Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

by Arthur C. Brooks

That’s because happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction.

The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Enjoyment requires an investment of time and effort. It means forgoing an easy, effortless thrill.

Here’s an exercise for increasing gratitude in your life. 1. On Sunday night, take thirty minutes and write down the five things in your life for which you are authentically grateful. It’s all right if they seem trivial or silly. Almost everyone else has ridiculous things on their gratitude lists, too. Make sure one or two, though, involve people you love. 2. Each evening during the week, take out your list and study it for five minutes, one minute for each item. Do it also in the morning if you have time. 3. Update your list each Sunday by adding one or two items. At the end of five weeks, write down the changes you have seen in your attitude and levels of negative affect. You will likely see what researchers almost always find—a significant improvement.

hope can be practiced and learned, by following three steps. First, imagine a better future, and detail what makes it so.

Beyond being tough, compassionate people are action oriented.

we need to choose compassion over empathy with ourselves, not just others. A lot of empathetic self-care involves feeling your own pain, but stops before doing something difficult in response to it. Being self-compassionate means doing the hard thing that you actually need to do, notwithstanding your feelings,

Empaths can’t help others commit to difficult resolutions, because their assistance stops at the victim’s feelings. But compassionate people, toughened up to act, can do hard things that the person suffering might not want or like but that are for their own good.

Try instead to observe more around you without regard to your opinions. Start by making more purely observational statements rather than values-based ones. Reframe “This coffee is terrible” as “This coffee has a bitter flavor.” At first this is very tricky, because we are just so used to judging everything. Once you get the hang of it, it is a huge relief to not have to have an opinion on everything.

Next time you feel self-conscious, notice that you are thinking about yourself.

The great irony is that by trying to be special, we end up reducing ourselves to a single quality and turning ourselves into cogs in a machine of our own making.

when we professionally self-objectify: we learn to love the image of our successful selves, not ourselves as we truly are in life.

A focus on the metaphysical makes you a lot less concerned with the opinions of others. It’s no surprise that exposure to nature does the same thing.