Book SummaryThe Happiness Project, by Gretchen Rubin

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Happiness Project

Author Gretchen Rubin spent a year examining how to become happier in her everyday life by making resolutions to improve different areas in small ways each month—a practice she calls a “happiness project.” She explains how you can create your own happiness project, a year-long quest to add more joy and gratitude to your life by enhancing your everyday life in small ways. In doing so, you’ll live up to your potential, spend less time dwelling on negativity and setbacks, and boost the happiness of those around you.

Going into your project, focus on four concepts:

• Feeling good and feeling bad: It’s common sense that happiness depends on doing more of what makes you feel good, and doing less of what makes you feel bad.
• Feeling right: It’s a bit less common sense that feeling good isn’t the same as feeling right, which is doing what’s right for you. For example, teaching might feel good as a job because it comes naturally to you, but you may find it unfulfilling. So, you switch jobs and become a writer, which feels right.
• Pursuing growth: When we achieve a goal or get something we want, the happiness of it wears off once we get used to it. Avoid “getting used to” your life by finding new ways to grow—such as learning a new skill; working on something that needs regular maintenance, like a garden; striving for a promotion at work; and so on.

We’ll go through one year of a happiness project, focusing each month on a different aspect of your life and happiness-boosting resolutions you can make. Everyone’s happiness project is unique, so use this as a guide for getting started.

Month 1: Energy

Focusing on your energy—both physical and mental—is a vital starting point because the more energy you have, the more motivated you’ll be to stick with your long-term project.

Physical Energy Boosters

Boost your physical energy in two key ways:

• Get better sleep by optimizing your environment—lower your lights at night and avoid stimulating activities like video games right before bed. Additionally, question if you really enjoy doing things late at night—and push them off to the weekend if possible.
• Exercise more—look for workout routines you’ll genuinely enjoy and find ways to sneak exercise into your everyday life. Find a friend who loves their exercise routine, and try it out for yourself. Additionally, commit to walking more. For example, if you need to run errands in nearby locations, walk instead of driving.

Mental Energy Boosters

Your surroundings have a strong bearing on your attitude, feelings of calm, and energy. Boost your mental energy in two ways:

• Eliminate physical clutter. This creates happiness by eliminating negative feelings like frustration, such as when you can’t find what you’re looking for. Furthermore, though you have fewer belongings in the end, they’re the belongings that you use and really like.
• Eliminate mental clutter. Tackling a list of your incomplete tasks eliminates the overwhelm and guilt that you experience when thinking about all you haven’t done.

Month 2: Relationship

Your relationship, and its happiness, touches all aspects of your life. There are four significant ways you can increase happiness in your relationship.

1) Stop Nagging

Nagging doesn’t make your partner do what you want—it just creates resentment for both parties. On the other hand, not nagging maintains a pleasant mood between you. To achieve this:

1. Commit to not nagging. If the task is time-sensitive, do it yourself. If it’s not time-sensitive, let them do the task on their schedule.
2. Acknowledge your partner’s contribution. You may be taking for granted how much your partner does around the house. For example, you may cook dinner every night, but don’t appreciate that your partner cleans the apartment top to bottom every week.

2) Let Go of Expectations

When you expect someone’s praise or acknowledgment and don’t get it, you’re likely to end up feeling resentful. To avoid this, stop expecting praise.

• Instead of doing things for others, do things for yourself. For example, while cleaning up after dinner, tell yourself, “I’m cleaning the kitchen tonight because I want to wake up to a clean house.”

3) Improve Communication

Relationship conflicts are inevitable. Common-sense keys to handling them constructively include: not bringing up issues from the past, avoiding absolutes (“never” and “always”), taking breaks from arguments, and recognizing what might be affecting your partner’s mood.

Additionally, keep communication positive by not unloading minor problems, irritations, or insecurities on your partner. Moods are contagious in relationships—when you approach your partner with gripes and negativity, they’ll mirror your emotions. Instead, consider how a complaint could be said more positively—or if it needs to be said at all.

• For example, instead of saying, “My boss always dumps tasks on me while she takes long lunches. I can’t stand it,” try, “My boss is giving me more responsibility. I know it will help with next year’s promotions, but it’s challenging.”

4) Show Love

Though you might feel love, it won’t matter unless your partner sees it in actions that demonstrate love and appreciation. The most effective way to show someone that you care is to emulate the actions that they use to show love and care. For example, if your spouse always throws big parties for his friends’ milestones, help his friends organize a party for his birthday.

Month 3: Work

Happiness at work is crucial to life satisfaction because you spend so much of your life there, and it can be a regular source of fulfillment, growth, socializing, and recognition.

Find the Right Work

Enthusiasm for your work drives you to master your skills, which gives you a competitive advantage over...

The Happiness Project Summary Introduction: What Is a Happiness Project?

Author Gretchen Rubin spent a year examining how to become happier in her everyday life, by making resolutions to improve different areas of her life in small ways each month—a practice she calls a “happiness project.” She explains how you can create your own happiness project, a journey to become happier in your everyday life by focusing on happiness that already exists in your life. You don’t need to be unhappy to start a happiness project—it’s for anyone who wants to appreciate the joys of their life a little more. Choosing to boost your happiness comes with a number of benefits:

• It increases your day-to-day gratitude.
• It pushes you to set a better standard for yourself in all aspects of your life.
• It boosts the happiness of the people whose lives you touch, such as your spouse, your children, your colleagues, and so on.
• It helps you transcend everyday negativity and you’ll spend less time dwelling on what makes you unhappy.
• It helps prepare you for darker days—you can cope with adversity better when you have an arsenal of methods for recovering from setbacks.

There are two main principles to keep in mind as you move through this book,...

Shortform Exercise: Build the Foundations of Your Happiness Formula

Thinking about what you want to do more of and less of, as well as what feels like “growth” for you, can help you build a strong foundation for your happiness project.

What behaviors make you feel good in your life—that is, what do you want to do more of because it makes you happy?

The Happiness Project Summary Month 1: Get Energized

To kick off your happiness project, focus on bringing more energy into your life. This is a vital starting point because resolutions and long-term projects are often hard to maintain—the more energy you have, the more motivated you’ll be to stick with your plans and goals. Additionally, boosting your energy starts a positive cycle. Having energy allows you to take part in things that foster happiness—such as social events or your hobbies—and increases your self-esteem, and taking part in happiness-fostering, self-esteem boosting events give you more energy in return.

There are two types of energy to address this month—your physical energy and your mental energy. First, we’ll discuss ways to increase your physical energy, which will give you the push you need to work on getting your mental energy in order.

Improve Your Physical Energy

Improving your physical energy is a good starting point for your happiness project. Happiness is an overwhelming and intangible goal, but small steps toward simply being physically healthier are tangible and achievable—naturally increasing your willingness to pursue the goal of happiness. There are two important steps to...

Shortform Exercise: Act With Energy

Rubin finds that simply acting as if you have energy can be a real energy booster.

Describe an activity where you frequently feel sapped of energy. (For example, cold-calling prospective clients, or having a tea party with your children yet again.)

Shortform Exercise: Clear Your Clutter

A simple way to start boosting your mental energy is clearing energy-draining clutter out of your home.

What types of clutter are most common in your home? (For example, you have a closet full of worn-out clothing, or your front hallway is overrun with documents and cords.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 2: Deepen Your Relationship

In the second month of your project, focus on the happiness of your relationship. Even if you have a strong relationship, you can always find ways to make it even stronger and happier. Strong, happy relationships contribute to overall happiness and life satisfaction by giving you the companionship and support that you need through day-to-day and major life events.

Like anyone, both you and your partner are a combination of wonderful qualities and irritating habits. This month, we’ll discuss ways to focus more on your partner’s good qualities and contributions and focus less on what irritates you. This will improve your relationship because you can’t change who your partner is and can’t argue their irritating habits out of them. Focusing instead on your partner’s good qualities makes their irritating habits more tolerable and naturally decreases bickering.

First, we’ll focus on how to avoid negativity when it comes to household tasks, and then we’ll discuss how to better communicate with and show appreciation for your partner.

Avoid Negativity in Household Tasks

Household tasks are a source of much bickering in long-term relationships. There are two...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Expressing Complaints More Positively

It’s tempting to unload all your annoyances and complaints onto your partner at the end of the day, but this can drag both of you down. Practice reframing and lightening the conversation.

What is an annoyance or complaint that you find yourself dumping on your partner frequently? (For example, your boss’s unreasonable timelines or your sister-in-law’s overuse of social media.)

Shortform Exercise: Stop Taking Your Partner for Granted

Almost everyone is guilty of taking their partner or their family members for granted at some point. Spend some time remembering what makes them great.

What are some habits or qualities of your partner or family member that you love, or find endearing?

The Happiness Project Summary Month 3: Love Your Work

If you, like Rubin, find yourself in the right job at the beginning of this month, this is an opportunity to find ways to be happier at work. On the other hand, if you, like many others, don’t feel that you’re in the right line of work, spend this month focusing on the changes you can make so that you end up in the right job.

Why Happiness at Work Matters

Once you’re in the right work, you can focus more on cultivating happiness at work by increasing your fulfillment, creativity, and efficiency. This is important because people who are happy at work perform better than unhappy people, for several reasons.

• You’re more likely to work more hours and think about your work outside of your regular workday.
• You’re more helpful and cooperative, and in turn, people are more helpful and cooperative toward you.
• People are more willing to work with you because happy people are less argumentative (but not less assertive), less vengeful, less prone to burnout, and more productive.
• The above factors combine to make you a better leader—people are more willing to listen to you because they perceive you as friendly, confident, and assertive.

**Furthermore,...

Shortform Exercise: Find the Right Work

Because you spend so much of your life at work, being in a job that feels right for you is an important step in your happiness journey.

What about your current job feels unfulfilling for you? (For example, there’s not enough contact with other people, or you’d prefer working with your hands to working on a computer.)

Shortform Exercise: Restructure Your Workday

When you examine your workday, you’ll likely find small ways to streamline it and make it more enjoyable.

Describe what you think your workday should look like.

The Happiness Project Summary Month 4: Become More Easygoing in Parenting

Raising children is a lot of work and certainly isn’t all wonderful moments, but it does produce happiness nonetheless. Much of parenting involves what Rubin calls “fog happiness”—a surrounding happiness that you can see and feel, but seems to disappear when examined closely.

• If you reflect on your feelings in individual parenting moments—such as throwing a birthday party or going to an amusement park—you’ll likely find many negative in-the-moment emotions, such as frustration, stress, or impatience. But, when you look back on the experience as a whole, it’s a happy memory.

This month’s resolutions minimize negative in-the-moment feelings and help you focus on the overall happy experience of parenting. This is important because your children won’t stay children forever—the time to maximize the happiness of your home is now.

There are a few ways to put more happiness into your parenting. First, we’ll discuss how to work on your communication with your children and then we’ll explore the different ways you can make more happy memories.

Rethink Your Communication Style

You won’t always be joyful when you’re talking to your children—but changing the...

Shortform Exercise: Practice Lightening Up

Finding ways to be lighter about the everyday annoyances of parenthood goes a long way to boosting both your mood and your kids’ moods.

Describe an unpleasant task that you and your kids have to get through regularly. (For example, waking up in the morning before school, or doing chores before dinner.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 5: Explore Play and Leisure

In our busy, ambitious lives, it’s easy to either forget about play completely or only engage in play that feels productive in some way. This month is about focusing on leisure activities that are done purely for enjoyment and because you want to do them—not because of their “productive” factor, money-making potential, or prestige. We’ll focus first on seeking more fun, and then we’ll explore the ways you can draw out more fun from your everyday life.

Seeking Out Challenging Fun

In this chapter, we’ll focus on challenging fun that helps you learn and master skills. This type of fun is demanding but is rewarding because it creates a feeling of significant growth. It looks like teaching yourself a new instrument or training for a marathon.

Seek Out More of What’s Fun for You

It’s very possible that you’re not sure how you have fun—many people go through life participating in activities that they think they should enjoy instead of activities they actually enjoy. We do this with the goal of projecting a certain image of ourselves, and it’s an easy way to get sucked into activities that don’t feel good or right for us.

There are three parts...

Shortform Exercise: Find What’s Fun for You

To get more happiness-boosting fun in your life, concentrate on what you really like to do and think about leisure activities you haven’t tried for a while.

Describe what you currently do for fun.

The Happiness Project Summary Month 6: Strengthen Friendships

This month’s resolutions will center on strengthening your social bonds. This focus is especially important because friendship is the one thing that everyone—scientists, philosophers, and happiness experts—can agree is a major contributor to overall happiness and life satisfaction.

There are a number of studies that back up the importance of strong, meaningful friendships—they make activities more enjoyable, lower your risk of depression, and can even boost your immune system. We’ll discuss three resolutions that can reinforce your existing friendships and help you make new connections: making the effort, cultivating a friendlier spirit, and pursuing new connections.

Make the Effort

Maintaining friendship takes a lot of work, and this work can easily get lost in your busy everyday life. Take the initiative in your friendships to be the one who makes an effort to stay in touch and follow through with plans.

Stay in Touch

Reaching out to old friends to let them know you’re thinking of them is a small gesture that goes a long way toward strengthening bonds—for example, Rubin emailed her friends on their birthdays. For you, the resolution to keep in...

Shortform Exercise: Find Your Generosity Type

Knowing how you prefer to express generosity toward others is essential to helping your friends in ways that you both find fulfilling.

What is a task that you genuinely enjoy? (For example, decluttering the house, gardening, or planning trips.)

Shortform Exercise: Think of Connections You Can Make

Connecting your friends with other friends and acquaintances who could help them is a great way to strengthen your friendships and demonstrate support.

Describe a project a friend is working on that you may be able to help with, connection-wise.

The Happiness Project Summary Month 7: Rethink Spending

Money and happiness have a heavily-debated relationship—it’s a common saying that money can’t buy happiness, but it’s fairly clear that money can certainly contribute to happiness, in a number of ways.

• You can buy necessities, express generosity toward others, indulge in the things you want, and further your knowledge and mastery of a subject—which helps you get ahead in life and work.
• You can focus on larger goals, ambitions, and happiness when you’re not focused on just scraping by and covering basic necessities.
• Beyond allowing us to acquire wants and needs, money is how we naturally size ourselves up against our peers. For example, if you lived in a nice house in a rough neighborhood, you’d likely be happier than if you were living in the least nice house in a very upscale neighborhood

But, though money can arguably buy happiness, studies regularly show that people in the United States—a relatively wealthy country—don’t consider themselves much happier than impoverished people in India. This is because we get used to what we have. We don’t feel happy about the luxuries we have—such as hot water, consistently working electricity, just a roof over our...

Shortform Exercise: Determine What “Good” Spending Looks Like

Knowing what kind of spending feels good for you can help you spend your money in happier ways.

What’s a small splurge that makes you feel good and creates a feeling of growth? (For example, spending money on your hobby, or splurging on high-quality ingredients for your meals.)

Shortform Exercise: Find Items You Can Use Up

Most people are guilty of saving their “good stuff” for a vague someday—but this type of hoarding doesn’t bring much happiness.

Describe the “good stuff” in your home that you’re saving for a future occasion. (For example, the good dishes, a “good” shirt, or a nice set of stationery.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 8: Contemplate Life’s Larger Meaning

Whether you’re religious or not, it’s important to explore various “spiritual states” to augment your happiness—these states include awe, mindfulness, gratitude, and even reflection on death. Research shows that spiritual people—that is, people who spend time considering these spiritual states—are happier with their lives overall. In turn, this elevated happiness grants them better mental and physical health, greater longevity, and an increased ability to deal with stress and setbacks.

This month’s practices will help you cultivate a deeper happiness that often is hard to recognize in our day-to-day lives. This deeper happiness includes a sense of gratitude for what you have, the recognition that your life as it is deserves appreciation, and the ability to focus on others’ happiness above your own. There are two significant ways to cultivate your spiritual happiness: seeking reminders of your good fortune and adopting a spiritual guide.

Seek Out Reminders of Your Good Fortune

Like most people, you may take your everyday life for granted, thinking that nothing can disturb your reality. Unfortunately, major life changes and catastrophe can happen to anyone, at any...

Shortform Exercise: Create Reminders of Your Good Fortune

Consistently reminding yourself of how fortunate you are in your ordinary life goes a long way toward increasing your overall life satisfaction.

Describe a practice you can adopt to consistently examine the fragility of life. (For example, reading memoirs of people touched by catastrophe, or spending time in nature throughout the seasons to consider the cycle of life and death.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 9: Dive Into a Passion

This month, we’ll focus on what makes you feel energized and excited. This month should help you determine what really interests you and push yourself in it. First, we’ll discuss how to choose your passion, and then discuss different ways to grow in your passion.

Pick a Passion—And Commit to Pursuing It

As in the month of practicing leisure, this month you’ll focus on an activity you genuinely enjoy. However, this month is focused on growing within this activity, rather than just having fun with it.

To choose a passion to pursue, focus on the interests you currently enjoy. As with leisure, it might be helpful at this step to think about what you spent your time doing as a child. Or, you might think about how you spend your free time on the weekends or focus on what you’re thinking about when you daydream.

This exercise is helpful because it takes your focus away from who you wish you were and the image of yourself you’re trying to project to others. Instead, you consider who you actually are and what you actually want to do with your time.

Push Yourself

Once you’ve chosen a passion, take an all-in approach—this stops you from hemming and...

Shortform Exercise: Choose and Pursue Your Passion

When you pursue a passion, you’re in full control of how you decide to pursue it.

Describe a passion you’d like to work on and grow within. (For example, writing a book, starting a permaculture farm, or launching a shop on Etsy.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 10: Cultivate Mindfulness

This month, we’ll focus on cultivating mindfulness and being fully aware of and engaged with the present—this practice can boost your happiness in three significant ways.

• Being present helps you better appreciate what you have. Additionally, a deeper awareness of the present makes it more vivid.
• Mindfulness can help you break bad habits that are the source of unhappy feelings such as guilt or resentment.
• Mindfulness can elevate mood by lowering your stress levels, making you less defensive, and engaging you more with the people and events around you.

One of the most well-known ways to work on mindfulness is meditation—and while this may work for you, Rubin found that there were two resolutions that better helped her cultivate her mindfulness: to question her world and to change her behaviors in order to change her mindset.

Question Your World

Asking questions about the world around you and the world you’ve constructed in your mind interrupts the automatic thought processes that cause you to pass through life disengaged.

Question the World Around You: Ponder Paradoxes

The first way to get your mind working in new ways is to contemplate...

Shortform Exercise: Examine the Rules You Live By

Everyone makes autopilot decisions based on “rules” they’ve adopted throughout their lives—awaken your mind by questioning these rules.

Describe two or three of the rules you live by. (For example, “Never go to bed angry,” “Do whatever makes for the better story,” “Growth in my career is the most important thing.”)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 11: Adjust Your Attitude

Thus far, we’ve discussed many ways to change your behaviors in ways that will make you happier. This month, we’ll focus on your attitude and how to keep your mindset cheerful and positive. Cultivating a happy attitude puts you in the right mindset to compound your happiness with happiness-boosting behaviors.

To improve her attitude, Rubin focused on ways to become more cheerful, content, and pleasant toward others—she committed herself to four methods: finding reasons to laugh, practicing politeness, searching for the positive, and finding a mental escape.

Find Reasons to Laugh

Laughter has the obvious side effect of making you happy, along with lowering your blood pressure and stress levels, helping ease conflicts, and strengthening social bonds with others. What’s less obvious is that your laughter goes a long way toward making others happy. There are several ways to come up with more occasions for laughter.

• Indulge in others’ attempts to make you laugh. This makes them feel good, as we all enjoy being the one to make another laugh, and it helps diminish your self-centered or prideful tendencies by forcing you to really listen to what...

Shortform Exercise: React With Enthusiasm

Being more positive about experiences not only lifts your mood, but also the moods of those around you.

Describe an experience that you reacted to unenthusiastically. (For example, the first time you heard heavy metal or getting yet another scribbled drawing from your child.)

Shortform Exercise: Put a Positive Spin on Criticism

Criticism can always be delivered in a more positive, less hurtful way—which keeps everyone in a good mood.

Describe a recent time that you criticized someone. (For example, you scolded your student for going off-topic on his paper, or shushed your child who was singing all day.)

The Happiness Project Summary Month 12: Putting It All Together and Reflecting on Takeaways

This month is the “boot camp” of the happiness project, when you try to stick with all of your resolutions, all of the time. Keep in mind that you likely won’t be able to keep up with all of your resolutions at all times—and that’s okay. There’s an important distinction between goals and resolutions.

Goals are finished once they’re achieved. And, it’s implied that anything besides achievement is a type of failure. On the other hand, resolutions—which we use in the happiness project—don’t have an end point. They’re a commitment to making an effort, each day....

Shortform Exercise: Outline The Resolutions for Your Happiness Project

While Rubin’s happiness project has many ideas that can be incorporated into your life, these projects are a highly individual activity. Come up with resolutions that are unique to your search for happiness and growth.

What are the areas that you’d like to concentrate on for your happiness project? (For example, your social anxiety, your relationship, your budget, and so on.)