Abby Quillen

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Resolve to Pursue Happiness

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The pursuit of happiness is age-old. Thinkers from Aristotle to Epicurus to Freud philosophized about it, and Thomas Jefferson considered it a right so inalienable that he included it in the Declaration of Independence right up there with life and liberty.

In modern America, we seem to take pursuing happiness to an ever higher level (often with an ever higher price tag). Authors like Stephen Covey make millions penning tomes on positive thinking, 10 percemt of Americans take anti-depressant medications, and life coaches charge up to $300 an hour to become partners in “defining a better future”. Many of us are obviously eager for the secrets to a happy life.

I’m sure I can’t end this seemingly universal human quest. But if you’re hoping to make this year a little happier than last, here are some things you might try:

1.  Face fear

Americans can be an anxious bunch. In his book The Science of Fear, Daniel Gardner writes:

Some people say we live in a culture of fear. Terrorists, Internet stalkers, crystal meth, avian flu, genetically modified organisms, contaminated food: New threats seem to sprout like poisonous mushrooms. Climate change, carcinogens, leaky breast implants, the “obesity epidemic”, pesticides, West Nile Virus, SARS, avian flu, and flesh eating disease.

Most recently, the globe seemed to succumb to near hysteria about the H1N1 flu pandemic. In “Killer Fear,” Peggy O’Mara, the editor of Mothering Magazine writes, “Not only is fear bad for our health, it colors our perception of reality.” She explains what fear does to the brain, and offers several antidotes here.

2.  Meditate

When scientists mapped the brain of a meditating Buddhist monk with a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, the left pre-frontal cortex of his brain, the part associated with happiness, joy, and enthusiasm, did not just light up. It was off the charts.

In another study, participants were randomly assigned into two groups. One received mindfulness meditation training and the other served as a control group. Like the Buddhist monk, the meditating group had more activity in the left pre-frontal cortex of their brains. They also had significantly better immune function than the control group.

Why does meditation make us happy? Taking time to sit silently is undoubtedly good for us, especially in our busy society. Moreover, observing our thoughts and emotions for 15 to 20 minutes a day shows us how transient they are, which helps us to not dwell as much on the negative ones when they arise.

Of course, the paradox is that while meditating is simple, it can be incredibly difficult. You can learn different methods by taking a class or getting a guided audio-recording.

3.  Slow down

Recently on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Steve Paulson interviewed Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk and follower of Ghandi. Kumar writes books, teaches at a college, gives lectures around the world, and edits a magazine, but he says his life is entirely stress-free, and his secret is taking life at a walking-pace.

Whatever work I am doing, editing a magazine or lecturing or whatever other work I am doing, I never hurry. I say, there’s plenty of time. The quality of your work is more important than the speed of your work. … If we seek fulfillment, we’ll have no stress. If we seek success we’ll have stress.

(You can listen to that interview and several others about the pursuit of happiness here.)

The irony about slowing down is that it can actually help us to get more done. Erin Hayes explains how doing things quickly often eats up time in her article, “Slow Down to Get More Done” and concludes with:

Sometimes faster is really slower, and doing less can help you accomplish more. And sometimes, the most productive way to schedule our time is to leave a big, blank space in our itinerary … and let our brain fill it in.

4.  Use your hands.

In her book Lifting Depression, neuro-scientist Kelly Lambert, PhD argues that when we cook, garden, knit, sew, build, or repair things with our hands and see tangible results from our efforts, our brains are bathed in feel-good chemicals. She writes:

In our drive to do less physical work to acquire what we want and need, we’ve lost something vital to our mental well-being—an innate resistance to depression.

Want to learn more? I wrote about it here.

5.  Seek out good news

Some days it seems like the headlines can sour even the rosiest mood. How can you counter-balance all the bad news? Scout out some good news. Reading YES! Magazine, Ode Magazine, GOOD, and Shareable.net makes me feel more hopeful about the world. And joyful distractions, like reading a good novel or looking at photographs of adorable creatures, probably couldn’t hurt either.

6.  Lower your expectations.

Denmark ranks as one of the three happiest countries in the world on surveys. Eric Weiner, author of The Geography of Bliss, attributes the Danes’ happiness to their low expectations. On the New York Times Opinionator blog,  he explains that we humans tend to get on hedonic treadmills. We want something, but when we get it, the joy from it wears off quickly, and we want something better … and then better … and then better. All this wanting often just leads to disappointment and unhappiness. The notion of simple living can be freeing.

How do you pursue happiness?

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Resolve to Spend More Time With Family

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Here are six ways to carve out a little more family time.

1.  Share a family meal

Getting together daily to share food breeds family intimacy and bonding and has enormous benefits for children. In “The Magic of the Family Meal” in Time Magazine, Nancy Gibbs writes:

“The more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.

2.  Take a daily walk

Incorporating a regular family walk into your schedule is a great way to bond with your family and get some daily exercise. And if you take it after dinner, it will also aid digestion.

3.  Start a family reading tradition

Carving out some daily read-aloud time for the whole family has many benefits. It creates lifelong readers, develops focus and listening skills, builds literacy skills, breeds the imagination, and it can encourage relaxation and restful sleep. Want to know more? I wrote about it here.

4.  Turn TV time into togetherness time

In a study of the daily activities of 1712 kids between the ages of 0 and 12, the more time kids spent watching TV, the less time they spent interacting with their parents and siblings. Of course, you can use television to spend more quality time with your kids, not less.

Here are a few basic tips:

  • The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV for kids under 2.
  • Restrict viewing time for older kids to 1-2 hours of quality television a day.
  • Find shows that engage your child intellectually or physically.
  • Watch TV together and talk about it afterward.
  • Read aloud about the same subjects your child learns about on TV.

5.  Institute an electronic sunset

If too much television, computer, or video gaming is getting in the way of family time, consider designating a time each night (like 7:00 p.m.) to shut off all of the electronics, phones included.

6.  Plan some adventures

It’s wintertime, and it’s easy to fall into a routine rut. Stave off those winter doldrums by planning some family fun, like a stargazing date, a trip to a museum or aquarium, a nature hike, or a day trip.

Do you want to spend more time with your family? Do you have any tips?

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Resolve to Get Organized

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I’m still astounded by how much harder it is to keep up a household with the addition of just one extra (very small) family member a year and a half ago. Maybe that’s because my son is a wizard at unfolding laundry, removing the contents from cabinets, and tucking away valuables in top-secret hiding spots? In any case, I’m on a mission to get more organized. Here are the seven best ways I’ve come across so far.

1.  Make a home for your keys, wallet, and phone

Do you often find yourself racing around searching for one of these three things? You’re not alone. Designate a place for them and always put them there. It helps if this place has an outlet, so you can plug in your phone.

2.  Say no to junk mail

According to New American Dream, most of us will spend eight months opening junk mail during our lives. The solution? Opt out. I did this 5 years ago, and I don’t miss junk mail at all. Find out how to do it here.

2.  Deal with the mail immediately

It’s hard to motivate yourself to go through the mail when it’s turned into a Leaning Tower of Pisa on the junk table. Open it the instant it arrives, put the bills in a designated area, file what you need to keep, and shred what you don’t. (Organizer Perri Kersh explains what you should keep and what you can safely shred here.)

3.  Do one thing at a time

We’ve all heard it – multitasking is inefficient. But until recently, I often found myself doing six things at once. I’d start one task, get distracted, start another, realize the first wasn’t done, go back to it, notice something else that wasn’t done … you get the picture. I somehow got things done. But I always felt overly-busy and harried. Then the solution dawned on me – a simple checklist. I can’t tell you how much this tool has transformed my life. Learn more here.

3.  Wash, dry, fold, and put away a load of laundry a day

I always imagined that the key to my laundry woes was a fancy laundry sorting system, preferably one with lots of cool, handmade wicker baskets. But it turns out that the more practical, less glamorous solution is just doing a load of laundry start-to-finish every day.

4.  Institute a 30-Minute Family Clean-up

After dinner, turn on some music and clean together for 30 minutes. You may be amazed by how much you get done, and it’s a lot more fun to do it together.

5.  Streamline your Internet time

We all know mindless surfing can eat hours from the day. Sadly, I think the answer to this one is just discipline. Pay attention to where you’re going online and cut out the surfing and blog-reading that’s not adding anything meaningful to your life. Download an add-on such as LeechBlock to keep you away from distractions and stick with it.

6.  Keep a family calendar

Write down everyone’s dates and appointments and what you’re planning to make for meals in one central location. A magnetic dry-erase calendar on the refrigerator works great for this.

7.  Plan your meals

Yes, meal-planning is my answer for everything – even world peace. I wrote about it here.

Do you have any organizing tips?

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Resolve to Save Money

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I’ve heard that most of us forget our resolutions sometime before Martin Luther King Day. But maybe we’re just making it too difficult? Living better often comes down to slowing down and keeping things simple. In that spirit, I’ll tackle a few common resolutions.

My goal is to share the easiest, least expensive, most practical knowledge I’ve gleaned on how we can live better. Share your favorite tips in the comments section, too.

If you’re serious about making positive changes, some experts advise that you focus on one specific, defined, quantifiable goal at a time. So pick one from the list and go for it!

Ten Ways to Save Money


Quite a few of us became reluctant experts on the art of pinching pennies. My husband and I became adept at tightening an already tight budget. Here are the best ideas I’ve come across so far:

1.  Write down everything you spend.

Do you already have a budget? If not, write down everything you buy for a week. It will make you aware of your spending habits. (You may be surprised how much incidental purchases add up.) Then use what you learn about your expenses to make a monthly budget.

2.  Carry cash

Try ditching the debit and credit cards and using cash for purchases. You may find that you’re more conscious of how much you’re spending. Parting with cash can feel more real than swiping a card. And a study suggests carrying large denomination bills makes people much less eager to spend money.

3.  Pay your Savings Account first

Determine how much money you can afford to save, and pay your savings account before you pay any other bills. If your employer offers direct deposit, automatically divert a portion of your paycheck into your savings account.

4.  Give yourself free money

Make sure each member of the household has a designated amount of money to spend on whatever they wish. It will help everyone stick to a tight budget without feeling deprived.

5.  Park your car for a week.

My husband and I recently parked our car for an entire month. We don’t drive much, so we thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. We learned how to be so much more economical with our trips and purchases. When you’re relying on public or human-powered transit, things like going to a box store on the outskirts of town, running out for last-minute take-out, or buying anything big and heavy become less attractive options.

We honestly missed the car a little more than we hoped we would. But we enjoyed riding our bikes everywhere, especially our son. He retrieves his bicycle helmet first thing in the morning and says, “Vroom, vroom.” His zeal for two wheels keeps us riding our bikes nearlly everywhere – even when it’s raining.

6.  Make your own

Stock up on baking soda, vinegar, and hydrogen peroxide, and whip up your own personal care products and household cleaners. These three ingredients are non-toxic, inexpensive, versatile, and amazingly effective.

Start with:

7.  Eat at home

If you eat out just once a week and spend $30, that adds up to $120 a month and $1,560 a year. It’s not hard to see how dining at home can save you lots of cash.

8.  Plan your meals

A meal-planning system can cut your grocery bill by hundreds of dollars a month. It can also help you eat healthier, incorporate more whole foods into your diet, enjoy cooking again, stop those last-minute “let’s just get a pizza” nights, and even help you get along better with your spouse. Want to learn more? I wrote about the art of meal-planning here.

9.  Cook from scratch

You can save a lot of cash by giving up processed and packaged food and preparing your meals from scratch. I’ve cut our food budget by at least $300 a month this way. But more importantly, I love it. It’s more labor-intensive, more time-consuming, and more general effort. But cooking from raw ingredients is creative work. Our house smells of fresh-baked bread; or of garlic, oregano, or basil; or of soup slowly simmered, and it just feels a lot more like home. Want to learn more? I wrote about cooking from scratch here.

10.  Eat local foods seasonally

In Eating Close to Home, Elin Cristina England writes, “We seem to have collectively succumbed to the myth that a green lettuce salad with a tomato should be part of every dinner from January to March.” She argues that we should eat seasonally, with our winter meals consisting of mainstays like carrots, parsnips, turnips and rutabagas. If we eat this way, she writes:

Over the course of a year, we end up eating a varied diet, from a wide range of the plant kingdom, which nourishes us with a full complement of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients.

Imagine how much money you might save on food by letting go of the idea of eating like it’s the peak of summer year-round.

Do you have any tips on saving money to share?


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Living Big in a Tiny House

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I reviewed Dee Williams’ The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir for Cities Are Now, the Winter 2015 issue of YES! Magazine.

72 Cities Cover

At 41, Dee Williams was a “nor­mal, middle-class, middle-of-the-road woman with a mortgage and a job and friends.” She worked as a state hazardous waste inspector and owned a 1927 Portland, Ore., fixer-upper that she shared with a rotation of roommates. She “went running and climbing and paddling, racing in a thousand different direc­tions at a thousand miles per hour.”

Then one day she woke up in an intensive care unit tethered to a urine bag, IV pole, and heart monitor, and the doctors diagnosed her with a potentially fatal heart condition. “It felt like death, or my mortality, or something bigger still, was leaning into my bed with the moonlight, clat­tering when I moved hangers in the closet, buzzing behind the sound of the shower running or my car idling in traffic,” she writes in The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir.

Soon after her diagnosis, Williams discovered an article about an Iowa City man who built and moved into a house the size of a shed. The idea of building such a little house—the process itself and the paring down it would require to move in—enticed Williams. “Somehow, it would shrink my life into a manageable mouthful,” she writes. Before long, Williams was drafting blueprints for her own tiny house.

Designing a house, even a very small one, involved some “outright panic” for Williams. She planned to live in the backyard of a house belong­ing to friends more than a hundred miles away in Olympia, Wash. Thus the house would need to fit on a trailer and be under 13.5 feet tall per Depart­ment of Transportation requirements. It would also need to withstand the rough shaking that transporting a house on the highway can present.

Excerpt from the book:

I thought I’d find something in all of this, and I got more than I bargained for. I discovered a new way of looking at the sky, the winter rain, the neighbors, and myself; and a different way of spending my time. Most important, I stumbled into a new sort of “happiness,” one that didn’t hinge on always getting what I want, but rather, on wanting what I have. It’s the kind of happiness that isn’t tied so tightly to being comfortable (or having money and property), but instead is linked to a deeper sense of satisfaction—to a sense of humility and gratitude, and a better understanding of who I am in my heart.

I now this sounds cheesy, and in fact, it sounds fairly similar to the gobbledygook that friends have thrown at me just after having their first baby. But the facts are the facts: I found a certain bigness in my little house—a sense of largeness, freedom, and happiness that comes when you see there’s no place you’d rather be.

As she built, Williams experienced sore muscles, bumps, bruises, smashed fingers—and lost her ponytail after she accidentally glued it to her house. She also had a lot of fun. “Risking life and limb every day” distracted her from her potentially debilitating disease. And she erected an undeniably attractive 84-square-foot cedar-and-knotty-pine house that man­ages to look open and airy in photos despite its minuscule size.

In a society drowning in commer­cials, books, and schemes promising to deliver us from hardship, it might have been tempting for Williams to oversell downsizing. She resisted that temptation—The Big Tiny abounds with refreshing honesty, humor, and endearing quirkiness.

Williams admits that getting rid of her three-bedroom house full of stuff was more agonizing than she expected, and living in less than a hundred square feet isn’t always comfortable. She has no refrigerator or plumb­ing. She cooks on a single burner and sleeps with her propane heater off, because she’s afraid her house will catch fire. She estimates she’s happy about 85 percent of the time, about the same amount of time she was happy in her big house.

When she escaped the “mindless rotisserie of work and projects” that guided her in her old house, Williams discovered a satisfaction that came from getting to know herself. “Let­ting go of ‘stuff,’” she writes, “allowed the world to collapse behind me as I moved, so I became nothing more or less than who I simply was: Me.”

The house and its large skylight helped her connect with nature in a new way. “I like the excitement of the windstorms and the rain pound­ing down a thousand different ways, inches from my head,” she writes. She also has more time for drinking tea on her porch and chatting with friends, because she no longer has to juggle bills and worry about constant home repairs.

What Williams celebrates most is that her new lifestyle requires her to depend on others. She lives “in com­munity” with her friends Hugh and Annie, their two sons, and Hugh’s elderly aunt Rita because she’s located in their backyard and needs their run­ning water. Williams happily takes on the role of Rita’s caretaker in exchange for using Rita’s shower and occasion­ally her oven. “If more people under­stood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors’ padlocks…we’d live in a very different place,” she insists.

Williams’ enthusiasm for small living and her charming hand-built house have already helped launch a tiny house movement. The Big Tiny will encourage many more people to assess whether bigger and more means happier—proof that making something tiny can ignite something very big.

If you liked this post, check out more of my popular posts about living simply:

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What’s Your Favorite Blog?

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Lately I’ve been cleaning, and when I say cleaning, I mean emptying dressers, stripping closets, and purging file cabinets and hard drives. I feel agitated when the kitchen counter is not scrubbed clean. I eye the newspaper moments after bringing it in from the porch, eager to recycle it.

The other day, as I was uttering “Why are these (fill in the blank: trains, balls, cars, clothes) always on the floor?” while I zipped around the house tidying, it occurred to me that the intensity of all of this scouring, scrubbing, and sanitizing isn’t, um, exactly normal for me.

Then I remembered something my friend said during her first pregnancy. “I knew I was nesting when I finished vacuuming and then took the vacuum apart to clean it.”

Oh, right, nesting. Is that what I’ve been doing?

Here’s what Pregnancy Weekly says about it:

Nesting brings about some unique and seemingly irrational behaviors in pregnant women and all of them experience it differently. Women have reported throwing away perfectly good sheets and towels because they felt the strong need to have “brand new, clean” sheets and towels in their home. They have also reported doing things like taking apart the knobs on kitchen cupboards, just so they could disinfect the screws attached to the knobs. Women have discussed taking on cleaning their entire house, armed with a toothbrush.

Okay, so that does sound curiously like what I’ve been doing. But I’m still clinging to the idea that I rationally make decisions about my day-to-day activities.

In any case, I figured I’d put all of this organizing mojo to use and attack a few of the more messy, disheveled, bedraggled corners of my life.

Enter: my Google feed reader.

A minimalist blogger recommends regularly purging your feed reader entirely and adding back only the blogs you miss. Sounds like a great idea, right?

I opened my reader, resolved to click on “delete all”. Except first I had to browse through my list of blogs … and then read through a few recent posts … and then click on a few of the posts those posts mentioned.

Full confession: I added seven blogs to my feed reader and deleted maybe six. Oops. So much for purging. But I fully intend to return to said reader with a more discerning eye in the near future.

There are just so many great blogs out there. Recently a reader recommended Drawing America by Bike, where Eric Clausen documents his 14-month round-the-country bike tour with ink drawings. It’s very cool, and it made me wonder what else I don’t know about.

I know it’s the opposite of purging, but in the interest of making my feed reader more interesting (albeit a little cluttered) will you help me by answering a few questions:

What’s your favorite blog? What blog(s) deserves to be on my feed reader? If you have time, I’m also curious, approximately how many blogs do you read? How do you keep up with them? Do you use a feed reader or some other method? Do you read blogs every day, once a week, or less often?

Thanks for your feedback! I’ll check out all of your recommendations and report back next week on my favorite new finds.

(To reach me, you can leave a comment below, email newurbanhabitat at gmail dot com, or tweet @newurbanhabitat.)