One weekend last winter, while my husband was off bonding with the menfolk in his family, I indulged in a thoroughly girly pastime: reading my earliest diaries. Sandwiched between covers of green leatherette and puffy pink vinyl were all the daily details of my preteen and early teenage years, and I wondered for a moment before cracking the first volume if I really wanted to dredge them up. Would I find page after page of melancholy meanderings documenting my adolescent angst? Woeful accounts of heartbreak and angry outbursts against authority?

I took a deep breath, began to read, and then began to smile, surprised and delighted that the girl I found living in those yellowed pages was happy, happy, happy, nearly every day. Parties, bike rides, and bowling were “a blast,” but even dissecting a frog or giving a speech in class was fun. She loved her friends, her family, her life, and, clearly, herself.

“I’m discovering my inner Gidget,” I told a friend who called while I was immersed in the diaries. But then, as I closed the cover on my 13-year-old life and stepped back into my 53-year-old existence, I had to wonder where Gidget had gone. Not that my life felt unhappy that November day — it was still filled with pleasurable pursuits and satisfying relationships — but my overall bliss-o-meter seemed to be registering several degrees lower. When was the last time a party had been a blast? Probably sometime in the sixties. Most social events now had become more obligatory than festive. Maybe the dimming of delight was an inevitable consequence of growing up and getting responsible, but I wanted to believe it was possible to boost happiness at any stage of life. The question was, how?

Luckily for me, a whole new branch of psychology has been exploring just that issue. Instead of focusing on negative states of mind, such as depression and anger, positive psychology seeks to understand and enhance upbeat emotions. And rather than telling people to work on correcting their weaknesses, this new approach suggests that they’ll be happier if they identify and find ways to use their inherent strengths.

It sounds like a tabloid headline — “Researchers Discover Secrets of Happiness!” — but this line of inquiry, which incorporates findings about how our brains are wired as well as observations about how we behave, has brought forth some simple and reliable ways to become happier. And dovetailing with these findings are striking new insights into the mood-boosting effects of meditation. By wiring up Buddhist monks and regular stressed-out schlumps who’ve been taught to meditate, researchers are finding that the practice literally shifts brain activity toward the sunny side.

The science of happiness is still in its formative years, and proponents all have their own takes on how to put its principles into practice. But the basic approach revolves around what medical psychologist Dan Baker calls happiness traps and tools. Hanging our hopes for happiness on acquiring this or that material possession is one typical trap; practicing gratitude for what we’ve got is one of the tools. For more than 30 years, Baker, founding director of the Life Enhancement Program at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona, and coauthor of What Happy People Know, has devoted himself to teaching people how to be happy. The key to contentment, he maintains, is sidestepping the traps while learning to use the tools.

The biggest obstacle

“Fear is the greatest enemy of happiness,” Baker says. And it isn’t something we can easily rid ourselves of. Being hard-wired for fear goes back to the dawn of humanity, when the ability to respond quickly to threats from snarling predators was essential. But most modern fears boil down to two basic types: fear of not having enough and fear of not being enough. So we go around hoping to ease our heart-pounding primal anxiety by trying to achieve and accumulate as much as we possibly can.

It’s a losing battle, says Baker; the instinct to be fearful is just too ingrained in us. But we can train ourselves to react differently to fear.

Appreciation, Baker contends, is fear’s most powerful antidote. “It’s a fact of neurology that the brain cannot be in a state of appreciation and a state of fear at the same time,” he says. The two states may alternate, but they can’t coexist. That’s because appreciation engages a part of the brain (the neocortex) that is dominant over more primitive areas (like the amygdala) where fear resides.

To keep fear in check, Baker tells people to perform something he calls “appreciation audits.” Take a few minutes three times every day, he suggests, to think about something you deeply cherish — your husband’s sense of humor, the view of your garden from the kitchen window, the taste of chocolate. It doesn’t matter what you choose; what’s important is the quality of the feeling.

After reading Baker’s book, I decided to give this a whirl one week when a demanding assignment had my primitive brain swinging like a frantic monkey between states of panic and doom. Every few hours I took time out to focus on something pleasant — the cheery sunflower picture in my breakfast room, the breeze on my face when I stepped out onto the deck for a moment. Sure enough, I felt a surge of contentment that carried over into the rest of my day. I still hated the horrid work assignment, but I didn’t hate my life because of it.

Surprisingly, one route to happiness that Baker doesn’t recommend is through pleasure. I always figured that since riding my motorcycle, dancing, and spending time outdoors made me feel good, then I should try to do these things as much as possible. But somehow, no matter how often I rode my bike or danced the night away, I still felt vaguely unhappy at other times. No wonder, says Baker: By focusing so much energy on activities I could only do occasionally, I was overlooking everyday opportunities for feeling good that were right under my nose.

Another pitfall is attempting to fix our faults. Worrying over weaknesses — even with the intention of correcting them — shifts our attention to our shortcomings, which only reinforces our fears. Instead, we should identify and use our “signature strengths,” says positive psychology pioneer Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness. A 245-item questionnaire on his website (http://www.authentichappiness.org/) helps users identify their characteristic strengths.

Play to your strengths
Curious about the fit between my best qualities and my current life, I took the online survey and learned that my top five strength categories are appreciation of beauty and excellence; curiosity and interest in the world; bravery and valor; creativity, ingenuity, and originality; and honesty, authenticity, and genuineness. The results didn’t necessarily surprise me, but they did get me thinking about how much — or how little — I actually exercise those strengths in day-to-day life. My work, relationships, and hobbies — from motorcycle adventures to gardening to making mosaics — offer plenty of opportunities for using the whole gamut, but on too many days I don’t make an effort to apply them.

As a reminder, I decided to print my list of strengths in purple ink on little cards, and I stuck them where I’d be sure to see them every day — in my journal and planner and on my computer monitor. After a few days of staring at the cards, I proposed an idea for a change in my part-time job as a university science writer that would allow me to focus more on the field that intrigues me the most. Almost immediatelly, I started feeling more satisfied with my work.

Still, while appreciation audits and strength surveys were nudging me toward contentment, I was finding that stress — whether in the form of difficult people or excessive deadlines — could derail me all too easily. Besides, maintaining my happiness this way was starting to seem like a lot of work. I still yearned for a way to just flip a switch in my brain that would tilt me toward the positive pole.

Then I read about new research linking a practice called mindfulness meditation and mood. Wow, I thought. Have researchers finally found the happiness Holy Grail? By simply sitting and paying attention to my breath for a while every day, the studies suggested, I could actually retrain my brain to be happier.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. We’ve long known that meditation can be calming by slowing heart rate and lessening stress hormones. But researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that mindfulness — a state of attentiveness to the present moment that can be increased through meditation — quiets the brain’s fear centers and shifts brain activity to a region associated with positive moods. The Wisconsin research team, led by Richard Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry, studied two groups of stressed-out employees from a local biotech company. One group got training in mindfulness meditation and was asked to meditate for an hour a day, six days a week, for eight weeks. The other group wasn’t asked to meditate.

At the beginning and end of the experiment, the researchers monitored electrical activity in the subjects’ brains with an electroencephalograph (EEG). Earlier studies had shown that when people are upset, depressed, or under stress, activity is greatest in the amygdala, that hub of fear, and another part of the brain called the right prefrontal cortex. When people feel upbeat, on the other hand, those regions quiet down and another area, the left prefrontal cortex, gets busy.

Most people shift back and forth between right and left activity, reflecting a mix of good and bad moods. However, seriously anxious or depressed people are more active on the right, while highly optimistic, resilient folks lean to the left. (A Tibetan lama studied in Davidson’s lab was wa-a-a-a-y left.) In the mindfulness study, stressed-out subjects who received meditation training showed a shift in brain activity over the eight weeks, with increasing activity on the mellow left side.

Impressed, I decided to try my own experiment. If my girlhood diaries were any indication, I had once been a naturally left-leaning lass. Maybe diligent mindfulness practice could shift me back in that direction.

My mindfulness experiment
I decided to use meditation tapes for training, and the happiness questionnaire on Seligman’s website to assess my mood at the beginning and end of my experiment. For eight weeks I meditated once or twice a day for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. I also read mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation In Everyday Life, and tried to practice mindfulness throughout the day, reminding myself to fully experience each moment as it occurs instead of ruminating about the past or projecting into the future.

I was an ideal guinea pig for such an undertaking, especially the week I had chosen to begin it. My mood is about the lowest it’s been in a while, I wrote in my journal a few days into the experiment. I feel restless, agitated, irritable, resentful, unhappy — not all at once, but at turns — and even resistant to doing the things and adopting the mindset that I know could make me happier.

But by the middle of the next week, I was already feeling calmer and learning to let my days unfold instead of getting uptight about whatever I thought should be happening. I find myself without as many desires and expectations for how things should be, I wrote, which is allowing me to be more receptive to whatever comes up.

As a result, experiences felt richer and more satisfying. At a blues concert one night, I experienced the music in a completely different way. Instead of half-listening while random thoughts ricocheted around my mind, I focused on the sounds and melodies so completely that they seemed to seep into every cell in my body. As the weeks went on, I felt myself becoming more content, less restless and edgy. I enjoyed my favorite pleasures — motorcycling, outdoor activities, and the rest — as much as ever, but frequently felt just as good doing other things.

A happy ending
Was I transformed? That’s hard to assess objectively, but my score on Seligman’s general happiness questionnaire did increase from 4.25 to 5.75 (on a scale of 1 to 7). Even more telling, my husband noticed something different. “Have you stopped having PMS?” he asked one day.

Mindfulness had worked some minor magic on me, but perhaps the biggest thing that had changed as a result of my experiment was my idea of what happiness is. It may sound mundane, but I realize that happiness is more of a habit to be cultivated than a state of bliss to be attained once and for all. Like good health, it must be maintained through certain regular, daily activities. Appreciation audits and meditation sessions won’t guarantee that I’ll never have another unhappy day, but I expect those practices will provide me with a lot more happy moments.

Case in point: Last weekend I spent several hours making dozens of cookies for a family party. In the past, I might have been anxious to finish the baking and get on to something more fun, and I probably would have burned a batch or two in my haste. This time, mindfully mixing ingredients and savoring smells, I enjoyed the process as much as the perfectly browned results.
And the party? It was a blast.

How to Get Happy
Not as joyous as you’d like to be? Avoiding these happiness traps and using the tools can make a huge difference, says medical psychologist Dan Baker.

Tools
Practice appreciation.
Appreciation is the most powerful fear-fighter. Try taking appreciation breaks throughout the day or creating Top Five lists of things like “favorite people,” “things I’m looking forward to,” or “things I love about my son.”

Exercising choice.
Powerlessness feeds fear. So look for opportunities to make choices — even small ones, such as waiting a split second before reacting to fearful and angry urges.

Lead with your strengths.
Focusing on strengths and building on successes creates energy, which drives real change.

Rephrase your life story in positive language.
“The stories we tell ourselves about our lives eventually become our lives,” Baker says.

Build balance and variety into your days. The more different — and rewarding — dimensions in your life, the greater the chances you’ll be happy.

Traps
Trying to buy happiness.
Once basic needs are met, increased wealth doesn’t bring greater felicity, research shows. Our prehistoric ancestors had to constantly hunt and gather to survive, so scarcity is burned into our brains. No matter how much we acquire, we’ll always feel it isn’t enough.

Pursuing pleasure.
Pleasure loses its punch when we rely on it as an exclusive route to well-being. Happy people create rituals that help them draw enjoyment from everyday events.

Resolving the past.
Bad memories can’t be erased, but they can be transcended. Focusing your attention on finding satisfaction in the here and now is more effective than fixating on past
anguish.

Overcoming weaknesses.
Training attention on your shortcomings — even with the intention of fixing them — only reinforces your fears.

Trying to force happiness.
Better to go at it obliquely, by cultivating qualities such as optimism, courage, altruism, and a sense of humor, all of which contribute to happiness.

Source: Adapted from What Happy People Know by Dan Baker and Cameron Stauth.

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