9 Habits of Happiness by David Leonhardt

Author:David Leonhardt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Inkstone
Published: 2017-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Answer:

Finger painting is more colorful. Other than that, they’re both childish games.

Uproot blame. Expel the word from your vocabulary.

River Rage

I learned a long time ago that if you’re going to throw a club in anger, throw it in front of you so you won’t have to go back and pick it up.

— President Ronald Reagan

In the dry season, Zambia’s Luangwa River shrivels up, until little is left but a dotted line of puddles in a swamp of mud. Most animals leave for moister ground. Not the hippos. They just squeeze into a shrinking pool of water. The more crowded they become, the nastier they act. They bear their teeth at one another. They pick fights. It’s river rage.

We read daily about road rage, air rage, parking lot rage, supermarket eight-items-or-less checkout line rage. Stressed out and impatient, it’s so easy to blow up at one another. And it’s so easy to feel righteous about it. But it’s hard to feel happy about it.

Anger is the junk food of emotions. You might have heard that ambitious and aggressive Type A people are prone to stress and heart attacks. This doesn’t sound healthy. But Duke University researchers report that not all Type A people flirt with heart attacks and stress breakdowns—just those with high hostility levels. Hostility leads to calcium deposits in the heart, which increases the risk of heart attacks and other afflictions. Mouth-to-mouth recrimination is no better for our bodies than for our spirits.

According to Pierre Thiffault, of the University of Montreal Driving Simulation Lab, aggression distracts from other goals: “Aggression takes energy. You are busy being aggressive, and that draws away from the driving task.”

Driving along a winding Pennsylvania road, a man approaches a long curve. A car approaches from the opposite direction. As it passes, a woman sticks out her head and yells, “Pig!” Shocked, the man yells back after her, “You’re not so great yourself.” As he turns his attention back to the road, he crashes into a large pig. A hasty assumption, a red-hot temper, a crash course in jumping to conclusions.

I had a similar experience in a remote campground. Halfway through the week, a stampede of characters drove away the tranquillity as they crammed into the two nearby sites. They brought half a dozen vehicles and at least as many kids. Above the newly elevated noise level, I suddenly heard the most terrifying wail. Then I heard it again. And once more. At first, I had no clue what it was, until I noticed one man…tuning his bagpipe. He spent half an hour tuning. I was livid.

As the sun approached the horizon, he went down to the strip of beach behind our sites and started playing a variety of tunes. My temper mellowed, and curiosity drew my lawn chair and me down to the sand, too. When the bottom of the sun tickled the top of the distant hills, the Scotsman waded into “Amazing Grace” and continued until the sun melted out of site. It was a truly inspirational moment.

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