The bright yellow cover got me, so I added this small volume to a stack I scooped up before Christmas break. Yes, it's overdue. I was on a little happiness jag with [b:The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want|2326098|The How of Happiness A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want|Sonja Lyubomirsky|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1266733909s/2326098.jpg|2332650] and [b:Flow|66354|Flow|Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1170649609s/66354.jpg|64339] in the same stack. Alas, none of these titles wooed me well.

Nettle presents statistics and information from studies, but his writing was not engaging. In grad school a woman from England incorporated the word "whilst" in a short presentation. Charming. But I felt put off by this British-ism in print. Silly, but there it is. I hoped for something as winning like Gretchen Reuben. Not this time. ( )

Remarkably good. There's an understandable fear, on seeing a book like this, that one is in for something like self-help homilies or, perhaps, religious mumbo-jumbo, but the book lives up to its sub-title. Rather than providing us with his personal thoughts on happiness, we hear about the results of a variety of different types of experiments, questionnaires and other such investigations. And the results are rather interesting.

I found especially valuable the discussion of wanting vs liking.
The idea is that there are basically two independent and uncoupled systems in the brain, the liking one not that strong and not especially active.
Liking tells us that "right now things are pretty good, you might as well try to maintain this situation for as long as possible by not changing anything", but it's pretty easily overridden by both external and internal occurrences.
Meanwhile the wanting system is constantly active, constantly blaring at full volume that by doing something or other life will be improved. The cruel trick is that, as I said, wanting is not hooked up to liking, so that wanting may tell you that having sex with this pretty girl, or being promoted, or buying this car/computer/TV/house will bring your more joy than you can possibly imagine but, on doing so, the joy is about the same as any other amount of joy, and lasts for about as long --- the joy system doesn't really go all the way to "11", no matter what the wanting system promises.

Another tidbit I found interesting was that, while, as is well-known, very few changes to one's life really do much to improve one's long term happiness, the main ones being marriage and good health, one thing that does have a marked and long-term positive effect on happiness, for women, is breast implants. ( )