In all of my looking at happiness, one thing I noticed right away is that the opposite of happiness isn't unhappiness or even depression, it's anxiety. It is something that can constantly block our happiness, or our chance to reach that sort of meditative state in our work or our home lives.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

In my experience, staying in a marriage that my ex and I both agreed had all its best moments behind it was epically depressing.

When you study postpartum depression, there is a very clear understanding that in communities where you see more support, there is less depression.

I'm sure there were plenty of loving, attentive mothers in the 'me generation,' but none of them lived at my house.

They say change gets more difficult as we get older - each year we're more stuck in our ways, more reluctant to learn something new.