Focus On Happiness

One recent Sunday, I was flicking through the string of cable news networks when I heard a sound bite on CNN, “Studies find women are less happy than men.” I put down the remote.

According to the segment, several recent studies, including the General Social Survey which has tracked American’s mood since 1972, have found that women’s happiness is declining while men’s happiness is increasing.

As if to provide me with the perfect parenthetical comment, one of the male commentators said, “That’s because we get to live with them and they have to live with us.” I swear I did not write that myself.

But seriously, what is it that is bringing women down? On the surface, it appears that we have more opportunities available to us than ever before in history. Could it be that choices add stress rather than relieving it?

Marcus Buckingham, author of Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently, thinks so. He says “Choice is inherently stressful, and women are being driven to distraction.”

In 1970, when women reported being happier than men, women had fewer expectations and more hope for the future. They compared themselves to other women, but focused on their home, their kids, their gardens. Now we compare ourselves not just to women but to men, and we assess our homes, our kids, our gardens, our careers, our activities, our ability to juggle multiple responsibilities, and so on.

Buckingham noted that women’s unhappiness grows over time. “Though women begin their lives more fulfilled than men, as they age, they gradually become less happy.” Perhaps this is because women tend to be “caretakers”, and as their families add members, the amount of caretaking grows exponentially. In addition, we now find ourselves taking care of our aging parents along with our toddlers.

In a recent article on this topic for The New York Times, Maureen Dowd argued that women take things more personally than men and are harder on themselves when they have to split their attention amongst all the important things that are crowded into their lives. They build stronger personal attachments with others and have greater regrets about losing these attachments. They also experience more pressure than men to maintain an attractive and specifically youthful appearance as they age, and have fewer options for finding companionship later in life.

Now, I am not using this space to send a message to our men about our tough lives, to reiterate that women do substantially more than men in the household (though this has been proven again and again in research studies, even when both spouses work outside the home) and to request greater appreciation for our efforts. Not this time.

This time I want to send a message to women about how we live our lives, to encourage us to do what feels good for our families instead of what we think we should do, to stop comparing ourselves to our neighbors (who more often than not are hiding their completely understandable flaws behind their perfectly painted white picket fences), to slow down.

For a start, let’s cut down on the multi-tasking.

We may impress ourselves with our ability to juggle multiple tasks and children, to cook dinner and clean up the kitchen at the same time, to email while helping our teen with her homework, or catch up on phone calls while swinging our son in the park. But how many of us collapse at the end of a day of non-stop activity, only to wonder why so many things that had been started remain incomplete. How many times do we struggle to remember exactly what our child told us about his school day, or to recall what we meant to write in the calendar after that phone call, or just where we put down that glass. If we really focused on it we might realize that each interaction got a little less of us than we thought.

In his recent book, The Guinea Pig Diaries, A.J. Jacobs spent a month avoiding multitasking altogether. When he visited Darien Library last week, he told his audience that during this month he felt more connected to each task as he did it and found “…life was slowing down – in a good way….” Furthermore, he cited studies that showed multitasking makes us less happy and less [not more] productive.

As women, we often joke that men aren’t capable of doing more than one thing at a time. But perhaps they are having the last laugh. I don’t know about you, but I could use a few more of those.