Beauty, fame and wealth don't make people happy, study after study shows. So what does? Maintaining meaningful relationships, especially with friends. Recently, David Brooks posited in The New York Times that Sandra Bullock would be a happier woman without an Oscar and with her marriage intact. What? Why do these two things have to be linked?
Yes, her marriage to a man we now find out has been an inveterate cheater appears to be dissolving. But that doesn't mean that her other relationships, those with her friends and family, her work colleagues and production team, aren't strong and, in the long run, maybe even more important (or lasting at least) than her marriage bond. Connectivity to your community, getting involved in organizations (a charity, a sports league or some other activity beyond your work and family) and being around other happy people is what it's all about. (Note to self: Work with winning personalities, hang out with positive people.)
In my new book, The Nine Rooms of Happiness, coauthored with well-known New York psychiatrist Catherine Birndorf, M.D., we provide strategies for finding happiness in every "room" of your emotional house. You can have eight rooms neat and tidy (meaning happy), but if you focus on the mess, it's the one thing that can bring you down. We call this the "mess of the day," and on our website, NineRooms.com, hundreds of people are posting their messes and helping each other clean them up.
We all have our mess of the day. The important thing is not to let it steal our happiness, now or over the years of many messes. We shouldn't look back and say, "I should have been happier then. Why didn't I let the good overcome the bad?"
Meaningful relationships help us do that. Keeping those on track is the most important thing, we'd agree, but it goes well beyond a marriage (the bedroom) into other rooms, like the family room, where our nearest and dearest drive us crazy or rush in to help us when the chips are down.
We offer our nine key processes, or strategies, for communicating better, getting over conflict and being more authentic--basically learning to be happier in every "room" of your emotional house--to the stars. They are our "faux-riends," whose lives we all seem to follow as if they were our neighbors or our mutual friends. (Full disclosure: While I've met some of these people, I don't actually know them!) But these key processes aren't just for our faux-riends. You can use them, too, to be happier in every room of your emotional life.
Screening
This is basically living in the past. You screen your memories like movies in your brain. This takes place in the basement of your emotional house, where the scrapbooks, yearbooks and stuff of your childhood are stored. Freud called them screen memories because we filter everything in our lives through the "screen" of certain traumatic childhood events. You can get stuck in a pattern of constantly reacting to memories of your past and never fully grow up. So who is screening?
Lindsay Lohan is screening by acting like a petulant child and not owning up to the responsibilities of being an adult. Once a child star, always a child star? We'd say: Lindsay, put away the scrapbooks of your time as the It Girl star of Mean Girls. Get out of the basement and back to the rest of your house, where your friends and family want you to grow up and act your age.
Pinging
This is the sonarlike signal (used by dolphins to find their way through rocky waters into a clear open, safe sea) to get feedback that is both authentic and helpful. American Idol tryouts are painful to watch because the terrible singers never got pinging about the need to find a profession in, say, dental hygiene. By surrounding yourself with helpful advisors, honest pingers, you learn and grow. Eventually you become your authentic self by listening to your own inner feedback, which points you to true north, your true self.
A+B=C is the relationship equation
You are A, the other person is B and C is your relationship. You can't change anyone else, but you can change yourself, and that will change the outcome.
Elin and Tiger: She has a choice to make since obviously he is a philanderer, and while Elin may never be able to change him, she can only decide if she wants to stay with him or not.
Venn diagram
The two circles come together in the middle to create an overlap, just as two individuals come together to create a relationship. Sorry, you Jerry McGuire fans, but no one "completes" you, you complete yourself. In a healthy relationship, the overlap is enough to make both people happy, but you also have your own life outside the relationship in order to be a happy, independent person.
Beyonce and Jay Z seem to embody this idea, with their own winning careers and each one leading a complementary professional life. But they overlap as well, and when you get a glimpse of their relationship, at a Lakers game, for instance, you sense they are truly happy just sitting beside each other. This is a marriage built on mutual respect but not control.
Self-involvement
When you spend too much time gazing in the mirror, you're not enjoying relationships outside your self. Instead, you're all about you. There are a few stars who, no matter how well they perform, can't hide this propensity. Let's give this one to John Mayer! His narcissism led him to make racist comments in Rolling Stone and disrespect two women who did nothing to invite his nastiness...saying Jessica Simpson was "sexual napalm" and mocking Jennifer Aniston at the same time he's saying how incredible she is? John, get over yourself. Get away from the mirror, out to the rest of your emotional landscape. Life is big. And it's not all about you.
It's not either/or... it's both/and
You don't have to think, "Either I agree with everything about my friend/sister/loved one or I don't love her." You can both love her and accept your differences. Venus and Serena! They may want to trounce each other at the next tournament, but they are still the closest and most supportive friends and sisters. You can have conflict with your loved ones. In fact, conflict is more than OK, it's part of a healthy life.
Too much of a good thing
Angelina Jolie is a good example of how too much can be overwhelming. Too much of a good thing (charity work, kids, money, power) can become a bad thing if it means you're pulled in too many directions and unable to juggle it all. Angelina is so involved in trying to save the world, she looks sickly thin and rumors percolate about the strain on her marriage.
Balance, we like to say, is a beam walked in the gym in school. Balancing often leads to a fall. You have to prioritize and choose what you're doing first, then next. In the living room, our friends ask so much of us and we don't want to let anyone down. We call it the "giving room," because we feel required to give and give to others and never take care of ourselves. The airlines say put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself and be strong to help others. We say: Your commitments can suck the life out of you, but only if you let them. Learn to say no and take care of your health, yourself. It's not selfish, it's self-preservation.
Not to decide is to decide
Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart! Either be together or stop moping about. You could lose the moment, the opportunity to be happy and have a normal adult relationship. We apply this to every aspect of life: work, relationships, even a chance to buy a house at a great price. If you don't move forward, that's a decision. So for our Twilight lovebirds, this means: Go on and have a real relationship instead of denying or hinting at it coyly. For the rest of us it means go (along with the status quo) or grow. The old saying, "Nothing ventured, nothing gained" is true. But something may be lost--as in an opportunity.
Acting out
On the same pages where David Brooks took a run at feminism by implying a woman's success could destroy her marriage, Maureen Dowd took a run at the pope for acting out by not speaking directly to the newest troubles the Catholic Church is facing regarding abusive priests. Dowd called for the pope's apology to the families involved. She was being direct and that's why we love her. Reading her column makes me happy.
For more on how to be happier in your relationships, your job, your life, check out NineRooms.com. Share your mess of the day, and we'll help you clean it up. Or you can read my SELF magazine blog at my blog.