The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections Read Online Free PDF Page B

the album all show you smiling, enjoying yourself, sharing good times. A picture of frowning children or getting caught in the rain doesn’t make it, nor do other unflattering shots for that matter. The overall positive events linger, and we even manage to take an embarrassing childhood anecdote and make it palatable in hindsight. A truly upsetting memory may remain intact in order to protect us against future injury, since if we hurt ourselves we need to remember not to do that again.
    But the filter is selective, and Catherine explains this as the “childbirth” effect: If you actually remembered all the pain you went through giving birth, you’d never do it again. Perhaps this is one reason our minds soften the bad parts, leaving us to believe that our past was full of mostly positive memories, or at least that the pain “wasn’t that bad.”
    When I was growing up, my family used to drive from Manhattan to southern Vermont for weekend ski jaunts. I enjoyed the long hours in the dark car with my brother, counting Christmas lights or playing license-plate bingo. Once there, we would sleep all piled into bunk beds in a family friend’s condo, then wake early to spend long freezing days on icy runs, where I’d chase my faster pals down the slopes and careen dangerously closeto chairlift poles. I recall loving every minute of it, so when my kids were old enough to ski, I packed them into our car and drove four-plus hours on a dark Friday night to try to re-create that fun family-bonding experience. It was, to say the least, harder than I remembered.
    In today’s version of the ski weekend, it became an endurance test that left me wiped out: I’d carry skis (the kids were little); park the car in a far-off lot. We’d finally get through the ticket line (paying a small ransom for the privilege of waiting in another line, for the lift) and then get onto the slope, where everyone immediately started shivering. One child or another would need to go to the bathroom, or get cold, want hot chocolate, or be impatient and not want to wait and go ski off ahead. By late afternoon, we’d trudge back to the car, exhausted, return to the house to watch TV, make dinner, and go to sleep early. Before bedtime, the phone would ring.
    It was my nonskiing spouse, calling to check in on how our day went.
    “Great!” I’d exclaim, and in that retelling, the sun was shining, the kids were exhilarated. My son loved snowboarding in the half-pipe, my daughter fell off the Poma lift three times (okay, so she cried, but we all thought it was high comedy, and now even she can laugh about it!). Suddenly all was whitewashed; even I started to believe we all had had a grand time. But if someone, a scientist, using what’s called the Experience Sampling Method, had beeped me randomly during the day, asked me to rate my happiness, on a scale from 1 to 10 at that moment, I’d have rated it a 3 or lower. Yet if I’d been asked at the end of the trip how it had all turned out, I’d probably have given it a 7 or higher. These are the tricks the brain plays. It is human nature. And this exact experiment has been done, showing memory is a filter that sees things in a positive light.
    The interim scores were always lower than the final one, which led researchers to conclude that we are our own best editors when it comes to remembering how we felt in the past. (Ask someone if they are happy in the moment—while shivering on a cold chairlift, for example—and they’ll likely tell you they are not. Ask at the end of the trip if they had fun, and they’ll say yes.)
    The question is, to what end? Why does our memory play tricks on us?
    Many talented and respected psychologists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and others have spent decades researching just this question.
    The father of positive psychology himself, Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania, has written that the quality of our overall happiness depends more on how we remember things