To increase happiness and self-esteem, consciously reduce your personal ambitions rather than solely striving to maximize success, as unchecked ambition can lead to a hedonic treadmill where growing success doesn’t increase happiness. This approach, observed in Scandinavian countries, involves taming desires and being content with current achievements.
Boost your happiness by prioritizing the frequency of small, positive emotions over the intensity of large, infrequent ones. Engage in repeatable, sustainable activities like regular coffee with friends, family brunches, or morning walks to consistently foster joy and strengthen close interpersonal relationships.
Cultivate a ‘psychological richness mindset’ to reframe negative events and setbacks as opportunities for learning, gaining insight, and personal growth. When minor frustrations occur, like getting lost, view them as potential sources of interesting stories or unexpected discoveries.
To truly accumulate psychological richness from your experiences, actively reflect on them by talking about them with others or writing them down. This deepens processing, ensures experiences remain in your ‘psychological portfolio,’ and helps you remember how they changed your perspective.
Develop the ‘muscle memory’ to turn life’s inevitable adversities, humiliations, and losses into sources of empowerment. Actively seek to reframe difficult experiences by focusing on how you grew or what positive changes emerged, transforming them into empowering stories that can also help others.
Honestly assess your core values and what you truly want in life—whether it’s comfort and happiness, contribution and meaning, or diverse experiences and richness. This self-knowledge will help you consciously decide which path to prioritize at different stages or moments in your life.
Cultivate ‘openness to experience’ by being receptive to new kinds of experiences, ideas, information, objects, cultures, and aesthetic encounters, as this strongly correlates with psychological richness. Additionally, practice ‘agreeableness’ by saying ‘yes’ to invitations for new experiences from friends or family, even if you’re introverted.
Find psychological richness without needing to travel or spend extensively by exploring the familiar. Revisit favorite books, albums, or films to discover new details, or spend dedicated time with loved ones to uncover new aspects of their interests and abilities.
Nurture your natural sense of curiosity as a skill, especially if your work is highly specialized and tends to reduce it. At home, consciously ’take off the hat’ of your professional role and embrace a childlike inquisitiveness about ideas, information, objects, and cultures.
Counteract the dulling effects of an obsession with productivity by prioritizing playfulness and spontaneity, taking ‘vacations’ from social and economic responsibilities. Schedule open slots in your daily routine for unstructured activities, allow yourself to be silly like a child, and engage with kids or animals to naturally increase your playful demeanor.
When making important decisions with many options (e.g., hiring, major purchases, dating), actively counteract cognitive laziness and the tendency to under-explore. As a practical heuristic, aim to seriously consider at least 12 options before settling on a choice, or statistically, explore at least 37% of available options to increase the likelihood of an optimal decision.
Draw on Buddhist principles to practice detachment from excessive desires and ambitions, especially those related to material things or status. This helps manage suffering and prevents staking your entire self-worth on fleeting external achievements like promotions or social approval.
Cultivate meaning in life through small, consistent actions and long-term dedication, such as regular volunteering or raising a family, rather than solely pursuing grand accomplishments. Establish and consistently follow daily routines and attend to small responsibilities to foster a sense of structure, coherence, and significance.
Develop effective tools and strategies to manage negative emotions and cultivate resilience in the face of life’s inevitable vexations. This ability to work with difficult feelings is a crucial component of a broad and capacious understanding of happiness and well-being.
To better control ambitions and desires and increase overall happiness, strive to be a ‘satisficer’—someone who is happy and satisfied with ‘good enough’ options. This contrasts with a ‘maximizer,’ who constantly seeks the absolute best and often finds their happiness diminished by ever-growing expectations.