The Architecture of Happiness

When Alain de Botton, the philosophical Swiss writer, was working on his 2006 book, The Architecture of Happiness, he thought that one of the great, but often unmentioned, causes of both happiness and misery is the quality of our environment: the kind of walls, chairs, buildings and streets we’re surrounded by. Then he got another idea: Living Architecture, an innovative approach to vacation--in modern structures. There are four places available for booking so far, all in the U.K.,The Balancing Barn in Suffolk and the non-profit is soliciting new designs from the bright lights of design all the time. 

According to this group of thinkers, curators, and architects:

Living Architecture is a social enterprise dedicated to the promotion and enjoyment of world-class modern architecture. We have asked a series of great architects to design houses for us around Britain and are making these available to rent for holidays all year round.

We started the organisation from a desire to shift perceptions of modern architecture. We wanted to allow people to experience what it is like to live, eat and sleep in a space designed by an outstanding architectural practice. While there are examples of great modern buildings in Britain, they tend to be in places that one passes through (eg. airports, museums, offices) and the few modern houses that exist are almost all in private hands and cannot be visited.

We see ourselves first and foremost as an educational body, dedicated to enhancing the appreciation of architecture. But we also hope that you will have an exceptional holiday with us. We are making available a standard of house unusual for the UK rental market (where the ancient cottage has until now been the norm), with the best of contemporary materials and technologies. Our houses are all in fascinating locations and have been meticulously designed for comfort and aesthetic delight (with prices starting from just £20 per person per night).

Maybe happiness is actually a destination.

New Insight Into How Mistakes Are Remembered

Your brain strives to put mistakes like infidelity in the past.In a clever little study that answers the question of how does one live with oneself after cheating on a spouse or committing some other moral indiscretion, researchers have found that the mind tries to put distance between us and our mistakes. The new research in the journal Emotion (which frankly sounds like one of the only medical journals worth keeping on the bedside table) manages to catch people's memories in the act of revision. In the study, people dated their moral failings 10 years earlier on average than their good deeds. 

“People honestly view their past in a morally critical light, but at the same time they tend to emphasize that they have been improving,” the authors concluded.

Other researchers have recorded similar mind tricks. Students who did poorly on an exam tend to sense the experience as further in the past than tests on which they did well and took at about the same time. Future selves tend to be the best of all. The unwritten potential of a future self scores consistently higher on a moral scale than either a present or past self image. This has been called the "ascending-toward-heaven autobiography."

“We can’t make up the past, but the brain has difficulty placing events in time, and we’re able to shift elements around,” Anne E. Wilson, a social psychologist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, told The New York Times in an article about the study. “The result is that we can create a personal history that, if not perfect, makes us feel we’re getting better and better.”

When Men Lecture Women About Pregnancy and Stress

This new book spurs the debate over the effects of stress during pregnancy.Origins, Annie Murphy Paul's great book about the how everything in the world around you effects your unborn child reignites the eternal nature vs nurture debate, and has left two usually incisive writers at odds over whether or not stress is good for a baby in the womb. Both esteemed Harvard doctor Jerome Groopman and Pulitzer Prize winning Op-Ed contributor Nicholas Kristof wrote about the book in the New York Times. But were they reading the same book? 

Groopman writes: "Women who reported moderate daily anxiety and stress during pregnancy had children who scored higher in tests of motor and mental development at age 2."

But Kristof has this to say, "Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation."

You might chalk this inconsistency up to different definitions of stress. Maybe Groopman is talking about the stress a woman experiences at a stressful but high paying job, while Kristof is referring to the unrelenting stress of grinding poverty--two very different animals. However, the two deep thinkers also managed to find opposing scientific explanations for the effects they chose to write about.

Groopman: "The placenta breaks down the stress hormone cortisol in the woman's blood, preventing most of it from reaching the fetus."

Kristof: "Stress in mothers seems to have particularly strong effects on their offspring, perhaps through release of cortisol, a hormone released when a person is anxious."

Come on guys, make up your minds. Both writers recognize that living through a catastrophic event during gestation--Hurricane Katrina or the Arab-Israeli Six-Day War--has demonstrably negative repercussions on a child's development. But the take-away message of Origins was radically different for these two writers. And woefully, the ever-hysterical debate about how pregnant women should live their lives rages on.

Click here to read Jerome Groopman's book review, and here to read Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed. Click here to see Healthline.com's cool graphic showing 20 effects of stress on the body.

Dr. Merrell's Tip: Whatever your stress level during pregnancy (and it's hard to find anyone these days who doesn't have tremendous stress in their lives) it's important to cultivate a stress-reduction practice such as breath exercises, meditation or biofeedback, which can reduce the level of stress hormones circulating in the blood stream, lower blood pressure and increase feelings of well-being.