The Happiness Project

Thanks to Twitter I found out about a book titled “The Happiness Project or Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean my Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun” by Gretchen Rubin. The book is a memoir of the year she spent “test driving the wisdom of the ages, the current scientific studies, and the lessons from the popular culture about how to be happy – from Aristotle to Martin Seligman to Thoreau to Oprah” (http://happiness-project.com). She has a blog at http://happiness-project.com where every Wednesday is tip day. The tweet I read took me to her entry on how to keep stay in touch with friends, etc., which I found very useful. You can read sample chapters at the blog, which I did and the book is available on Amazon.

The big draw for me, however, was the Happiness Project Toolbox which is found at this link http://www.happinessprojecttoolbox.com/. The Happiness Project Toolbox supplies eight tools to help you construct your "happiness project." Your "happiness project" is your own project to take specific steps to boost your happiness. Even if you do not read the book you can use the Happiness Project Toolbox. You can use it to make resolutions, lists, keep a one-sentence journal, personal commandments. You can do all this without the Happiness Project Toolbox but with the toolbox you can share your posts with other persons and you can read other people’s posts for inspiration.
Since I have been having my issues with this thing called happiness, I am going to start a happiness project today and I am going to start with personal commandments. I think I am going to plagiarize the author’s own first of her twelve commandments and make my first one “Be Joni”. Second on my list perhaps may be “When persons comment on the fact that you have put on weight resist the urge to smile politely and say thanks but I have a mirror or punch them in the face or tell them they are ugly”. What is it (and this is me venting now) with people, that the first thing they say to a person is about their body being bigger than it once was? Do I go around telling people they are ugly? Do people routinely tell people that they have lost weight? No they don’t. You can compliment someone’s clothing or hairdo or say something about something they did, anything other than a comment about extra pounds. But I suppose that might be harder, and we humans do not like harder or thinking about the consequences of our actions.

If you decide to start a happiness project of your own let me know by leaving a comment, or emailing, or using Facebook, so we can support each other. There is a tool in the toolbox for group resolutions which perhaps we could use.