A Happiness Ritual

Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar born 1970, is an American and Israeli teacher, and writer in the areas of positive psychology and leadership. As a lecturer at Harvard University, Ben-Shahar created the most popular course in Harvard's history. The subject of the course was “happiness.” In his very popular book, Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment (p. 11), he reveals a “happiness ritual” that has proven to be very successful.

Each night before going to sleep, write down at least five things that made or make you happy — things for which you are grateful. These can be little or big: from a meal that you enjoyed to a meaningful conversation you had with a friend, from a project at work to God.

If you do this exercise regularly, you will naturally repeat yourself, which is perfectly fine. The key is, despite the repetition, to keep the emotions fresh; imagine what each item means to you as you write it down, and experience the feeling associated with it. Doing this exercise regularly can help you to appreciate the positive in your life rather than take it for granted.

You can do this exercise on your own or with a loved one: a partner, child, parent, sibling, or close friend. Expressing gratitude together can contribute in a meaningful way to the relationship.

Understanding how the brain functions provides key insights as to why the “happiness ritual” is so successful. Michael Shermer wrote about those functions in his book The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and God to Politics and Conspiracies – How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths (p. 5).

The brain is a belief engine. From sensory data flowing in through the senses the brain naturally begins to look for and find patterns, and then infuses those patterns with meaning. The first process I call patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless data. The second process I call agenticity: the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention, and agency. We can’t help it. Our brains evolved to connect the dots of our world into meaningful patterns that explain why things happen. These meaningful patterns become beliefs, and these beliefs shape our understanding of reality.

Once beliefs are formed, the brain begins to look for and find confirmatory evidence in support of those beliefs, which adds an emotional boost of further confidence in the beliefs and thereby accelerates the process of reinforcing them, and round and round the process goes in a positive feedback loop of belief confirmation.

Use the “happiness ritual” to create new patterns of happiness and give your brain something much better to search for and confirm.

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