenemies, 161–166

making, 147–153

true and real, and happiness, 54, 82, 141, 161, 164–165, 180

gender and sex differences

compliment-giving, 108

cursing, 125

first impressions, 170

friends and frenemies, 163

perception and trust, 168

generations

money worries and differences, 53

sandwiching, 86–87

generativity vs. stagnation, 87

genetics

parent-child, and nature vs. nurture, 156–157, 158

worrying, 41

giving

charitable, 56, 73–77, 82, 181

criticism, 101–106

ideas, 207–208, 209

goal setting

attainment letdowns, 188–189, 190

goal achievement methods, 44, 91–97, 188, 190–191

ideals’ importance, 13, 191

planning for “success,” 5, 12, 188, 189–191, 203, 217

and practicing, 135, 203

procrastination avoidance methods, 32

Grant, Adam, 28

health issues. See mental health issues; physical activity; physical ailments

Hemingway, Ernest, 199, 201, 205

Hooke, Robert, 106

human psychological needs

ego protection, 176

safety, 61, 81

self-actualization and self-efficacy, 54, 56, 87, 188

social inclusion, 122, 132, 133, 180

“A Hunger Artist” (Kafka), 221–222

hyperbolic discounting, 34–35

ideals and values. See values

individualism in society, 47–48

influence, personal, 51, 147–153, 159, 183

inhibition and disinhibition, 47–52

insult comedy, 208

intelligence, 205–209

intrinsic motivation

achievement theory, 92–97

goal progress, 188, 190

ideals within, 13, 26, 51–52

novel experiences, 34, 35

procrastination avoidance, 31–32, 94

work happiness vs. burnout, 23–24

intrinsic values, 13, 26, 51–52, 191, 197, 207

intuition

first impressions, 168–170

interviewing others, 171

in the job search, 67–72

Jaques, Elliott, 85

Jesus Christ, 147–148

job interviews, 67, 167, 169–171

job satisfaction

“best companies,” 217–218

changing jobs, 62, 67–68, 203–204

management and leadership caveats, 211–216

meetings’ failings, 113

raises and earnings, 218

job searches

advice, 167, 170–171

changing jobs and job satisfaction, 61–65, 203–204, 211–216

evaluation tools, 70–71

intuition in, 67–72

judgment and perception, human, 67–72, 167–169

Jung, Carl, 139–145

leading by example, 159

Levinson, Daniel J., 86

Lin, Xiaodong D., 11–13

listening, 152

loneliness, 17, 55, 70, 213–214

love

friends, 141, 164–165, 166

marriage and family, 141, 145, 179

parenting, 158–159

romantic, and challenges, 9–10, 11, 173–174, 174–178

sharing values, 147–148, 151, 153, 207

speaking truth in, 135–136

Maimonides, 74

making friends, 147–153

management

fostering happiness over burnout, 23, 24

personal life, and happiness, 1–2, 3–6, 63, 64

professional life, and happiness, 62, 211–216

manipulation, 45, 161, 163

marriage, 141, 145, 179

Maslow, Abraham, 54, 56

meetings

fatigue and burnout, 23, 24, 120, 121–122

improved approaches, 115–117, 122

negative realities, 113–117

videoconferencing, 119–123

memories, 195–196

mental health issues

burnout and overwhelm, 33–38, 122

dealing with, 42–45, 54

depression, 42, 54, 64, 121, 133, 189

dissatisfaction despite money, 82

dopamine and addiction, 17, 19, 31, 34, 189

failure and responses, 9, 10–11, 11–12

happiness and well-being, 140–141, 142–143, 180, 181, 220–221

individual vs. collective orientation, 48

integrity in time use, 15–17, 19–20, 30–31, 94, 96

midlife crises, 85–89

personality disorders, 103, 133

and spirituality, 144

stressful jobs, 23, 212–213

stressful relationships, 164

virtual interaction outcomes, 121–122

worrying, 39–45, 53–57, 133–134

metacognitive techniques, 43

middle age, 86–89

midlife crises, 85–89

mindfulness

cursing, 125–129

focusing on the present, 93–96, 197

procrastination techniques, 30, 93–94

money. See earnings; resources, material

moral beauty, 112

moral courage, 132–136, 202

motivation. See intrinsic motivation; motivation from feedback; productivity; protection motivation theory

motivation from feedback, 104, 105

narcissists, 103

nature and art appreciation, 142, 145, 181

nature vs. nurture, 156–157

needs. See human psychological needs; resources, material

Newport, Cal, 18

Newton, Isaac, 105–106

“no,” saying, 33–38

nostalgia, 195–196

novel experiences

danger and courage, 199–204

motivation, 34, 35, 69

Obama, Barack, 151–152

opportunity costs, time spent, 16–17, 18–19

opt-out vs. opt-in mechanisms, 36–37

ostracism, 132–134

overt narcissists, 103

“Ozymandias” (Shelley), 193–194, 198

parenting, 86, 155–160

peer pressure. See social and peer pressure

perception and judgment, human, 67–72, 167–169

personal challenges

dealing with criticism, 101–106, 107

dealing with failure, 9–14

relationship struggles, 9–10, 173–178

speaking truth without fear, 131–136

personal relationships

caregiving and parenting, 86–87, 155–160

dealing with failure in, 9–10, 11, 173–178

emotional labor and sharing, 23, 148–153, 209

first impressions, 167–171

frenemies, 161–166

giving and receiving criticism, 101–106, 107–108

giving compliments, 107–112

in-person importance, 120–121, 122, 181

maintenance and success, 4–5, 82, 107, 141, 145, 164–165, 166, 180

manipulation, 45, 161, 163

real friends, 141, 161, 164–165

sharing beliefs and values, 148–153, 207–208

See also communications; social connection

personal values. See values

personalities

agreeableness and happiness, 88, 157, 181

child development, 156–157, 158

perceptions and impressions, 167–171

personality disorders, 103, 133

philanthropy, 56, 73–77, 82, 181, 207–208, 209

philosophy

achievement and rewards, 2, 92, 93

exhibitionism, 47

friendship, 161

reality, 123

spiritual and religious, 74, 143–144, 145, 147–148, 153

worry, 42

physical activity

creativity boosters, 31

healthy outcomes, 140–141, 180, 181

physical ailments

burnout-related, 22–23

worry and anxiety-related, 41, 54

political discourse, 148, 149, 150–153

poverty, 53, 55, 80

practicing, 135

pre-crastination, 28–29

procrastination, 16, 27–32, 93–94

See also wasting time

productivity

happiness effects, 219

meetings’ failings, 113–115, 116

wasting time and activity, 15–20, 30–31, 94

See also declining tasks

profanity, 125–129

prospection, 95–96

protection motivation theory, 149–150

psychological needs. See human psychological needs

Pychyl, Timothy, 27–28

reality, 42, 92, 123

reciprocity, 111

recklessness, 200–201

regret, 9, 16, 35

religion and spirituality

attachment and suffering, 2, 189

health and happiness factors, 143–144, 145, 153, 180

parental influence, 157

remote and hybrid workers

communication issues, 4

videoconferencing, 119–123

work life and burnout, 25, 181

remote schooling, 121–122

research. See academic and scientific research

resilience, 12, 143–144

resources, material

money “buying happiness” concept, 2, 55–57, 79–83, 143, 182

money worries, significance, 53–57

survival vs. happiness, 2–3, 54, 55, 56–57, 80, 81, 142–143, 207, 215–216

restraint, 47–52

reviews, 101

risk and reward

business entrepreneurs, 1–2, 173–175, 177

fear of future regret, 35

job changes: excitement, fear, and deadness, 69–72

personal risk-taking, 200–201, 202–204

rewards quality and happiness, 2–3

romance, 173–175, 177–178

Rogers, Ronald W., 149–150

romance challenges, 173–174, 174–178

Romney, Mitt, 151–152

running of the bulls (Pamplona, Spain), 199–200, 201

sarcasm, 208

scheduling

downtime, 18, 96

fostering work-life balance, 24–25

time blocking, 18, 25, 26, 31, 96

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 92–97

scientific research. See academic and scientific research

self-actualization, 54, 56, 87–88, 141–145, 220–221

self-awareness

authentic self-improvement, 51–52

criticism processing, 104

goals and accomplishments, 95–97

honest and courageous communication, 134–135, 136

procrastination, 29, 94

videoconferencing, 120

self-control, 47–52

self-determination theory, 47

self-esteem and identity

acknowledging accomplishments, 182, 193, 198

charitable giving, 56, 74–75, 76

compliment processing, 109–110

criticism processing, 102–103, 103–104

financial worth ties, 54–56

group inclusion, 132

intrinsic values, 13, 26, 51–52, 191, 197, 207

meaningful work, 188, 220–221

midlife crises, 85–89

service to others, 56, 73–77, 143, 145, 220–221

Sheehy, Gail, 85

smart people, 205–209

smartphone use

anxiety source, 44, 94

fostering work-life balance, 24–25

time wasting and procrastination, 15–16, 17, 19, 30–31

smiling, 170

social and peer pressure

evolution and survival, 131–132, 168

oversharing vs. restraint, 47, 49–52

saying “no,” 36

social comparison, 56

social connection

group behavior, 132–133, 148–149

human needs, 54, 55, 121, 122, 132, 133, 175, 180

sharing beliefs and values, 148–153, 207–208

videoconferencing aspects, 120–122

See also personal relationships

social media

cursing, 125, 128–129

information overload and anxiety, 44, 94, 96

oversharing vs. restraint, 47, 50, 51

reviews and criticisms on, 101

sharing opinions and beliefs, 149–150, 152–153

social power and influence, 51, 147–153, 159, 183

speech, freedom of, 131–132

stagnation, 87

stoicism, 144

substance use and abuse, 140, 157–158, 200, 201

success

acknowledgment and pride, 182, 193–194, 218–219

anticlimactic effects, 187–188, 188–189, 190, 215, 219

failure interconnectedness, 9–14, 173–174

happiness and steps to achievement, 91–97, 140–145, 179–183, 190–191, 217–222

healthy aging realizations, 87–88

overfocus on, 12, 187–188, 190

self-defining, 5, 219

worrying and performance, 42, 155, 187, 190

superstition, 41, 43–44

taking criticism, 101–106

Taylor, Charles, 47–48

technological tools

organization and productivity, 33, 36–37

philosophy of human reality and, 123

videoconferencing, 119–123

television watching, 15–16

Tertullian, 147, 153

Thoreau, Henry David, 15, 19

time

blocking, 18, 25, 26, 31, 96

meetings data, 113, 114

Parkinson’s law, 116

wise use vs. wasting, 15–20, 29, 30–31, 94

See also procrastination; scheduling; work-life balance

totalitarianism, 131

transcendence, 144, 145, 180

trophies, 193–198

Trueman, Carl R., 47–48

truth

inauthentic social strategies, 163–164, 165

parent-child relations, 159

speaking without fear, 131–136

twin studies, 156–157

unemployment, 142–143

values

alignment with time and activities, 15–20, 26, 197

moral beauty compliments, 112

moral identity and giving, 74–75, 76, 181

parental guidance, 155–160

personal values’ importance, 13, 26, 51–52, 191, 197, 207

personal values sharing/influence, 148, 149–153, 183, 207–208

time and money valuation, 18–19

See also self-esteem and identity: intrinsic values

videoconferencing, 119–123

virtual interaction. See social media; videoconferencing

virtual schooling, 121–122

virtue, 74, 133, 159

vocabulary skills, 206

volunteerism and service, 56, 75–77, 143

Walden (Thoreau), 15, 19, 20

wasting time, 15–20, 30–31, 94, 96

See also meetings; procrastination

wealth. See earnings; resources, material

Wethington, Elaine, 88

Winfrey, Oprah, 140

work friendships, 148–149, 162, 163, 181

work-life balance

avoiding overwork, 56, 182, 220, 221–222

“best companies,” 217–218

life-job separation methods, 24–25, 56

maintenance and success, 4–5, 63, 64, 143, 220

saying “no” for balance, 33–38

work-life integration, 4–5, 143, 188

worrier/warrior gene, 41

worrying, 39–45, 133–134

dealing with, 40, 42–45, 54

money-related, 39, 53–57

ostracism, 133–134

parenting-related, 155–160

“yes,” saying, 33, 34, 35–36, 37

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

If there are errors or omissions in this book, they are mine alone. However, the work was far from a sole endeavor. My research lead Bryce Fuemmeler made this book possible, as did the support of our colleagues at the Leadership and Happiness Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, and the team at ACB Ideas, led by Candice Gayl. These are the people around me every day working to bring the art and science of happiness to new audiences.

The essays in this book originally appeared in my “How to Build a Life” column at The Atlantic. I am grateful to the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeff Goldberg, who asked me to start this column back in 2021, as well as my amazing column editor, Matt Seaton.

Many of the ideas behind these essays come from questions posed by my wonderful graduate students at the Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. The leadership of these great schools—deans Srikant Datar, Doug Elmendorf, and Jeremy Weinstein—have been unfailingly supportive of my creative work, and I am deeply grateful.

For their encouragement and guidance throughout this project, I’m indebted to Jeff Kehoe and Dave Lievens at HBR Press; Angela Piliouras at Westchester Publishing Services; and Anthony Mattero, my literary agent at Creative Artists Agency.

For their friendship and support of my work, I will always be thankful to Dan D’Aniello, Tully Friedman, Chris and Cindy Galvin, and Ravenel Curry.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ARTHUR C. BROOKS is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. He is also a columnist at The Atlantic, where he writes the weekly “How to Build a Life” column. Brooks is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 14 books, including Build the Life You Want, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey, and From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. He is one of the world’s leading experts on the science of human happiness, appearing in the media and traveling around the world to teach people in private companies, universities, public agencies, and faith communities how they can live happier lives and bring greater well-being to others.