THE HAPPINESS PROJECT

Experimenting with Greater Happiness

Setting out on a journey toward our own happiness and learning about how happiness works for us all

A year ago, I moved. I like moving. It reminds me of happy times during my childhood.

I want to keep my Japanese man statue, but we can give my baseball and bat to Pancho ’cause he doesn’t have his own. I’ll miss Pancho, but there will be kids at our new place. Mama, I’ll put your candlesticks in the kitchen box, okay? Can I pack the books? Will there be a swimming pool near our new house?

As a military family, we had to pack up and drive across the country every few years. Every time, my Mama was optimistic about what might be in our future in a new place. She was happy to move, so I was happy to move.

After my last move, in what may be my last home, my carved ivory Japanese statuette, acquired by my father after World War II during the occupation and reconstruction of Japan by the U.S. military, sits under a glass dome on my bookshelf. He is exquisitely carved, but what I notice most often when I glance up at him from my writing desk is his angelic smile. Whoever the sculptor was, he knew happiness.

Even under the influence of my happy little angel, however, I’m no longer as happy as I was right after I moved and got everything into my new home exactly how I want it.

And that’s normal. We all experience happiness during a happy event, and for all of us, that happiness subsides over time in a process that positive psychologists and happiness researchers call “hedonic adaptation.” Because of hedonic adaptation, we get used to and maybe even bored with the high we experience due to a happy event, and so we get less happy. Happiness subsides back to what those psychologists and researchers call a “set point.”

I’m now at my set point, experiencing life at my customary level of happiness. For me, this is a kind of ho-hum level, not high enough to be exhilarating, not low enough to seem debilitating. I’ve been at this set point often — it is, after all, my set point — and I’ve often wondered if I could do something to make myself happier.

How could I … no, how can I … no, how can we acquire a higher set point?

Research informs me that:

• Everyone’s set point is primarily inherited and not subject to considerable change.
• Many people find they are more comfortable at their set point than they are below or above it.

Comfort is good — as I get older, comfort is very good! But this is a get-used-to-it or an it-is-what-it-is philosophy maybe best stated as “ho hum.”

More research finds something that looks more promising: “hedonic adaptation prevention.” As I read about this, I realize it is exactly what the phrase suggests. I’ll rewrite the research and put it into a happiness ingredients list that I hope will be more communicative than it is in scientific terms.

• Take every opportunity to be grateful.
• Help others when you can.
• Keep learning.
• Stop and smell the roses.

I’m going to add one more ingredient to the list that I don’t find in the research:

• Do something you can be proud of.

So that’s it. Nothing earth-shaking. But it occurs to me that, although I knew all this before I decided today to research it, I’m not often doing what the research indicates I should do. So, with typical thoroughness (some might say a__l retentiveness), I’m creating a worksheet. It’s based on one I found in an article titled “How to Escape the Hedonic Treadmill and Be Happier.”

I’m not only creating the worksheet, but I’m also titling it “The Happiness Project” and inviting everyone who reads this post to take part in the project. The worksheet includes questions about what you’ve done that made you happy on the day you complete it. You can complete it daily, weekly, yearly, or whenever you feel like it.

I’ve also created reports that will enable you to track your pathways to happiness and see how others are doing as well.

Let each of us take this opportunity to complete the Happiness Project Worksheet and embark on a journey toward our own happiness and learn about how happiness works for us all.

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🌻Complete the Happiness Project Worksheet 🌻View all entries into the worksheet 🌻View your entries and track your happiness over time

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More information about happiness:

🌻PLEASE this time don’t just clap, comment, and highlight — though those are appreciated. This time, also please complete the Happiness Project Worksheet, above. You may also want to get an email when I publish. THANK YOU!

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