Having a sense of CONTROL over your life... Gretchen Happiness Project

Research shows that a key component of happiness is a sense of control over your life. The more you perceive yourself to be in control, the better you feel.
A sense of control means having a feeling of autonomy, of choosing how you spend your time, of doing your own work in your own way.
This is obviously true about major issues, such as whether you can control when you leave work each night or whether you have any leisure time. Lately, though, I’ve noticed how much better I feel even in insignificant situations when I feel like I have some control.
Generally, if the Big Man makes dinner, I clean the kitchen; despite the obvious moral hazard inherent in this system, it works well. The other night, however, as we finished eating, I looked around and noticed that he’d somehow used every pot and chopping board we owned.
“Don’t worry about the kitchen,” the Big Man volunteered, before I said a word. “I’ll clean it up after my conference call.”
I went ahead and cleaned up the mess myself. By telling me that he’d take over the chore even though it was my responsibility, he put me in control. By offering to do the clean-up himself, he removed my sense of resentment, and he also made me feel like I was choosing to give him a treat.
Also, discomfort is easier to bear when you know that you can end it when you choose.
A few months ago, for our trip to India, I got my first prescription for sleep medication. I used to get very worked up when I had trouble sleeping, but now my bouts of insomnia bother me less. I almost never actually take the Ambien, but just knowing that it’s in the medicine cabinet makes me feel in control of my sleep.
So I’ve been looking for ways to make people, particularly the Big Man, feel that they have more control, especially in situations they find unpleasant. I’m trying to say things like…
“Do as much as you can, and I’ll finish up.”
“We’ll leave as soon as you want to leave.”
“Don’t worry about that, this time I’ll take care of it.”
Child-rearing experts advise giving children a sense of control by allowing them to make choices about the little things in their lives—though with kids, it’s better to limit the choices so they don’t feel overwhelmed.
“Would you like to wear your green shirt or your white shirt?”
“Do you feel like having milk or water with dinner?”
“Pick out a book for me to read to you.”
This blog is a great example of how having a sense of control changes perception of a task. If “someone” had assigned me the job of writing a blog entry six days a week, I would have considered it an enormous burden. But because I control the blog, and I can change my mind whenever I like, keeping up with the writing feels like a satisfying exercise of autonomy, rather than an onerous assignment.
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I just finished The Magic Mountain, where Thomas Mann points out that most of us think that when we’re bored, time passes slowly, and when we’re interested, time passes quickly.
He argues that that’s only partially correct. True, hours pass slowly when we’re bored—but years speed by in a flash, because the time holds nothing. By contrast, while hours fly when we’re interested and engaged, eventful years hold so much experience that they seem to last a long time.
I think that’s true. I clerked for Justice O’Connor for only one year, and although those twelve months passed quickly, I feel like the experience lasted much, much longer. A friend made the same observation about the birth of his first child: before she was born, he felt like time was passing quickly, but it slowed to a crawl during the first three months of her life. So much was new.
So—how to take advantage of this observation, without taking a new job or moving to Mombai? I crave routine and predictability, but my happiness research is making me think I need to break out of my gerbil-cage existence, even though that’s what I like
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  Thomas Mann talks about the concept of "getting used to getting used." He describes it in the sense of Castorp who never gets used to the thin air in the Alps and therefore always winds up redfaced and short of breath. However, Castorp does get used to always being redfaced and short of breath. Therefore, he gets used to getting used to the Alps. This is what part of life is. We are unhappy with many parts of our life (maybe a job, maybe family, maybe friends or lack of friends, or financial resources) and we never get used to that. It leaves us with an empty feeling somewhere in our soul and no way to get rid of it. We never get used to this problem and thus the empty feeling never goes away. But we get used to the empty place in our soul and think of it only occasionally. But it is there crying out. What a sad thought about life. The solution, of course, is to listen to the part that is crying out rather than squelching it and to try to do something about it. But it is often easier to get used to getting used to a situation than it is to fix the situation. It is easier for Castorp to stay in the mountains rather than breathing normally.