The Compassionate Instinct

At first, it felt a little awkward to keep a journal specifically for gratitude—I felt as if I should plaster my car in cheesy bumper stickers (“Happiness is”) and call it a day. But even on that first downbeat afternoon, my journal did make me feel a little better about things. Listing things I was grateful for made me feel, well, grateful for them—and since I’d also decided to jot down moments each day that had made me happy (another positive psychology-endorsed exercise), I had a concrete list of cheerful experiences to look back on when I was feeling down. Thanks to my journal, I know that on January 18 I was happy because I’d exercised, had a good Chinese lesson, and spent 15 minutes dancing around my room to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.” On January 30, I was grateful for my perseverance, the Pacific Ocean, and the fact that I have really, really good cholesterol.

I’ve always kept a journal, but once my initial excitement about my new project had passed, my writing schedule felt a bit contrived—I often had to force myself to stay awake for a few minutes before bedtime so that I wouldn’t miss an entry. But I quickly found that encouraging myself to focus on the good in my life instead of dwelling on the bad was helping me gain a bit of perspective on things. “The actions in my day-to-day life are actually quite pleasant,” I wrote on January 21, in a moment of insight. “It’s anxieties that get me derailed.”

It was also good to get in the habit of countering bad things in my day with reflections on the good. For example, on February 1—which I described as “having a lot going against it”—I wrote that I “spent a bunch of the day cleaning my room and trying to get my new phone to work, went on fruitless errands, ripped out part of a sweater I was knitting, and when I e-mailed the pattern designer—who goes by “Yarn Boy”—to ask if he could help me figure out where I’d gone wrong, he sent me an e-mail back telling me to ‘take it to a yarn shop.’ Thanks a lot, Yarn Ass.” And yet the entry ends as follows: “But I did get my phone set up and cleaned my room a bit. Chinese went well. I got cute new barrettes. I worked out even though I didn’t feel like it, then I savored the feel of my calf muscles.”

That might not sound like much, but trust me: it’s an improvement.

Despite my calf muscle appreciation, I wasn’t exactly sure how to practice my “savoring” exercise, so I e-mailed Todd Kashdan, a psychology professor at George Mason University who teaches an immensely popular class called “Science of Well-Being and Character Strengths.” Kashdan, who worked on the floor of the stock exchange until a late-night revelation on a golf course made him realize he’d rather spend his life studying creativity and happiness, wrote back quickly.

“You can do something simple, such as stop and notice an instance of natural beauty, e.g., a sunrise, a flower, a bird singing, a couple gazing at each other,” he suggested. “Or start keeping a journal of beautiful moments in which you write down each day the most beautiful things you saw and then return to it before you go to sleep.”

Not wanting to start another journal, I instead tried to take more time to appreciate my surroundings. On an 8-mile run on a fire trail, I stopped at a bench on top of a steep hill to give myself a chance to “savor.” I felt a bit like I was cheating—after all, the real reason I’d stopped was that if I hadn’t, I’d have thrown up—but as my heart rate slowed, I allowed myself to appreciate what was around me: the view of San Francisco, the warmth of the sun, the cool breeze, and the sounds of the birds. It made me feel nice, and since it didn’t involve jogging, I continued to savor for 20 minutes before forcing myself back on the trail.

Surprisingly, that exercise made me want to try to savor other small things in my day: watching a mechanic on break from work crack open a beautiful ripe pomegranate, noticing rays of light outside my kitchen window—even enjoying the feeling, weird as it might sound, of brushing my own hair. These were all small, private moments, but consciously trying to find things to savor was kind of like looking for manhole covers on the street: once you start paying attention, they’re everywhere.