The Nine Rooms of Happiness: Loving Yourself, Finding Your Purpose, and Getting Over Life's Little Imperfections (3 page)

At times the divide between the outer self and the inner self can get so big that there is no connection between the you projected to the world and the you that you recognize as the best version of yourself. One day you wake up and don’t like either the inner or the outer you and think: What
happened
to me?

This Isn’t a Weight-Loss Book…but I Lost Twenty-five Pounds Writing It

What do
you
want to lose? What bad habit or self-destructive behavior do you want to change? Do you repeat the same pattern over and over (for years) and not evolve?

Applying the concepts in this book helped me see how I’d linked my happiness to body image, how I used sugar to treat my anxiety and wine to douse what I called my “stress fires.” By working with Catherine on my family room and other messes, I was able to see that I’d fallen into self-destructive habits (I was internalizing all the stress, friction, and conflict with people I love). And just by changing my emotional inner life I was able to shed unwanted pounds without going on a specific diet (I
hate
diets!). I just didn’t need as much food to feel satisfied, since now I was eating for pleasure and sustenance, and not to feel better or self-soothe.

This is not a weight-loss book; it is a life-solutions book. You can obsess about the one thing in your life that’s going wrong, or you can learn to let the things that are going right become catalysts, building on the good and minimizing the bad in a positive chain reaction, where you let one good event become the spark for more positivity. When you do that, suddenly it’s “all good.” Or at least it’s
good enough
.

The wonderful irony here is that if you take better care of your inner self, your outer self will look and feel better as a result. I didn’t set out to change my body, but by getting my inner house in order, I changed everything: inner self, outer self, and how I relate to the world. The keys are here for you to do it too. Get ready to get happy.

O
nce upon a time Catherine and I thought the only truly enlightened
people were those who’d had a near-death experience or lost a loved one. We thought those life-changing experiences made the survivors grateful and wise forevermore.

We thought wrong.

Such shattering experiences can change your life…but only, it seems, for a while. Then you go back to the old you, for better or worse.

While working on the annual Women’s Cancer Handbook at
Self
, which cofounded the Pink Ribbon for Breast Cancer Awareness back in 1992, I have met many women who have faced such life-threatening challenges—diagnosed with advanced-stage breast cancer or, equally threatening, ovarian cancer or metastatic melanoma—and they have survived. Most of these courageous women say the same thing: The hard lessons learned when facing death become less front-of-mind over time. Just as your hair grows back after chemo, once you are “cured” you largely revert to the same personality traits and behavioral patterns you had before. No one knows whether this is part of our survival mechanism or if it’s simply our happiness set point reasserting itself.

Michelle, a Los Angeles–based working mother, now in her midforties, who survived a life-threatening bout with colon cancer ten years ago, explains it this way:

She adds that you do gain a new, bigger perspective, which puts the irritations in context, and it’s all just part of a normal, happy life. Michelle says that she tries to remember not to stress out, but adds: “There’s nothing wrong with the ups and downs, the silly aggravations. I know I’m lucky and grateful, but it doesn’t mean I have to feel that way every second.” So the lesson seems to be that “normal” means having ups and downs. The gift is to appreciate both.

It is possible to learn to love your life and the people in it without having a brush with death. Consider the poignant contrasts in Catherine’s life and marriage. Catherine and her husband, Dan Labow, both went to medical school but chose different paths to helping people—Dan is a renowned surgical oncologist specializing in one of the deadliest of cancers: pancreatic; Catherine is a respected psychiatrist treating women grappling with problems ranging from relationship crises and depression, to managing family and career, including pregnancy, infertility, and motherhood.

When Dan meets a new patient, someone recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, he is greeting someone who may have more hope than time, while Catherine’s new patients may arrive with more time than hope.

Imagine that their new patients could switch places for even a day. How would their outlook change if they thought they could possibly die within a year or two? Would they abandon their daily rituals? Change everything? Change nothing? If you could imagine for just one minute that today is one of the last ones you’ll spend on the planet, would you appreciate the little things or disdain them? What would you feel most? If we had to predict your answer, it would be: gratitude, overwhelming love, empathy, and appreciation. But you couldn’t sustain it every minute (for
even that one day!), since that would be impossible. It’s simply not the human condition.

This idea is poignantly dramatized in my favorite play, Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
, where the mundane takes on extra meaning after the naive young character Emily has died, but gets to relive one day of her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday, since it was such a typical yet joy-filled day. She doesn’t want to choose a significant day, such as when she got married or learned she was pregnant. At one point she asks the Stage Manager (the play’s narrator) if human beings ever appreciate “every, every minute.” He answers: Saints and poets, some moments only. It’s impossible to appreciate “every, every minute,” but if we’re lucky we can appreciate some moments.

In my life, I try to identify these moments whenever I’m able. I call these “perfect moments” because they make it possible for me to see that my life is full of blessings. All of ours are. For me, the easiest time to identify a perfect moment is when I’m at the water’s edge with loved ones and I see glistening sunlight sparkling on the water, and I can take a mental snapshot of this beautiful scene and tell myself, this is it, a perfect moment. And I feel that my life is lucky, blessed, and full. And then, just like that, the moment is gone. Something interrupts it and I can’t get it back.

Learning not to let little things bring you down and to appreciate the “perfect moments” in the ordinary day is a life’s work, but there are a few tricks that will help you reframe your nega-speak and self-defeating habits into positive behavior, if you choose to.

Let’s Be Real—There Are Serious Things to Feel Down About

We won’t pretend this book can help someone cope with the stress and fear they experience when dealing with life-and-death situations or the trauma of divorce or total financial ruin. We call those A, B, C problems. This book addresses the X, Y, Z problems, the little ones that should come at the end of any “What’s bothering me?” list but tend to push their way to the front of women’s minds. When X, Y, Z problems persist they can grow into A, B, C issues quickly, since, for example, a bored woman who seeks
excitement may be tempted to have an affair, and then what started as a little problem (lack of stimulation) quickly grows into a big one (finding herself tempted to leave her marriage). So if we’re not happy, even when everything is okay in our world, we may blame our spouse or our circumstances, instead of looking inward for the answers. If we don’t address them, the X, Y, Z problems in this book can become A, B, C problems before you know it. It’s within your control to make sure the X, Y, Zs stay at the end of the alphabet, and focus on what really matters in your life.

Even when there is no reason to be anxious, women create reasons, and often we ruminate on the wrong things, according to a study in
Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy
, which found that 85 percent of the things women worry about happening never come to pass. Plus, we’d add, women spend an inordinate amount of time fretting over things they can’t control. Yet such thoughts plague us day and night. Worry in general seems to be a female epidemic. See if any of these laments sound familiar:

• Whenever there’s a cash crunch in our family, I turn it into a doomsday scenario. We’re broke. We’ll lose everything! Will I ever feel secure?
  
• When I look in my mirror, I compare myself to friends who look ten years younger. Why don’t I look as young as other women? Or as pretty?
  
• My husband is much more patient with the kids than I am. Why can’t I be more like him? I just go off the handle. I need a break.
  
• Why did I waste time watching that stupid movie last night when I could have been reading, working out, paying bills, sleeping? I have so much to do!
  
• I constantly catch a view of myself in a window and think I look fat. What do others think? If I were my honey, I wouldn’t want to sleep with me!
  
• If I ask my boss for a raise, she’ll laugh—or fire me. I don’t understand how to get ahead. I work harder than anyone, but I am not appreciated.
  
• I worry that my life is just passing me by. If I were rich or famous, I’d be happier. Plus, I could make a more meaningful contribution to the world.
  

Catherine has heard all of these negative thoughts and many more from her patients, friends, and every woman she knows—this inner monologue is like elevator music for too many of us, constantly playing in the background of our lives. If you don’t have an effective strategy for dealing with these minor problems, they can become the big problems. This is why women need to rethink and shift the paradigm.

Your Memory Wants You to Remember the Good Times

Memory is a filter, editing our past like a scrapbook computer program. You go on a trip, and the pictures that make it into 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 close
to 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 than on how we experience them. Seligman stresses that the spin our memories put on things is more important than how we feel in the moment. By contrast other leading positive psychologists, such as Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University, emphasize the importance of the “experiencing self” as a measure of happiness more than the “remembering self.” Kahneman says it’s the moment, the actual experience, that matters. Clearly, researchers are grappling with the question of whether the memory of an event is more important to our happiness than the actual experience of the event.

I know that I look back at my life and see it through rose-colored goggles: I’m a sentimental optimist. If I had fun skiing once, I assume I’ll have fun skiing again. Seligman believes this makes sense, since happiness isn’t how you feel in the moment, it’s comprised of three essential components over a lifetime of experiences: pleasure, engagement, and meaning.

I would add that in my years of editing well-being features of, about, and for women, I’ve found that most of us
want
to be happy. From the point of view of my remembering cold ski weekends, there may have been many miserable moments on the mountain, but in my mind, the lines are shorter, the hot chocolate warmer and creamier, and the frigid wind just a gentle breeze. Despite the long trudge through the parking lot while schlepping little skis, I tell myself it was fun. I want to see the glass as half full. And I want to be rewarded for my natural optimism. So long as I’m pursuing happiness, I like to tell myself I’m on the right track.

Here is the truth about our memory: Looking back, the little niggling annoyances fade away, and we believe we were happy. So if we ask ourselves if we’re happy right now, we’d find reasons to downgrade the present from, say, a great day to an only okay day. Ask ourselves in the future to look back at the moment we are living presently and we’d say we were happy then (meaning now) and realize it was actually pretty great. The key is to have that perspective
as we live our lives.