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A few weeks ago, my husband and I joined a packed auditorium at the Hilton New York for a lecture on positive psychology by Shawn Achor, a popular professor at Harvard. (This was part of One-Day University, a cool program that assembles a group of lecturers from top universities for a day of public lectures in major cities.) Achor took the audience through the greatest hits of the science of happiness, covering a wide swath of material in his alotted 70 minutes. He explained how positive psychology developed as a field of study. Instead of focusing exclusively on mental troubles like depression, psychologists like Martin Selgiman started focusing on people who are happy to figure out what we could learn from them.
Achor took us through a host of nifty experiments, like this one: Pair off into a group of two people, preferably people who don't know one another. Call one person A and the other B. A and B should spend seven seconds looking at each other with A smiling the whole time and B keeping a totally neutral expression. Person B is virtually guaranteed to have a difficult time, as all of us in the audience realized as we tried out our A and B roles. Voila: smiling is contagious. And the theory goes that happiness is too. At the end of the session, Achor left us with a few simple activities we could use to boost our own happiness levels (journaling for twenty minutes a day, exercising for as little as ten minutes a day, practicing random acts of kindness, and my favorite -- sending out one kind, positive email to a friend before looking at any other messages.)
Earlier this month, Facebook announced its Gross National Happiness Index -- kind of like a Dow Jones of Happiness, which the site calculates based on the number of times members use positive words (like "yay," "awesome") versus negative ones (like "sad," "doubt," or "tragic") in their status updates. The idea is to track the national mood of people in the United States (or, more specifically, those of them who inhabit Facebook).
Gretchen Rubin, whose blog, The Happiness Project, is one of the only ones I read every day, is weeks away from unveiling her memoir, The Happiness Project. I know Gretchen through a women's writers salon we belong to. And ever since I started reading her blog, I've found that I'm following her advice and repeating her happiness mantras wherever I go (Act the way you want to feel; Be Marci; What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.) I like paying attention to all this. But frankly, it's hard to know I'm happier because I do these things or whether they just feed into my existing predilection for learning about this stuff.
Of course there are the happiness naysayers. Barbara Ehrenreich, who excels at documenting things that aren't so happy, has a new book out criticizing the pervasive feel good culture we live in. And then there's my husband, who, turned to me after the Shawn Achor lecture to say: "You'd be happy no matter how much gratitude you show. It's how you're wired."
What do you think. Does thinking about, learning about, or focusing on happiness improve your mood?
