Grounded in research • Rooted in wisdom
Happiness can be cultivated. The research shows how.
Cultivating Happiness brings together four decades of well-being science and the world’s oldest wisdom traditions into one practical plan: build the foundations, train your mind for the long term, use faster proven strategies meanwhile, and protect everything you build. A free companion app helps you keep it up.
Two speeds, one project
Most happiness books pick one truth and ignore the other. The deepest and most lasting happiness comes from a mind you have learned to manage, and that learning is slow. Meanwhile, simpler things work now. This book is built on both truths at once, and on the relationship between them: the things that make life better this week also train the mind for the long run.
Foundations First
Body, mind, money, and hope. Sleep, movement, and food treated as mood interventions; the mental capacity to recover; financial security in stages; trainable optimism and your strengths. Nothing else takes hold on top of exhaustion and money worry.
The Long Game
Train the mind. Attitude, acceptance, gratitude, forgiveness, mindfulness and meditation, and the quieting of rumination and chronic stress. Slow, deep, and the most durable investment you can make in your own well-being.
Meanwhile
Raise happiness now. Purpose and meaningful goals, close relationships, giving, movement, learning, nature and awe, a psychologically rich life, and a healthier relationship with work and technology. Results you can feel this month.
Protecting Your Happiness
Fix the drain before running more water. Clutter and the news, comparison and envy, perfectionism, loneliness, harmful relationships, compulsive escape, and grief. Removing what drains you often helps faster than adding more.
25+
years with the research
29
practical chapters, each with one place to start
4
parts: foundations, long game, meanwhile, protections
1
free companion app to keep you going
“Train the mind; it is slow, and it is the prize. While it trains, live the life that happiness research recommends, because that life trains the mind too. Protect the whole thing from the drains.”
From the Conclusion of Cultivating Happiness
If you did nothing else: six things
This is not a checklist of twenty-nine things to do. It is a framework for finding the few changes that matter most to you. These six matter most, and the chapters exist to help you do them well.
- Protect your sleep. Sleep loss takes away the capacity to feel good before it does anything else.
- Invest in one or two close relationships. The strongest predictor of happiness and health ever measured.
- Move your body most days. One of the fastest, best-proven mood tools in existence.
- Keep one daily thought practice. Gratitude is the easiest place to start.
- Make progress on one goal that matters. The forward movement is where most of the reward lives.
- Remove your costliest drain. Whatever it is for you, fixing it pays faster than adding more.
The book comes with a free app
Take the book’s well-being baseline, track the practices you choose, time your meditation, and repeat the assessment in ninety days to see what moved. Free for iPhone and Android, coming soon to the App Store and Google Play.
About the author
Sanjiv Sahay has studied the science of happiness for over twenty-five years and meditated for more than thirty. A Silicon Valley technology entrepreneur and engineer by training, he created myhappiness.com in 2000 to share what he had learned. Read more