The Smallest Things Will Make You Happy
SURE, THE PURSUIT of happiness is guaranteed in the Declaration of Independence, but the Founders couldn’t promise that we’d know the right way to go about that pursuit. Those juicy rewards we think of as the happiness jackpot—a prestigious promotion, a new car, a winning lottery ticket? “They make us happy temporarily, but the feeling doesn’t last as long as we’d expect,” says Laurie Santos, PhD, a cognitive scientist and professor of psychology at Yale University. Joy wanes naturally thanks to a phenomenon known as hedonic adaptation. “That’s a fancy way of saying we get used to stuff, even great stuff,” says Santos, whose popular happiness class at Yale has been adapted into a Coursera program called “The Science of Well-Being.” “You buy a new house, and it’s cool for a…