How to be happier: sleep, gratitude, and usefulness

👋 Welcome back to the Medium Newsletter
Issue #109: an antidote to America’s all-or-nothing car culture, website 500 errors explained, and how to say no to yourself
By Harris Sockel

In May of 2020, when Covid-19 cases were at a mere 20,000 per day in the U.S. (which seemed like a lot, but we had no idea how bad things would get), I enrolled in Yale’s free “Science of Well-Being” course alongside 600,000 other people. Like most of us, I was wearing a mask everywhere and taking extra precautions to protect my physical health… but my mental health was a different story.

As the most popular course in Yale’s 323-year history (it’s now offered via Coursera), it promises to reveal the keys to happiness. Of course, “happiness” is a pretty vague term, and it’s also a new obsession for humans. Historians agree we’ve only started optimizing our lives for happiness since the 1700s. Some believe the concept of happiness coincided with the invention of at-home heating and other creature comforts, which gave people a better baseline so they could aspire to something more than just being safe and warm.

Alexa V.S., on Medium, took the exact same course I did — and also completed its 28-day homework assignment which essentially involves practicing key habits multiple psych studies have linked to greater happiness (defined here as experiencing more joy, awe, and contentment). She observed a 10% increase in her personal happiness (which she could measure because she’d figured out her baseline beforehand!) by doing a few simple things every day:

• Using her strengths (you can take this test to find out yours)
• Zooming in on small moments and really savoring them
• Writing a list (or letter) expressing gratitude for people and/or things
• Being kind to strangers, and accepting kindness in turn
• Making time for someone important every day
• Sleeping at least 7 hours per night
• Exercising for at least 30 minutes a few times a week
• Meditating and/or spending a few hours in nature per week

And honestly, that’s what most of the research around happiness says: To be happier, you really just have be kind, cultivate gratitude and get enough sleep.

What else we’re reading

• Today I learned that French 14-year-olds can drive cute mini electric cars, AKA voitures sans permis (“cars without a license”). They look sort of like bumper cars, top out at only 30–40mph, and are built for short daily commutes. George Dillard sees in them an alternative to America’s all-or-nothing car culture: “you could own a little quadricycle like the Ami for daily use and rent a larger vehicle the few times a year you need to take a road trip or haul lumber home.”
• IT pro Rodney Lacroix explains how HTTP errors work — you know, 404, 500, etc. If you get a 5xx error, relax. It’s not your fault (unless you work at the website you’re trying to reach).

Your daily dose of practical wisdom: on loving yourself enough to say no

True compassion for yourself doesn’t mean giving yourself anything and everything — it also means saying no to yourself sometimes. Especially when saying no to something you only sorta kinda want means saying yes to something else you actually want more.

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Edited by Scott Lamb

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