The Happiness Project Read Online Free PDF

miles every day. But did I? I picked up a $20 pedometer from the running store near my apartment. Once I’d been clipping it onto my belt for a week, I discovered that on days when I did a fair amount of walking—walking Eliza to school and walking to the gym, for example—I hit 10,000 easily. On days when I stayed close to home, I barely cleared 3,000.
    It was interesting to have a better sense of my daily habits. Also, the very fact of wearing a pedometer made me walk more. One of my worst qualities is my insatiable need for credit ; I always want the gold star, the recognition. One night when I was in high school, I came home late from a party and decided to surprise my mother by cleaning up our messy kitchen. She came downstairs the next morning and said, “What wonderful fairy came in the night and did all this work?” and looked so pleased. More than twenty years later, I still remember that gold star, and I still want more of them.
    This generally negative quality had a benefit in this circumstance; because the pedometer gave me credit for making an extra effort, I wasmore likely to do it. One morning I’d planned to take the subway to my dentist’s appointment, but as I walked out the door, it occurred to me, “Walking to the dentist will take the same amount of time, and I’ll get credit for the steps!” Plus, I think I benefited from the “Hawthorne effect,” in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting. In this case, I was the guinea pig of my own experiment.
    Walking had an added benefit: it helped me to think. Nietzsche wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking,” and his observation is backed up by science; exercise-induced brain chemicals help people think clearly. In fact, just stepping outside clarifies thinking and boosts energy. Light deprivation is one reason that people feel tired, and even five minutes of daylight stimulates production of serotonin and dopamine, brain chemicals that improve mood. Many times, I’d guiltily leave my desk to take a break, and while I was walking around the block, I’d get some useful insight that had eluded me when I was being virtuously diligent.
    TOSS, RESTORE, ORGANIZE.
    Household disorder was a constant drain on my energy; the minute I walked through the apartment door, I felt as if I needed to start putting clothes in the hamper and gathering loose toys. I wasn’t alone in my fight against clutter. In a sign that people are finding their possessions truly unmanageable, the number of storage units nationwide practically doubled in one decade. One study suggested that eliminating clutter would cut down the amount of housework in the average home by 40 percent.
    To use the first month of my happiness project to tackle clutter seemed a bit small-minded, as if my highest priority in life were to rearrange my sock drawer. But I craved an existence of order and serenity—which, translated into real life, meant a household with coats hung in the closet and spare rolls of paper towels.
    I was also weighed down by the invisible, but even more enervating, psychic clutter of loose ends. I had a long list of neglected tasks that made me feel weary and guilty whenever I thought of them. I needed to clear away the detritus in my mind.
    I decided to tackle the visible clutter first, and I discovered something surprising: the psychologists and social scientists who do happiness research never mention clutter at all. They never raise it in their descriptions of the factors that contribute to happiness or in their lists of strategies to boost happiness. The philosophers, too, ignore it, although Samuel Johnson, who had an opinion about everything, did remark, “No money is better spent that what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.”
    By contrast, when I turned to popular culture, discussions of clutter clearing abounded. Whatever the happiness scientists might study, ordinary