Casual Friday: Do Random Acts of Kindness!

From Drive.

Hello and good Friday to all you in Internet-land! Today I have a very important happiness tip:  give to other people! The concept may seem obvious, but scientific evidence backs it up. Doing things for other people makes you happier.

Sonja Lyubomirsky and her team studied this in 2004. She had a group of test subjects put quarters into strangers' parking meters. By measuring the test subjects' happiness levels before and after the quartering (and comparing them to those of a control group, of course), she found that performing kind acts really does make people happier. Some call it a "giver's high." It works even if the recipient of the kind act isn't aware that you did anything (or that you even exist)!

Interestingly, Sonja's tests show that the best way to perform kind acts is to do a bunch of them all in a single day, instead of spreading them out over a week. The reason may be that pushing yourself to do one act every day becomes too routine, while doing around five all at once is more spontaneous, which keeps things fresh and makes you more likely to be kind in the future.

So give kindness a try. It can be as simple as putting quarters in a stranger's parking meter!

(For more details on this experiment and many others, check out Sonja's book, The How of Happiness.)

Casual Friday: Happiness Fit

Do you think a lot of this happiness stuff is cheesy? That's okay:  so do I. And so does Sonja Lyubomirsky. Luckily, this doesn't mean we're walled off from the benefits of happiness science; it just means we need to find happiness activities that fit our personalities.

Sonja Lyubomirsky is one of the world's leading happiness researchers. In her book The How of Happiness, she includes a test for those of us who think a lot of positive psychology is cheesy:  "The Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic." This test asks you to assign number values to 12 activities shown to increase happiness. You can see a PDF version of the test here. Read the document for further instructions.

So give it a try. The test will give you ideas on how to meaningfully increase your happiness in the least cheesy way possible. This is important because if you're going to continue these activities over the long term, you shouldn't have to feel like a big cheesy idiot!