How to exercise your happiness muscle
I know firsthand that happiness can be incredibly elusive. When we’re kids, if we’re lucky, we are sold a picture of adulthood that includes Disney-level romance, a fulfilling and meaningful career, white picket fences, children, money, freedom.
As we get older though, we start to be weighed down by the realities of adulthood. Romance is great, sure, but relationships are hard. Careers can be meaningful, but at the end of the day, most of us still have to go to work on Monday. Finances are constantly stressful. Debts pile up. Kids are expensive, vacations even more so.
I vividly remember my first year working as a teacher after graduating college. A few months into the schoolyear, I remember thinking to myself: “This is it?”
The thing is, it IS hard to be happy when facing the stressors of daily life and the calamities of the world, and that’s even with the privilege and great fortune of good health, job security, and solid relationships. As one of my friends said to me recently, “life is just dreadful.”
Maybe so. But there are a few tried-and-true things I’ve learned in the past 10 years of adulthood that can help balance the dread with some moments of joy and excitement, however small those are in comparison to our Disney-esque fantasies of childhood.
Our drive to seek out happiness is a muscle. Like any muscle, it needs exercise and training to keep it strong. We can all train ourselves to savor positive emotions more acutely, even when facing mental health conditions like depression and anxiety. Here are some tips for how to do that.
1. Increase positive emotions: When struggling with our mental health, our first line of defense is learning how to reduce distress and alleviate symptoms. But most of us could also benefit from thinking about how to increase joy. There are some tangible ways to increase joy in your day-to-day life. Start by planning one activity per day that makes you happy or gives you a sense of accomplishment. It can be small: FaceTiming a friend, enjoying a good cup of coffee, going for a short walk around the block. After you’ve enjoyed the activity, close your eyes and recount to yourself, in present tense, where and when you experienced moments of joy or happiness while doing the activity (or, write about it!) Focus on the sensory details and physical sensations of the experience: how the sun felt on your face while walking, hearing your friend’s laughter on the phone, the sweetness of the vanilla in your coffee. The point of this exercise is to really “zero in” on those small, joyful moments that often go unnoticed throughout the day if we’re not actively paying attention to them. It’s the active practice of savoring “glimmers:” those small moments of pleasure that arise from simple things. Feeling gratitude for these moments, despite the presence of ongoing stressors or strains in your life, can really enhance our mental wellbeing. Try it for a week and see what you notice.
2. Avoid comparisons: One of the things that really activates my personal anxieties is spending a lot of time on social media, which inevitably leads to increased comparisons between myself and other people. A perfect example is my recent wedding day: it was a truly wonderful day, and I had zero regrets- until I got on my Instagram and saw this person’s dress, that person’s flowers, another person’s cake- and suddenly my anxiety spiked and that pesky voice in my head was telling me that everything I had so carefully planned and executed for my wedding was somehow wrong. As soon as I got myself away from social media, I was back to savoring the specialness of my day. So, take yourself away from an environment where you’re prone to making comparisons. If it’s social media that’s a trigger for you, as it is for me, then set a timer on your phone for 10-15 minutes a day of scrolling. Once the timer goes off, close the apps and do something that brings you fulfillment or enjoyment. To help with this, you can also download “Screen Zen” which locks you out of your social media sites after a designated amount of time per day. And, remember that social media is a highlight reel: it never reflects what’s actually happening in anyone’s life on a day-to-day basis!
3. Interrogate your inner critic: By asking yourself certain questions, you can challenge the negative thought spirals that can lead to depression and anxiety. Often, we are telling ourselves a specific story about events in our lives; an alternative always exists, we just have to locate it. For example, if you often find yourself worrying about the worst-case scenario or interpreting something that happened to you really negatively, try interrupting that thought process by asking yourself questions like: What assumptions am I making about this experience? Is there any evidence to support my thoughts? Can I find evidence that disproves my thoughts? Strictly using facts, how can I describe this experience or reframe it? When you try to look at a situation intellectually rather than emotionally, you can usually come up with a more neutral, accurate story.
4. Find gratitude: Research shows that practicing gratitude for even 5 minutes a day can improve emotional wellbeing and promote long-term happiness. Gratitude is the simple practice of shifting our attention away from the negative and onto the positive elements of our lives and selves. Keeping a gratitude log is an easy way to incorporate this practice into your life. Try writing down one thing per day that you feel grateful for, however small. Or, try asking yourself how you can treat yourself with gratitude, nourishment, or respect at some point during the day- and then execute that plan. Another idea: express gratitude to someone else in your life. Sharing positive feelings towards a person you care about can rapidly increase your own sense of personal wellbeing and positive emotions.
With some practice in attention-shifting, we can all increase the positive emotions in our lives. But it does take practice, especially when most of us have been inadvertently teaching ourselves to seek out the negative for a long time. Try one or all of these tips for a week and see if you notice any changes in your overall sense of wellbeing. And, as always, if you find you need more help switching off your negative self-talk and emotions, reach out to a trusted professional for guidance and feedback.
Lastly, I want to close with a poem that a friend introduced to me which I now keep on my fridge. I find it to be an excellent reminder that every day, no matter how ordinary or seemingly dull, has something to offer us- if we allow it.
The Life of a Day- Tom Hennen
Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks, which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, such as autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.
