Happiness by Design

The benefits of saving for your retirement come not only from being secure in your old age but also from feeling secure about your old age now.

happiness for us as experiences of pleasure and purpose over time.

Attention devoted to one stimulus is, by definition, attention that is not devoted to another.

the AREA model. Events in life are attention-grabbing to begin with. You then react and, if you can explain the event, you will withdraw attention and adapt to

You are more likely to run a marathon if you first commit to going out for a run a couple of times a week and building up from there, as opposed to saying “I’m going to run a marathon.”

current income relative to previous income is a significant predictor of life satisfaction and mental health, whether people move up or down.66 There is also evidence, again using reports of life satisfaction and mental health, that the gains from increases in income can be completely offset if your expectations about gains in income rise faster th

great deal of choice over how you use your discretionary time: what you have left over each week once the necessities of life have been dealt with.17

To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.

Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel.