More About Being Happy

(by Siri Carpenter)
6. Shift your focus.
From work to relationships to health, we have choices about where to concentrate our attention.
When a snowstorm keeps you from getting to the office, do you choose to focus on how behind you’ll be by tomorrow or on the 8-hour gift of time you’ve just been given? When you paint your daughter’s bedroom, do you fret about how much you hate the drudgery or think ahead to how pleased she’ll be when she comes home for Christmas break? The answer to such questions has a big influence on your well-being, writes Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life.

Studies show that focusing on positive emotions—curiosity instead of fear, compassion instead of anger—leads to broader, more flexible thinking, more playfulness and exploration, and richer social connections. Positive emotions also temper negative feelings’ corrosive physiological effects—especially their impact on the cardiovascular system. It’s not surprising, then, that people who habitually adopt an optimistic focus have fewer health problems and live longer than their more pessimistic counterparts.
7. Let your mind wander.
The flipside of focus is daydreaming
Although we spend up to one-third of our waking lives in this luscious state of “undirected thought,” we often dismiss daydreaming as a sign of procrastination and laziness. But recent brain-imaging research shows that when you’re daydreaming, your brain is actually working pretty hard. In one recent study, University of British Columbia psychologist Kalina Christoff, PhD, and colleagues found that people who allowed their minds to wander while doing simple tasks tapped into not only their “executive” brain network (source of logical thinking and problem solving) but also their “default network” that is the wellspring for creative thought and relaxed, introspective thinking.
To rev brainpower, Christoff suggests alternating deliberate, focused thinking with more spontaneous mind-wandering. Another strategy is to occasionally set aside time for uninterrupted daydreaming, like a stolen hour for a stroll in the park.
8. Give money away.
Once a person’s basic needs are met, having more money does little to boost happiness, studies show.
What matters more is how much you give away. In a survey of 632 Americans, University of British Columbia psychologist Elizabeth Dunn, PhD, and colleagues found that the money people spent on themselves was unrelated to general happiness, but the more money people gave away as gifts and donations, the happier they were.

In another study, the researchers gave people $5 or $20 with instructions to spend the money on themselves, on someone else, or to donate it. Those who gave the money away or spent it on others—no matter the amount—were happier than those who used it for themselves.
If you have money to give away!
9. Chat up your spouse like a stranger.
No one wants to make a bad first impression, so we tend to put our best face forward, especially with people we don’t know.
And that turns out to be a good strategy for enhancing our own happiness. In one study, Dunn and colleagues learned, observers judged that people conversing with strangers tried harder to make good impressions than did people conversing with their romantic partners—and the more they did so, the happier they felt after the interaction was over.

Another experiment showed that people instructed to talk with their romantic partners as though they were trying to make a good impression (as they would with a stranger) felt happier after the experiment ended than those who were told to interact normally.
10. Settle for good enough.
We tend to equate choice with freedom—and what could be wrong with that?
Plenty, according to Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz, PhD, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Faced with a vast array of options—whether among consumer products like blue jeans and toothpastes or more consequential services like prescription drug plans and retirement plans—many of us end up bewildered. We can’t stop worrying whether what we don’t choose might make us happier. One simple solution, Schwartz argues, is to opt out of the multiple-choice game by narrowing your pick to several “good enough” options—then choose randomly.
11. Know when to fold ’em.
Most of us are not very good at knowing when to walk away from circumstances that are just plain bad.
Economists and psychologists call this human foible “the fallacy of sunk costs.” We keep holding when we should be folding—sticking with bad jobs because of the months and years we’ve already sunk into them, or unhappy relationships that we can’t imagine extracting ourselves from, or sluggish supermarket lines we’ve stood in too long to abandon. Because we’re so averse to wasting money, time, effort, or emotional investment, we fail to see that staying the course won’t recoup what we’ve already lost, says Ohio State University psychologist Hal Arkes, PhD.

But this is a failure we can overcome by deliberately thinking through our choices as though we weren’t already invested in one course of action. The next time you’re faced with a problem that has gone from good to bad to worse, think to yourself: If I were coming into this situation right now, what would I do?
12. Make something.
Few activities are as reliably pleasurable as making things with our own hands.
In one study, Harvard University psychologist Michael Norton, PhD, and colleagues asked participants to make origami, then to bid on their artwork along with others. People were willing to pay more for their own amateurish work than for others’ attempts—and in many cases, they rated their creations as more valuable than origami made by professionals.

One catch: To get the boost in satisfaction that comes from making something—whether an origami crane or a new coffee table—you need to actually finish the job. (Alas, a lovely knitted sweater with one sleeve won’t give you the same emotional boost.)
Maybe that is why I love to bake!