Gus Godsey is the happiest person in America, according to an article USA Weekend magazine published in 2003. Now, I wouldn’t take this claim too seriously, because the USA Weekend editors eliminated half the population right off the bat, namely, women. “We knew it had to be a guy,” they wrote. “Even though women have been shown to have higher emotional highs, they also have lower lows. Men maintain a more consistent blend of happiness.” This is an odd statement, because research has shown that women are actually happier than men on average (though the gap has narrowed in recent years).¹

For another thing, the magazine limited its search to people in the city of Virginia Beach, Virginia, because this city had placed first in lists of the best places to live in America. Although that made the search a lot easier—the editors didn’t have to look beyond the borders of that resort city—I wouldn’t be so quick to eliminate people living in Cleveland, Dubuque, Spokane, or any other part of America, because research shows that where we live does not influence our happiness as much as we think it does.

But even though Gus may not be the happiest person in America, there is no doubt that he is a very happy guy. The USA Weekend editors sent him to a website to take four standardized tests designed to measure happiness and life satisfaction, and Gus aced them all. As the author of the USA Weekend article put it, “He comes off as 10 gallons of happiness in a 5-gallon bag.” What makes Gus so happy? What are the ingredients of happiness, anyway, and how did Gus get so many of them?²

Well, you might think, Gus must be fabulously wealthy and able to get whatever he wants without lifting a finger (other than to retrieve his credit card from his wallet). He probably owns houses all over the world, zips around in a private Learjet, orders whatever he wants from a four-star private chef, and gets front-row seats at all the best concerts and plays. Who wouldn’t be happy with all these riches?

Lots of people, it turns out. As we will see, money is not the primary cause of happiness, as long as we have enough to meet our basic needs. Indeed, Gus Godsey is not some Bill Gates–like billionaire, but rather a stockbroker who lives a pretty ordinary life, by the standards of middle-class America. At the time he won the “happiest person” title, he didn’t own a McMansion but lived in a twenty-three-hundred-square-foot home. He was a forty-five-year-old married guy with two kids who went to work every day, rooted for the Green Bay Packers, and was fond of Sears Craftsman tools. No Learjet, no private chef. So what makes him so happy? Does he know some secret that you and I could learn, which would move us closer to him on the happiness scale?

Although we do not have complete control over the things that make us happy, our well-being is intimately tied up with the way in which we think about ourselves and our place in the world—the personal interpretations that are the very subject of this book. In this chapter, we will see that, using the story-editing approach, we can change our views in ways that will make us happier—but not necessarily in the ways that we might think. In fact, there is an awful lot of misinformation out there about how to live a happier and more fulfilling life, much of it propagated by the self-help industry. Let’s begin by dispelling some of those myths.

HOPE FOR SALE: THE SELF-HELP INDUSTRY

Visit the self-help section in your local bookstore and you will see shelves of books that promise to improve your life in any number of ways. You can read about a breakthrough program to end negative behavior and feel great again, the secrets to daily joy and lasting fulfillment, five simple steps to emotional healing, ways of overcoming self-defeating behaviors, how to break the emotional bad habits that make you miserable, and how to stop worry and anxiety from ruining your relationships. And let’s not forget the bestselling books by Dr. Phil and Tony Robbins, as well as Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life, Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret.

These books sell and sell fast, to the tune of more than $700 million in sales in 2005. When other forms of self-help are added to the mix, such as infomercials, seminars, and personal coaches, the total amount spent on self-improvement in the United States reached a staggering $9.6 billion in 2006.³

The speed with which self-help books fly off the shelves would seem to suggest that they really do improve our lives. But I have a wise friend who points out that whenever there are multiple solutions to one problem we can be pretty sure that none of them works. (She developed this theory when her dog kept getting sprayed by skunks: each person she consulted offered a different remedy for getting rid of the odor, none of which worked.) Similarly, the very fact that there are so many self-help books on the market might be a sign that none of them is effective. After all, if one of them really did unlock the secret to everlasting happiness, it would corner the market and crowd out all the others. But instead, there is what is known in the self-help industry as the eighteen-month rule, which is that the person most likely to buy a self-help book is someone who bought one eighteen months earlier.⁴

Steve Salerno, in his book Sham: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, argues that there are huge costs associated with the public acceptance of what he calls SHAM, which stands for the Self-Help and Actualization Movement. Buying into the claims self-help books make, he argues, can lead to blaming oneself for failure and avoiding treatments that actually do work. Further, very little of the advice offered in self-help books has been tested scientifically, despite the fact that there are ways to do so—and, indeed, there have been many good scientific studies on how to become happier. But most self-help authors are either unaware of this research or opt not to discuss it. Instead, they offer mantras that are like the twenty-first-century version of patent medicines. Similar to their nineteenth-century counterparts, whose main ingredient was often alcohol or cocaine, these “remedies” make people feel good but don’t cure what ails them.

What’s the harm in that, you might ask, as long as people know what they are getting? Maybe a better analogy is that reading a self-help book is like buying a lottery ticket: for a small investment, we get hope in return; the dream that all our problems will soon be solved without any real expectation that they will be. But there may be real harm in self-help books. As an example, let’s take a look at one of the most popular self-help publications of all time, Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret. The Secret was distributed as both a film and a companion book, released in 2006. Both have been phenomenally successful. The DVD has sold more than two million copies and the book more than four million copies.

What is the secret, anyway? It turns out that it’s pretty simple: it’s the “law of attraction,” which says that thinking about something makes it more likely to happen to you. Once you understand this basic “law of the universe,” there are three simple steps to getting whatever you want: first, think about it—focus on the positive and not the negative. If you are trying to shed a few pounds, for example, don’t think about the fact that you are too heavy; those negative thoughts will make you heavier. Think instead about slipping on a pair of your favorite jeans and buttoning them over a perfectly flat stomach—that’s a positive thought that will make you thinner. The second step is to believe in what you want and have faith that it will soon be yours. Again, no negative thoughts allowed—those jeans will fit perfectly very soon. The third step is to receive the idea of having what you want, feeling as you will once you get it. Imagine what it will be like to wear those jeans and adopt those feelings now.

All these steps can be boiled down to the power of positive thinking, which has been touted in various forms for many years, most famously (pre-Secret, anyway) by Norman Vincent Peale in his 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for more than three years and has sold more than five million copies. Peale offered ten lessons for building one’s confidence, many of which sound a lot like those found in The Secret, such as “Formulate and stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding… Your mind will seek to develop this picture,” and “Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought to cancel it out.”⁵

As we will see shortly, scientific research shows that some forms of positive thinking are indeed beneficial. But again, self-help books typically ignore this research and embed their messages in questionable ideologies. In Rhonda Byrne’s case, the belief system is a New Age philosophy that is unabashedly evocative of The Da Vinci Code. The “secret” has been known by a select few throughout history, Byrne informs us, including the Babylonians, Plato, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Abraham Lincoln, and Albert Einstein, but has been hidden from the rest of us until she uncovered it by searching the Internet.

How can positive thoughts have such power? The Secret doesn’t disappoint—it provides an explanation to back up its amazing claims. It turns out that thoughts have frequencies that are magnetic, attracting things that are on the same frequency. What’s more, human beings have incredible transmitting power: “The frequency you transmit reaches beyond cities, beyond countries, beyond the world. It reverberates throughout the entire universe.” Once the object of our desire receives these thought frequencies, it moves closer to us, because these thoughts are magnetic.

I don’t mean to nitpick, but there are a few questions that come to mind about this scientific explanation of the law of attraction. How, exactly, does sending out thought frequencies make something materialize in our lives? Let’s say I have my heart set on a new wide-screen TV that is sitting in the showroom of my local electronics dealer. I ask the universe for the TV, believe that I will get it, and receive positive thoughts and feelings about it. My positive thought frequencies zoom out of my head and into the showroom, and because they are magnetic, the TV moves closer to me. But wait a minute—does it actually inch closer each day? Won’t the store personnel be a little suspicious when they arrive in the morning and find that the TV has moved to the loading dock? And how exactly does the TV get into my living room? Does it swoop in through the chimney like Santa delivering presents on Christmas Eve? Aren’t there a few unresolved questions here?

I know, I know, I’m being too literal about thought frequencies. They’re not magnetic in a physical sense, I gather, but rather in some mysterious, cosmic way that makes things come true, much like rubbing Aladdin’s lamp makes a genie come out and grant our wishes. If I focus my positive thoughts on the TV, maybe I’ll wake up to find that I won it in a raffle or got a windfall of cash that would allow me to buy it. Exactly how this happens isn’t clear, but that’s why it’s a secret, you numbskull—the ways of the universe are mysterious.

But what if I’m not the only one who wants that particular television? Suppose that Joe across town has his heart set on the very same model—which happens to be the last one in stock. Joe, too, has read The Secret and starts thinking positive thoughts. Do our thought frequencies compete with each other? If Joe thinks more positive thoughts than I, does the TV inch closer to his house, only to creep back when I turn up the volume on my positive thoughts? Here I go getting too literal again—though one does wonder, with the phenomenal success of The Secret, how we are all going to get what we want. Only one of us can have that particular TV or the last brownie on the plate, and I can only imagine how cluttered the cosmic airwaves are getting with all those positive thoughts colliding with one another.

But there are other problems with The Secret besides its questionable science. One is the blame it confers on people who don’t succeed in attracting what they want. If you don’t get the TV or that last brownie, if you are poor, or if, God forbid, you contract a serious illness—well, it’s your own damn fault. The book makes no bones about this. Dr. Joe Vitale, one of the experts quoted in The Secret, says, “Now I know at first blush that’s going to be something that you hate to hear. You’re going to immediately say, ‘I didn’t attract the car accident. I didn’t attract this particular client who gives me a hard time. I didn’t particularly attract the debt.’ And I’m here to be a little bit in your face and to say, yes you did attract it.” You did so, you see, because you were thinking negative thoughts.

In March of 2007, Saturday Night Live broadcasted a biting parody of the atrocious finger-pointing inherent in The Secret. Rhonda Byrne (played by Amy Poehler) and Oprah Winfrey (played by Maya Rudolph) visit Darfur, the site of some of the worst poverty and violence in the world. (The real Oprah was a fan of The Secret; she had Byrne on her show twice, after which sales of the book skyrocketed.) On the SNL skit, Oprah and Byrne pooh-pooh a Darfurian man’s lament about starvation in his country, chastising him for having negative thoughts. As scathing as this skit was, it was satire: The Secret doesn’t really mean to blame children for their own poverty and starvation, does it? Well, apparently, it does. In March of 2007, Bob Proctor, one of the “experts” most quoted by Rhonda Byrne, was interviewed by Cynthia McFadden on the TV show Nightline:

MCFADDEN: Children in Darfur are starving to death.

PROCTOR: Yeah.

MCFADDEN: Ha… have they attracted that starvation to themselves?

PROCTOR: I… I… I think the country probably has.

Another problem with The Secret is that it can steer people away from effective solutions to their problems by suggesting that good health, love, and riches are theirs for the asking if they just think about them. Rhonda Byrne reports that she cured herself of farsightedness in three days by imagining that she had perfect eyesight—to the point where she no longer needs reading glasses. Even more startlingly, in the book, a woman claims that she cured herself of breast cancer in three months, without medical treatment, by believing that she was healed. “Illness cannot exist in a body that has harmonious thoughts,” Byrne explains, and “nothing is incurable.”⁶

Do people really take The Secret that seriously? Unfortunately, some do. A friend of mine who teaches at a highly regarded liberal arts college reports that one of her students arrived at her office, gave her a DVD of The Secret, and told her that she needed to watch it to improve her life. (One suspects that simply thinking positively hadn’t resulted in good grades for the student, and that he figured he might still get an A if he could turn his professor on to The Secret so that their thought frequencies would be aligned.)

There have been reports of people seeking therapy after failing in the dream world of The Secret and of people who go on spending sprees for things they can’t afford in the belief that thinking positive thoughts will lead to windfalls of cash. And lest you think these are fanatics who have misunderstood the message, make a quick visit to The Secret’s website (http://thesecret.tv/). Click on “Gifts for You” and scroll down to “The Bank of the Universe,” where you can download a “universal check” by following these instructions: “Print out the check, then fill in your name and the amount you wish to receive, in the currency of your choice.” Doing so, it seems, will attract that amount of money to you. Go ahead and fill it out! If a Brink’s truck arrives at your door tomorrow with a bag full of cash (in the currency of your choice), you can thank me for the tip.⁷

But unfortunately the Brink’s truck isn’t likely to show up, no matter how many checks you fill out from the Universal Bank (Un)Limited. Don’t waste your money on self-help books such as The Secret, I suggest, unless they are based on actual scientific research of the sort described in the remainder of this chapter. Let’s begin with a look at research on what it is that makes us happy in the first place.

WHAT REALLY MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY?

Earlier we considered the question of whether Gus Godsey, the “happiest person in America,” may have gotten that way by accumulating wealth. Indeed, the idea that material riches make us happy has been around for a long time. In fact, the original definition of the word “happiness,” traced back to 1530 by The Oxford English Dictionary, was “good fortune or luck in life,” which reflected the belief that happiness comes from external circumstances largely outside of a person’s control. Psychologist Shigehiro Oishi, who has examined the historical definitions of happiness, notes that it was not until the 1961 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary that the definition of happiness as “good fortune; good luck; prosperity” was deemed archaic. Rather than uncontrollable things that happen to people, happiness came to mean a pleasant internal state or the satisfaction of one’s desires. Oishi suggests that because life became more controllable over time, happiness was no longer viewed as the result of whims of fortune but something that people could strive for and achieve.⁸

This isn’t to say that happiness is completely under our control. In fact, a sizable portion of our happiness is determined by our genetic makeup, which is good news for those of us who inherited lots of “happy” genes and bad news for those of us who did not. I’m sure this doesn’t come as a big surprise; we all know people who have a naturally sunny disposition and others who are so grumpy that they can barely crack a smile even under the happiest of circumstances. Another thing that is obviously hard to change is the economic and political environment in which we live, such as whether we happen to be born into an impoverished family in a country plagued by human rights abuses, poverty, violence, and political instability (think of Zimbabwe) or into a comfortable family in a politically stable country such as the United States. Research shows that people living in Zimbabwe, for example, are among the unhappiest in the world. Similarly, people in several of the former Soviet-bloc countries report low levels of happiness. An American journalist, during a visit to Prague in 2009, gave this explanation of why Czech citizens seem so dour:

On the tram and the metro no one was listening to music, or reading, or smiling. Almost everyone was staring, downcast, at a spot on the floor. Richard [the tour director] explained that this was a hangover from decades of Soviet rule. When tourists started flocking to the city in the ’90s, they noticed that no one in Prague laughed. It was the result of decades of conditioning. “If you stood out, if you drew attention to yourself, you were suspect. And you never knew who was looking, so people just retreated.”⁹

To be fair, Czech citizens report greater levels of happiness on international surveys than do the citizens of several other former Soviet-controlled countries, such as Armenia, Moldova, Belarus, and Ukraine. But they report a much lower level of happiness than do the residents of countries such as Denmark, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and the United States.¹⁰

In addition to political and economic conditions, there are other life circumstances that are not completely under our control but exert a major influence on our happiness. Good health and enough money to meet our basic needs are obvious examples. Another is being blessed with loving family and friends. In fact, happiness researchers will tell you that the number one predictor of how happy people are is the quality of their social relationships. We are an incredibly social species, and frequent contact with friends and family is vital to our well-being. Health, money, and love are controllable to some degree, of course, but if they were completely under our control no one would die of cancer, poverty would disappear, and there would be no more lonely-hearts clubs.

Happiness, then, is due in part to the hand we are dealt, in terms of our genes and life circumstances. Some happiness researchers have tried to estimate the extent to which human happiness is due to these uncontrollable factors, arguing, for example, that 50 percent of happiness is genetic and 10 percent is due to life circumstances. I don’t think that such numbers mean very much, because the effects of our genes are not independent of the effects of our environment—the two interact in complex ways. As the emerging field of epigenetics shows, environmental conditions can influence the activation and expression of certain genes and not others. Maybe, for example, “curmudgeon” genes are especially likely to be activated when people are under severe stress, but lay dormant otherwise. Further, the nature of our life circumstances—whether extreme or moderate—surely influences how much impact those circumstances have. I doubt that people living in Zimbabwe would agree that their life circumstances account for only 10 percent of their happiness.

ROOM TO MANEUVER

But surely we need more than good genes and comfortable living conditions in order to be happy. If that were all there was to it, we wouldn’t be much different from our mammalian cousins, including pigs, who are content when they have room to forage, ample food, and a nice mud bath to wallow in when the weather turns warm. Well, one could argue, maybe we aren’t that different from pigs; it’s just that we have more sophisticated needs than a good mud bath (unless it’s the kind found at an expensive spa). Give me the human version of comfortable living conditions, this argument goes, such as a McMansion, fancy cars to fill its three-car garage, and a wide-screen TV, and I’ll be as happy as that pig. But, as we saw with Gus Godsey, this argument is flawed. As long as we have enough resources to meet our basic needs, adding Lexuses and McMansions to the mix won’t make us all that much happier in the long run. In the final analysis, it is not material goods that make people happy.

That’s because of a big difference between us and pigs: we have a huge brain, with a well-developed prefrontal cortex, with which we can ponder our life circumstances and our place in the world. We need to find meaning in our lives—to acquire what Aristotle called eudaimonia, a life well-lived with a sense of purpose and virtue. How do we define “a life well-lived” and “virtue”? This question has occupied philosophers for centuries and I certainly won’t answer it here. My point is simply that happiness is at least in part a function of how we think about ourselves and our place in the world. It’s not just about things; it’s about our personal take on our lives.

But let me be very clear about what I don’t mean. Happiness doesn’t exist solely inside of our heads, disconnected from reality. I would never argue that a resident of Zimbabwe should just develop a better interpretation of his or her lot in order to be happy (sounds like another Saturday Night Live skit in the making). Nor would I argue that we should focus only on our personal viewpoints at the expense of changing our behavior. If I were to give one piece of advice for how to be happier, it would be to carve out more time to spend with friends and loved ones, because, as we’ve seen, the best predictor of happiness is the quality of our social relationships.

But happiness is partly in our heads—some ways of viewing the world make us happier than others, even if our objective circumstances remain the same. There are plenty of middle-aged stockbrokers in America but only one Gus Godsey—his outlook on life makes him happier than others. And further, some kinds of perspectives make people act in ways that bring them happiness—by drawing them closer to other people, for example.

What kinds of perspectives make us happy? Research reveals three key ingredients: meaning, hope, and purpose. First, it helps to have answers to the most basic questions about human existence and our place in the world, in a way that allows us to make sense of why bad things sometimes occur. Second, it helps to be optimistic—not because positive thoughts magically attract things to us, but because optimistic people cope better with adversity. Third, it helps to view ourselves as strong protagonists who set our own goals and make progress toward them; in other words, to have a sense of purpose. The good news is that there are relatively simple story-editing exercises any of us can do to shape our views in these directions.

FINDING MEANING

As we’ve seen, one of the main differences between us and the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have a large brain with which we can construct elaborate theories and explanations about what is happening in the world and why. This gives us a huge advantage—after all, we are the ones who domesticated pigs and now use them as a food source, rather than the other way around. But our ability to think and ponder and reflect comes with a heavy price tag, namely, awareness of our own mortality. We are the only species (as far as we know) aware of what is ultimately in store for us. We can gaze into the dark sky on a clear night and think about how small and insignificant we are, how fleeting is our time on earth, and how we are nothing more than tiny temporary specks in an endless universe. Getting a little nervous? It is so unsettling to think such thoughts that we have developed narratives that provide comforting answers. These are core narratives—worldviews that explain creation, the purpose of life, and what happens after we die, thereby helping us deal with the terror of gazing into the sky and seeing ourselves as insignificant specks.¹¹

Organized religions are important sources of core narratives. Virtually all faiths explain how we came to be, how we ought to live, and what happens to us after we die. Many studies show that religious people are happier than nonreligious people. To get these benefits, though, you can’t just go down to your local church, synagogue, or mosque and fill out a membership card. Religious people are happier only if they truly believe and those beliefs are shared by their loved ones. If people have fragmented religious beliefs that are not well integrated into their overall lives, and if these beliefs are not supported by their loved ones, they are no happier than anyone else. Research also shows that people who believe in the devil and hell are less happy than people who do not. Apparently, worrying that we might end up at Satan’s side in everlasting flames confers less happiness than believing that—no worries!—we are guaranteed a spot in the eternal Eden.¹²

Core narratives don’t have to be religious in nature. “Whatever gets you through the night,” as John Lennon sang, can reduce existential terror, as long as it is a coherent set of beliefs that explains life’s mysteries. Being a cat person might even work, as in the Sam Gross cartoon opposite.¹³ The guru in that cartoon is surely happier than the one in a cartoon by Lee Lorenz that depicts a guru sitting on a mountaintop wearing a T-shirt that says, “Life is a bitch, then you die.” We all need core narratives to make sense of life’s most basic questions.

To a large extent, we acquire core narratives from our culture and parents and religions. We are provided with a ready-made belief system about the major questions in life, and for many of us, this is perfectly fine. Perhaps we went to church with our parents, have continued with that religion, and are happy with the spiritual guidance it provides. Other people, however, question their core narratives at some point in their lives, coming to believe that the religion they were brought up with does not provide all the answers or that the prevailing cultural view about “the good life” is not for them. If they are lucky, they are able to find a new set of core beliefs that answer life’s most basic questions.

What about those of us who struggle with our basic beliefs? Some of us have lost faith in the core beliefs of our childhoods and haven’t found a compelling new narrative. I’m afraid that there is no easy fix here; we can’t wave a magic wand and suddenly believe in Christianity or Judaism or, for that matter, the wonder of cats. Most of us have at least some core beliefs, however, whether they are our political views, our desire for social change, or a passion for sports (in the words of Annie Savoy, from the movie Bull Durham, “I believe in the Church of Baseball”). In order to develop and validate those beliefs, one thing we can do is to hang out with like-minded individuals. I say this with some reluctance, because seeking out only people who share our beliefs, and avoiding those who do not, is not a good way to stretch one’s mind and is likely to contribute to the polarization of viewpoints that is so endemic today. But the fact is that interacting with people who share our core beliefs is a way to strengthen and validate those beliefs.

Further, other people are a source of comfort when our most basic core beliefs are challenged, such as when we are reminded of our own mortality. When Americans first heard about the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, their first impulse, in many cases, was to seek out loved ones. Even strangers can reduce our anxiety. A friend told me a story about a time when she was on a commercial airplane that developed engine trouble. The pilot announced that he would have to make an emergency landing and it was far from certain that the plane could land safely. As the plane lurched and yawed on its approach, an older man seated next to my friend asked if she would mind if they held hands. She had not spoken previously with the man, but readily agreed to his request, and they squeezed their hands tightly together as the plane bounced on the runway and finally skidded safely to a stop. My friend reports that she received great comfort from that small gesture; it was reassuring to face the abyss hand in hand with someone—even a complete stranger—rather than alone.¹⁴

Understanding Life’s Setbacks

It is thus critical to have core narratives about the basic questions of life. But let’s say that we have that covered—we have a coherent narrative that keeps existential terror at bay and loved ones who share those views. That’s great, but we are still going to experience the spills and tumbles, hassles and setbacks that plague everyone from time to time. The better we can understand and explain negative events such as relationship breakups, business failures, or medical problems, the faster we will recover from them. Obviously, some kinds of explanations make us feel better than others; as we will see shortly, optimists put more of a positive spin on negative outcomes than do pessimists, enabling them to cope better and bounce back more quickly. But achieving some understanding of a negative event is preferable to having no understanding at all. In fact, we feel worst when we are in a state of uncertainty, either about why something terrible has happened to us or about the likelihood that a negative event will occur.

Suppose, for example, that you are in your twenties and that one of your parents died of Huntington’s disease, which causes nerve degeneration in the brain and slowly kills people in middle age (it is the disease that killed the singer Woody Guthrie). The disease is genetically transmitted, and if one of your parents had it, you have a 50 percent chance of getting it yourself. But because the symptoms of the disease generally don’t appear until people are in their thirties or forties, you must endure many years of living in uncertainty. Recently, however, a genetic test was developed that can, in most cases, identify whether you have inherited the gene that will trigger the disease. You can take the test and find out the good news—you didn’t inherit the gene—or the really bad news—you have the gene and, because there is no cure for Huntington’s, you will die of the disease in middle age. Would you take the test? Maybe it would be best to leave well enough alone and let nature take its course.

According to at least one study, that would be the wrong decision. Researchers followed a sample of young adults who had a 50 percent chance of getting Huntington’s disease and who agreed to take the genetic test. The participants completed measures of depression and psychological well-being before they knew the results of the genetic test, right after they got the results, six months later, and one year later. Those who got the bad news were, of course, initially devastated, reporting considerably more distress and depression than did those who got the good news. At the six-month and one-year points, however, the two groups were indistinguishable—those who knew that they would die at a relatively young age were no more depressed, and expressed just as much well-being, as did those who knew that they were disease-free. The participants who learned they had the gene received the worst news one can get, and yet within six months they were as happy as anyone else.

Even more striking were the results of a third group—those for whom the test was inconclusive or who had chosen not to take the test. At the beginning of the study, before any genetic testing had begun, this group was as happy and well-adjusted as the others. But as time went by, this group did the worst: at the one-year mark, they exhibited significantly more depression, and lower well-being, than those in the other two groups—including the ones who had found out that they had inherited the Huntington gene. In other words, people who were 100 percent sure that they would get the disease and die prematurely were happier and less depressed than people who were 50 percent sure that they were healthy and disease-free.

This study illustrates, I think, how adept people are at making sense of even the worst news. Those who learned that they had inherited the Huntington’s gene found a way to come to terms with it, by incorporating this news into their narratives and finding some meaning in it. Perhaps they relied on their religious beliefs about God’s will, or maybe they developed a view of themselves as people whose time would be short but who would live life to the fullest. Those who remained uncertain about their health status could not undergo this restorative process of narrative change, because there was always the possibility that they didn’t have the gene. In other words, the uncertain person doesn’t know what to make sense of, whereas the certain one can begin the process of meaning-making and understanding and explanation for even the bleakest of outcomes. And by so doing, that person adapts and recovers—because once we reach an understanding of what something means and why it occurred, we dwell on it less and its impact wanes.¹⁵

Thus, making sense of negative outcomes is the first step to recovering from them, a principle that has been demonstrated in many areas of life. Studies of bereavement, for example, find that people who recover the quickest from the death of a loved one are those who can find some meaning in their loss (religious beliefs can be of help here). Many forms of psychotherapy involve giving clients a framework within which to understand their problems and experiences, such as childhood traumas. And by understanding them, they dwell on them less, as noted by a character in Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love: “People often remark on how quickly the extraordinary becomes commonplace… We are highly adaptive creatures. The predictable becomes, by definition, background, leaving the attention uncluttered, the better to deal with the random or unexpected.”¹⁶

What if we haven’t succeeded in making a traumatic event seem understandable and predictable? Are there story-editing approaches that we can use in our everyday lives to hasten this process? Indeed there are, and we have already encountered one of them in chapter 1: the Pennebaker writing technique, in which people wait until they have some distance from a problem, then write about it for at least fifteen minutes on each of three or four consecutive days. As we saw, this is a simple yet powerful way of making sense of confusing, upsetting episodes in our lives, giving us some closure and allowing us to move on.

Subsequent research has found that the writing exercise works best when two conditions are met: people gain some distance from the event, so that thinking about it doesn’t overwhelm them, and they analyze why the event occurred. To understand this, take a minute to think of a time from your past when you felt a great deal of anger and hostility toward someone. Maybe it was an ex-lover who cheated on you, or the boss from hell who hovered over your desk and made every work day miserable. If you are like most people, when you think about episodes like these you immerse yourself in them as if they were happening again. You see the veins bulge on your boss’s neck when he yells at you for no reason and recall in excruciating detail what it was like when he called you into his office and tore up the report you had spent weeks preparing. How are you feeling as you relive the episode? Research shows that this “immersion” strategy causes people to re-experience negative emotions and engage in repetitive, circular rumination about the event, and triggers unhealthy cardiovascular reactions, including an increase in blood pressure. Basically, people relive the event without making any further sense of it than they did before, and feel terrible as a result.

But suppose you adopt another approach. Instead of immersing yourself in the original experience, you take a step back and watch it unfold from the perspective of a neutral observer. Then you focus on why you feel the way you do, rather than on the feelings themselves. Here is an excerpt from the instructions people are given in research studies testing this step-back-and-ask-why approach (the full instructions are at the end of this chapter): “Go back to the time and place of the experience you just recalled and see the scene in your mind’s eye. Now take a few steps back. Move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event… As you continue to watch the situation unfold to your distant self, try to understand his/her feelings. Why did he (she) have those feelings?”

Several studies have tested the effectiveness of this step-back-and-ask-why strategy by using the experimental methods described in chapter 2. In one study, for example, participants were asked to think of a time they felt “overwhelming anger and hostility” toward someone, just as I asked you to do a moment ago. Participants were then randomly assigned to either immerse themselves in the experience or to adopt the distancing approach. Further, half of the participants in each of these groups were asked to focus on the feelings they experienced at the time, and half were asked to think about the reasons behind their feelings. There were thus four experimental groups: (1) those who immersed and focused on feelings, (2) those who immersed and thought about reasons, (3) those who distanced themselves and focused on feelings, and (4) those who distanced themselves and thought about reasons.

As it happened, only one of these groups benefited from the writing exercise: those who distanced themselves and thought about reasons. Only these participants were able to adopt a dispassionate approach whereby they reframed the event and found new meaning in it (e.g., “I see now that my boss’s anger had more to do with his impending divorce than with anything about me, and now that I think about it, I have to admit that I could have done a better job on that report”). And, by reconstruing the event, participants in this group experienced fewer negative emotions, engaged in less repetitive rumination, and maintained a steady blood pressure. As simple as this sounds, it is an easy lesson to forget, because for most of us, our natural inclination is to immerse ourselves in past grievances and upsetting events, engaging in a “he said, she said” internal dialogue that makes us feel bad all over again. The next time you think about an upsetting event from your past, remember to take a step back and analyze it from a distance, and to think dispassionately about why it occurred. In short, don’t recount the event, take a step back and reconstrue and explain it.¹⁷

George Bailey and the Pleasures of Uncertainty

What about when we recall pleasant events? Should we adopt the same distancing strategy, trying our best to understand why something good happened to us? There is a clear advantage to doing so; after all, by understanding why the attractive stranger smiled at us at the party, or why our boss liked our report, we are in a better position to make these events happen again. But herein lies a paradox—just as understanding and explaining negative events blunts their impact, so does understanding and explaining positive events. That is, as we have seen, reducing uncertainty about negative events, and understanding them as best we can, is a good way to bounce back from these events. But the same holds for the pleasures of life: if we reduce uncertainty about them, and understand them too well, we rob these events of the pleasure they bring us. My colleagues and I call this phenomenon the pleasure of uncertainty to convey the idea that a little mystery about positive events prolongs the pleasure we get from them.

In one study, for example, a research assistant approached a student studying alone in the library and gave him or her a card with a dollar coin attached to it. “Have a nice day,” the assistant said, and walked away. Imagine you were the recipient of this unexpected gift. You would likely be perplexed as to why a stranger had just given you a dollar, and would search the card for an explanation. The text on the card wasn’t much help: it said, “The Smile Society, a Student/Community Secular Alliance,” and “We Like to Promote Random Acts of Kindness.” That gives you a clue as to who gave you a dollar—it wasn’t some religious cult trying to convert you—but it is still pretty perplexing. We suspected that this element of mystery would keep people’s attention on the gift and prolong the pleasure they got from it. This seemed to be the case: when another research assistant approached the students and asked them to complete a short survey, they indicated that they were in a good mood—more so than people in a control condition who hadn’t received a gift.

But how did we know that it was the mystery about the card that prolonged people’s pleasure? We included another condition in which we gave people the same gift but tried to reduce the mystery surrounding it. We did so with a subtle alteration of the text, namely, the addition of questions to which the aforementioned phrases seemed like logical answers. For example, we inserted the question, “Who Are We?” which was answered with the same text as the other participants got: “The Smile Society, a Student/Community Secular Alliance.” We also inserted the question, “Why do we do this?” to which the text “We Like to Promote Random Acts of Kindness” provided the answer. In other words, participants in this group got the same information as did participants in the first group, except that it was framed in a question-and-answer format that, we suspected, would give people the impression that they understood why a stranger had given them a dollar. We also assumed that this understanding would make people dwell on the event less—they would be more likely to return to their studying instead of thinking about the event, which would shorten the pleasure they got from the gift. Just as we thought, people in this question-and-answer condition reported a less positive mood when approached by the research assistant with the survey than did people who got the card with the answers but not the questions. (Other students who saw the cards confirmed our hunch that the ones with the questions and answers appeared to make more sense and seemed less mysterious.)¹⁸

In short, there seems to be a pleasure paradox: people want to understand the good things in life so that they can experience them again, but by so doing they reduce the pleasure they get from these events. Furthermore, the pleasure paradox helps explain why a popular way of increasing happiness—keeping gratitude journals, in which people write about the things in their lives for which they are thankful—does not always work. Although it seems like taking time to stop and smell the flowers in this manner would increase people’s well-being, studies that have examined this technique have yielded mixed results. A few studies have found that keeping gratitude journals makes people happier, but many others have found that doing so has no impact on people’s happiness. The reason gratitude journals can be ineffective, I think, is that people typically spend a lot of time thinking about the good things that have happened to them, and thus by the time they sit down to write about these events they have already achieved an understanding of them and robbed them of some of their mystery.

The first time I had an article accepted for publication in a professional journal, for example, I was thrilled. “Maybe I really can make it as a research psychologist,” I thought, and I basked in the good news for days. But that first publication was followed by others, and in retrospect it doesn’t seem all that significant in the grand scheme of things. I am thankful when I think about the article (which I haven’t done in some time before writing about it now), but stopping and smelling that particular rose doesn’t do much for my current mood, to be honest. In McEwan’s words, “the extraordinary becomes commonplace.”

Fortunately, there is a way around this problem. Instead of writing about something you are grateful for, like a career breakthrough, try writing about all the ways that that good thing might not have occurred. My colleagues and I call this the George Bailey technique: you may recall that, in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel named Clarence Odbody shows George what the world would have been like if he had never been born. Rather than asking George to count his blessings, Clarence allows him to see a world in which those blessings never came about. Similarly, in our research we ask people to mentally subtract from their lives something they cherish. In one study, for example, happily married participants imagined what life would be like if they had never met their spouses, had never begun dating them after they met, and had not ended up together after starting to date. Other participants were randomly assigned to a condition in which they wrote about how they did in fact meet their partners, began dating, and ended up together.

Before I tell you the results of this study, think about which writing exercise you would rather do: would you prefer to spend time thinking about all the ways you might not have ended up with your partner, or to tell the story of how you did end up with him or her? If you are like our participants, you would overwhelmingly prefer the latter task and predict that it would make you happier. After all, who wants to dwell on the fact that they easily could have missed the party at which they met their future husband or wife? In fact, however, the participants randomly assigned to do just that—those in the George Bailey condition—reported greater happiness with their relationship than did people randomly assigned to tell the story of how they had met their spouses. The latter participants had undoubtedly told that story countless times, and telling it again had little impact. But imagining how one of the most important things in their lives might not have happened made it seem surprising and special again, and maybe a little mysterious—the very conditions that prolong the pleasure we get from the good things in life.¹⁹

To recap, a critical element to our well-being is how well we understand what happens to us and why. But so far we haven’t said much about the way in which we understand positive and negative events, which is surely important. Consider the people who took the genetic test and found out that they had the Huntington’s gene. The one who puts a positive spin on this, deciding to live life to its fullest and do all the things she always wanted to do, will be happier than the one who wallows in self-pity and decides that she must have done something to deserve this cruel fate. Similarly, as we saw in chapter 1, a student who does poorly on a test is better off explaining this as a sign that she needs to buckle down and work harder than she is assuming that she doesn’t have what it takes to succeed in college. True, the worst state to be in is uncertainty about the nature of a negative event or why it occurred. But it is also true that some ways of understanding and explaining negative events are better than others, particularly if one can find a silver lining in the cloud of bad news.

HOPE: THE REAL POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING

Let’s return to the student who did poorly on a test. Research shows that how he explains his bad performance is critical to his well-being and future performance. People who attribute negative events (such as failing a test) to things about themselves that are hard to change and that affect a broad spectrum of their lives experience learned helplessness, which puts them at risk for depression and poor health, gives them low expectations about the future, and makes them likely to give up easily on future tasks. People who attribute negative events to things that they can control and change, such as the time they spend studying for the next test, are less likely to be depressed, are less likely to have health problems, and are more likely to try harder when the going gets tough. We saw evidence for this in chapter 1 in my study with college freshmen: those who learned that many people experience academic problems in the first year of college, but do better thereafter, had reason to hope that they would do better in the future. And indeed they did, compared to a control group who did not get the message that the causes of bad grades are temporary.²⁰

More generally, people who have a hopeful, optimistic outlook on life are happier and healthier than people who have a hopeless, pessimistic outlook. As an example, take a moment to answer the questions in the table opposite and compute your score. This questionnaire, called the Life Orientation Test (Revised), is the most commonly used measure of optimism.²¹ Studies have shown that the higher people score on this test, the happier they are, because they are better at dealing with life’s traumas. For example, optimists are less likely to experience postpartum depression and less likely to experience distress after coronary bypass surgery or following a diagnosis of cancer. And optimists tend to be healthier, as measured by the reports of their physicians and such things as survival time following a heart attack.

This research seems consistent with the message in many self-help books, such as The Secret and The Power of Positive Thinking; i.e., we simply need to think positive thoughts in order to get what we want. But it isn’t just sitting in our armchairs and having positive thoughts that does the trick. Instead, research shows that there is an optimistic way of behaving that makes people happier. What really sets optimists apart is that they have better coping strategies in the face of adversity—they confront problems rather than avoid them, plan better for the future, focus on what they can control and change, and persist when they encounter obstacles instead of giving up. It is important to add that optimists do not have their heads buried in the sand. Obviously it would not be good for people to smoke cigarettes with abandon, eat whatever they like, and drive 120 miles per hour on the interstate because they are convinced that nothing bad will happen to them. Instead, optimists see the world the way it really is and recognize the obstacles in their path, but also believe that they can overcome these obstacles by planning for them and redoubling their efforts when they fail. In short, optimists don’t just sit back and think positive thoughts—they have an adaptive, healthy way of coping with the world.²²

All of this raises the question of whether it is possible to become more optimistic. If you are the kind of person who sees the glass as half empty, is there something you can do to change your outlook so that you see it as half full? The bad news is that optimism is, in part, a deeply rooted trait that is not completely malleable. In fact, there is evidence that it has a genetic component, just as happiness does.

But, as with happiness, there is room to maneuver—people can be trained to be more optimistic using story-editing techniques. In one study, college students participated in a group session in which they were taught to replace negative thoughts (e.g., “It’s useless to engage in wishful thinking”) with positive ones (e.g., “Wishful thinking can help people find alternative solutions to problems”); to engage in positive visualization, in which they vividly imagined positive outcomes (such as getting a desired job) and optimistic reactions to negative outcomes (such as not getting a desired job); and to complete a “silver lining” exercise, in which they found at least one positive aspect to a negative situation (e.g., “I didn’t get the job in New York but at least I don’t have to move far away from my family”). The students were instructed to practice these exercises on their own for a week. Compared to students who had been randomly assigned to a control group, at the end of the week those in the “optimism training” group reported more optimistic thoughts, felt better equipped to solve problems, and performed better on a task of creative problem solving.²³

Although this intervention was successful, it required facilitators to guide people through the exercises. Fortunately, there is also a simple exercise that you can do on your own. Here’s how it works: Think about your life in the future and write for twenty minutes, on four consecutive days, about how “everything has gone as well as it possibly could” and your life dreams have come true. (The exact instructions are at the end of this chapter, on page 73.) College students who completed this “best possible self” writing exercise, compared to students who were randomly assigned to write about a neutral topic, reported greater optimism on the questionnaire reproduced on page 65 and greater satisfaction with their lives—not just right away but three weeks later. And, in the five months following the study, the students who had written about their best possible selves visited the health center significantly less often than did students who wrote about the neutral topic.²⁴

Can such a simple writing exercise really work? Well, we need to be careful how we do it, in order to avoid being like Stuart Smalley, who simply recites positive statements to himself. Smalley, a fictional character created by Al Franken on Saturday Night Live, looks in the mirror and repeats, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me!” (Smalley is reminiscent of the real-life Émile Coué, the French author who advised people, nearly a century ago, to repeat to themselves, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”) Unfortunately, it’s not so simple, and in fact the Stuart Smalley approach can backfire among people who have low opinions of themselves—the very people who most need a boost. In one study, people with high or low self-esteem were randomly assigned to either the Stuart Smalley condition, in which they repeated the phrase “I am a lovable person” every fifteen seconds, or to a control condition, in which they did not repeat any phrases. People who already felt good about themselves showed a small benefit from repeating the phrase: compared to those in the control condition, their moods went up slightly. But those with low self-esteem became even more dispirited! For people with a low opinion of themselves, saying “I am a lovable person” reminds them of all the ways in which they are not lovable, pushing them further into the doldrums.²⁵

Why doesn’t repeating the phrase “I am a lovable person” work, when it is helpful to write for twenty minutes on four consecutive days about how “everything has gone as well as it possibly could”? The key difference is that simply thinking about how wonderful we are does not equip us with strategies to make ourselves so. But by imagining how well things will turn out in the future, we focus on ways of achieving those goals and think about what we need to do to get there. Indeed, research shows that people who focus on the process of achieving a desired outcome are more likely to achieve it than those who simply think about the outcome itself. Thus, Stuart Smalley would be better off writing for twenty minutes each day about the ways in which he could become good enough and smart enough instead of simply declaring it to be so.²⁶

This research highlights a key problem with self-help books like The Secret. According to The Secret, all we have to do is sit in our armchairs and think about what we want and it will magically come to us. And therein lies the danger—people are told that they don’t have to actually do anything, such as diet if they want to lose weight or study if they want to do well on a test. In fact, why diet or study if we can get what we want simply by thinking positive thoughts? Pass that bag of Doritos! In contrast, the optimism interventions we’ve just seen, such as the “best possible selves” writing exercise, don’t simply instill positive thoughts, they change how people interpret events in ways that make it easier for them to act in beneficial ways. Optimists, for example, are more likely to stick to their diets because of their confidence that they can succeed. College students who believe they can improve their grades by studying harder actually do study harder.²⁷

A SENSE OF PURPOSE

So far we’ve seen that happy people’s narratives provide meaning, particularly about why bad things occur, as well as hopeful, optimistic outlooks on the future. Good narratives also have a strong protagonist, a leading woman or man who takes charge and works toward a desired goal. People who have such a narrative—who feel in control of their lives, have goals of their own choosing, and make progress toward those goals—are happier than people who do not. Thus we should strive to be like Indiana Jones pursuing the lost ark or Lara Croft seeking the Triangle of Light. We can’t all be swashbuckling adventurers or multilingual tomb raiders, of course, but fortunately these aren’t the only ways of feeling like effective, autonomous people who are good at what they do. There are accountants who feel this way, as well as teachers, doctors, lawyers, social workers—members of any profession, really, who love what they do. Nor do we have to find purpose in our professions as long as we have passions to follow elsewhere in our lives—through volunteer work, say, or our families, or a hobby. The important thing is to pursue goals that give us a sense of autonomy, effectiveness, and mastery. If we can do so in a way that draws us closer to other people, so much the better, given how important social relationships are to happiness.²⁸

Not everyone has the freedom to pursue a life course of his or her own choosing, especially those who live in extreme poverty. Most of us, though, have some latitude in the goals we can set for ourselves. Consider college students deciding what career to pursue. As a college professor, I have talked to many students about what they want to do after they graduate. Not surprisingly, many students want to pursue careers that pay high salaries. I remember one student, for example, who told me that she would be applying to law school, not because of any particular interest in the law but because of the high salaries lawyers make. Compare her motives to another advisee of mine who applied to law school. Her father is a minister who founded a homeless shelter, and this student shares his commitment to helping people in need. A law degree would enable her to fulfill her goal of fighting poverty by providing legal services for people who could not otherwise afford them.

Let’s fast-forward five years into the future and imagine what these students’ lives are like. The first student has finished law school and has landed a job in a prestigious firm that pays her a six-figure salary. She has thus fulfilled her goal of becoming financially secure. But she has little control over her life and no sense of satisfaction in what she does. She is expected to work up to eighty hours a week and to answer e-mails from clients within an hour at any time of day or night, except when she is asleep (which, given her schedule, exempts her for only a few hours a night). She has little interest in the details of the cases she works on, which have to do with corporate acquisitions. She has few friends at work, and in fact finds herself in a competitive environment where several associates are vying for a limited number of partnership positions in the firm.

Student number two finishes law school and secures a job at a legal-aid office in her hometown. Although her salary is a fraction of what she could earn in a private law firm, she earns enough to live on. She has considerable latitude in the kinds of cases she selects; recently, she decided to bring a class-action suit against a landlord who owned a number of substandard housing units in a high-poverty part of town. There is an esprit de corps at her office; after all, no one is in it for the money and no one is competing for limited partnership positions. She becomes close to several of the other new attorneys and hangs out with them after work and on weekends.

Obviously, the first lawyer’s wealth will give her opportunities the second lawyer doesn’t have, such as the ability to buy a house in the best school district (should she have kids) and the opportunity to retire at a young age. But lawyer number two has a lot of advantages that the first lawyer doesn’t have—advantages that young people often overlook when planning their futures. She has a greater sense of autonomy, effectiveness, and competence, as well as a closer connection to other people. Focusing on a full bank account can be important, but we shouldn’t do so at the expense of a full life.

Another reason lawyer number two is likely to be happier is because of the do good, be good principle discussed in chapter 1. We are all observers of our own behavior and draw conclusions about ourselves by watching what we do. Just as most people would admire the second lawyer for devoting her life to helping others, at considerable financial cost to herself, so is she likely to admire herself. Indeed, research shows that people who help others are happier than those who do not. They are more likely to form bonds with others and to acquire an image of themselves as effective, worthy people. It is probably no accident that Gus Godsey, for example, volunteers a great deal of his time to many charities and community organizations, including the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, the Richard Hassell Foundation, and the Virginia Beach Human Rights Commission. Twenty years ago, he started a Thanksgiving and holiday food and toy drive, and more recently he started the Mr. Happy USA Foundation, which raises money for seniors. Thus one of the best ways to achieve a sense of purpose is to find an activity you enjoy in which you are helping others.²⁹

USING IT

In this chapter, we applied the story-editing approach to personal happiness. Happy narratives, we saw, are those that give people meaning, hope, and purpose. And there are a number of techniques we can use to revise our narratives in these directions, including simple writing exercises, maintaining a sense of purpose, and the do good, be good approach. Each of these techniques has been shown to make people happier. If you want to give them a try, here are specific instructions:

The Pennebaker Writing Exercise: Is there something in your life that you are particularly worried or upset about right now? If it has been on your mind for several weeks, and keeps bubbling back up to the surface of your thoughts, you might want to try the Pennebaker writing exercise. Find a quiet, private place to write. Commit to writing about your problem for at least fifteen minutes a day for three or four consecutive days—ideally, at the end of the day—and write without interruption each time. You can write longhand or on a computer, or even talk into a tape recorder instead of writing. You can find more specific instructions on James Pennebaker’s Web page: http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Faculty/Pennebaker/Home2000/WritingandHealth.html.

The Step-Back-and-Ask-Why Approach: As we saw earlier in this chapter, there is another writing exercise that helps people get over events from their past that they find particularly upsetting or depressing. After recalling an upsetting or sad event, follow these instructions:

Close your eyes. Go back to the time and place of the experience you just recalled and see the scene in your mind’s eye.

Now take a few steps back (in your mind). Move away from the situation to a point where you can now watch the event unfold from a distance and see yourself in the event. As you do this, focus on what has now become the distant you.

Now watch the experience unfold as if it were happening to the distant you all over again.

Replay the event as it unfolds in your imagination as you observe your distant self. Take a few moments to do this.

As you continue to watch the situation unfold to your distant self, try to understand his/her feelings. Why did he (she) have those feelings? What were the underlying causes and reasons?³⁰

The Best Possible Selves Exercise: If you would rather not dredge up upsetting events from the past, and prefer to focus on the positive, try this writing exercise. Again, find a quiet, private place and follow these instructions on four consecutive nights: “Think about your life in the future. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. You have worked hard and succeeded at accomplishing all of your life goals. Think of this as the realization of all of your life dreams. Now, write about what you imagined.”³¹

Don’t just think about what you have achieved (e.g., getting your dream job), but be sure to write about how you got there (e.g., doing an internship, going to graduate school). By so doing you might become more optimistic about your future and cope better with any obstacles you encounter.

Maintain a Sense of Purpose: In a classic Peanuts comic strip, Sally is merrily jumping rope when suddenly she bursts into tears. “What’s the matter?” asks her friend Linus. Sally replies, “I was jumping rope… Everything was all right… When… I don’t know… Suddenly it all seemed so futile.”³² When we find ourselves in Sally’s boat, we should remind ourselves of our most important goals in life and find ways of making progress toward them. Caring for our families is the most important goal for many of us, and for many of us there are ways we can do it better. Others find meaning and purpose in their religions, professions, communities, or, as in the cartoon earlier in this chapter, in the world of cats. Whatever it is that gives us a sense of purpose, we should be sure to make time in our lives to pursue it. As obvious as this advice sounds, people sometimes forget to follow it when choosing careers or deciding how to spend their leisure time.

The Do Good, Be Good Principle: We can’t all be as happy as Gus Godsey—after all, some of us inherited those curmudgeon genes, and some of us endure gut-wrenching blows such as losing our jobs or seeing a relationship disintegrate. But we can all act like Gus Godsey, by engaging in a lot of volunteer work, trying to find the positive in whatever we must endure, and connecting ourselves to other people. By so doing, our narratives will change to match our behavior and we will move a little closer to Gus on the happiness scale.

CHAPTER 3

Shaping Our Narratives

Increasing Personal Well-Being