jamesclear.com

Each year, I conduct my Annual Review and share it publicly. I do this because I find it helpful to review the successes and failures of the previous 12 months, but also because I think it is important to hold myself publicly accountable

But what researchers find is that when people actually suffer a traumatic event like living through an earthquake or becoming a paraplegic their happiness levels are nearly identical six months after the event as they were the day before the event. In a very famous study published by researchers at Northwestern University in 1978 it was discovered that the happiness levels of paraplegics and lottery winners were essentially the same within a year after the event occurred. Extreme positive and extreme negative events don’t actually influence our long-term levels of happiness nearly as much as we think they would. We overestimate how much negative events will harm our lives for precisely the same reason that we overvalue how much positive events will help our lives.