women's self-help book reviews

Gretchen Rubin, the author of the #1 New York Times bestselling The Happiness Project, already was happy. Generally satisfied with the overall structure of her life, her marriage, children, career and residence were all exactly as she would have chosen. Still, she was frequently impatient and irritable with her husband and children, and it often felt like life was just passing by, and that maybe she wasn’t making the absolute most out of it. Knowing she could be happier, Rubin decided to embark on a “happiness project” that was, as she puts it, a quest to “change my life without changing my life”. The resulting book, The Happiness Project, is a memoir of self-help detailing the year she systematically tested a variety of resolutions designed to increase her happiness.

While there are more dramatic quest-for-happiness memoirs such as the blockbuster Eat Pray Love, The Happiness Project stands out for its relatability. Most of us, like Rubin, are working within the confines of our ordinary lives. No matter how little your life resembles Gretchen Rubin’s or how likely that you’ll actually undertake a happiness project in as comprehensive and dogged a manner as she, you will probably find it easy to relate as she shares her shortcomings and attempts to improve herself.

For the one-year project, each month Rubin chose an area of her life to work on and made four or five resolutions. She kept track on a calendar, at the end of each day giving herself a check or an X for each resolution, depending on her success that day. Each month she took on a new set of resolutions, adding them to the others, and so by December she was grading herself daily on eleven months of resolutions!

Her first month, January, was about boosting energy, an excellent place to start because it definitely takes energy to improve yourself. To increase her energy, Rubin decided to go to sleep earlier, exercise, clear out clutter and organize, and take on tasks that had been nagging her in the back of her mind. At this point I was hooked and already inspired to join in. Although February’s topic of marriage wouldn’t seem to apply to me (being unmarried myself), the specificity of her resolutions (quit nagging, don’t expect praise, fight right, etc.) and the effects of her actions held universal truths applicable to roommate situations and in relating to people in general. I enjoyed reading about “the week of extreme nice”, in which Rubin did her best to go above and beyond in the nice department and found it excruciating but with positive effects. March, “work month”, was when Rubin launched her blog, www.happiness-project.com, that became popular almost overnight.

Rubin’s book is not merely her experiences in a bubble. She did copious amounts of research on happiness, and the book is peppered with results of scientific studies that we can apply to our own lives. Some examples: People who have fun are twenty times as likely to feel happy. Even introverts are happier in the company of others. Hugs increase happiness. Faking a smile or acting energetic when you don’t feel either happy or energetic leads to feeling happier and more energetic. It is also full of other random tidbits. Did you know that Benjamin Franklin and twelve friends met weekly for 40 years with the goal of mutual improvement? I ended up making notes of books I wanted to read, a pen she insisted was the smoothest, most enjoyable write (got some and I agree), and even jotted down the particular name and scent of a candle she loves. Why did I do this? Is she my self-help hero? Am I going to follow everything she does?

Well, not everything. Some of Rubin’s resolutions I dismiss immediately as things that are not going to work for me. For example – start a collection of something. I don’t see that happening. She also discarded possibilities for her own happiness project (including my favorite mood-enhancer, meditation), continually reminding herself to “be Gretchen”. In other words, just because others prefer museum-going to staying home reading doesn’t mean that she should too. Along these lines, Rubin emphasizes that, while we can all have a happiness project, each of our happiness projects will be different.

As a person who both loves to read and tends to be hard on myself, I related to Rubin squashing her interest in children’s literature and then, during her happiness project, realizing she shouldn’t feel guilty for indulging it. One of the most inspiring lessons of the book is that, whatever your passion(s), making them a real priority in your life contributes greatly to happiness.

Reading this book really boosted my motivation. Last year I sat in my writer’s group listening to people talk about writing a novel in a month and thinking I couldn’t possibly. But something clicked when I was reading Rubin’s book. She did the same challenge on top of everything else in her life and, even though she is a way more experienced and successful writer than I, it still inspired me to do it too.

“The Happiness Project” offers plenty of inspiration and the reminder that “it is not goal attainment but the process of striving after the goals that brings happiness”.