Happiness Blog

Last week I suggested making gratitude a more regular part of your day, so as to increase happiness (yours and that of those around you) in 2014.  Jeremy Adam Smith wrote an article on The Greater Good website (https://greatergood.berkeley.edu) that outlined six habits of highly grateful people.  All are good, but one struck me as particularly helpful.  The most meaningful expressions of gratitude aren’t vague.  “You’re so awesome!” is certainly nice to hear but hearing specifics around it make it more genuine.  The best thank you’s identify one (or more) of these three things: the giver’s intentions (“Touchscreen gloves so my fingers don’t get frostbitten when I use my phone outside!  Thank you!”), the cost to the giver (“I know how much time it must have taken you to Photoshop this photo for me, and how busy you are these days – thank you.  It’s perfect.”), and the value of the benefit of the gift (“I really appreciate you always offering to take the kids when you know I have a ton of errands to do.  Without you I’d get half my chores done.  Thank you.”)   Give it a shot.  It takes a little bit more effort, and the results are beyond worth it.

The more I learn about happiness, the clearer it is to me that gratitude plays a crucial role.  I’ll go out on a limb and say that if we aren’t grateful then we can’t be happy.  We might feel entitled, or disappointed, or resentful – all obstacles to happiness.  Another thing I’m learning is that gratitude is very much a habit.  Like any sort of thinking, the more you do it the easier it becomes and soon it is a very natural part of how you think because you’ve rewired your brain to do it automatically.  I know a lot of people aren’t into New Year’s resolutions – years of trying and failing to get a new habit up and running perfectly from day one takes its toll! – but try this on for size: “In 2014 I’m going to be happier.”  Hard to pass that up, right?  It’s so do-able!  Just noticing a little bit more often when someone is kind to you, or doing a good job, or has affected your life in some positive way – no matter how small! – and then sometimes sharing your gratitude with them… just this small shift can make you happier.  Because it’ll become easier to do the more you do it, so you’ll do it more and more, and you’ll be making others feel good every time you share it with them (so they’re more likely to do that thing more, and possibly pay it forward)… it’s the New Year’s gift that keeps on giving.

Happy New Year, everyone!

I recently heard that to effectively study happiness, researchers tend to break it down into joy and contentment.   It suddenly explained why I’ve never thought of “happy” as an emotion.  “Happy” means different things to different people, whereas “joy” and “contentment” are basically understood by all, and mean very different things.

To me, “content” means generally feeling satisfied, not longing for something to be very different.  “Joy” is more of an occasional, intense burst of delight.  This made me think of Brene’ Brown’s musing on joy and twinkle lights:

“Twinkle lights are the perfect metaphor for joy.  Joy is not a constant.  It comes to us in moments – often ordinary moments.  Sometimes we miss out on the bursts of joy because we’re too busy chasing down extraordinary moments.  Other times we’re so afraid of the dark that we don’t dare let ourselves enjoy the light.  I believe a joyful life is made up of joyful moments gracefully strung together by trust, gratitude, inspiration, and faith.”  – Brene’ Brown

Here’s to lots of twinkle lights in your holidays.

A few weeks ago I wrote about savoring the bad to help you appreciate the good.  My example was small potatoes (appreciating the fun Uno cards because you’re comparing them to the regular Uno cards; appreciating your current partner because they compare favorably to a bad ex).  It turns out that this comparison/appreciation thing works well on a more serious level.  A research team polled almost 15,000 people to explore whether a severe negative event in their life (such as divorce or death of a loved one) affected how happy they were now.  People who had experienced severe adversity and worked through it (as opposed to people who hadn’t experienced it or hadn’t worked through it) showed a greater ability to savor the present.  This might seem like a small silver lining when you’re going through the difficult event, but it’s nice to know that it doesn’t have to be a just a blight on your life and can actually contribute to your happiness in the long run.

Lately I’ve been reading about great holiday traditions that incorporate many of the things that research shows contribute to our happiness.  They blew my chocolate advent calendar out of the water.  Here are two of my favorites:

Thanksgiving – The Gratitude Tree.  This one is perfect for a home with little kids.  Cut out the shape of a tree and put it up on your wall or patio door.  Cut out lots of leaves and have every family member write down something they’re grateful for each night.  Stick the leaves on the tree.  New, fun countdown to Thanksgiving next year!

An Acts of Kindness Countdown Calendar to your end-of-the-year holiday:  It doesn’t matter if you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or something else.  Write down acts of kindness on slips of paper and open one each morning with the plan of doing it that day.  That night, talk with your family about how your act of kindness went.  

Do you have any similar holiday traditions?  Feel free to share in the comments!

Happiness and Positive Listing

“I bombed the interview.  Got stood up for lunch.  Stained my new shirt.  My dog needs a bunch of expensive tests, I was late for a meeting, got in a fight with my sister, forgot to DVR my show, burned my dinner, AND I have a hangnail!”

This is what I call negative listing – a way of thinking that we can get sucked into when we’re in a funk and searching high and low for evidence that things are not going our way and life is against us!  Whether or not it’s obvious to us, our mind sees this as a challenge, a game, and this is one reason it can be hard to stop.

So replace it instead.  Notice you’re doing it, take a deep breath to switch gears, and start positive listing.  Think of all the things that are going well in your life.  Things that you love about yourself.  Things you’re grateful for.  Try to make this list at least a little longer than your negative list.  It’s not a cure-all for a bad mood, and when something serious has happened it needs to be respected, tended to, and not dismissed with this strategy.  But when you’re throwing a pity party that’s spiraling into a darker place, it’s an effective way to flip on the lights and tell everyone they don’t have to go home but they can’t stay here.

November 18, 2013

Have you ever wolfed down a candy bar and then felt like it was gone too quickly and you didn’t even really get a chance to taste it?  Or perhaps you’ve felt that way about a moment in life.  We’ve all wished at some point that we had been more in the moment, enjoying it, rather than recording it or focusing on something else at the same time.  I once spent an entire fireworks display behind my camera and afterwards felt like I hadn’t been there at all.  We’re talking about savoring – taking the time and making the effort to fully appreciate something in the now.  Lyubomirsky (The How of Happiness) counts this as one of the strategies we can use to become happier.  She points out that you can savor in three time periods: past, present, and future.  People who savor the past (reminisce happily) tend to be good at buffering stress.  People who savor the present (mindfully appreciating what is happening right now) are less likely to experience guilt, shame, and depression.  And people who savor the future (fantasize positively) tend to be optimistic.  Again, this is something you can cultivate so if you’re not practiced at savoring, you can start now.  Positively fantasize about eating that Snickers Almond, then fully enjoy eating it, then reminisce about how tasty it was, and now you have a solid 15 minutes of candy bar joy rather than the usual two!  Makes the $1 price tag worth it.

When we were little, my older sister and I would occasionally play Uno with only the awesome cards.  Imagine!  Every turn a Reverse, Wild, or Draw 4!  Sooooo fun!!!

Except it wasn’t.  Not even the first time.  It turns out that all the special cards aren’t special or fun without the regular cards.  There was no anticipatory excitement about getting a “good” card because you already knew you would.  Every card was good… except it wasn’t.  It still had the same cool function, but because there was no potential for getting anything but a good card, that “goodness” just disappeared.

“Good” and “bad” are relative terms.   Something is only good or bad compared to something else.  One person’s version of a good day might be someone else’s bad day.  If you’re used to chronic pain, a day where you only had a little might be one for the memory books.  To someone else who lives pain-free, having that same amount of pain one day might cause them a lot of anxiety, frustration, and irritability.

In order to appreciate the great stuff, you have to be willing to experience and even appreciate the difficult stuff (your rotten ex makes you more appreciative of your current partner.  You can finally breathe now that allergy season is over – who knew breathing was so awesome?!).  Next time something happens that you wish hadn’t, instead of focusing on the impossible (trying to wish away reality), focus on appreciating that “bad thing.”  Its occurrence will make your good times that much sweeter.