BookYol

Concept

Intentional Activities

Intentional activities are the practices a person chooses and keeps doing on purpose, such as expressing gratitude, nurturing relationships or savoring good moments, which Sonja Lyubomirsky identifies as the part of happiness most open to deliberate change.

Lyubomirsky's argument in The How of Happiness (2007) starts from three influences on how happy a person is: a genetic set point, which is real and fairly stable; life circumstances, such as income, marriage or where you live, which matter less than people expect because we adapt to them; and intentional activities, what we choose to do with our days. The book and the research behind it present the third as the part worth working on. The exact shares once drawn as a pie chart have since been criticised and revisited, but the practical point survives the debate. Activities resist hedonic adaptation better than circumstances, because they are episodic, they can be varied and they demand attention: a new car is the same car every morning, but a weekly gratitude letter or a planned kindness is a different act each time. The book describes twelve such activities, among them gratitude, optimism, kindness, relationships, flow, savoring, committing to goals and caring for the body, and asks the reader to choose the few that fit rather than try them all. Jonathan Haidt's happiness formula makes the same point with its V, for voluntary activities.

A real-life example

Tuncay, an engineer in İzmit, spent two years waiting for a move to his company's Istanbul office, sure it would make him happier; when it came, the lift lasted a season. This autumn he changed the question from what should change around him to what he could do: a Tuesday evening football game with old colleagues and a weekly call to his brother in Germany. Neither costs a lira, and neither has faded.

How to use it

  1. 1Split a sheet into two columns: what you are waiting to change around you, and what you could start doing this week.
  2. 2Choose one or two activities from the second column that you would enjoy and value, not ones you feel you should do.
  3. 3Put them in the calendar at a fixed time and vary how you do them every few weeks, so they do not turn into routine.