The Happiness Project

  “Do you really think it can make a difference?” she asked.

  “All the studies say that it does.”

  I’d tried all these steps myself, and I’d found the last one—keeping our bedroom dark—surprisingly difficult to accomplish.

  “What are you doing?” Jamie had asked one night when he caught me rearranging various devices throughout our room.

  “I’m trying to block the light from all these gizmos,” I answered. “I read that even a tiny light from a digital alarm clock can disrupt a sleep cycle, and it’s like a mad scientist’s lab in here. Our BlackBerrys, the computer, the cable box—everything blinks or glows bright green.”

  “Huh” was all he said, but he did help me move some things on the nightstand to block the light coming from our alarm clock.

  These changes did seem to make falling asleep easier. But I often lost sleep for another reason: I’d wake up in the middle of the night—curiously, usually at 3:18 A.M.—and be unable to go back to sleep. For those nights, I developed another set of tricks. I breathed deeply and slowly until I couldn’t stand it anymore. When my mind was racing with a to-do list, I wrote everything down. There’s evidence that too little blood flow to the extremities can keep you awake, so if my feet were cold, I put on wool socks—which, though it made me feel frumpish, did seem to help.

  Two of my most useful getting-to-sleep strategies were my own invention. First, I tried to get ready for bed well before bedtime. Sometimes I stayed up late because I was too tired to take out my contacts—plus, putting on my glasses had an effect like putting the cover on the parrot’s cage. Also, if I woke up in the night, I’d tell myself, “I have to get up in two minutes.” I’d imagine that I’d just hit the snooze alarm and in two minutes, I’d have to march through my morning routine. Often this was an exhausting enough prospect to make me fall asleep.

  And sometimes I gave up and took an Ambien.

  After a week or so of more sleep, I began to feel a real difference. I felt more energetic and cheerful with my children in the morning. I didn’t feel a painful, never-fulfilled urge to take a nap in the afternoon. Getting out of bed in the morning was no longer torture; it’s so much nicer to wake up naturally instead of being jerked out of sleep by a buzzing alarm.

  Nevertheless, despite all the benefits, I still struggled to put myself to bed as soon as I felt sleepy. Those last few hours of the day were precious—when the workday was finished, Jamie was home, my daughters were asleep, and I had some free time. Only the daily reminder on my Resolutions Chart kept me from staying up until midnight most nights.

  EXERCISE BETTER.

  There’s a staggering amount of evidence to show that exercise is good for you. Among other benefits, people who exercise are healthier, think more clearly, sleep better, and have delayed onset of dementia. Regular exercise boosts energy levels; although some people assume that working out is tiring, in fact, it boosts energy, especially in sedentary people—of whom there are many. A recent study showed that 25 percent of Americans don’t get any exercise at all. Just by exercising twenty minutes a day three days a week for six weeks, persistently tired people boosted their energy.

  Even knowing all these benefits, though, you can find it difficult to change from a couch potato into a gym enthusiast. Many years ago, I’d managed to turn myself into a regular exerciser, but it hadn’t been easy. My idea of fun has always been to lie in bed reading. Preferably while eating a snack.

  When I was in high school, I wanted to redecorate my bedroom to replace the stylized flowered wallpaper that I thought wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated for a freshman, and I wrote a long proposal laying out my argument to my parents. My father considered the proposal and said, “All right, we’ll redecorate your room. But in return, you have to do something four times a week for twenty minutes.”

  “What do I have to do?” I asked, suspicious.

  “You have to take it or leave it. It’s twenty minutes. How bad can it be?”

  “Okay, I’ll take the deal,” I decided. “What do I have to do?”

  His answer: “Go for a run.”

  My father, himself a dedicated runner, never told me how far I had to run or how fast; he didn’t even keep track of whether I went for twenty minutes. All he asked was that I put on my running shoes and shut the door behind me. My father’s deal got me to commit to a routine, and once I started running, I found that I didn’t mind exercising, I just didn’t like sports.

  My father’s approach might well have backfired. With extrinsic motivation, people act to win external rewards or avoid external punishments; with intrinsic motivation, people act for their own satisfaction. Studies show that if you reward people for doing an activity, they often stop doing it for fun; being paid turns it into “work.” Parents, for example, are warned not to reward children for reading—they’re teaching kids to read for a reward, not for pleasure. By giving me an extrinsic motivation, my father risked sapping my inclination to exercise on my own. As it happened, in my case, he provided an extrinsic motivation that unleashed my intrinsic motivation.

  Ever since that room redecoration, I’ve been exercising regularly. I never push myself hard, but I get myself out the door several times a week. For a long time, however, I’d been thinking that I really should start strength training. Lifting weights increases muscle mass, strengthens bones, firms the core, and—I admit, most important to me—improves shape. People who work out with weights maintain more muscle and gain less fat as they age. A few times over the years, I’d halfheartedly tried lifting weights, but I’d never stuck to it; now, with my resolution to “Exercise better,” it was time to start.

  There’s a Buddhist saying that I’ve found to be uncannily true: “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Just a few days after I committed to my resolution to “Exercise better,” I met a friend for coffee, and she mentioned that she’d started a great weight-training program at a gym in my neighborhood.

  “I don’t like the idea of working out with a trainer,” I objected. “I’d feel self-conscious, and it’s expensive. I want to do it on my own.”

  “Try it,” my friend urged. “I promise, you’ll love it. It’s a superefficient way to exercise. The whole workout takes only twenty minutes. Plus”—she paused dramatically—“you don’t sweat. You work out without having to shower afterward.”

  This was a major selling point. I dislike taking showers. “But,” I asked doubtfully, “how can a good workout take only twenty minutes if you’re not even sweating?”

  “You lift weights at the very outer limit of your strength. You don’t do many repetitions, and you do only one set. Believe me, it works. I love it.”

  In Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness, he argues that the most effective way to judge whether a particular course of action will make you happy in the future is to ask people who are following that course of action right now if they’re happy and assume that you’ll feel the same way. According to his theory, the fact that my friend raved about this fitness routine was a pretty good indicator that I’d be enthusiastic, too. Also, I reminded myself, one of my Secrets of Adulthood was “Most decisions don’t require extensive research.”

  I made an appointment for the next day, and by the time I left, I was a convert. My trainer was terrific, and the atmosphere in the training room was much nicer than most gyms—no music, no mirrors, no crowds, no waiting. On my way out the door, I charged the maximum twenty-four sessions on my credit card to get the discount, and within a month, I’d convinced Jamie and my mother-in-law, Judy, to start going to the same gym.

  The only disadvantage was that it was expensive. “It seems like a lot to spend for a twenty-minute workout,” I said to Jamie.

  “Would you rather get more for your money?” he asked. “We’re spending more to get a shorter workout.” Good point.

  In addition to strength training, I wanted to start walking more. The repetitive activity of walking, studies show, triggers
the body’s relaxation response and so helps reduce stress; at the same time, even a quick ten-minute walk provides an immediate energy boost and improves mood—in fact, exercise is an effective way to snap out of a funk. Also, I kept reading that, as a minimum of activity for good health, people should aim to take 10,000 steps a day—a number that also reportedly keeps most people from gaining weight.

  Living in New York, I felt as if I walked miles every day. But did I? I picked up a $20 pedometer from the running store near my apartment. Once I’d been clipping it onto my belt for a week, I discovered that on days when I did a fair amount of walking—walking Eliza to school and walking to the gym, for example—I hit 10,000 easily. On days when I stayed close to home, I barely cleared 3,000.

  It was interesting to have a better sense of my daily habits. Also, the very fact of wearing a pedometer made me walk more. One of my worst qualities is my insatiable need for credit; I always want the gold star, the recognition. One night when I was in high school, I came home late from a party and decided to surprise my mother by cleaning up our messy kitchen. She came downstairs the next morning and said, “What wonderful fairy came in the night and did all this work?” and looked so pleased. More than twenty years later, I still remember that gold star, and I still want more of them.

  This generally negative quality had a benefit in this circumstance; because the pedometer gave me credit for making an extra effort, I was more likely to do it. One morning I’d planned to take the subway to my dentist’s appointment, but as I walked out the door, it occurred to me, “Walking to the dentist will take the same amount of time, and I’ll get credit for the steps!” Plus, I think I benefited from the “Hawthorne effect,” in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting. In this case, I was the guinea pig of my own experiment.

  Walking had an added benefit: it helped me to think. Nietzsche wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and his observation is backed up by science; exercise-induced brain chemicals help people think clearly. In fact, just stepping outside clarifies thinking and boosts energy. Light deprivation is one reason that people feel tired, and even five minutes of daylight stimulates production of serotonin and dopamine, brain chemicals that improve mood. Many times, I’d guiltily leave my desk to take a break, and while I was walking around the block, I’d get some useful insight that had eluded me when I was being virtuously diligent.

  TOSS, RESTORE, ORGANIZE.

  Household disorder was a constant drain on my energy; the minute I walked through the apartment door, I felt as if I needed to start putting clothes in the hamper and gathering loose toys. I wasn’t alone in my fight against clutter. In a sign that people are finding their possessions truly unmanageable, the number of storage units nationwide practically doubled in one decade. One study suggested that eliminating clutter would cut down the amount of housework in the average home by 40 percent.

  To use the first month of my happiness project to tackle clutter seemed a bit small-minded, as if my highest priority in life were to rearrange my sock drawer. But I craved an existence of order and serenity—which, translated into real life, meant a household with coats hung in the closet and spare rolls of paper towels.

  I was also weighed down by the invisible, but even more enervating, psychic clutter of loose ends. I had a long list of neglected tasks that made me feel weary and guilty whenever I thought of them. I needed to clear away the detritus in my mind.

  I decided to tackle the visible clutter first, and I discovered something surprising: the psychologists and social scientists who do happiness research never mention clutter at all. They never raise it in their descriptions of the factors that contribute to happiness or in their lists of strategies to boost happiness. The philosophers, too, ignore it, although Samuel Johnson, who had an opinion about everything, did remark, “No money is better spent that what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”

  By contrast, when I turned to popular culture, discussions of clutter clearing abounded. Whatever the happiness scientists might study, ordinary people are convinced that clearing clutter will boost their happiness—and they’re “laying out money for domestic satisfaction” by buying Real Simple magazine, reading the Unclutterer blog, hiring California Closets, and practicing amateur feng shui. Apparently, other people, like me, believe that their physical surroundings influence their spiritual happiness.

  I paced through our apartment to size up the clutter-clearing challenge I faced. Once I started really looking, I was amazed by how much clutter had accumulated without my realizing it. Our apartment was bright and pleasant, but a scum of clutter filmed its surface.

  When I surveyed the master bedroom, for example, I was dismayed. The soft green walls and the rose-and-leaf pattern on the bed and curtains made the room calm and inviting, but stacks of papers were piled randomly on the coffee table and on the floor in the corner. Untidy heaps of books covered every available surface. CDs, DVDs, cords, chargers, coins, collar stays, business cards, and instruction booklets were scattered like confetti. Objects that needed to be put away, objects that didn’t have a real place, unidentified lurking objects—they all needed to be placed in their proper homes. Or tossed or given away.

  As I contemplated the magnitude of the job before me, I invoked my Tenth Commandment: “Do what ought to be done.” This commandment distilled into one principle a lot of different strands of advice my mother had given me over the years. The fact is, I tend to feel overwhelmed by large tasks and am often tempted to try to make life easier by cutting corners.

  We recently moved, and beforehand, I was panicking at the thought of everything that needed to be done. What moving company should we use? Where could we buy boxes? How would our furniture fit into our new apartment building’s tiny ser vice elevator? I was paralyzed. My mother had her usual matter-of-fact, unruffled attitude, and she reminded me that I should just do what I knew I ought to do. “It won’t really be that hard,” she said reassuringly when I called her for a pep talk. “Make a list, do a little bit each day, and stay calm.” Taking the bar exam, writing thank-you notes, having a baby, getting our carpets cleaned, checking endless footnotes as I was finishing my biography of Winston Churchill…my mother made me feel that nothing was insurmountable if I did what I knew ought to be done, little by little.

  My evaluation of our apartment revealed that my clutter came in several distinct varieties. First was nostalgic clutter, made up of relics I clung to from my earlier life. I made a mental note that I didn’t need to keep the huge box of materials I used for the “Business and Regulation of Television” seminar I taught years ago.

  Second was self-righteous conservation clutter, made up of things that I’ve kept because they’re useful—even though they’re useless to me. Why was I storing twenty-three glass florist-shop vases?

  One kind of clutter I saw in other people’s homes but didn’t suffer from myself was bargain clutter, which results from buying unnecessary things because they’re on sale. I did suffer from related freebie clutter—the clutter of gifts, hand-me-downs, and giveaways that we didn’t use. Recently my mother-in-law mentioned that she was getting rid of one of their table lamps, and she asked if we wanted it.

  “Sure,” I said automatically, “it’s a great lamp.” But a few days later, I thought better of it. The lampshade wasn’t right, the color wasn’t right, and we didn’t really have a place to put it.

  “Actually,” I e-mailed her later, “we don’t need the lamp. But thanks.” I’d narrowly missed some freebie clutter.

  I also had a problem with crutch clutter. These things I used but knew I shouldn’t: my horrible green sweatshirt (bought secondhand more than ten years ago), my eight-year-old underwear with holes and frayed edges. This kind of clutter drove my mother crazy. “Why do you want to wear that?” she’d say. She always looked fabulous, while I found it difficult not to wear shapeless yoga pants and ratty white T-shirts day
after day.

  I felt particularly oppressed by aspirational clutter—things that I owned but only aspired to use: the glue gun I never mastered, mysteriously specific silver serving pieces untouched since our wedding, my beige pumps with superhigh heels. The flip side of aspirational clutter is outgrown clutter. I discovered a big pile of plastic photo boxes piled in a drawer. I used them for years, but even though I like proper picture frames now, I’d held on to the plastic versions.

  The kind of clutter that I found most disagreeable was buyer’s remorse clutter, when, rather than admit that I’d made a bad purchase, I hung on to things until somehow I felt they’d been “used up” by sitting in a closet or on a shelf—the canvas bag that I’d used only once since I bought it two years ago, those impractical white pants.

  Having sized up the situation, I went straight to the festering heart of my household clutter: my own closet. I’ve never been very good at folding, so messy, lopsided towers of shirts and sweaters jammed the shelves. Too many items were hung on the clothes rod, so I had to muscle my way into a mass of wool and cotton to pull anything out. Bits of socks and T-shirts hung over the edges of the drawers that I’d forced shut. I’d start my clutter clearing here.

  So I could focus properly, I stayed home while Jamie took the girls to visit his parents for the day. The minute the elevator door closed behind them, I began.

  I’d read suggestions that I should invest in an extra closet rod or in storage boxes that fit under the bed or in hangers that would hold four pairs of pants on one rod. For me, however, there was only one essential tool of clutter clearing: trash bags. I set aside one bag for throwaways and one for giveaways and dived in.

  First, I got rid of items that no one should be wearing anymore. Good-bye, baggy yoga pants. Next I pulled out the items that, realistically, I knew I wouldn’t wear. Good-bye, gray sweater that barely covered my navel. Then the culling got harder. I liked those brown pants, but I couldn’t figure out what shoes to wear with them. I liked that dress, but I never had the right place to wear it. I forced myself to take the time to make each item work, and if I couldn’t, out it went. I started to notice my dodges. When I told myself, “I would wear this,” I meant that I didn’t, in fact, wear it. “I have worn this” meant that I’d worn it twice in five years. “I could wear this” meant that I’d never worn it and never would.