by Adams, Scott
For starters, the single biggest trick for manipulating your happiness chemistry is being able to do what you want, when you want. I’m contrasting that with the more common situation, in which you might be able to do all the things you want, but you can’t often do them when you want.
For example, you might enjoy eating a delicious meal. But if the only time you were allowed to eat delicious food was right after you’d already filled your stomach with junk food, the delicious meal would not make you happy. A mediocre meal when you’re starving will contribute more to your happiness than an extraordinary meal when you’re not hungry. The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things.
Napping is another perfect example of the importance of timing. A good nap can be a wonderful thing, but if the only available time to nap is an hour before bedtime, a nap would do you little good. You need to control the order and timing of things to be happy. It’s important to look at happiness in terms of timing because timing is easier to control than resources. It’s hard to become rich enough to buy your own private island but, relatively speaking, it’s easier to find a job with flexible hours. A person with a flexible schedule and average resources will be happier than a rich person who has everything except a flexible schedule. Step one in your search for happiness is to continually work toward having control of your schedule.
Parents understand what I’m talking about. Most parents love their kids and are glad they had them. At the same time, kids remove almost all of the flexibility in your schedule, especially if you’re the stay-at-home parent. It’s no wonder that parents who seem to have everything—nice house, great kids, and good friends—still find themselves in misery during the years their kids are young. Those parents might have all the “stuff” they could ask for but no flexibility to enjoy what they want when they want.
As I write this chapter, I’m sitting in a comfortable chair with my trusty dog, Snickers, while enjoying a warm cup of coffee. I just came from a good workout, so I’m feeling relaxed and in the mood to write. By any definition, what I’m doing is work, but because I can control the timing of it on this particular day, it doesn’t feel like work. I’ve transformed work into pleasure simply by having control over when I do it.
In your personal life and your career, consider schedule flexibility when making any big decision. Realistically, sometimes you need to suck it up and work long hours, watch the kids, and do your duty. Just remember to keep your eye out for ways to maximize your schedule freedom in the long term. It’s something you want to work toward. You won’t all become work-at-home cartoonists, but you can certainly find a boss who values your productivity over your attendance.
That brings me to the next important mechanism for happiness. Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are. A person who is worth two billion dollars will feel sad if he suddenly loses one billion because he’s moving in the wrong direction, even if the change has no impact on his ability to buy what he wants. But a street person will celebrate discovering a new Dumpster behind an upscale restaurant because it means good eating ahead. We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad.
The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year. Tennis and golf are two perfect examples. With either sport, an average player can continue improving well past the age of sixty. Slow and steady improvement at anything makes you feel that you are on the right track. The feeling of progress stimulates your body to create the chemicals that make you feel happy.
When you choose a career, consider whether it will lead to a lifetime of ever-improved performance, a plateau, or a steady decline in your skills. As a cartoonist, my drawing skills have slowly improved over most of my career, and that is a source of happiness for me. If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.
The next element of happiness you need to master is imagination. I wrote about this in the context of raising your energy, which is closely related to happiness, but it bears repeating in this chapter. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy and gooses the chemistry in your body that produces a sensation of happiness. If you can’t even imagine an improved future, you won’t be happy no matter how well your life is going right now.
I find it useful to daydream that the future will be better than today, by far. I like to imagine a future that is spectacular and breathtaking. The daydreams need not be accurate in terms of predicting the future. Simply imagining a better future hacks your brain chemistry and provides you with the sensation of happiness today. Being happy raises your energy level and makes it easier to pursue the steps toward real-world happiness. This is another case in which your imagination can influence the real world. Don’t let reality control your imagination. Let your imagination be the user interface to steer your reality.
The next important thing to remember about happiness is that it’s not a mystery of the mind and it’s not magic. Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
As I write this next paragraph, a few days have passed, and now I’m sitting at a table in my health club. I exercised, I had my healthy reward snack, and now I’m thoroughly happy, even though I’m working at rewriting and tweaking this chapter. Taking care of my body always influences my happiness more than whatever task I’m involved in. That’s an important point because normally when you feel unhappy, you blame your mood on whatever your environment is serving up to you. It’s easy to blame your environment because you know you can interpret almost anything as bad news or potential bad news. Just add pessimism and cynicism to any observation and you can manufacture bad news out of thin air. If you know anyone who routinely interprets good news as bad, you know how easily it can be done. I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
I’ve explained to a number of people my observations about how exercise, diet, and sleep influence mood. The usual reaction is a blank expression followed by a change of topic. No one wants to believe that the formula for happiness is as simple as daydreaming, controlling your schedule, napping, eating right, and being active every day. You’d feel like an idiot for suffering so many unhappy days while not knowing the cure was so accessible. I know from experience that you might accept the idea that daily lifestyle choices are perhaps a small part of what causes your bad moods. But you probably think the majority of your crabbiness is caused by the idiots and sociopaths in your life plus your inexplicable bad luck on any given day. Based on a lifetime of observation, my best estimate is that 80 percent of your mood is based on how your body feels and only 20 percent is based on your genes and your circumstances, particularly your health.
Ask yourself this question: At times when you’ve exercised earlier in the day, eaten well, hydrated, and had enough sleep, what percentage of those times have you found yourself in a good mood? I’ll bet you don’t know the answer to that question because it’s not the sort of thing anyone pays attention to. But now that I’ve put the idea in your head, you’ll automatically find yourself noticing the link between daily body maintenance and your not-so-mysterious happiness. I predict you’ll observe that your good moods are highly correlated with exercise, diet, and sleep.
Exercise has two very different benefits that are hard to untangle. The exercise itself releases natural pain-relieving substances, endorphins,3 and that gives you a direct feeling of well-being. But exercise is also a mental escape from whatever was stressing you before you laced your athletic shoes. That’s why I recommend forms of exercises that occupy your mind at the same time as your muscles.
Ex
ercise also helps you sleep better, so that’s a double benefit. 4 Of the big five factors in happiness—flexible schedule, imagination, diet, exercise, and sleep—my pick for the most important is exercise. If exercise sounds like a lot of work, wait for my chapter on the easiest way to become active.
If the list of five elements for happiness seems incomplete, that’s intentional. I know you might also want sex, a soul mate, fame, recognition, a feeling of importance, career success, and lots more. My contention is that your five-pronged pursuit of happiness will act as a magnet for the other components of happiness you need. When you’re fit, happy, and full of energy, people are far more likely to have sex with you, be your friend, and hire you, sometimes all in the same day.
If you’re chubby, tired, horny, and unhappy, then your best long-term solution probably isn’t Match.com. I’m a proponent of online dating services because the evidence shows they work. But a smarter approach is to take care of yourself first and use that success as leverage to get everything else you need.
I’ll cap this discussion by telling you the story of how I felt when my cartooning career reached its high point. It was the late nineties and I had just deposited the biggest check of my life, thanks largely to a multibook publishing deal. I had the precise job I had wanted since childhood. I was officially rich. I was as famous as I wanted to be. And I was suddenly and profoundly sad. What the hell was going on?
After some self-reflection I realized that I was feeling adrift. I no longer had a primary purpose in life because I’d already achieved it. It was an eerie feeling, unreal and unsettling. I had no kids at the time, so I had no reason to achieve anything more. I’d dipped well below my baseline happiness and I wasn’t rebounding.
The way I climbed out of my funk was by realizing that my newly acquired resources could help me change the world in some small but positive ways. That was the motivation for creating the Dilberito, which I hoped would make nutrition convenient and perhaps contribute to a trend. In the long run, the Dilberito didn’t work out. But it was 100 percent successful in giving me a meaningful purpose, which allowed my optimism and energy to return.
Unhappiness that is caused by too much success is a high-class problem. That’s the sort of unhappiness people work all of their lives to get. If you find yourself there, and I hope you do, you’ll find your attention naturally turning outward. You’ll seek happiness through service to others. I promise it will feel wonderful.
Routine
Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice, tells us that people become unhappy if they have too many options in life. The problem with options is that choosing any path can leave you plagued with self-doubt. You quite rationally think that one of the paths not chosen might have worked out better. That can eat at you.
Choosing among attractive alternatives can also be exhausting. You want to feel as if you researched and considered all of your options. That’s why I find great comfort in routine. If you ask me today where I will be at 6:20 A.M. on a Saturday morning in the year 2017, I’ll tell you I will be at my desk finishing the artwork on some comics I drew earlier in the week. That’s what I was doing last Saturday at that time and what I plan to do this Saturday as well. I can’t recall the last time I woke up and looked at my options for what to do first. It’s always the same, at least for the first few hours of my day.
Likewise, I always have a banana at about 6:05 A.M., my first sip of coffee at about 6:10 A.M., and a protein bar to keep me from getting hungry again until late afternoon. I never waste a brain cell in the morning trying to figure out what to do when. Compare that with some people you know who spend two hours planning and deciding for every task that takes one hour to complete. I’m happier than those people.
Recapping the happiness formula:
Eat right.
Exercise.
Get enough sleep.
Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it).
Work toward a flexible schedule.
Do things you can steadily improve at.
Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself).
Reduce daily decisions to routine.
If you do those eight things, the rest of what you need to stimulate the chemistry of happiness in your brain will be a lot easier to find. In fact, the other components of happiness that you seek—such as career opportunities, love, and friends—might find their way to you if you make yourself an attractive target.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Diet
This is a good time to remind you that nothing in this book should be seen as advice. It’s never a good idea to take advice from cartoonists, and that’s a hundred times more important if the topic is health related. I don’t know how many people have died from following the health advice of cartoonists, but the number probably isn’t zero.
So don’t view this chapter, or anything else I write, as advice. In the coming pages I’ll make reference to some interesting and useful studies about diet. And I’ll describe my own experiences. That will address two dimensions of your bullshit filter—scientific studies and the experience of a smart friend—but just to be on the safe side, talk to your doctor before embracing any ideas in this book.
My value on the topic of diet, if any, is in simplification. The simple diet plan that works for me is this: I eat as much as I want, of anything I want, whenever I want. I weigh a trim 145 pounds and have literally never felt better. My healthy weight is not a genetic gift. In years past I have weighed as much as 168 pounds, which looks portly on my smallish frame.
Obviously there are some tricks involved with my too-easy-to-be-true diet plan. The tricks are simple, but they will take some explaining. Let’s start with the part about eating “anything I want.” The trick there is to change what you want. Yes, that’s possible, and it’s probably easier than you imagine. Once you want to eat the right kinds of food for enjoyment, and you don’t crave the wrong kinds of food, everything else comes somewhat easily.
You probably need some convincing that people can reprogram their food preferences. But consider how different food tastes when you are famished versus when you have a full stomach. It’s the same food, but your enjoyment level is radically different. The best meal I’m ever tasted was a week after dental surgery because I hadn’t had solid food for days. An ordinary dish of angel-hair pasta tasted as if it had been delivered by a deity and carefully paired to my DNA. A month later, the same meal was boring.
I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences in which bland or even bad food tastes great when you’re hungry. Your taste preferences are more like a suggestion from your brain than a result of hardwiring.
You have also observed that your tastes in food evolve as you age. A kid who can tolerate nothing but mac and cheese matures into an adult who can’t get enough sushi. And I imagine you’ve had the experience of getting sick soon after eating a specific type of food and the finding that the coincidental association completely alters your preference for the food later.
You also might have discovered that some foods you thought were awful tasting can be delightful if prepared and seasoned to your liking. Technique has to be factored into your taste preferences as well.
Your food preferences change continually throughout your life, but you’ve probably never put much effort into deliberately changing your preferences. I’ll describe some tricks for doing just that. If the tricks work, you too can eat “whatever you want” because eventually you’ll only want food that is good for you.
I used to crave ice cream in a big way. At one point in my life I consumed up to two heaping bowls of vanilla-bean ice cream per day. During those years, broccoli seemed like the sort of thing that jailers forced prisoners to eat as punishment. Over time I trained myself to reverse my cravings. Now ice cream is easy to resist but I’m not comfortable going two days without a hit of broccoli. This transformation in cravings was the result of a deliberate effort to change my preferences. I set out to hack my brain l
ike a computer and rewire the cravings circuitry.
If no longer craving your favorite food sounds like a sacrifice, it isn’t. That’s an illusion caused by the fact that it’s nearly impossible to imagine losing a craving of any kind. Cravings feel like they grow directly from our core. They feel a part of us. My experience is that cravings can be manipulated. I’ve successfully erased cravings for a wide variety of less-healthy foods. I do them one at a time, and it’s a lot easier than you might think.
It also works the other way; I can instill cravings for healthy foods where I previously had no such desires. There’s a limit to this trick, in the sense that you probably can’t get past a truly nasty taste. But most healthy food is closer to bland than obnoxious.
Healthy food has a bad reputation with most normal eaters because we associate healthy food with the worst tastes and textures in the category. If healthy food makes you think of tofu, rice cakes, and anything that tastes like soap, you’re probably not too keen to develop a craving for healthy eating. Think instead of delicious salted nuts, a buttery ear of corn, or a banana, and you’re closer to the mark. (I’ll talk later about the trade-offs of consuming salt and butter.)
Changing your food preferences is a fairly straightforward process, and it starts the way all change starts: by looking at things differently. It’s my job to do the hard part and show you a different way to look at the familiar topic of diet. Your part will happen naturally as your own thought process gently nudges your behavior along a predictable and controlled pathway of cause and effect.
My experience, as odd as it sounds, is that I can change my food preferences by thinking of my body as a programmable robot as opposed to a fleshy bag full of magic. This minor change in perspective is more powerful than it seems. Most people believe there is no strong connection between what they eat and how they feel. I call that perception the Fleshy Bag of Magic worldview. When you think of yourself as a fleshy bag of magic, you either assume there is no direct connection between what you eat and how you feel or think your diet has some impact but it’s unpredictable because life is complicated and there are too many factors in play.
