The Happiness Project

Hello once again, folks!

I'm a blogging machine this week.  I'm happy I'm keeping up with my resolutions!

Speaking of resolutions...

So, with the new year rolling around, and the tradition of making resolutions, I had been thinking pretty seriously about what I wanted to accomplish this year.  Granted, at New Years, I hadn't decided what I wanted to do with my future, let alone next year, and I was in a pretty low place.

Now, I don't often read non-fiction, and I almost NEVER read self-help books.  They're often too touchy-feely, big picture, "change the world with the power of thinking" for me.  That's not how my brain functions.  I'm a fairly level-headed, emotionally-reserved, detail-oriented person.  But I thought, "What can it hurt?"  So I started doing some research and making plans on how to be happier.

I remember doing an essay on Ben Franklin's Autobiography in 11th-grade English.  Good 'ole Ben decided he wanted to be EVEN MORE AWESOME, so he picked 13 "virtues" that he wanted to cultivate, and then meticulously graded himself every day on how he performed in each virtue.  That seemed like a very rational way to approach bettering yourself.  But I couldn't find any rational self-help books like that.  A lot of books recommend making drastic or vague changes in your life, like "move to a new place" or "think happier".  I can "think happier" about as easily as I could up and move to Bangladesh.  I need concrete goals to achieve, not high-minded ideals.

Then I stumbled upon a gem of a book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin.  While reading the inside flap, I recognized that I had the same self-realization that the author did.  Namely, I wasn't depressed with my life, I just wasn't as happy as I should be considering how great my life is.  Ms. Rubin was also tied down to her life; she had a family and a job and couldn't change anything drastic.  But she decided she could be happier and lead a full life (oh yeah, remember my last post?).

As I started reading her introduction, it read more like my internal monologue.  She had much the same ideas as I did, even values.  Her method of approaching things was just like mine.  She loves research, preparation, lists, and guidelines.  She had even come across the Ben Franklin thing herself!  She was officially in my brain, so much so it was scary.

But basically her premise was this.  She would pick eleven different areas of her life, like family, work, friends, leisure, health, finances, faith, etc.  For each one of these, she would pick 3 or 4 concrete resolutions.  Like for leisure, instead of saying "Have more fun", she would say "go see a movie every week" or "join a book club".  She made concrete goals that she could definitively check off of her list.

Then she assigned each different area to a month.  For the first month, she would concentrate on those resolutions only, doing them every day until they became a habit, and an ordinary part of her life.  The next month, she would add her next resolutions and work on those.  This is pretty logical, because it supposedly takes 21 days of doing something repeatedly for the brain to accept it as a habit.  Doing it for a month was giving the resolution a pretty solid chance at habit-hood.  It is a lot of work, when you think big picture and look at how much you're trying to change your outlook over a year.  But breaking it up into manageable chunks that you can see concrete progress with is another way that the brain is wired to work.

She took time before she started to really evaluate her life.  She was honest with herself and figured out what she liked to do, what was going well in her life now, as well as what made her bored or frustrated.    And after making her lists and plans, she then tells what worked for her and what didn't.  By the time she got to December, she was supposed to be incorporating all her different resolutions and hopefully, making her life happier. (I haven't gotten that far yet, to see how it all turned out in the end for her.)

I know it might seem silly, or even crazy, for some of you to try and be happier by going about life so systematically, but that's why all you normal people have regular self-help books.  As for me, I'm going to see how this plan works out.

As such, you'll probably see blog posts over the next year about my progress through this project.  I'll have to do some tweaking, as I'm running late (as usual).  Maybe on February I'll start working on my punctuality and efficiency...

Anyways, wish me luck, if you will!  It's another thing that's got me quite excited about this year, and it'll be interesting to see if the project changes if I get into grad school.  It should, because this is about enjoying my life as it is, regardless of where it is.

amy