Something that has made me very happy lately has been the launch of my internet movie, The Years Are Short (and the movie is short, too – just one minute). Check it out!

Everyone from contemporary scientists to ancient philosophers to religious leaders agrees: a KEY to happiness is having close relationships with other people.

As Bertrand Russell pointed out, “To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.”

But what if you’re having trouble liking other people? When I meet people, I often feel distracted, wary, or self-absorbed, instead of friendly.

I’ve discovered a trick.

Research shows that although we think that we act because of the way we feel, in fact, we often feel because of the way we act. That’s why one of my Twelve Commandments (see left-hand column) is to Act the way I want to feel.

As improbable as it may sound, it really works. Try it. If you don’t like the way you’re feeling, act as you’d like to feel—and your feelings will change. It’s uncanny.

So if you want to have warmer relationships with people, act more warmly.

I started a strategy that I call the “You’re my friend from camp!” technique. When I meet someone, I try to imagine that he or she is a long-last pal from summer camp. Even though I don’t really fool myself, it makes my tone and attitude warmer. My smile is sincere, instead of a perfunctory grimace. I honestly feel more friendly.

And not only does this strategy make me feel more friendly to that person, it also makes that person feel more friendly in return.

That’s because we tend to like people who like us.

This just happened to me. There’s a woman I encounter regularly whom I’d describe as an “acquaintance.” When I came back from winter vacation, she was suddenly much friendlier to me. In return, I felt much more friendly towards her – even though nothing had changed.

In a nutshell: by acting friendly, we make ourselves feel more friendly, and as a consequence, others respond in a friendly way. Science backs this up. A study found that when volunteers were asked to treat subjects as if they liked them, these volunteers did indeed end up genuinely liking those people — and the subjects, too, liked the volunteers better.

When I was in sixth grade, my classroom had a poster that said, “If you want to make a friend, be a friend.” I guess that just because a piece of advice can be found on a Snoopy poster doesn’t mean that it’s not worth trying.

From 2006 through 2014, as she wrote The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, Gretchen chronicled her thoughts, observations, and discoveries on The Happiness Project Blog.

I have long believed that thinking about regret is a powerful motivator for action. When you’re feeling indecisive, trying to figure out if a particular step is a good one, consider how you’ll feel if you don’t take the step. Often this leads you to what seems like the right direction.

But while mental models can be helpful, most of them also have limits. Lately I’ve realized there’s a flaw in the logic of focusing your attention on the avoidance of regrets. Simply put, regret is an unreliable emotion.

Think about that for a moment—what does it mean?

It means, in short, that regret is both difficult to anticipate and even harder to characterize in retrospect. If you feel certain about your choices in either direction—either looking back or looking forward—you may be basing your interpretations on selectively chosen information.

This post on asymmetric opportunities influenced my thinking on this topic. The author explains the argument in more context here:

“You only experience regret when you later learn something that reveals a past mistake.

If you exit a failing relationship, you’ll never see how things might have gone, and so of course you’ll never wish you had stayed. On the other hand, if you stay too long, you might find out it’s a waste of time and wish you had left earlier.

Regret in these instances is purely a function of selection bias, and has little to do with which decision was actually better.

Similarly, a round of company layoffs that doesn’t include you could pave the way for rapid promotions. If you leave, you’ll think ‘Thank god I got off that sinking ship!’, and never learn about what could have been.”

Looking back on past decisions, we assume we have the benefit of hindsight … but how could we? We only have the benefit of what we’ve discovered on one path. Maybe the other path branched out into an alternate universe, but if so, it’s not one we have access to.

In other words, how often do we really know we made the right decision? The best answer is: rarely, if ever!

There’s always the road not taken, the choice left behind. If you feel satisfied with the choice you made, that’s great—but could you really say it’s better than any other?

Of course, in some cases I think it’s a pretty safe bet to say we did the right thing, objectively speaking. My choice to start writing online and setting out to visit any country, for example—that decision came about when I started thinking seriously about regret.

I can’t imagine any alternate universe in which I thought about writing online but decided instead to get a job at a bank, or dreamed of seeing the world but decided instead to stay home.

That one seems pretty clear-cut to me. Still, I suppose there’s always a counterfactual that remains unknown, the limited information by which we are constrained. If I had died in an accident just as I began my quest, I might have spent my last few moments of life thinking, Hmmm, maybe this wasn’t such a great idea after all.

Or maybe it’s like Sylvia Plath’s classic metaphor of the fig tree. In the story, the protagonist stands before an unfolding set of choices, literally branched out before her in the shape of a tree. Feeling a deep sense of overwhelm, she’s unable to choose a single one.

The moral of the story is: you just have to choose. If, in the end, you look back and think “I’m so glad I made that choice,” perhaps this is merely positive self-talk. But perhaps it also doesn’t matter. Since you’ll never know for certain one way or another, you might as well choose to be happy with where you ended up.

Regret, meanwhile, is an emotion hindered by bias—sometimes helpful for making a decision to move forward, but rarely definitive in our interpretation of the ideal life.

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In fact, 60 percent of people who get diagnosed with it are ages 45 to 64, decades younger than the average person diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (which causes most cases of dementia). And yet, experts believe this is a significant undercount because it’s “rare enough that most medical providers, even specialists, don’t have experience with it, and so they don’t know what it looks like,” said Brad Dickerson, neurologist at the Mass General Brigham Neuroscience Institute and director of the Frontotemporal Disorders Unit at Massachusetts General Hospital.

The initial symptoms of FTD also diverge sharply from those of the more common Alzheimer’s disease because of the parts of the brain it attacks. FTD often starts “in the front of the brain, which is very important for behavior, regulation of social interactions, addiction, drive, organizing and planning,” said Bruce Miller, a professor of neurology and director of the Edward and Pearl Fein Memory and Aging Center at the University of California at San Francisco.

So, FTD generally manifests first with behavior or mood changes — rather than the memory loss and thinking problems of Alzheimer’s (which typically first affects the areas of the brain responsible for these tasks, including the hippocampus). It’s the reason FTD is often misread as a psychiatric issue, Miller said. On average, it takes about three to four years for people to get a diagnosis of FTD, according to the Association for Frontotemporal Degeneration.

Below, experts explain why FTD tends to hit earlier in life than other dementias, the often-overlooked signs to know and what care for people with the condition looks like.

Why FTD starts earlier than other forms of dementia

Unlike Alzheimer’s, most people with FTD are diagnosed before age 65. The question of why is still being studied — but experts think the answer has to do with the underlying cause.

Roughly 20 percent of cases are thought to be caused by any one of several genetic mutations. Two of them produce abnormal proteins with toxic effects on brain cells, and one of them leads to a deficiency in a protein that neurons need, Dickerson explained. These are readily passed down: You only need one bad copy of any of these genes to almost certainly develop FTD, he said, meaning that a child of a person with a mutation has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it.

Genetic mutations can “drive the biology” of FTD, starting early in life, Miller said. “By the time someone reaches the age of 40 or 50, there may have been many years [during which] that genetic cause has wreaked havoc in their brain.”

Experts also think yet-to-be-discovered genes could play a role in some of the remaining 80 percent of cases. After all, as many as 40 percent of people with FTD have a family history.

One area of research is focused on genetic variants that, individually, are not disease-causing abnormalities, Dickerson said, but that could increase risk when they occur together. It’s thought that if you inherit particular sets of these genes, you could be made more vulnerable by other risk factors, perhaps environmental ones, than someone without a similar genetic pattern. (It’s not clear what these environmental factors might be yet, but Dickerson made the comparison to the known association between air pollution and an increased likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s and the fact that not everyone who lives in a polluted area will develop the disease.)

Ultimately, Miller said, the “number of FTD cases that have a genetic basis is likely quite high,” which pushes down the age of onset. As for the cases where a genetic link isn’t apparent, experts are still figuring out the contributors, though lifestyle is thought to be important. Research suggests that even those with a genetic mutation tied to FTD could delay symptoms if they are cognitively active and exercise regularly, Miller said. He added that head trauma is a risk factor that researchers are investigating, too.

Key early signs of FTD that are easy to miss

The symptoms of FTD depend on where exactly in the brain the condition starts. If it initially hits the temporal lobe, particularly on the left side, it’ll affect language skills, including the ability to speak and comprehend — causing a condition known as primary progressive aphasia. With this kind of FTD, people tend to get referred to a neurologist and diagnosed quickly, Dickerson said.

But as noted above, FTD most often begins in the frontal lobe and its earliest symptoms typically include behavior or personality changes — called behavioral-variant FTD. The most common ones are easily mistaken as signs of psychiatric conditions such as depression or bipolar disorder, or dismissed as the effects of stress, burnout or even a midlife crisis. They include:

Loved ones and friends often notice these changes first. A person with FTD will generally lack insight into their symptoms and might not think anything is wrong, Dickerson said. They might relay a different story to a doctor, which can further complicate diagnosis.

The stigma surrounding both dementia and psychiatric conditions can also lead people with FTD and their family members to avoid seeking care. If they do, they often wind up getting referred to a psychiatrist, Dickerson said, rather than a neurologist.

By the time a diagnosis arrives, the disease has often progressed. “FTD moves about twice as fast as the typical Alzheimer’s disease,” Miller said, with an average life expectancy around seven to 13 years. “As the disease progresses, the apathy becomes more profound, and people completely immobilize,” he said. Some people develop motor problems, such as tremors; as many as 30 percent of those with FTD wind up with symptoms consistent with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease that causes weakness, muscle wasting and difficulty swallowing.

It’s the reason Miller said it’s important to “think about the brain, and the frontal lobes in particular, in any case of dramatic change in behavior or personality.”

A helpful point to remember: Dementia is often understood as a loss, for instance, of memory or reasoning skills, and there can certainly be a loss of organization with FTD. But many early symptoms of FTD also reflect “a gain of personality traits that were not there before,” Dickerson said. Ones that register as inappropriate or out of character should especially prompt a visit to a neurologist. “We can help families manage it if we get in early,” Miller said.

What treatment looks like for frontotemporal dementia

There is currently no cure for FTD. Care involves working with a team of experts — physicians, nurses, psychologists — to manage symptoms and behaviors, Miller said. “That often means thinking about, ‘Which ones of these [symptoms] need to be managed, and which can we ignore?’” Some may be harmful to the person with FTD and those around them, while others may be minor enough to learn to accept and work around.

Some people with FTD may benefit from the antidepressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), Miller noted. “They can decrease irritability and compulsive behaviors and improve mood.” Those who have language deficits may also find speech therapy to be helpful, at least in early stages.

Both experts are hopeful, however, about the momentum they’re seeing in treatment research, which has been supported by growing awareness. Dickerson pointed to clinical trials that aim to restore levels of the deficient protein in one form of FTD. Miller noted studies attempting to lower tau — one of the abnormal proteins that can drive FTD — and gene-editing efforts to “turn off or turn down the bad genes” in other types of dementia. These approaches are “not quite ready yet for frontotemporal dementia,” but when they are, “it’s going to be really exciting.”