Archive for: Our Happiness Blog

As summertime ends, we transition from pool time and vacations to school, extracurricular activities, and scheduled routines. Some of us are eager to return to consistent schedules, others are not ready for summer to end, and some struggle with the transition. Students and parents (of all ages) tend to have some anxiety about the future year. If you are struggling with transitioning to the fall season, checkout some of the helpful tips below:

• Emphasize optimism and new opportunities
• Focus on strengthening your resilience
• Accumulate positive experiences and build mastery
• Embrace your emotions
• Remind yourself of past successes
• Be flexible – Our plans for transitions don’t always work, so be open to making alternative strategies
• Take care of yourself physically and mentally
• Reflect on what is within your control and what isn’t

The Olympic Games feature athletes possessing extraordinary levels of guts, grit, and perseverance. These Olympians dedicate their lives to strengthening and refining their skills with the chance of obtaining gold. Viewers get caught-up in the excitement, thrills, victories, missteps, and defeats. While we are excited for the athletes on the top tier of the pedestal crying as they hear their national anthem, we feel just as much for those athletes who make errors that take them out of the running for medals. If you are looking for inspiration this week, look toward those athletes in Rio.

I often speak to clients about the power of facial expressions affecting emotions. Consider this classic research by Strack and colleagues from 1988. Undergraduate students were instructed to read comic strips while holding a pen in three different positions: teeth only (smiling face), lips only (lips squeezed together in a pout), and non-dominant hand. Mean ratings of overall funniness were highest when participants held the pen between their teeth in the smiling position. Manipulations of facial expression (smiling) led to an improved affect state (higher ratings of funniness).

You can benefit from this research by adopting a half-smile, a small grin with the corners of the lips turned slightly up. This slight smile, often unnoticed by others, can lead you toward feeling more positive and accepting of yourself as well as those around you.

Make this summer’s heat wave more bearable by celebrating these August National Holidays!

August 6 – National Wiggle Your Toes Day: Give those toes a stretch, air them out, and place them next to a pool or cookout.

August 7 – National Friendship Day: Celebrate those who stick with you through thick and thin or take part in your shenanigans.

August 10 – National S’mores Day: Either by fire or microwave, treat yourself to this delicious concoction.

August 15 – National Relaxation Day: Take five minutes from your day for a breather.

August 16 – National Tell A Joke Day: What happens to a frog’s car when it breaks down? It gets toad!

August 23 – National Ride the Wind Day: Fly a kite, take a breeze break, and let the wind through your hair.

August 26 – National Dog Day: Give love, thanks, and maybe a treat to the loyalist of companions.

“Remember that one time…” is typically how my sister and I begin conversations. We share anecdotes from our childhood that have stood the test of time. There is the time I clotheslined my dad in the kitchen and his plate of crackers scattered over the floor on impact. And, the time some guy yelled “COOKIES!” throughout a Pittsburgh Pirates game for no apparent reason.

While these stories may seem meaningless, they are positive memories of our past. There have been good times and bad times, but these are the stories we choose to tell. What story do you choose to tell about your life? How we mentally frame our stories can influence our attitudes, hope, perseverance, and resilience.

By now, you have probably made an impression about the Pokémon Go phenomenon. I am sure you’ve heard stories of people walking in others’ yards or requests not to hunt Pokémon at historical sites. I admit I was skeptical when my sister encouraged me to download the App in order to connect with my kiddo clients, but that changed the moment I took a hike at my local park. I walked out of my car and immediately observed 90% of park-goers were playing Pokémon, from young children to older couples. It was somewhat disturbing seeing all of the people staring at their phones, but it turned out to be a fantastic social experiment. I congregated with 10-15 people in the woods while catching Pokémon and laughed as I passed other adults (because we knew what each other was doing).

You can easily forget the purpose of the App amongst all the media pomp and circumstance, getting children of all ages active. From what I have observed on my Pokémon excursions, it seems to promote exercise, social skills, and navigating maps.

“Eat a live frog every morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” –Mark Twain

I was introduced to this quote several years ago at a training. The idea is you are most effective at work when you tackle the worst thing on your to-do list at the beginning of the day. Once you eat that frog, it is smooth sailing. “Frogs” appear in both our professional and personal lives as we are faced with important decisions, conflicts, or difficult conversations. These frogs can create significant stress or anxiety and sometimes we avoid or push-off frogs hoping they will go away. I have found that when I tackle my toughest issue first, it frees up my emotional bandwidth so that I can move forward in my day and direct my attention and emotions to other activities.

Parents in the United States are reported being less happy than their nonparent counterparts yet limited research has investigated this happiness gap. Jennifer Glass and colleagues recently sought to understand this discrepancy by reviewing surveys from 22 European and English-speaking countries. Among the countries studied, the United States had the largest happiness gap between parents and nonparents, which was significantly greater than the gaps in Australia and Great Britain. A close look at the data revealed the negative side of parenting reflected stressful social policies that did not allow parents to support both work and familial obligations. However, policies such as paid sick leave and vacation time correlated with greater ratings of happiness for all adults in a country regardless if they had children.

Journal of Happiness Studies

A recent study by Juliet Ruth Helen Wakefield and colleagues published in the Journal of Happiness Studies investigated if group identification (“a sense of belonging to one’s social group, coupled with a sense of commonality among group members”) influences satisfaction with life. Group identification was divided into three categories: family, local community, and group of personal choice (sports group, hobby group, etc.). Over 3000 individuals from Scotland and England participated in the study. The results demonstrated higher levels of identification with the three groups correlated with higher satisfaction with life scores, even after removing potential effects of gender, age, occupation, and nationality. The researchers also found group identification had an additive effect, meaning satisfaction with life was higher for those who identified with more groups. The authors suggest people consider spending more time with social groups as one way of promoting greater satisfaction with life.