The Happiness Factor by Nancy Kalish Article Analysis

I believe that while advancing into your elderly years if you are hopeful you can have a longer life expectancy. In Nancy Kalish’s article “The Happiness Factor”, she goes into grave detail about how completing four easy steps every once in a while can increase your lifespan by seven and a  half years! In my opinion, this seems like a great way to live and experience life, and maybe even live longer?

The four steps to increasing your life span in “The Happiness Factor”, are learning to work your cells phones in the correct manner, expressing gratitude often, making random acts of kindness, and reappraising your life. When Kalish writes about working your cell phones in the correct manner, this might come across hard for some people that have a hard time working with technology. But actually, you only have to make a phone call to a friend. By doing this, it can reduce your cortisol levels and blood pressure, prevent heart attacks and can keep your brain sharp. The next step is expressing gratitude often. In my opinion, I feel like this is the easiest step. The only products you need for this are paper and a pencil, or just even a computer. With these items, you can record all of your happy events! Kalish then went into further detail by saying that “People who write down about all the things they are thankful for are optimistic about the upcoming week and more satisfied overall with their lives, according to the University of California, Davis, Study” (Kalish 1).

Now the third step, I feel like is an everyday occurrence for many people, is doing five acts of kindness. This can just be buying an extra coffee to give to a friend or just taking the time out of your day to compliment someone. But what you need to remember about this, is not to make it a routine, just make it genuine and spontaneous! By doing this it can help build your self-esteem up. The very last step is reappraising your life. This is a lot like step two, but with a little bit of a twist. You can still write down events that have happened in your life and you can also write down bad times. “It’s helpful to look at the bad times as well as the good. Perhaps now that a few years have passed, you’ll be able to see how that breakup or failed job opportunity opened other doors and finally forgive yourself-and your ex-boyfriend of would-be boss” (Kalish 2). What I gathered from this quote is that bad times are as good as the good times or better. This is because you can change what has happened in the past and do better in the future.

One step out of these four that I make sure to do is expressing gratitude and reappraising life. I lost a family member a couple of years ago and one thing I learned from that experience is to write down your memories. This was very helpful to me because over time you can’t always remember every single memory. But by writing your memories down, you have a place to look back at them if you forget. If a certain memory pops up in my mind I try to stop what I am doing and prioritize writing that memory down. I also think that by writing down your memories you get to relive them. You get to go over everything that happened in the memory and think about how you want to write it down. Which I personally think makes it extra special.

As you can see, by following these five steps you can feel complete with your life and maybe even live longer. You will be able to look back at all your amazing memories, think about how many acts of kindness did, feel fulfilled with how many people you have socialized with, and how you have been able to reappraise your life. I for one do complete many of these steps often and at the end of the day, I usually feel fulfilled. Do you complete these steps often or just sometimes?