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Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives
By Gretchen Rubin
Doubleday Canada, 320 pages, $29.95
The Time of Your Life: Choosing a Vibrant, Joyful Future
By Margaret Trudeau
Harper Avenue, 320 pages, $32.99
Like many a sporadically driven, bandwagon-mounting, frequently frazzled individual, I was really obsessed with The Happiness Project, the 2009 self-help bible that sold 1.5 million copies, spent 107 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and turned its author Gretchen Rubin into a celebrated happiness evangelist. For that book, Rubin – a former lawyer and political scribe – spent a year making herself a happier, more deeply satisfied person, devoting each month to a different area of focus including personal relationships, new hobbies, contemplating the heavens and boosting energy. Reading the chapter on household decluttering was a borderline-pornographic experience. I raced through, reread, underlined. Afterwards, I lent my copy to my sisters and my mom. Soon, we were discussing our own personal "Happiness Projects" over e-mail. We would master new skills, pay bills, read widely, do more yoga, eat less junk and so on. For Christmas, my sister even bought us each our very own Happiness Project-branded "gratitude journal" – a Rubin-endorsed ritual where you take just a minute at the end of each day to record something that made you happy. The teenage-diary-sized logs are sky-blue and sun-yellow, which is how being a soldier in Gretchen Rubin's Happiness Army made me feel – full of light, optimistic, high on possibility.
And then those rah-rah feelings passed.
I returned to my previous existence as a lower-case-happy person (one who eats too many chips and still hasn't mastered the art of timely thank-you notes). To this day I get a twinge of guilt when I see the gratitude journal idling on my bookshelf. It has room for five years worth of entries. I don't think I made it past five days.
The problem is that I failed to turn my happiness-enabling behaviours into happiness-enabling habits, which are our regular and often automatic actions – the (good and bad) things we do with little or no consideration. They are also the subjects of Rubin's latest self-help text, Better Than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives. Twice-daily tooth brushing is a habit. So is time-sucking Internet surfing and using (or never using) the snooze button on your alarm. Habits, Rubin says, are the tent poles of our existence – since 40 per cent of our behaviours are repeated daily, she reasons that by changing our habits, we can change our lives.
Of course, if habit formation were that simple, my gratitude journal would contain almost five years worth of daily jubilation. So what determines our habitual behaviour (and why are some people so much better at maintaining good habits than others)?
Early on, Rubin zeroes in on her key revelation, which is that different personality types are inspired to adopt and keep habits for different reasons. She is an "Upholder," meaning she responds to both internal and external expectations. "Questioners" will only meet expectations (i.e., keep habits) if they believe them to be justified, "Obligers" do things because other people expect them to and "Rebels" resist expectations of any kind. These are the "Four Tendencies," Rubin says, presenting her theory as a giant "aha!" (when, in fact, it feels like a giant – well, duh).
She isn't wrong, per se. It's just that few of us need to read 250-plus pages to figure out whether we are motivated by external judgment, whether we are larks versus night owls, whether we can eat tempting foods on special occasions or never. If The Happiness Project was a journey of self-discovery, Better Than Before feels more like being in the constant company of the friend who asks – are you really going to eat that?
Rubin explains how writing itself has become a strictly enforced habit – every day she walks to the public library to escape the Internet and put words on the page. This mechanical technique explains her prolific output over the past few years – she updates her happiness blog six times a week and released a second self-help title (Happier at Home) in 2012. It might also explain why what once felt fresh now feels rote and maybe even recycled – all habit, no heart.
It's a criticism that could be lobbied more broadly at the entire self-help genre, a giant juggernaut of an industry that has become as parody-worthy as it is profitable. To wit: Last month the comedian and performance artist Jeff Wysaski planted a series of satirical self-help dust jackets on the shelves at an L.A. bookstore. The faux titles – So Your Son Is a Centaur, How to Dress … Yourself and The Beginner's Guide to Human Sacrifice – were deliberately absurd, and yet not so different from the sort of thing you might find in the bloated "personal improvement" section at your local bookstore. Hot new self-help offerings from just the last month include Reform Your Inner Mean Girl: 7 Steps to Stop Bullying Yourself and Start Loving Yourself; The Like Switch: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Influencing, Attracting, and Winning People Over; and Take Off Your Pants! (a guide to good writing, which sounds a lot more exciting than it is).
No matter the ailment, issue, insecurity or imperfection, there is almost certainly a self-help book telling you how to fix it. (And another one telling you to do the exact opposite.) With little focus on credentials and such a low bar to entry, anyone can position themselves as a self-styled self-help expert, and lately it feels like anyone is.
Just this week, in fact, rock musician Alanis Morissette announced plans to release a self-help book-slash-memoir later in the year. It's part of a growing book trend wherein celebs dole out life wisdom along with personal anecdotes. Lena Dunham's Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned" is an example of how this can go (mostly) right. Last month's The Natty Professor: A Master Class on Mentoring, Motivating and Making It Work! (an utterly useless offering from Project Runway's Tim Gunn), is the exact opposite.
Margaret Trudeau's new book Time of Your Life: Choosing a Vibrant, Joyful Future falls somewhere in between. After spending more than two decades "living in the now," Trudeau says she woke one day to find she was not a carefree flower child any more, but in fact a 65-year-old woman. A bad ski accident, the loss of her mother and a close friend's Alzheimer's diagnosis caused her to take stock of her life, both where she was at and where she is going. Her conclusion, that if she wanted to enjoy the so-called "third chapter" – a term coined by the age- and gravity-defying Jane Fonda – she was going to have to get real about getting old.
"Our youth-oriented society does not have a clearly defined place for the older woman," Trudeau writes, noting that by 2036, one in four Canadians will be over 65. She shares personal reflections on successful aging, along with stories from friends and notable females (ex-Home Depot Canada CEO Annette Verschuren, Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi). There is plenty of straightforward advice (on banking, on grandparenting, on sex over 60), and just enough Trudeau-type gossip (the time that Gloria Steinem sent a copy of Ms. Magazine to 24 Sussex, upsetting Pierre).
The book raises important issues around feminism, ageism and the direction our society must take to address the coming grey revolution. And to be fair, Trudeau is a well-known public figure, a competent storyteller and a passionate social advocate. If lending her voice to this important cause prompts discourse, then that is undoubtedly a good thing. It's just not clear what qualifies her to lead the discussion.
You could argue the same thing about Gretchen Rubin. Before she published The Happiness Project, Rubin clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. A while back, when Rubin asked her former boss about her own happiness philosophy, O'Connor said that the key is three simple words: "work worth doing." It's a mantra the self-help industry could probably stand to revisit.
Courtney Shea is a Toronto journalist. Follow her on Twitter at @CocoShea.