Happy Hour

Carstensen and her team are now studying meditating Buddhists, to see how their practice alters their perception of time. Her theory is that meditation may cultivate a mind-set similar to an old person's, since it shuts out thoughts of the past and the future in favor of the present. "The religion is centered around the fact that we could die at any moment," she says.

Related research by psychologist Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin has in fact shown that meditation may change how the brain works. He measured brain activity in people who had finished eight weeks of meditation training and found significantly more activity in the left prefrontal cortex, a region associated with positive feelings and pursuit of goals. More recently, Davidson traveled to India to measure the brain activity of Buddhist monks who had each spent at least 10,000 hours in meditation. The activity in their left prefrontal cortex far exceeded that in their right prefrontal cortex, which is the brain's home for negative emotions and anxiety. Most of us don't have 10,000 free hours to devote to brain resculpturing. But the finding suggests that if we train ourselves to become more mindful and slow down our sense of passing time, we can learn to monitor our moods and thoughts before they spiral downward. We can, in other words, make ourselves happier.

In the quest for happiness, most of us try to guess what the future might bring, then project our current selves—with all of our hopes, quirks and predilections—into that unknown. We use a fuzzy image of the future to make all kinds of decisions, whether it's what to make for dinner or whom to marry. Those predictions are essential to happiness—and they are almost always wrong, finds Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard. As a result, our efforts to improve our lives often fall flat.

Working with Tim Wilson, professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, Gilbert has shown that we are remarkably bad at "affective forecasting," or predicting how we'll feel in the future. The good things are never as good as we imagine they'll be; the bad things are never as bad. We think of ourselves as both more fragile and more easily satisfied than we really are. We overestimate the impact of a good turn of event: We think that a fresh career or a new relationship will permanently change us, when all it does is provide a short-term mood boost. On the other hand, we are also much more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Most of us do recover emotionally from life's traumas, whether it's the death of a close friend or a bitter divorce.

"Memory is a flawed partner to anticipation," explains Gilbert. "If I ask you to remember a terrorist attack, you will instantly think of September 11, not because it's a prototypical act of terrorism but because it's so unrepresentative." But if your memory provides you with the example of September 11 as a representative for all terrorist attacks, you're very likely to mispredict how you'll feel in response to future attacks. You expect that you will feel the way you did after September 11, yet because the vast majority of terrorist attacks are very small and involve the loss of relatively few lives, you would probably be a lot less upset and recover more quickly. The bright side to forecasting errors like this is that they expose our built-in psychological immune system, as Gilbert calls it, which ensures we will survive future horrors we can't predict.

There are many other reasons why we have such trouble imagining how we'll feel in the future: We don't account for our own internal spin-room, the rationalization techniques we use to explain away bad situations. ("She wasn't right for me anyway.") We also tend to anticipate the most dramatic symbol of a future event. If it's a promotion, for example, we fantasize about the moment the boss breaks the news. What we forget is that life goes on after the congratulatory handshake—there will still be a job to do, a commute to endure and a family to raise.