Happiness 101 (previously published as When Likes Aren't Enough): Simple Secrets to Smart Living & Well-Being

by Tim Bono

As Maya Angelou once said, “You can tell a lot about a person by the way they handle three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”

Many studies have found a relationship between social media use and unhappiness: the more time people spend on it, the less happy they tend to be.

hedonic adaptation.

the hedonic treadmill—no matter how much luxury and glamour we add to our lives, eventually our expectations about what we should have will catch up to the once highly coveted fortune that we currently have.

One of my students uses birthdays as an opportunity to write gratitude letters to her closest friends.

The technology of today allows us to accomplish most daily tasks with the click of a button, from the comfort of wherever we are right now, without actually going anywhere. And without a reason to go anywhere, many people stay seated in front of a screen all day. Mary Z’s generation actually had to get up and out of their rooms to do those things. Tough break for them. Or was it?

Often, the hardest part of completing a big task is just getting started. If we can muster the strength to carry out the first step, the sense of accomplishment from that single step raises our self-efficacy.

I never skip a workout or a chance to run, even when I’m pressed for time. My brain works better and my body feels better after exercising.”

The students graduating with the strongest academic records and highest overall happiness consistently get eight hours of sleep each night, or at least enough that they wake up each morning feeling refreshed.

Everyone knows they feel better after a good night’s sleep, but sleep is more important for your overall happiness and well-being than you may realize.

However, whether we realize it or not, as we sleep the brain is working.

It’s ironic: when I give up sleep to do more when I am awake, I do everything in a sleepy, inhibited state. But when I take the time to get consistent and long, quality sleep I am the most happy, creative, and productive.”

“Sleep is the last thing I want to sacrifice. I know that sleeping cures a lot of ailments. Worried? Sleep on it. Sick? Sleep it off. Tired? Sleep!”

My graduate school adviser likened sleep to hitting the reset button on our brains, giving us a fresh start

bedtime of around eleven p.m. with a rising time around seven a.m. is the gold standard.

The good news is that if timed correctly, naps can be refreshing and rejuvenating. They don’t have to take much time, either. You may have heard the term power nap. It turns out that catching forty winks in the middle of the day can in fact be powerful—if it is timed just right. The right timing is a matter of both when in the day the nap begins and how long it lasts.

So if you must nap during the day, doing so in the slot between three and five in the afternoon will capitalize on the body’s natural rhythm of tiredness and alertness.

nap after they’ve had dinner following a full day of work or activities. However, these same scientists label this evening interval (from seven to nine at night) the forbidden zone of sleep because nodding off there can interrupt our circadian rhythms and prevent a full sleep period that night.

Productive naps need a strict time limit.

Within about one hour you are in your deepest stage of sleep. This is why a one-hour nap is one of the worst things you can do for yourself. You will wake up feeling groggy and disoriented, a phenomenon scientists have termed sleep inertia, and an indication that you likely have woken up during slow-wave sleep.

number of studies have shown that ten minutes may be the optimal length for a power nap, one that will give you a second wind by diminishing fatigue and sharpening your focus.

much longer lands us in a sleep stage that makes it harder to awaken.

That is, of course, unless you have a full ninety minutes to devote to your nap. Within ninety minutes you will have completed a full cycle of sleep, from fast wave to slow and back to fast.

So if you have only sixty minutes to nap and don’t think you’ll be able to wake up after only ten or fifteen, skip it. You are likely better off not taking a nap at all.

However, if you do find yourself waking from a nap in a state of inertia, a few strategies can help reduce the effect and restore a state of alert wakefulness. Expose yourself to bright lights—especially natural sunlight if it’s available. Wash your face with cold water—it has been shown to counteract grogginess. If you can plan ahead, try drinking coffee or consuming other sources of caffeine five minutes before your nap. Yes, that’s correct! It takes about some time for caffeine to have its alerting effect, so it won’t prevent you from falling asleep, but it will kick in before your nap extends into the deep sleep stages that lead to inertia.

The more frequently they used those devices in bed, the more likely they were to report symptoms of insomnia and daytime sleepiness.

Close your laptop, turn off the TV, and keep your phone out of reach.

They found that one of the most robust predictors of a person’s psychological well-being was whether they were able to get close to the same amount of sleep each night. Those with the largest sleep variability were the most prone to stress and other negative emotions throughout the week.

In other words, it’s not simply enough to get a full night’s sleep tonight. Rather, the aim should be achieving that regularly.

Adults who consistently get optimal sleep—between six and eight hours per night—are less likely to experience depression and anxiety, and are more likely to achieve self-directed goals.

It’s because I sleep more that I have more time. By investing the time to sleep, my awake hours are much more productive, efficient, and less stressed than most of my friends, I want to shout that from the rooftops: Invest in your sleep!

mindfulness (as opposed to a wandering mind)

fully present

No matter what we are doing, we are better off paying full attention to it—engaging our senses and bringing awareness to what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like—instead of surrendering to the distractions luring our minds away.

Six minutes isn’t that long, right? All you’ll need is a quiet space and timer. Once you are seated in a comfortable position, begin by bringing attention to your body in the space that you currently occupy. Relax your muscles and then slowly bring attention to your breath. Feel the sensation of air entering your nose and leaving as you exhale. Pay attention to what it feels like as your lungs fill with air and your chest expands. Those are the experiences you are having in this very moment, and for your meditation period, those are the experiences worthy of your full and nonjudgmental attention. Continue this pattern of mindfulness throughout these six minutes. Inevitably your mind will begin to wander. That’s OK. When this happens, simply give attention to the fact that your mind led you astray, let those thoughts go, and gently bring your attention back to the task at hand, your breathing, and the feeling of your body in space.

Addiction to our smartphones has become so pervasive—and dangerous—that in 2017 the city of Honolulu passed legislation to make it illegal to view a mobile device while crossing the street.

We have become so uncomfortable with silence as we wait for the subway, place our order at a fast food joint, or even walk down the street that our automatic reflex has become to check the mobile device in our pockets to entertain our attention.

One study found that interruptions from phone alerts can increase symptoms of ADHD such as inattention and hyperactivity.

“As soon as you encounter a red light, immediately stop, smile, and breathe. That’s it. Stop, smile in recognition that this is a tiny opportunity you’ve been presented with to take a few mindful breaths, and then mindfully take a long breath in, and a long breath out. If you’re lucky enough to be at a busy intersection, you’ll get a few complete breaths in. “This strategy is great for those of you, like me, who tend to get frustrated when hitting a red light. Which is so crazy, right? Taking something personally that couldn’t be more impersonal—as if it saw me coming and deliberately decided to change so that I’d be held up. Since learning this technique I find myself much less bothered by traffic lights.”

Anxiety is born of future-focused thinking.

Eating is a prime opportunity for mindfulness when we consider how much goes into preparing meals, and the fusions of ingredients that produce distinct tastes. Many people report that when they bring mindfulness to their eating, they enjoy the food more, find it more satisfying, and often will even end up eating less because they are taking their meal at a slower pace.

healthier relationship with food, and maybe to lose a pound or two, mindful eating could be one step toward these goals.

Meditation is a lot like sleep or exercise. Many are reluctant to devote large amounts of time to it because it feels like a waste of time. Those behaviors, however, position us to use our remaining time more efficiently, ultimately allowing us to be more productive in the long run.

Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled, and More Miserable than Ever Before.

Remember from the early pages of this book that well-being is not about being happy all the time. A core component of psychological health is knowing how to respond to negativity. We all fail from time to time. Having the coping mechanisms to get back on our feet will help to minimize its impact.

This person is energized in the face of challenge because it presents a learning opportunity.

When things go well, it’s tempting to celebrate the victories and rest on your laurels. When times are tough, it’s tempting to quit prematurely and brood over your shortcomings. But if you can get yourself to focus on the process of how you got to where you are—or how you came up short—you’ll be developing the growth mindset, ensuring greater perseverance in the future.

Self-esteem without esteemability represents a dangerous miscalibration in which people think they can master hard things with ease (because everyone has told them that their middling performances are exceptional) and it deprives those individuals of the chance to know that they are not yet exceptional but perhaps could be with hard work.”

Showering a child—or an adult, for that matter—with indiscriminate praise only produces an artificial sense of self,

Part of what happens when we accomplish even a small, rudimentary task is an increased sense of confidence in our ability to complete our work. The confidence we get from completing one task inspires us to tackle the next, cycling us upward on the spiral of productivity.