Author Erin Port on How “Tiny Tweaks” Help Us Shift Toward Happiness

Baking delicious banana bread requires trial and error. Your first attempt might need more salt; your second might need more nutmeg. If it still doesn’t taste the way you want it to, you continue making tiny tweaks until you’re happy with your loaf. The same idea can be applied to our lives, says Erin Port. 

Port is the author of Tiny Tweaks, Happy Life: Simple Changes to Create Space for What Matters (published Jan. 27), and her banana bread analogy was inspired by her experience baking with her four kids. The final tweak that perfected their family recipe? The addition of chocolate chips. 

“You have a great life. You have a perfectly good banana bread recipe, right? We’re not throwing out the banana recipe for a cookie recipe. That’s silly,” she explained to Nice News. “We’re wanting banana bread. We want our life. But it’s just little iterations that can make it better.”

These little iterations are effective, Port says, because they break through the paralysis so many of us feel in the face of making larger shifts. “When we try to do a sweeping overhaul and it doesn’t work out, it gives us evidence that we can’t make a change,” she noted, adding: “There’s something that really is powerful in making a small change. It gives us evidence that we can, and evidence that we can is a far better motivator than failure.” 

A Light in the Dark

The concept of making little changes rather than a huge overhaul materialized for Port, the founder of lifestyle brand Simple Purposeful Living, amid a trying period several years ago. She and her husband had just adopted their youngest child, Quincy, and though they knew the toddler had special needs, they weren’t aware of the extent.

Port found herself struggling to stay afloat as she cared for Quincy and her other three children while running a business. One day, her emotions came to a head. “I just collapsed in the hallway and I sobbed,” she shared. “I felt so much shame that I couldn’t be the mom that he needed. This was the life I asked for and wanted, and I felt so inadequate.” 

It was then that Port was reminded of a simple question she first heard on author Emily P. Freeman’s podcast, though its origins trace back to Carl Jung: “What is the next right thing?”

She immediately felt grounded. She got up, brewed herself a cup of coffee, and stood on her back deck in the sunlight, taking deep breaths. “That was the moment when I realized a tiny little change could help,” the Iowa resident said. She began making small changes — accepting help from loved ones, making space in her schedule to journal, and going for walks in the sun. It would take time for Quincy’s health to improve, but today he is a thriving 8-year-old.

Start With Happiness

So how does one know where to start shifting things? The first step in making changes is to take stock of what it is we actually enjoy, Port explained.

“I tell people all the time, the light bulb was invented to make our life easier, so was the airplane, then the internet, and now AI. But we’ve never been busier and unhappiness has never been higher,” she said. “And so it’s important if we’re going to tweak our way to a life that we love, we first need to know what we love.” She dedicates the first section of Tiny Tweaks, Happy Life to helping readers clarify this for themselves, describing “happiness guideposts” to pay attention to and offering a few questions for reflection.