By Gretchen Rubin

I just got back from a very nice week’s vacation. While I was away, I tried an experiment on myself, which turned out very successfully.

I’d been intrigued by studies suggesting that interrupting a pleasant experience with something less pleasant can intensify a person’s overall pleasure. For example, surprisingly, commercials actually make TV-watching more fun. Interrupting a massage heightens the pleasure it gives.

I decided to adapt this finding for my holiday. Along with pleasure reading—I spent most of my reading time on two excellent books, E.O. Wilson's Naturalist and Virginia Woolf's A Moment's Liberty: The Shorter Diary, though there’s only so much reading I can do on a family vacation—I took several long articles that I’d been meaning to read. They’d been sitting... More...