This week is my daughter's half birthday, meaning she's turning 9 and a half. Remember when birthdays were so much fun you had to dream up a reason to cram more of them into the year? But as the decades roll by, birthdays can start to feel decidedly less fun. You might minimize them, dread them, or (if you're me) write articles about the positive effects of aging , the relatively advanced age of successful entrepreneurs , or celebrities' tricks for aging with grace to cheer yourself up.
It's not just me who often finds themself swimming against a tide of gloom when their birthday rolls around each year. Apparently, even Harvard happiness researchers have the same problem, though thankfully they can offer helpful, science-backed tips to beat it. In a recent Atlantic column , Harvard's Arthur Brooks confesses he too was dreading a recent birthday.
"A weird thing is happening to me this week: I am turning 60. I enter a seventh decade with no small amount of apprehension," he writes before rounding up a variety of quotes from artists and thinkers showing that birthday depression is relatively common even for folks as young as 30. But unlike those he quotes, Brooks is uniquely well-equipped to fight back against his birthday blues.
As someone who studies and writes about the science of happiness , he's deeply immersed in what research can tell us about how to look at aging more positively and turn birthdays we're silently dreading back into causes for genuine celebration. Here are.
