THE FINAL FIVE OF 'MORE ABOUT HAPPINESS'

8.Give money away.
    Once a person's basic needs are met, having more money does little to boost happiness.

     What matters more is how much you give away. In a survey of 632  Americans, University of British Columbia psychologist Elizabeth Dunn, PhD, and colleagues found that the money people spent on themselves was unrelated to general happiness, but the more money people gave away as gifts and donations, the happier they were.
     In another study, the researchers gave people $5 or $20 with instructions to spend the money on themselves, on someone else, or to donate it. Those who gave the money away or spent it on others--no matter the amount--were happier than those who used it for themselves.

9. Chat up your spouse like a stranger.
    No one wants to make a bad first impression, so we tend to put our best face forward, especially with people we don't know.

     And that turns out to be a good strategy for enhancing our own happiness. In one study, Dunn and colleagues learned, observers judged that people conversing with strangers tried harder to make good impressions than did people conversing with their romantic partners--and the more they did so, the happier they felt after the interaction was over.
     Another experiment showed that people instructed to talk with their romantic partners as though they were trying to make a good impression (as they would with a stranger) felt happier after the experiment ended than those who were told to interact normally.

10.Settle for good enough.
     We tend to equate choice with freedom--and what could be wrong with that?

       Plenty, according to Swarthmore College psychologist Barry Schwartz, PhD, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. Faced with a vast array of options--whether among consumer products like blue jeans and toothpastes or more consequential services like prescription drug plans and retirement plans--many of us end up bewildered. We can't stop worrying whether what we don't choose might make us happier. One simple solution, Schwartz argues, is to opt out of the multiple-choice game by narrowing your pick to several "good enough" options--then choose randomly.

11.Know when to fold 'em.
     Most of us are not very good at knowing when to walk away from circumstances that are just plain bad.

       Economists and psychologists call this human foible "the fallacy of sunk costs." We keep holding when we should be folding--sticking to bad jobs because of the months and years we've already sunk into them, or unhappy relationships that we can't imagine extracting ourselves from, or sluggish supermarket lines we've stood in too long to abandon. Because we're so averse to wasting money, time, effort, or emotional investment, we fail to see that staying the course won't recoup what we've already lost, says Ohio State University psychologist Hal Arkes, PhD.
      But this is a failure we can overcome by deliberately thinking through our choices as though we weren't already invested in one course of action. The next time you're faced with a problem that has gone from good to bad to worse, think to yourself: If I were coming into this situation right now, what would I do?