Imagine you’ve just been told that you have less than six months to live.

• What do you need to do? 
• Who do you need to talk to? 
• Where do you need to visit? 
• How will you spend your remaining time? 

These are all questions that Lee Lipsenthal, author of Enjoy Every Sandwich, asked me and some friends after he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. As he led us through a visualization of our own deaths, I felt my life slow way down. All the hustle and busy-ness no longer seemed very important.

My life, and everything wonderful about it, was put into stark perspective. I felt deep gratitude where only moments before, I’d felt stressed and exhausted. Sometimes we get trapped in a way of thinking that curbs our happiness; often a dramatic change in perspective can help. Lee wrote:

Some cures require a radical intervention of the soul: a change in our mindset and our way of being. These cures require us to stop racing through our busy lives, working, providing, and consuming. Some cures require that we stop and enjoy every sandwich.

Are the holidays starting to exhaust you? If so, try radically shifting your perspective.

Take Action: What if this was your last holiday season? Who would you spend your time with? What would you be sure to really savor?

Join the Discussion: What will you do today to “enjoy every sandwich”? Inspire others in the comments below.

If this Happiness Tip intrigues or inspires you, I think you’d like my new book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work. You might also like my manifesto for enjoying life more — read it, or download it free here.

Photo courtesy of Adrian Dressler.

 

When was the last time you just sat down and stared into space? Put your feet up and did nothing? Spaced out in the shower? Okay, now when was the last time you did one of these things and didn’t feel like you should be doing something else instead?

If you can’t remember, you aren’t alone.Many of us don’t feel good about just sitting around doing nothing. But we human beings need stillness in order to recharge our batteries. The constant stream of external stimulation that we get from our televisions and computers and smart phones, while often gratifying in the moment, ultimately causes what neuroscientists call “cognitive overload.” This state of feeling overwhelmed impairs our ability to think creatively, to plan, organize, innovate, solve problems, make decisions, resist temptations, learn new things easily, speak fluently, remember important social information (like the name of our boss’s daughter, or our daughter’s boss), and control our emotions. In other words, it impairs basically everything we need to do in a given day.

Take Action: For 5-10 minutes today, practice being still. Turn off your phone and close your laptop. Get comfortable in a favorite chair or on the couch. Then…don’t do anything. Just stare into space. Rest. It’s okay if you get bored or agitated or sleepy — that’s normal if you don’t do this very often.

Join the Discussion: How does it feel to just sit and do nothing? How does it feel to get back to work after you’ve rested? Share in the comments or discuss on Facebook here. 

If you are interested in why this practice can make you more productive and happy, or why we are so bad at being still these days, I hope you’ll check out this blog post.

And for more about the concept of achieving more by doing less, check out my latest eCourse, “The Science of Finding Flow.“

While I’ve long known about the neurological benefits of meditation, it wasn’t until I watched Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk that I started thinking about how many of the benefits of meditation come from quieting the verbal part of our brains.

To be honest, silence is not a state I naturally seek. I’m extroverted. I’m loud. I love parties and big families and people. And as an avid reader and professional writer, I tend to fear — not cultivate — a loss of words.

But reading nobel prize-winner Daniel Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow got me (you guessed it) thinking a little more about this. That noisy verbal part of our brains is slow, processing only about 40 bits of information per second. The creative, intuitive, non-verbal brain processes about 11 million bits per second. Knowing this, I’ve been motivated to try and better harness the power of my non-verbal brain.

According to Martha Beck — Harvard sociologist turned life coach, and one of my personal heros — practicing what she calls “deep wordlessness” is just the ticket. Here’s what she writes about wordlessness in her most recent book Finding Your Way in a Wild New World:

To master Wordlessness…you must unlearn almost everything you were taught in school about what it means to be intelligent. The sharp focus you were told to sustain is actually a limiting, stressful, narrow attention field — something animals only using the the moment of ‘fight or flight.’ Dropping into Wordlessness moves the brain into its ‘rest and relax’ state.”

I’ve been practicing Beck’s techniques for cultivating worldlessness, and though it doesn’t come easily to me, I’m finding it well worth the effort.

Take Action: Beck’s book is loaded with literally dozens of techniques for activating our non-verbal brains. One is to simply to follow your own bloodstream. You can try it by focusing your attention on your heart in the space between breaths: after you exhale deeply, pause your breathing and find the feeling of your heart beating. Take another breath while following the sensation of your heart beat. Once you’re following your heart beat, see if you can feel your circulatory system elsewhere, in your ears or toes or hands, your head and organs, or your entire body. Hang out for a while in this meditative state.

Join the discussion: What do you think?!

Learn more! I write a lot about wordlessness in my new book, The Sweet Spot.  I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it…pre-orders matter a lot for authors; they determine whether or not a book launches as a bestseller. Lots of people are already recommending it — check out the testimonials here!

Photo by Michael Coghlin

 

This last weekend was my nephew’s first birthday party, and because he is absolutely the most adorable baby EVER and I love him so much, I’d planned on widely documenting the occasion, in HD video and still photography.

You know, just so we’ll never ever forget the adorableness of it all. 

I forgot my big camera, but that didn’t really matter because every adult and teenager there was snapping away with their phone cameras like crazy paparazzi (myself included).

In the middle of all this, I remembered a study which showed that photographing objects in a museum impaired a person’s ability to recall much about the object they photographed — and also impaired their ability to remember that they’d seen the object at all. So I stopped madly photographing the big event and started trying to just be present.

Then I remembered a follow-up study. The “photo-taking impairment effect,” as researchers call it, didn’t occur when people were asked to zoom in on a detail of the object they were photographing. And so I went back to photographing, this time zooming in on my nephew’s messy face (did I mention that he is adorable?).

Here is what researchers think is happening: When we take a picture, we delegate memory-making to our camera, and our brain stops trying to make the memory itself. But when people photograph a specific part of an object, their memory is not impaired, presumably because their brains still need to make sense of the whole picture in order to photograph the detail.

Take Action: We tend to feel happiest when we give the people we love our full attention. It is hard to be fully present at the same time that we are photographing something. So whether we are after a happy moment or a happy memory, often the best thing we can do is just put our camera down.

Join the Discussion: Have you noticed that you remember less about an event or special moment when you photograph it?

 

I am not a journaler; after sitting in front of my computer all day, it doesn’t usually occur to me to end the day by whipping out pen and paper to document life’s events.

But I’ve long preached the benefits of ending the day by noting “3 good things” that happened. And I’ve practiced this research-tested happiness-boosting technique by asking my kids about “3 good things” that occurred during their day at bedtime for nearly a decade. It has come to be my favorite part of the day — when it happens. Which increasingly, it doesn’t. My kids are are now tweeners and teenagers. They share rooms, and they no longer always want to end the day by cuddling with me.

Clearly our family’s “3 good things” practice is ripe for reinvention. And I was recently reminded by the Greater Good Science Center’s wonderful (free!) Science of Happiness online class that the power of this exercise often comes from writing down three good things that happened to you during the day. Here is the suggested practice:

• At about the same time each day (I recommend the evening, just before bed), take about 10 minutes to write down three things that went well for you.
• In addition to just jotting down what happened (e.g., “I finally finished a project I’d been procrastinating”) add some details, like what you did or said, or what others did or said.
• Focus on your feelings. How did you feel when the good thing happened? How did you feel afterwards? How do you feel now?

I’ve decided to start doing this expanded “3 good things” with my kids… via text. Even if they are under the same roof. I like this because sometimes I am not with them at bedtime, but am in a place where I can still text with them. I also like it because the practice includes me more: I prompt them with something good that happened to me during my day, sometimes sending them a picture. (Again, even if they are just in the next room.)

Text doesn’t really lend itself to detail, so for each good thing I typically send two texts, one for what happened, and one for how it made me feel. I use the voice recognition on my phone and speak the texts, which saves me time.

My kids and I exchange just one good thing now, typically, since we are trying to go into detail. I also have been jotting down one private good thing for myself, and talking to my husband about a third.

Even though this isn’t the exact exercise that was tested by researchers, I think it is better to modify an exercise to make it something that you find inherently enjoyable than to try to stick to something that doesn’t feel like as good a fit.

Take Action: How can you integrate detailed reflection about three good things that happened during your day? Block off time on your calendar, or set a reminder on your phone, and try to do this practice for 10 days in a row.

Join the Discussion: Are you planning to try out the “3 Good Things” exercise? If so, what format do you think will work best for you? If you’ve done something similar before, what worked for you? Share in the comments!

We recently adopted a dog, which has given me a new perspective on how animals bring happiness to humans. We were certainly happy before we met Buster (pictured below), but rarely have I seen a sentient bring so much sheer joy into a family.

I’m not surprised that research shows that greater health and happiness can come from caring for a pet. One study tracked “hypertensive stockbrokers” who adopted a cat or dog; caring for their new animals lowered their blood pressure more than prescribed medicine! And you may have heard about the study that found that dog-owners tend to get more exercise than folks without a dog. Exercise is, of course, a sure way to boost health and happiness.

Take Action: This week, find a cat to pet, a dog to walk, or a fish to feed. If you feel noticeably calmer after the experience, consider adopting!

Join the Discussion: Do your pets — or the idea of pets, if you don’t have them — bring more or less joy into your life? What about stress? Share in the comments.