Bounding into a playroom on purpose actually lifted her mood

One tired afternoon, Gretchen Rubin had run out of ideas for entertaining her daughters and felt the pull to suggest something that let her lie on the couch. Instead, she bounded into the room and announced, hey, let's play in the tent. It worked. The burst of pretend energy she manufactured turned into real energy a few minutes later.

This is the reverse of how most people think emotion works. We assume we act because of how we feel: we smile because we're happy, we walk briskly because we're energetic. The philosopher and psychologist William James argued the opposite is often true. Action seems to follow feeling, he wrote, but really action and feeling go together, and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. You can't order yourself to feel cheerful. You can order your body to act cheerful, and the feeling frequently follows.

Rubin found evidence for this everywhere she looked. Studies show that even an artificially produced smile can shift people toward happier emotions, and researchers have found that people who use Botox, unable to physically make an angry face, are less prone to anger, because the outward expression and the inward feeling reinforce each other. Rubin adopted this as her Third Commandment: act the way I want to feel. She sped up her walk when she felt sluggish. She paced while talking on the phone instead of slumping. She put more warmth into her voice on mornings when she wanted to snap.

She was careful about the limits of the trick, though. Fake it till you feel it worked well for shifting a mood in the moment, but she warned herself against using it to talk herself into liking a job or a hobby that wasn't genuinely hers. Faking enthusiasm for the wrong career, she noticed, never produced the kind of lasting passion that came naturally when the fit was right in the first place. The technique changes how a Tuesday feels. It doesn't decide whether you're in the right life.

Try this the next time you notice you're dragging for no real reason: instead of waiting to feel more energetic, act as if you already are. Walk a little faster than feels natural, straighten up, and put some warmth into the next thing you say. If you're a parent, catch one moment today when you're tempted to flop onto the couch and offer a low-energy activity, and instead do the more energetic thing first, before you feel like it. Keep this for ordinary moods, not for deciding whether to stay in a job or a relationship, since faking enthusiasm there tends to wear thin fast. Notice, afterward, whether the feeling caught up with the action, because for most people, it quietly does.