Learning the secret of happiness

Gretchen Rubin is an author who has been working on the Happiness Project, which as the name indicates is an exploration of a formula for what makes people happy. She also has a blog tracking her progress. In a recent post she summarizes her findings and observations so far and is worth following the link and reading in its entirety. Here are the key takeaways:

...formula for happiness is this: being happier requires you to thinking about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.

...studies show that people think that they will be slightly happier in the future than they are in the present. And research shows that a sense of purpose is very important to happiness.

Growth helps explain the happiness brought by children, by gardens, by pay raises, by stamp collections, by training for a marathon, or learning to use PhotoShop, or cooking your way through a Julia Childs cookbook.

My father was a great tennis player and played a lot when I was growing up. At some point, he started playing golf, and over time, gave up tennis. I asked him why. "My tennis game," he explained, "was gradually getting worse, but my golf game is gradually improving."

The hedonic treadmill means it’s easy to grow accustomed to some of the things that make you “feel good.” An atmosphere of growth offsets that. Anyway, many experiences that involve growth aren’t susceptible to adaptation at all.

To feel happy, it’s not enough to have fun with your friends, and not feel guilty about yelling all the time, and feel like you’re working in the right job; you also need to feel growth—a sense of learning, of betterment, of advancement, of contributing to the growth of others.

...I’m on the lookout for ways to incorporate more growth into my life: learning new skills, working on satisfying projects on which I can make progress, celebrating milestones, fostering the growth of others.