🎈 the 6 laws of incremental happiness

Savor your moment.

Reflect every day.

Reframe your reality.

Collect micro-habits.

Engineer your environment.

Battle forgetfulness.

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It’s pretty crazy… younger people are often happier than older people.

You’d think that anyone older than you would be happier than you. After all, they have had more time to practice the skill of happiness… but often they aren’t.

Take my Gramma as an example… she’s just miserable… 92 years of practice…

She hasn’t mastered the game of incremental happiness — getting happier and happier with time. It sure doesn’t happen automatically, so that’s why I am writing this guide.

“Sure Jacques, but I was born unhappy.”

Not so fast. Only 30-40% of happiness is hereditary. The rest is up to you. You can learn it.

If we look to the research on self-reported well-being over time, it looks like a U-curve. Younger people and older people are happiest… but this doesn’t make much sense. Shouldn’t it be a linear curve upward?

Keep in mind too, this is not actual happiness, it is self-reported well-being. I bet you if the curve actually measured happiness in-the-moment, it would not be U-shaped.

There are many reasons to explain why it’s not a linear curve. But here, I want to help you linearly increase your happiness.

So here are my six laws for incremental happiness.

And I don’t mean ‘self-reported well-being’ — how happy you think you are. What I mean is true happiness as a state of consciousness.

1 Savor your moment

“A wandering mind is an unhappy one.” Research has shown that when our minds wander, we’re less happy. So the first step of incremental happiness is training yourself to pay more attention to your life. Without attention, there’s no progress. Don’t develop a scatter brain addicted to TikTok.