Archive for: Our Happiness Blog

Last week we talked about how the 3 Box Method for decluttering your home can work for your mind as well. But regardless of what you’re tidying, doing a big clean-up like that isn’t enough since you don’t want to wait until you’re overwhelmed to take action. Maintenance is key. One quick tip I call the 2 Minute Miracle can help keep clutter from getting out of hand. Pick two minutes every day to clean up. Maybe it’s right when you get up in the morning, or as soon as you walk in the door from work, or immediately after dinner. Spend two minutes tackling some mess. You’d be surprised what you can get clean in a couple of minutes! In the same vein, you’d be surprised what a two minute phone call can do for a friendship. What two minutes of soothing can do for a tantrumming preschooler on a Monday morning. What two minutes of diaphragmatic breathing or mindfulness can do for your stress level. What two minutes of really solid empathizing can do for your relationship. Even if you’re in a rush to get to work or catch a movie, consider giving two minutes of your time to maintain these other really important areas of life. If you’re like most of us, you have a lot to gain and little to lose.

I sometimes work with people who want to declutter their home. The mess of all their stuff is overwhelming and now they don’t know where to start, don’t have the motivation. My first suggestion for decluttering is to sort every bit of the mess into one of three categories: Throw Away, Give Away, Put Away. Label three large boxes and just start tossing everything lying around into the right box. At the end of the day or week you take the trash out to the curb, bring the donations to the Goodwill, and put everything from the third box in its proper place. Repeat until your home is decluttered. Now sit back and enjoy the space.

I think we all feel cluttered, overwhelmed, and undermotivated sometimes, whether the mess is in our house or in our mind. Fortunately, the 3 Box Method can work for mind-clutter, too. Throw Away – We spend a lot of time worrying and ruminating about things that we can’t actually control. Just like trash in the house, there is no use keeping it around, tripping over it every day. Remove the stressors you can’t control by accepting them and moving on. Give Away – Don’t take on other people’s problems as your own. It doesn’t help either person and it increases stress for both. Learn to empathize, support, and help without owning their problems. Put Away – Deal with the things that you can change. Put them in their proper place by problem-solving healthy and effective solutions.

Repeat until your mind is decluttered. Now sit back and enjoy the peace.

Mathophiles rejoice! There is now an official equation for happiness. Researchers at University College London have determined that happiness has to do with expectations. So listen up pessimists because it turns out you’re right – having low expectations increases the chances that we will be pleasantly surprised at the outcome, which makes us happy. And score one for the optimists as well: positive anticipation brings us happiness for the time period before an outcome occurs. Here’s a caveat for anyone considering converting to pessimism in order to maximize that surprise-outcome-happiness: chronically, in the long run, it doesn’t work. When you teach yourself to expect the worst you train your brain to notice negative things that support your belief. You unwittingly dismiss or warp evidence that conflicts with your negative outlook and by the time the better-than-expected outcome occurs you’re in such a cynical funk that you won’t be impressed by it. Let there be room for eager anticipation while having reasonable expectations for the outcome. Get excited about the movie you’re planning to see but don’t expect it to be the event of the year. Eagerly anticipate that first date without putting them on a pedestal. 

When you take a picture on your cell phone you can choose which filter to use which affects how you see that moment in time. So it goes with memories. We can look back at that awkward moment at the interview, or the party, or the first date, or when we yelled at our kid, and see it with iPhone’s “chrome” filter – extra vivid. Not accurate. The shame or embarrassment or guilt is in Technicolor. When you find yourself ruminating and cringing, take a moment to check things out: is that really how it happened? And if you’re making assumptions about other people’s thoughts and feelings about that moment – is that really what they thought and felt? See how you feel when you remove the filter. And if it actually was so bad, accept it and grow from it. Don’t try to pretend it never happened. At the end of your life you’ll want to look back at all your pictures, not just the vibrant, happy ones you posted on Facebook.

Negative fantasizing. It’s when you’re carrying your newborn down the stairs and the image of accidentally whacking its head on the banister is so clear you swear it just happened. It’s when you’re picturing your upcoming job interview and realize you’ve stopped breathing as you vividly imagine tripping and wiping out in front of the CEO. It’s when the babysitter’s put you to bed and within five minutes you’re in tears, having imagined every detail of your parents’ car accident and your sad life as an unloved orphan. We tend to be really good at negatively fantasizing – our fears need a voice. But when that voice gets really loud we almost forget that it didn’t actually happen. We have an emotional and often physiological response to a strong fantasy whether it ‘s pleasant or unpleasant, and that response gets tucked away like a memory. We’ve got enough unpleasant real memories, why add fake ones? When you find yourself negative fantasizing, immediately stop and replace it with a fantasy that’s more realistic (or downright positive!). Remember, the more you practice this way of thinking the easier it gets.

Have you been reading the daily news reports comparing happiness levels in different countries? We seem to be obsessed with figuring out who is happiest in the world. The third annual World Happiness Report has been published, and right up front it explains that “happiness is increasingly considered a proper measure of social progress” which explains why it’s blowing up our headlines. Among other happiness data, the report shares six factors that appear to determine a nation’s happiness: The GDP per capita (typically an indicator of standard of living), your sense of social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to live your life as you want, your own level of generosity, and government corruption. According to the report, these explain almost 75% of the variation in reported happiness by country. So where to settle down? Cancel your one-way plane ticket to the Congo (#20) and pack your bags for Switzerland (#1). Genießen Sie Ihr neues glückliches Leben!

Get ready to love! Global Love Day is May 1st. It was created by the Love Foundation in 2004 and is celebrated in countries around the world. Its tenets are:

We are one humanity on this planet.
All life is interconnected and interdependent.
All share in the Universal bond of love.
Love begins with self acceptance and forgiveness.
With respect and compassion we embrace diversity.
Together we make a difference through love.

If your city is not one of the 475 cities who officially honor Global Love Day, take your love to the internet. Second Life celebrates Global Love Day so stay home from work, spruce up your avatar, and virtually love on humanity all day long. Just make sure to share some of that love with the real world.

I heard a great story on NPR’s Storycorps recently that epitomizes something I talk about often in therapy and something I try very hard to live: instead of trying to forget difficult life events, figuring out how to make them work for you.

In this story, two adults talk about a car accident they’d been in when they were in high school. The man was driving and he hit the woman as she was crossing the road. I’ll skip over most of the story to get to the point of this post: guess what they did with their lives? She became a stunt woman specializing in car hits, and he became a surgical technician who does a lot of orthopedic surgery on car accident victims. An incredible and inspiring use of difficult life events. Does it make you wonder what path you might have taken had you used certain difficult events to work for you?

Or maybe – what path you still could take?

Last weekend we went to a butterfly house. Have you ever been? Usually there’s a winding maze amongst tropical trees and shrubs, with fruit and hummingbird feeders tucked here and there and lots of butterflies fluttering all around you. It’s really warm inside, and peaceful. It’s a different world. While there I saw a big yellow butterfly land on a boy’s shoulder. At first he wasn’t aware of it because he was looking the other way, but when he noticed he stopped everything and just took it in, totally focused, frozen in awe and delight. It made me think of this:

“Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” ~Nathaniel Hawthorne

I’m not sure I totally agree with the entire sentiment here, as I’m firmly in the Pursue and Create Your Own Happiness camp, but it made me think of how often happiness might be sitting beside us on the bus or climbing into bed next to us after a long day, and we don’t notice because we’re looking the other way. Hawthorne and I agree about this, though – never miss a chance to notice happiness alighting upon you.