5 . When Shakespeare called a good night’s rest the “cure of hurt minds,” he was really onto something. According to a recent survey, “Most days or every day” in 2020, nearly 15 percent of American adults had trouble falling asleep in the previous month. So you’re a little sleepy — no big deal, right? Wrong. A 1999 article in the medical journal The Lancet showed and decades of research suggest that “sleep debt” can have significant harmful effects on your health.

Happiness is the first to suffer. Everyone knows what it feels like to run on insufficient (不足的) sleep — you can be foggy, inattentive, and bad-tempered. A paper published in the journal Health Psychology in 2020 found that the participants without enough sleep experienced a less positive mood when they came across quite ordinary stress, and smaller increases in positive mood from pleasant events. When lacking sleep, people felt annoyed more and easier, and things feel less fun.

More seriously, sleep loss can cause clinical depression and anxiety. In 2014, Australian scholars studying young women found that a year of frequent sleep difficulties predicted the onset of depression and anxiety in later years.

Some researchers have identified long-time sleep debt as a disease — insufficient sleep syndrome (ISS). Given the reported evidence for how widespread the syndrome is, it might even be classed as an epidemic. Although no study has yet established a connection, it seems reasonable to think about whether the long-term declines in American happiness and increases in social conflicts may be connected to loss of sleep.

Whether you are a sleep-deprived student, or workaholic, or just an old-fashioned insomniac (失眠症患者), attending to sleep is a critical strategy for health and happiness. And adjusting this aspect of your life could be one of the best things you do all year.

6 . More than half of the world’s population are city residents, and, by 2050, the United Nations predicts that seven in ten people will be. Architects are having to consider how architecture influences our emotional well-being in urban settings.

According to Colin Ellard, a research psychologist at Waterloo University, Canada, there is a lot of evidence which shows “the profound impact that the design of buildings has on how we feel, how we treat one another, and our overall psychological well-being”. A study from the University of Heidelberg concluded that people raised in the countryside are less likely to have mental disorders than those raised in the city. The city of Vancouver in Canada, which is surrounded by mountains and ocean, recognises the need to connect with nature. It has included protecting ocean and mountain views in its urban planning guidelines. For example, tall buildings are set up in strategic locations that don’t block scenic views for downtown residents.

The British designer Thomas Heatherwick wants to make architecture less soulless and boring. He told The Guardian, “We need to fearlessly demand interestingness and make buildings that enrich our senses.” He has listed seven characteristics of a boring building. These include being too flat and straight. He says lack of depth means light and shadow cannot play on surfaces, while straight lines are at odds with nature and make buildings dull.

However, making buildings interesting is not always easy, as architect Rafael Vinoly found out in 2013 when he created the 37-store y skyscraper in London. The building was admired for its curved exterior walls covered in reflective glass. However, it acted like a magnifying glass and reflected light which melted nearby cars and almost set fire to a carpet. A screen had to be added to prevent the building causing further damage.

So, for your own well-being, surround yourself with buildings that bring you joy, and ideally a view of nature.

7 . While often seen as a negative (消极的) emotion, anger can also be a powerful motivator (促进因素) for people to achieve challenging goals in their lives, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

“People often believe that a state of happiness is perfect,” said lead author Heather Lench, PhD, a professor in the department of psychologcal and brain sciences at Texas A & M University, “but previous research suggests that a mix of emotions, including negative emotions like anger, results in good outcomes.”

The functionalist theory of emotion suggests that all emotions, good or bad, are reactions to events within a person’s environment and help that person to make proper actions, according to Lench. For example, sadness may suggest that a person needs to seek help or emotional support, while anger may indicate a person needs to take action to overcome an obstacle (障碍).

To better understand the role of anger in achieving goals, researchers conducted a series of experiments involving more than 1,000 participants and analyzed survey data from more than 1,400 respondents. In each experiment, participants either had an emotional response (such as anger, amusement, desire or sadness) or a neutral (中性的) emotional state, and then were presented with a challenging goal. Across all the experiments, anger improved people’s ability to reach their goals compared with a neutral condition in a variety of challenging situations.

“Our research adds to the growing evidence that a mix of positive and negative emotions promotes well-being, and that using negative emotions as tools can be particularly effective in some situations,” Lench said.