Introduction — The Chatter No One Admits To
The mind has a gift for nostalgia and a corresponding talent for self-deception. We remember our pasts as having been more pleasant than they actually were, and we do this reliably for two distinct reasons. First, we tend to cope with large negative events far better than we predicted — the impact of a romantic breakup or the failure to land a dream job seldom lingers as long as we feared it would. Second, over time we give those painful episodes a generous reinterpretation, so that the heartbreak from a rejected prom date or the embarrassment of failing an important exam eventually becomes a story that made life more colorful rather than one that cast a permanent shadow. It is precisely because past negative events become more positive in memory that women agree to a second childbirth and authors agree to write a second book.
What the same retrospective picture reveals about the present is more unsettling. Happiness peaks in childhood, retreats through adolescence — among life’s most trying periods, when we look and behave awkwardly and feel our worst — and continues to dip into what research confirms is a genuine midlife crisis: our most miserable years as adults fall between forty and fifty. If we were happier as children than we are now, the question practically writes itself: what did we know as kids that we’ve forgotten as adults? And what do we know now that we didn’t know then — and is it actually hurting us?
One rigorous way to begin investigating those questions is through the mental chatter exercise, which calls for keeping a brutally honest daily record of naturally occurring thoughts for two weeks. The essential discipline is to resist steering thoughts in a more positive direction and to resist the urge to find closure or meaning in the day’s events. This makes the mental chatter exercise fundamentally different from keeping a journal. The goal is not interpretation but documentation — a raw transcript of mental life as it actually runs. The reason for sitting with all that negativity is that spontaneously occurring negative thoughts are not meaningless noise randomly produced by the mind. They are rooted in deep-seated goals, desires, and values. Attempting to override them with positive thinking is like popping peppermints to smother bad breath: it addresses the symptom but leaves the cause entirely untouched. If you aspire not just to enhance your well-being but to sustain that enhancement, you need a deeper understanding of the goals and values responsible for the negative chatter.
Although there is a small positive relationship between wealth and happiness, it is not as significant as most people expect. Fame, too, has little measurable effect. What the mental chatter exercise consistently surfaces instead are three broad categories of negative thought. First, thoughts about inferiority — the persistent sense of not measuring up — rooted in the tendency to engage in social comparisons, in keeping up with the Joneses, which is itself rooted in the desire for superiority. Second, thoughts about a lack of love and connection, rooted in insecurities about relationships and expressed either as neediness (relationship anxiety) or as avoidance. Third, thoughts about a lack of control, rooted in the desire to be a maximizer — someone with an irrepressible urge to make things better, to tighten the grip on circumstances.
What makes this pattern consequential is that so many of our confident beliefs about what produces success turn out to be wrong. We tend to believe that the need for superiority — the hunger to be the wealthiest, fastest, strongest — is a powerful engine for achievement. We believe that the ability to be an emotional island, unaffected by others, defines great leaders. We believe control over others and the environment is the path to success. The evidence supports none of these beliefs. The need for superiority is, overall, more hindrance than help in achieving meaningful goals. The world’s best leaders are not emotionally distant but compassionate and kind. Being overly controlling has well-documented limits and is not the optimal path to success. The unhappy irony is that the very behaviors generating the most negative mental chatter are precisely the behaviors we’ve been taught to admire. Letting them go — and replacing them with behaviors that are both happier and, as the evidence shows, more effective — is what this book is about.
Chapter 1 — Devaluing Happiness
Consider a thought experiment. You are in a satisfying romantic relationship with a wonderful partner, but there is one area you’d like him to work on: losing weight. You offer good advice for months. He never follows it. Then one day he comes home excited about a new lifestyle he’s discovered from someone else — a lifestyle you recognize as nearly identical to the one you’ve been recommending all along. What do you do? When researchers put this question to participants, 85 percent agreed that Option B was better for happiness: congratulate him and let it go. In relationships, you can often either be right or be happy — not both. And yet when a separate group of participants was asked to choose for themselves in the same scenario, only 72 percent selected the happiness-enhancing option. Roughly one in eight were willing to sacrifice happiness for the satisfaction of being right.
The pattern repeats at higher stakes. Imagine two job offers. Job A pays well and sets you on a successful career path; former employees report that the work is uninteresting, the hours long, and the colleagues difficult. Job B pays about half as much — enough for a decent life, but not wealth — and the work is genuinely engaging, the people easy to get along with. When asked which job would make them happier, 78 percent chose Job B. But when the same choice was presented inside the stress of a simulated job interview — conditions designed to mimic the competitive pressure of actual career decisions — 55 percent of participants in the job-stress condition switched to the higher-paying option. In a milder stress condition, 44 percent made the same switch. The more the situation resembled the anxiety of a real career moment, the more people quietly abandoned happiness in favor of what seemed more serious, more quantifiable, more defensible.
This is the first deadly happiness sin: devaluing happiness. Not rejecting it outright — surveys consistently place happiness near the top of what people claim to want from life — but routinely treating it as expendable when something else presses in. People sacrifice happiness to be right, to signal seriousness, to acquire money or status, almost without noticing they’ve done it.
The antidote is the first habit of the highly happy: prioritizing happiness without pursuing it. The distinction sounds paradoxical but turns out to be the key to the whole practice. A wealthy American banker on vacation in a small Mexican fishing village struck up a conversation with a local fisherman who was, it became clear, sharp enough to have thrived on Wall Street. “You know,” the banker said, flashing his Rolex, “with your intelligence you could earn a real fortune.” The fisherman asked why he’d want to. “So that you could retire early,” the banker said. “Settle down somewhere nice — maybe a small Mexican village. Fish all day!” The fisherman looked around at where he was already sitting and said nothing that needed to be said. The banker had traced the full arc of ambition and arrived back at the beginning without realizing he’d ever left.
One persistent reason we don’t prioritize happiness is the mistaken belief that it makes us selfish — that focusing too much on our own enjoyment means neglecting others. Findings consistently contradict this. Happy people volunteer more, judge others more generously, and are more willing to share their good fortune equitably. People in happy moods contribute more money to charity and are more likely to donate blood. Happiness does not narrow our concern for others; it expands it.
A second reason is what researchers call medium maximization: the tendency to forget the end goal entirely and fixate instead on maximizing the means to it. In one revealing experiment, participants chose between a shorter task and a longer task. With no reward attached, most chose the shorter one. When points redeemable for candy were introduced, most switched to the longer task — not because they wanted more effort, but because the points had distracted them from what they actually wanted, which was the enjoyment of the candy. They had become so focused on accumulating the medium that they’d lost sight of the end. Money does this to people constantly. So does the desire to be right, to acquire beauty, fame, or prestige. People can get so caught up chasing money that they forget all about why they wanted it in the first place.
One simple intervention breaks this pattern: a reminder. In one study, a group of participants received a gentle daily email for a week reminding them to make happiness-enhancing decisions. A control group received nothing. By the end of the week, the reminder group was far happier — and the reason was behavioral. They chose, when the email arrived, to do things like go to a child’s baseball game rather than sit home watching television. Small choices, made consciously, in the direction of what actually produces happiness.
The reminder comes, however, with an important caveat: prioritizing happiness is not the same as pursuing or chasing it. When you actively pursue happiness, you compare how you currently feel with how you would ideally like to feel, and since you almost always want to feel happier than you do, the pursuit produces a secondary unhappiness — the misery of being unhappy about being unhappy. The right model is sleep. You don’t make yourself fall asleep by lying awake monitoring whether you’ve dozed off yet. You take steps that increase the odds — a light dinner, a walk, avoiding a heated argument about which channel to watch — and then you stop monitoring and let sleep arrive. Prioritizing, but not pursuing, happiness works exactly the same way.
Those steps begin with two tasks. The first is to define happiness — to arrive at a genuinely concrete personal sense of what the word means to you. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate and professor of psychology and public affairs emeritus at Princeton University, has observed that there are two basic types of happiness that often fail to track each other: the immediate, visceral sense of how pleasant or unpleasant you feel right now, and the more holistic assessment of how satisfied you feel with your life overall. A survey of 188 respondents asked to recollect and write about a recent experience that made them happy revealed four main emotional clusters: love and connection, which is the feeling associated with intimacy — felt not only toward people and pets but toward activities, events, and objects; joy, which stems from the sense that life is safe enough to let down one’s guard and be playful or even silly; authentic pride, the satisfaction of having achieved something genuinely important and worthwhile; and hubristic pride, the feeling that arises from recognizing “I am special, superior” — always involving an implicit or explicit comparison with another person and the perception of one’s own superiority over them. These are not the only candidates. Barbara Fredrickson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her colleagues have identified at least seven additional positive emotions that people experience regularly — including serenity, awe, inspiration, interest, and hope — any of which might plausibly carry the word happiness for a particular person in a particular moment.
Two further definitions deserve special attention. Harmony is the feeling of not wishing you were somewhere else, doing something else — a complete presence with what is. Abundance is the feeling that you have enough, indeed more than enough, of anything and everything life could offer: money, love, good fortune. Life, seen from inside abundance, seems like a cozy mess: perfect despite its imperfections. What makes both so alluring as definitions is a paradox at the heart of each. Harmony requires full acceptance of one’s circumstances and yet does not require withdrawal from engagement or ambition. Abundance requires believing that everything will ultimately be all right without pretending circumstances are other than they are. It is this rare combination of full acceptance and full engagement — including the desire to change things — that makes harmony and abundance feel like genuine and lasting states rather than passing moods. Both depend far less on external conditions than on an internal capacity: the capacity to deal with whatever comes.
The second task, once you’ve arrived at a definition, is to build a portfolio — a working list of the activities, people, objects, and experiences that reliably trigger that feeling. If happiness means love and connection for you, you recall previous occasions when you felt it and trace what caused it. If it means harmony, you identify what reliably produces that state. By defining happiness concretely, you give it greater prominence: we instinctively accord more importance to goals that are easier to name and process. By identifying the reliable determinants of happiness, you recognize the kinds of choices your daily life needs to contain more of. There is a reason we carefully specify what we want our children to value — money, status, beauty, power — and a reason that list so rarely includes happiness on its own terms. It is precisely because we tell our children what to value that they learn to lose sight of what makes them truly happy. In naming happiness explicitly, in your own language, you begin to reverse the quiet process by which smart people drift, almost imperceptibly, into lives that leave them wondering why they’re not happy.
Chapter 2 — Chasing Superiority
Beyond the desire for others’ approval and the desire for self-esteem, the need for mastery is another reason we seek superiority — the drive to confirm that our skills are growing. Research reveals that status matters for two main reasons: those higher in status enjoy better self-esteem and, as a result, are happier; and they perceive themselves to have greater autonomy and control over their own decisions, which is itself a reliable source of well-being.
Here is the paradox at the center of this chapter: although being superior enhances happiness, the pursuit of superiority lowers it. Controlling for one’s current status, the greater the need for superiority, the lower the happiness levels. Regardless of how wealthy, famous, powerful, or attractive you are compared with others, the more you strive for superiority, the less happy you will be.
Part of the reason lies in the yardsticks we use. Wealth, power, and fame are the default proxies for superiority because they are quantifiable — but they come saddled with a serious problem: they direct attention toward accumulating extrinsic, materialistic rewards, and a materialistic focus is one of the most reliable happiness killers. We adapt to each new level of wealth, power, and fame, meaning that if we tether happiness to the need for superiority, we would need to become increasingly wealthy, powerful, and famous over the course of a lifetime simply to maintain the same level of satisfaction. The treadmill never stops.
Materialism also erodes happiness through a different mechanism: it promotes self-centeredness and lowers compassion, making others less likely to cooperate and leaving the materialistic person lonelier in the long run. As a result, materialistic people are more likely to sacrifice the things that actually bring joy — hanging out with friends and family, contributing to the community — in favor of money, power, and fame. A study that tracked twelve thousand college freshmen over nineteen years found that those for whom making money was the primary goal were far less happy with their lives two decades later. Other findings show that materialistic people are more likely to suffer from mental disorders.
The mechanics of comparison add another layer. Our perceived sense of superiority is shaped more by how we believe our acquaintances — rather than our close friends or family members — perceive us. And the pattern is clear: the less attention you pay to how much better or worse than others you are, the happier you are likely to be. The more you compare, the less happy you will be. Mitigating the need for superiority without jeopardizing your chances of success requires watching for the situations most likely to trigger it — particularly moments of insecurity, when we are most susceptible to the chase. And ironically, material success itself can heighten the need: exposure to symbols of wealth and status tends to make us more self-centered and materialistic.
The alternative to chasing superiority is pursuing flow. Is there something common to the experiences that people from all walks of life — the plumber, the artist, the businessperson, the scientist — find most meaningful? The answer that emerges consistently is flow. Time appears to both slow down and speed up during it — a paradox that practitioners recognize immediately. A second feature is the complete absence of self-consciousness: during flow, a person becomes so absorbed that no attentional capacity remains for evaluating performance. The third feature, flowing naturally from the other two, is being fully in the moment — acutely focused on the task at hand or, more precisely, on the next immediate subgoal. The desire to be thus absorbed, to get lost in an activity, appears to be a fundamental human need.
Flow is most likely when the challenge of the task is just slightly above your current skill level. When your opponent is just ever so slightly better than you, or the problem is just beyond what feels routine, you are challenged without being overwhelmed — learning and growing even as you are engaged. Flow also carries benefits that spread outward. People are inspired by seeing others in flow, whether at a concert where the band is fully present or in a lecture hall where a passionate professor inhabits his subject. That inspiration means flow is a far more sustainable source of happiness than chasing superiority, because one person’s flow does not have to come at the cost of another’s. By contrast, extrinsic rewards are limited: an increase in one person’s wealth, power, or fame necessarily comes at someone else’s expense.
The same principle governs performance. Our processing capacity is finite. The more of it we allocate to thoughts of wealth, fame, and other superiority yardsticks, the less remains for the task at hand. It is when we forget about extrinsic rewards and focus on the process that we make the most progress. As most sports psychologists know, the factor that separates truly great athletes from merely good ones is not physical or technical ability — it is the mental ability to forget what just happened, not think about what might happen next, and attend, instead, to what is happening right now. Studies confirm the pattern: participants consistently perform better without the pressure of monetary rewards hanging over them. Extrinsic incentives — carrots and sticks — worsen rather than improve performance because they pull attention away from the process and fix it on the outcome.
Because flow is so central to both happiness and success, and because most of our waking life is spent at work, finding flow at work matters. Reconnecting with a hobby is one of the most direct paths. At work, identify where your talents lie and nurture them, even if that means taking on more responsibility or bending your job description. Identify what your community or the wider world needs and find ways to meet those needs. And make room for more of the things you genuinely enjoy doing — it is often easier to answer “What do I enjoy?” than the harder questions about mastery or calling. Building expertise along these lines takes what Angela Duckworth, a professor in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, calls grit: dedication and effort that can be painful in the short run but serves something larger. For those who want to transition to more meaningful work, the slow and organic path tends to serve better than jumping ship; those who spend a few hours a week exposing themselves to people and activities in the work they aspire to are often better positioned than those who quit suddenly and start from scratch.
Two practices actively counteract the pull toward superiority. Self-compassion — which combines self-kindness (treating yourself as you would a close friend after a failure), common humanity (recognizing that failure is universal and not a sign of isolation), and mindfulness (being aware of what you’re experiencing without denial) — reduces the insecurity that most reliably triggers the chase for status. The other practice is gratitude. When you succeed, rather than savoring your own superiority, identify someone who played a critical role in that success and express genuine gratitude toward them. Gratitude acts as a bridge from hubristic pride — a self-centered positive feeling — to love and connection, an other-centered positive feeling with far more staying power. It takes you away from a type of happiness that doesn’t typically last very long to one that has the potential to last longer, and in doing so it loosens the grip of the need to be better than everyone else.
Chapter 3 — Desperation for Love
Harry Harlow’s classic experiments with baby monkeys revealed how fundamental the need for love actually is. When an infant monkey was exposed to a threatening object — one that made loud clattering noises and resembled an aggressive adult — it always sought out a cloth-and-foam surrogate mother rather than a wire-mesh one that provided food but no tactile comfort. Young monkeys reared with real mothers and playmates later learned to socialize easily with peers; those raised with cloth-and-foam mothers were slower but caught up within about a year. Those raised with only wire-mesh mothers became socially incompetent as adults, and the females who did have babies were neglectful of them. The capacity for love and nurturance, it turns out, depends on whether you yourself were sufficiently loved and nurtured.
Being in love feels positive, potent, and powerful all at once, and it is universally rated as one of our most cherished experiences. We are also creatures of remarkable social dependence in subtler ways. Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments showed that people feel compelled to agree with others even when they know the others are wrong — a herd mentality so strong that it overrides direct evidence. In a related set of experiments, participants paired with a confederate watched entertaining or boring videos together. One might expect that the objective quality of the video would be the primary driver of enjoyment. It wasn’t. Perceived agreement with the confederate was far more potent: watching boring videos was more enjoyable when the confederate seemed to agree than watching entertaining videos when the confederate appeared to disagree. We care more about whether others are with us than about the objective quality of what we’re experiencing.
John Cacioppo, a researcher who devoted a large portion of his career to studying the effects of social disconnection, found that feeling lonely is perhaps the single biggest determinant of a host of psychological and physiological illnesses — depression, insomnia, obesity, diabetes, and more. Importantly, it is perceived loneliness, not actual social isolation, that matters most. A study that tracked 268 men from the time they entered college in 1938 through the late 2000s found that the strength of social relationships was the only characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from the rest. Being socially excluded activates the same regions of the brain that are activated by physical pain.
But as critical as being loved is for happiness, the pursuit of it is the cause of much misery. There is a thin line separating a healthy desire for love and connection from an unhealthy desperation for it. Being needy turns people off — partly because the needy are too easily available and we are wired to devalue what is easily accessible, and partly because neediness itself triggers loneliness, since others tend to avoid people who radiate that hunger. Avoidant people, meanwhile, view themselves as strong and independent, but this self-portrait is mostly a façade. At a deeper level, avoidants are just as eager for love and connection as the needy — they simply want others to take the initiative. When that initiative is not forthcoming, which it typically isn’t because being avoidant is not endearing, avoidants find themselves isolated and bereft of meaningful connection. Fortunately, attachment style is not fixed. Research shows that mere exposure to words connoting intimacy — “love,” “hugs” — can at least temporarily boost feelings of security. Recalling childhood instances of love and nurturance can do the same. Two practices with deeper and more lasting potential for mitigating both neediness and avoidance are gratitude, which research shows enriches social life, and self-compassion, which deactivates the threat system associated with insecurity and defensiveness and activates instead the self-soothing system associated with secure attachment.
The third habit of the highly happy turns this dynamic on its head: rather than waiting to be loved, it means choosing to love and give. People have an innate desire to help others. When doctors and nurses on a commercial flight volunteered their skills for a stranger having a heart attack, they could have demanded payment — they did not. They stepped forward spontaneously and with evident enthusiasm. When researchers asked people whether they would be happier spending a windfall on themselves or on someone else, 63 percent predicted self-spending would win. They were wrong. You would, in fact, have been happier spending the money on someone else. The effect of charitable giving on life satisfaction is not trivial: it has the same impact as doubling household income.
Why does generosity boost happiness? First, it redirects attention away from your own worries and toward others’. Second, people reciprocate kindness, which raises their happiness and, in turn, yours. Third — and perhaps most compellingly — being generous changes the story you tell yourself about who you are. When you are nice to others, you feel like a king or a queen: more capable, more effective, more abundant. Remarkably, even small gestures of generosity produce this effect.
The economist Arthur Brooks, analyzing data from more than thirty thousand Americans, found that for every extra dollar earned, charitable giving went up by fourteen cents. But for every dollar donated, income went up by $3.75 — a 375 percent return. Adam Grant, author of Give and Take, found consistent evidence that givers outperform in their careers. Work altruists — those who are present for colleagues, family, and friends when needed — provide as much as twenty times more support than work isolators, and are six times as likely to be promoted.
Does this mean that the more you give, the happier and more successful you will be? The answer is clearly no. Giving beyond a certain point burns you out. Caretakers of Alzheimer’s patients are three times as likely to be depressed as the average person. Studies show that givers are both the most likely and the least likely to succeed, because there are two kinds. Grant calls them selfless givers and otherish givers. Selfless givers give so indiscriminately that they exhaust themselves and end up at the bottom. Otherish givers are equally well-intentioned but smarter about how they practice generosity — they identify when, how much, how, and to whom to give. Otherish givers contain the cost of giving: if four people need the same type of help, they address those needs at once rather than one by one, and if someone else would be a better source of help, they make the introduction. They also practice value expansion, taking authentic pride in the ripples their generosity generates and feeling grateful to be in a position to give at all, which energizes further generosity. A final rule: get to see the impact of your giving. Those who witness the effects of their generosity derive the biggest boost in happiness.
One more asymmetry shapes all of this: bad is stronger than good. Negative stimuli have a larger psychological impact than positive stimuli of equal magnitude. It takes as many as five positive remarks from a significant other to compensate for the emotional damage of one negative remark. It takes three positive experiences to compensate for a single negative one. This is why generosity toward others, and self-compassion toward oneself, need to be practiced with some intentionality — the natural arithmetic of emotional life is already tilted against us.
Chapter 4 — The Need for Control
Findings from Terror Management Theory reveal something telling about the human relationship with uncertainty. When people are asked to contemplate their own death, they become more deeply attached to their previously held values, ideals, and worldviews — not less. The fear of death evokes feelings of uncertainty and loss of control, and people respond by gravitating toward whatever makes them feel more certain and more in command. This is not peculiar to death: it is how we deal with uncertainty of all kinds. When life feels unpredictable, we tighten our grip.
The need for control also expresses itself through the illusion of control — the belief that we wield more influence over outcomes than we actually do. In one lottery study, participants were either given lottery tickets at random or allowed to choose their own. They were then offered the chance to trade their tickets for ones with a higher probability of winning. Those who had chosen their own tickets were far more reluctant to trade. They had come to feel, without any rational basis, that the act of choosing had somehow improved their odds. The same illusion may explain why most people are less afraid of driving than of flying, even though accident odds are far greater behind the wheel: when driving, we believe we control our destiny in a way we don’t when someone else is in the cockpit.
The desire for control serves real purposes. It cultivates self-efficacy — the belief that we can shape outcomes to our liking — and a sense of self-efficacy boosts well-being through the feeling of competence. It also serves the goal of autonomy. Given these benefits, it’s no surprise we seek control. Studies show that those with a higher need for control generally set loftier goals and achieve more. But seeking control is a good thing only up to a point. Being too control-seeking — constantly trying to make things better, obsessing over outcomes — lowers happiness beyond a tipping point that is easier to cross than we expect.
This is especially visible in relationships. The desire for autonomy is particularly pronounced among two-year-olds and teenagers, and it doesn’t disappear in adulthood. When you seek to control a spouse’s diet, you are likely to be met with increased consumption of the very foods you’ve targeted — not to spite you, consciously, but because psychological reactance is a reflexive response to perceived constraint. Attempting to control your children’s homework tends to produce grumpiness or other exhibitions of revolt. In relationships, you can either have control over others or you can have their love — not both. Overly controlling people also generate what the well-known motivational psychologist David McClelland calls power stress: the tendency to become angry and frustrated when others don’t behave as desired. The controlling person sets themselves up for a steady stream of negative feelings — anger, frustration, disappointment — and for something subtler and more damaging besides: they drive away anyone who disagrees with them, surrounding themselves only with yea-sayers. Good decision-making requires diverse perspectives; the controller systematically eliminates them.
Being overly controlling of outcomes is a related but distinct problem. It is not the same as being keen to achieve desirable results — having goals boosts happiness. The line is crossed when the desire to achieve outcomes controls you, rather than you being in control of the desire. One study found that salespeople were more dissatisfied and performed worse when their level of control in customer interactions was lower than they desired. When people are placed in situations with less control than they want, their blood pressure rises. And those high in the need for control are more likely to take excessive risks and become superstitious under stress — as if magical thinking can compensate for a sense of lost agency. Most destructively, when you are obsessed with a particular outcome, you tend to sacrifice other things that actually make you happy in its service.
One of the most productive ways to mitigate the desire for control is to learn to appreciate uncertainty rather than flee it. We already know, at some level, that uncertainty is important — which is why we avoid spoiler alerts before a movie and would not watch the end of a recorded game before the beginning. Uncertainty is precisely what makes the experience worth having. Counterintuitively, engaging in social service tends to make people feel more time abundant, and awe-inducing experiences — whales, waterfalls, vast landscapes — slow the perception of time, creating a sense of temporal affluence that loosens the grip of urgency and control. But the most powerful intervention is what might be called taking internal control.
The fourth habit of the highly happy is gaining internal control: keeping the keys to your own happiness in your own hands. We consistently overpredict how much we will enjoy future positive events and how much we will suffer from future negative ones. Heart attacks are more common on Monday mornings — before the workweek has truly begun — than at any other time of the week. We remember past vacations as more enjoyable than they actually were because we selectively reminisce about the highlights. All of this points to the same underlying truth: by changing the content of our thoughts, we can change how we feel. Rather than feeling angry at a boss who didn’t give you a raise, you could feel grateful that you still have the job. Rather than feeling sad that your partner is leaving town after a good week together, you could feel happy about all the fun you had. Taking personal responsibility for your own happiness means never blaming someone else or the circumstances for how you feel — it means finding ways to feel well despite others’ actions and external events. Although circumstances control external outcomes, they do not control internal states. That distinction is the whole thing.
Developing internal control resembles building muscle: you are more likely to build it when you take on challenges commensurate with your current abilities — neither too light nor too heavy. Four emotion regulation tactics help. The first is situation selection: choosing circumstances more likely to produce positive feelings. The second is emotion labeling — coming up with a precise label for what you are feeling (“I am feeling angry”) and then moving on. Merely naming a feeling lowers its intensity, even though most people predict the opposite. The third is attention deployment: redirecting your focus toward the more positive aspects of a difficult situation. The fourth is cognitive reappraisal: reinterpreting the negative situation to feel better about it. If you are stressed about an impending meeting, you might remind yourself that this is, at bottom, a first-world problem — and a sign that your work is consequential enough to matter. In executing these tactics, it is important not to suppress negative feelings. Suppression doesn’t work: the brain regions activated by negative emotions remain active even when the emotions are suppressed, the effort consumes cognitive capacity, and others can usually sense it, which increases their stress and reduces their warmth toward you.
An arguably more powerful way to take internal control is to lead a healthier lifestyle: eating right, moving more, and sleeping better. Each has a large effect on both physical and mental health. Sitting for more than six hours a day increases the risk of early death in ways comparable to smoking for heart disease, and even among those who exercise heavily, those who also sit most of the day carry a 50 percent greater risk of death — you cannot sit all day and exercise for an hour and consider yourself safe. Ninety-five percent of people need between seven and nine hours of sleep per night; only 2.5 percent feel well-rested with less than seven. Getting just ninety minutes less sleep than you need lowers your daytime alertness by a third. These are not minor inconveniences. They are the body’s most direct route to internal control — or its most direct route away from it. The “schedule partner project” — finding someone to jointly pursue healthy lifestyle changes with you — leverages a simple finding from goal research: you are far more likely to achieve a goal you are pursuing alongside someone else than one you are pursuing alone.
Chapter 5 — Distrusting Others
In general, the more prosperous a country, the happier its citizens, and people living in stable democracies are happier than those in violent autocracies. But something else matters more than economic prosperity or political ideology: trust. Findings from one study showed that the more citizens of a country responded to the question “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” with “most people can be trusted,” the happier those citizens were. The relationship was striking in its directness.
A more ingenious study made the point differently. Researchers “accidentally” left twelve wallets, each containing the equivalent of about fifty dollars and the owner’s address, in sixteen cities around the world. After the wallets were planted, the researchers tracked what proportion were returned. That proportion served as a proxy for the trustworthiness of each country — and, once again, trust turned out to be a major determinant of happiness: the greater the proportion of wallets returned, the happier the country.
The logic is intimate as well as statistical. Imagine that you couldn’t trust your friends to split a restaurant bill equitably, or trust any of your colleagues to keep a secret. When you can’t trust others, you can’t relax. When you can’t relax, you can’t be happy. Many people can’t bring themselves to trust others because of a hardwired cynicism — a default assumption that others are likely to disappoint. And yet the research suggests that if a critical mass of people could overcome this predisposition and proactively trust others, mutual trust would build and everyone’s happiness would benefit. The starting point is always asymmetric: someone has to go first. John Gottman, one of the best-known researchers in the study of relationships, finds that it takes as many as five trustworthy behaviors to overcome the negative feelings generated by just one untrustworthy one.
The fifth habit of the highly happy is exercising what might be called smart trust. People’s propensities — their attitudes and behaviors — are not set in stone. Few people are unqualified saints or unequivocal devils. The factor that most determines which tendency surfaces at any given moment is the context we’re in. In a setting where saintliness is expected and everyone is behaving accordingly, we are likely to do the same. In a context where devilishness is not just permitted but encouraged, we drift in that direction. Which means that the extent to which people exhibit trustworthiness is itself contextual — and that the contexts we create for others, through our own trust or distrust, shape who they become in our presence.
Smart trust involves a mental preparation before extending trust. Decide ahead of time that if the person cheats you, you will not simply let them go without consequence — you will seek to understand what led them to violate your trust. The goal is not revenge; it is comprehension. Knowing is understanding, and understanding is forgiving. A useful thought experiment accelerates this: think of someone you dislike. Now imagine that you had been born with that person’s genetic material — their looks, intelligence, aptitudes — and had lived their exact upbringing, with their parents, neighborhood, school, and set of friends. Do you think you would behave any differently from how they behave? Once this realization sinks in, the knee-jerk tendency to sort others into “good” and “bad” begins to soften, replaced by a genuine curiosity about why people behave the way they do. That curiosity is the foundation of durable trust.
Chapter 6 — Passion and Outcomes
At some level, we all know — or should know — that we lack the ability to calculate all the downstream consequences that any outcome will trigger. We do not have the information required to determine the “net present value,” in business terms, of any experience we go through. An outcome that currently seems positive — marrying a sweetheart, landing a dream job — may turn out to be negative. An outcome that currently seems negative — a divorce, a failure, a rejection — may later prove to be the best thing that happened. Life is unpredictable and whimsical, and because it is, we should hold our judgments about outcomes lightly, especially before they have fully played out.
A related and important finding: we are happier when we are busy than when we are idle, and even happier when what we are doing is meaningful rather than meaningless. This suggests something liberating: we do not need to depend on outcomes for happiness. We could derive all our happiness from the process of working toward outcomes — from preparing for an exam, planning a vacation, building toward a goal — rather than from the outcomes themselves. The sixth deadly happiness sin is an attachment to outcomes that produces either a desperate pursuit of the desired ones or a devastating indifference when things go wrong. The sixth habit of the highly happy is what might be called the dispassionate pursuit of passion: having genuine preferences for certain outcomes before they occur, but being genuinely nonjudgmental about them once they have.
There is empirical support for why this is worth practicing. Our feelings toward both negative and positive events generally become less intense with time, but this change is more pronounced for negative events — they lose their sting more rapidly than positive events lose their glow. You are likely to savor the feelings from a first kiss or a memorable vacation long after they are over, but you will probably not harbor the negative feelings from a financial loss or a failed exam for anywhere near as long.
More striking still is what happens to our sense of meaning. People find past negative events to be significantly more meaningful than past positive ones. Negative events provide greater opportunity for growth, learning, and the kind of understanding that only comes through difficulty. Some time has to pass before this becomes apparent — you cannot easily see meaning in events that have just transpired — but the pattern holds: the past events we find most meaningful are often the ones we were most intensely negative about when they occurred. Negative events make us more compassionate, because we know what suffering feels like from the inside. They make us wiser and more capable of handling the curveballs life throws. They provide, eventually, what might be called bragging rights — the grueling hike that sounded terrible, the culturally exotic dish that seemed genuinely disgusting, become the stories that make you interesting at a dull party. And they make us feel stronger and more resilient when we reflect and realize we lived through them.
Placebo effects offer a final piece of evidence for why our orientation toward outcomes matters. When patients believe a treatment will work, there is an objectively greater likelihood that it will — a phenomenon well documented enough to be controlled for in every clinical drug trial. Not every subjective belief shapes objective reality: no matter how firmly you believe the Earth has two moons, it does not acquire one. But in domains where perception, intention, and effort interact, our beliefs do shape what is possible. Findings from research on religion and spirituality show that those who hold a spiritual attitude toward life lead happier lives. Optimists and those with a more positive general outlook are happier than their more pessimistic counterparts. The way we hold our outcomes — tightly or loosely, with desperation or with openness — is not merely a style choice. It shapes the territory itself.
Chapter 7 — Mind Addiction
The idea that many of our decisions are based on emotions is not news. Nor is the fact that we often feel compelled to justify those emotional decisions with “rational” reasons — post hoc rationalization is a familiar concept. What is less often acknowledged is something more uncomfortable: we feel uneasy admitting that feelings drive our decisions, because of an implicit assumption we harbor that feelings serve to hinder, rather than enhance, the quality of our judgments. This assumption turns out to be largely mistaken.
Mind addiction is the tendency to ignore or underestimate the importance of gut instincts and feelings. It stems from two interrelated beliefs: first, that the most reliable way to solve any problem is through careful deliberation; and second, that feelings and gut instincts serve primarily to detract from, rather than add to, the quality of judgment and decision-making. One reason that thinking too much gets in the way is that thoughts distract us from the intelligence already present in our feelings. Our gut instincts and intuitions are not random or arbitrary — they are the repository of a great deal of useful information that served us well in our adaptive past. We also underestimate feelings because most of the goals we pursue tend to be quantitative in nature — losing a specific number of pounds, amassing a specific amount of money — and deliberation seems more naturally suited to quantifiable targets.
But deliberation can only go so far in generating ideas, and particularly in generating the inspiring ones. Our most inspiring ideas are almost always products of the subconscious. Without the participation of feelings and gut instincts, deliberation would be severely handicapped — because ultimately, the source of all ideas is the subconscious. This is why best ideas tend to arrive not when you are actively working on the problem but when you are thinking about something else entirely. The breakthrough comes in the shower, on the walk, just before sleep.
A second cluster of problems rooted in mind addiction involves a lack of self-awareness, which Richard Davidson identifies as one of the biggest happiness killers. Without a certain level of self-awareness, you are unlikely to recognize the ways you might be sabotaging your own happiness. Imagine that you are deeply status-conscious but have convinced yourself that you couldn’t care less about your standing relative to others. Or that you are insecure and needy in relationships but believe yourself to be the picture of secure attachment. The less self-aware you are, the more easily you sustain this kind of self-delusion. And the more thoroughly you sustain it, the less likely you are to understand why you feel the way you do. The more honest thing — and the more productive one — is to stop deluding yourself and look honestly at the ways you may be undermining your own happiness.
The decision of whether to go with gut feel or deliberation is ultimately more art than science. One context in which deliberation tends to serve better is when making a decision on behalf of a group, particularly when the desired outcome is functional — recruiting someone for an open position — rather than hedonic, like choosing a venue for a party. People tend to trust and approve of those who make group decisions through deliberation more than those who rely on feeling. Beyond that, the general principle holds: the gut often knows things the deliberating mind has not yet caught up with, and ignoring it consistently is its own form of error.
The seventh habit of the highly happy is mindfulness: the practice of observing experience rather than being swallowed by it. To understand why this matters, it helps to understand the concept of GATEs — Goals, Actions (or action-tendencies), Thoughts, and Emotions. Life involves being caught in a web of consequences that experiences, interacting with the GATEs of the mind, continuously weave. Getting shouted at by a boss triggers anger, which triggers thoughts of revenge, which trigger certain actions, which trigger further feelings, which trigger new thoughts, and so on. Most of the time, we are inside this web rather than observing it.
Mindfulness offers a different relationship to the web: stepping outside the GATE of your head and simply observing what is going on — being, in a useful image, a fly on the wall of your own mind. This practice of bare attention means observing experience as if it were happening to someone else, and when done well it actually brings you closer to what you are experiencing rather than further away. What the mind labels “anxiety” reduces, on inspection, to sensations: clammy palms, a slightly elevated heart rate, undulations in the stomach — nothing inherently threatening or even unpleasant. But those same sensations, when judged, categorized, and ruminated upon, take on an ominous quality and persist, because the mental commentary keeps the GATE web alive. By merely observing a negative feeling without adding commentary, you allow the GATE web to slow and the feelings to pass more quickly.
Research has documented the opposite condition — mind-wandering — in illuminating ways. A study found that regardless of whether an activity was pleasant or unpleasant, participants were consistently less happy when their minds were wandering than when they were present. You are always better off, in terms of happiness, being in the here and now than anywhere else. We all know that attitudes shape behavior — someone who believes life is a zero-sum game will be more likely to seek superiority. What is less commonly recognized is that behavior also shapes attitudes. Through a process of self-perception, when we observe ourselves behaving compassionately, we infer that our attitude must be consistent with that behavior and begin to genuinely feel more compassionate. Someone who regularly practices gratitude will likely become less prone to chasing superiority over time. Someone who practices kindness will likely become less needy and less avoidant. Mindfulness both enables and reinforces these shifts, because it creates the space between stimulus and response in which choice becomes possible.
Practicing mindfulness also lowers activation of the amygdala, the brain region associated with worrying and stress, while simultaneously strengthening areas associated with positivity. Those who have practiced mindfulness are far less prone to stress when required to give a speech or perform mental calculations in front of an audience. Mindfulness also improves workplace success by enhancing what is called response flexibility — the ability to pause before acting or reacting, and to respond to situations in a more conscious and considered way. Mindfulness is not about not thinking. It is about changing one’s relationship with thoughts — treating them as events to observe rather than commands to follow or truths to believe.
Three reminders help sustain a consistent mindfulness practice: approach each session as genuinely new, with no preconceptions about how it should go; hold the goal of bare attention as the only goal, and let all other goals fall away; and when you inevitably deviate from that goal, use a combination of self-compassion and the dispassionate pursuit of passion to course-correct without self-judgment. Most people find it easier to begin by observing a bodily sensation rather than the contents of the mind, and the breath turns out to be an ideal object. It is constantly changing — you are always breathing in, breathing out, or holding your breath — so it remains interesting, and yet it is not so much in flux as thoughts that it becomes impossible to track.
Chapter 8 — The Road Ahead
A bird’s-eye view of the preceding chapters reveals that once basic necessities are met, we need three things to be happy. The first is to feel that we are good at something — dancing, teaching, writing, problem-solving, whatever it might be. Call this the need for Mastery. We encountered it in several forms: as one of the reasons we seek superiority (to assess whether our skills are growing), as the engine that flow harnesses and feeds, and as the deeper reason why taking personal responsibility for happiness works — internal control is, at bottom, mastery over one’s own thoughts and feelings. The second need is for a sense of intimacy and connection with at least one other person. Call this the need to Belong. It is the need to Belong that, among those who didn’t receive sufficient or the right kind of love as children, makes some of us needy and others avoidant. It is the same need that makes us feel good when we are kind and generous, and that makes trust so foundational to happiness. The third need is for a sense of freedom — the sense that we, rather than others, are the authors of our own judgments and decisions. Call this the need for Autonomy. It figures in the observation that higher status fulfills it, in the psychological reactance that arises when we feel controlled, in the practice of internal control, and in mindfulness, which creates space between impulse and response.
These three needs — Mastery, Belonging, Autonomy — form what might be called the MBA of happiness. Their fulfillment is necessary, but it is not sufficient. What is also critical is using the right route. There are two routes to each. For Mastery: pursuing superiority or pursuing flow. For Belonging: desperation for love or the need to love and give. For Autonomy: the need for external control or the need for internal control. The first route in each pair is the deadly happiness sin; the second is the habit of the highly happy.
What distinguishes the two routes at a deeper level is orientation. The three sin routes stem from a scarcity orientation — a background belief that there is not enough of what matters, that the world’s goods are limited and must be competed for, that safety and significance require proving oneself superior to others. The three alternative routes stem from an abundance orientation. It is when you feel adequately taken care of that you can pursue an activity for the enjoyment you derive from it rather than for the extrinsic rewards it might yield. It is when you feel abundant — like a king or queen — that you feel genuinely capable of generosity rather than feeling that giving costs you something you can’t afford to lose. It is when you feel confident in your ability to handle whatever life brings that you can let go of the obsessive pursuit of external control and seek internal control instead. The recipe for a happy and fulfilling life ultimately reduces to weaning yourself away from scarcity and toward abundance.
The societal implications are not trivial. As Sonja Lyubomirsky notes in The How of Happiness, a compelling case can be made that the level of material comfort most people experience today is equivalent to how the top five percent of people lived a mere half century ago. With each passing year, more people know from direct personal experience — not as an abstract principle — that greater wealth does not automatically translate into greater happiness. A natural consequence is a genuine and growing interest in understanding what actually determines fulfillment. Cultural inertia remains a powerful counterforce: people think and act in ways antithetical to a happy life partly because that’s how they were raised, and partly because of the evaluability problem — we accord greater importance to goals that are easy to measure, even when those goals matter less. Money is measurable; harmony is not. Status is rankable; authentic connection is not. The scoreboards we use tend to track the wrong things.
The most practical strategy for sustaining progress is to respond, on a daily basis, to a set of questions posed by what the executive coach Marshall Goldsmith calls a peer coach — someone who will check in with you regularly enough to create accountability. The questions do not require long answers; they require honest ones. Did you do your best to prioritize happiness without pursuing it? To be self-compassionate rather than self-pitying when you failed? To be grateful for the good things that came your way? To pursue flow and steer toward something meaningful rather than scrambling for superiority? To avoid being needy or avoidant? To be a giver rather than a taker? To practice kindness and generosity in the otherish rather than the selfless mode? To avoid being overly controlling of others or of outcomes? To take personal responsibility for your own happiness? To eat well, move more, and sleep enough? To exercise smart trust? To be forgiving of others? To look for the positive consequences even in negative events? To practice mindfulness? These questions are not a ladder to climb once and put down. They are a daily compass — one that, used honestly and persistently, points toward the kind of life that actually delivers what most people say they want most.