Tag: Happiness

3 More Ways to Make Your Holidays Happier — Even if You are Super Busy

The holidays can be a mixed-bag for some people when it comes to happiness. Many of us tend to look forward to this time of year, but can often feel overwhelmed when it comes. Here are three quick (and science-based!) ways to make the holiday season happier–and less overwhelming–this year.

#1: Create a giving trifecta.

A mountain of research shows that giving to others — particularly those in need — makes us happier, so I’m always looking for ways to buy my holiday gifts from retailers that donate money to causes I believe in. For example, this year I’m going to purchase gifts through the AmazonSmile program using my Chase Freedom card. This creates a giving trifecta: First, I get a gift for someone on my Christmas list; second, AmazonSmile donates a percentage of my purchase to a charity I love (the Tipping Point Community, a local non-profit that fights poverty); and third, I’ll donate the 5% cash back I earn when using my Chase Freedom card to Tipping Point.

#2: Let the little things go.

This is a busy time of year, and something’s got to give. Let it be the little things. Even though I prefer homemade meals, I become very dependent on inexpensive prepared foods from Trader Joe’s at this time of year. And I’ve stopped being such a perfectionist when it comes to gift giving; although I’d prefer to exquisitely wrap each gift in handmade paper, I get hives just thinking about having to wait in line at the post office to mail those gifts. This year I’m letting Amazon.com do my shipping and wrapping (see tip #1)!

#3: Put your to-do list on your calendar.

One of the things that can detract from our happiness is our extra-long long task-list. Researchers used to think that worry about unfinished tasks was our unconscious mind trying to help us get things done by reminding us of what we still needed to do.

But now research shows that simply making a plan for when we will do a task turns off all those unconscious reminders (aka, worry). Turns out that our unconscious isn’t nagging us to do the task at hand, but rather to make a plan to get it done. (More about my plan for the holidays here.)

Want more holiday happiness tips? Join us Tuesday at 5:00pm Pacific Time for a fun little twitter chat sponsored by BlogHer and Chase Freedom — Follow along with #HolidayHappinessBH.

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Make a Holiday Game Plan

So that I can actually enjoy the holidays, I’ve had to devise a three-part plan for tackling all that needs to be done at this time of year. The foundation of this plan is scheduling, however dull that might sound.

First, I make a simple list of all the things I need and want to do in the next six weeks.

Second, I block off time on our family calendar to actually do those things–including the not-so-obvious things, like time to update my address book so that our holiday cards make it to where they’re supposed to. (Research suggests that telling your brain when you will do something reduces stress.)

Third, I actually schedule downtime on my calendar, like weekend mornings when we commit to not going anywhere or doing anything.

Once I do my scheduling, it becomes obvious that I’m not going to have enough time to do everything on my list. But I can’t skip my downtime, or I won’t actually enjoy the holidays.

It is never easy to stick to the plan. Inevitably, someone will call to see if we can go ice skating on a weekend morning when we’ve scheduled downtime, and we’ll all want to go. But if we can’t easily reschedule the downtime for the next day, we’ll say no.

I’ll get a lot of pushback on this decision from my family, but I’ll remind them that more is not necessarily better, and that I’m actually not that fun to be around when I’m exhausted.

Take Action: Take time this week to make your holiday game plan. Don’t forget to schedule some downtime for yourself!

Join the Discussion: What tricks help you stay sane during the holidays? Share your insight by leaving a comment below!

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Practice Saying No

I am rarely so unhappy as when I’ve committed to do something I don’t really want to do; dread is such a yucky thing to feel.

For better or worse, this time of year tends to bring more invitations to events and parties, more opportunities to volunteer, and more people asking us to help out during the holidays than we could ever possibly accept. When we accept too many invitations, tempting as they might be, we eventually become too exhausted to enjoy the season.

It helps to have (and practice!) a go-to way to say no.

Take Action: Make it easier for yourself to say no by preparing now what you will say the next time you need to decline an invitation. If you need ideas, check out this list of “21 Ways to Give Good No.”

Join the Discussion: What is your favorite way to say no?

Want more ways to reduce stress over the holidays?
Join us for our last live call on this subject at noon on Wednesday, November 19 at noon PST. Or just download the three class teleseries and listen while you are driving, or doing the dishes.

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Stare into Space

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.“

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Find Something to Love About the Moment You Are In Right Now

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When I drop my kids off at school in the morning, I ask them one question: “What are you going to do today?” They always answer, usually without rolling their eyes and sometimes with actual enthusiasm: “HAVE FUN!!”

Having fun, to me, is the most important thing. Yes, I want them to learn and be respectful and kind and everything else, and no, I don’t want them to have fun at the expense of other people or by breaking school rules — obviously. But when it comes down to it, I know that if they are having fun, they will learn better, and make better friends, and in general, be a delight to their teachers.

And there is always fun to be had, even in the more boring or trying aspects of school, or, as the case may be, work. Or life. Finding something to love in every situation isn’t about complacency, it’s about accepting the full truth of the present moment. It’s about focusing our minds on the positive aspects of a situation, and then reaping the benefits of doing so.

A friend recently faced a nerve-wracking medical procedure for a serious illness. She was terrified, and having a hard time finding something to love about the situation, which included the possibility that she might not recover. But here are some things we came up with:

She felt love and gratitude for the people supporting her — her doctors and nurses, her husband, her friends.

She felt hope and gratitude because there are treatments for her illness (and super thankful she has health insurance).

She felt deep gratitude (again) just to be alive. She came to see her fear as a part of her profound will to live.

Finding something to love even in very difficult situations involves acceptance of (and even surrender to) things that we didn’t choose and perhaps didn’t want. But instead of just pointing to the ways that a situation is hard or wrong or bad, or focusing on the things that we’d like to change, we can transform a situation by also acknowledging the positive aspects of a situation. The key: seeing that we would not get to experience these positive aspects, at least in the same way, without the difficult bits.

Seeing this fuller picture–accepting both the good and the bad in a situation–is a solid tactic for feeling happier and more more fulfilled. The positive emotions that arise when we identify what we love are tremendously functional. Gratitude, love, hope, optimism, compassion, awe — these emotions all make us healthier, happier, and more satisfied with our lives.

Take action: Have fun today. If not that, find something to love about the situation you are in.

Join the discussion: Tell us about something you love about today. Share in the comments or discuss on Facebook here.

Photo by keiichi

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Cultivate Wordlessness

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

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Find Your Sweet Spot

A long-time perfectionist and over-achiever, I used to accomplished my goals through the sheer force of my iron-clad will, my grit, and darn hard work.

Until about five years ago, when my ability to push through pain and difficulty started to slip away. My body began breaking down; in 18 months, I blew through nine courses of antibiotics (at the end of which I still had a chronic strep infection).

I had it all, except the thing that mattered most — my health. (The fact that I was a successful happiness expert did not escape me!)

Fortunately, I did have the solution to my utter exhaustion at my fingertips: I was absolutely steeped in the science of happiness and resilience and well-being. I knew that I could find a way to apply all this research to my life so that I could be happier and more successful without also feeling sick and tired.

And so that is what I did. I consciously and deliberately road-tested any tactic that had been validated scientifically that could bring more ease into my life—anything that could make me more efficient or more productive or more creative or more intelligent. I tried out every research-based strategy that promised to give me more energy. I consciously sought to develop my “sweet spot,” that place where I had the greatest strength, but also the greatest ease.

In short, here is what I did:

(1) I learned to dramatically increase my brainpower through play and positive emotions.

(2) I developed daily micro-habits that channel my brain’s natural ability to run on autopilot, so my habits could bear the burdens that I’d been hoping willpower would shoulder.

(3) I figured out how to ease overwhelm. On a typical day, we take in the equivalent of about 174 newspapers’ worth of information, five times as much as we did in 1986. Unfortunately, feeling overwhelmed makes us dumber than if we were stoned or deprived of an entire night’s sleep. It also makes us irritable, irrational, anxious, and impulsive.

(4) I learned new ways to connect with the people around me and repair relationships that had frayed, knowing that our social connections are our single greatest source of both strength and ease.

(5) Finally, I learned how to become comfortable with a little discomfort while I built mastery and developed the grit I needed to bounce back from life’s inevitable setbacks.

All of these tactics of ease made me healthier and stronger. Before long, I’d made my sweet spot bigger, and I’d found my groove. I hadn’t dramatically changed my career or my family structure or moved to the woods without my smartphone. I’d made a series of small shifts.

Our lives are like a set of interlocking gears of varying sizes. Often, we try to improve our lives by moving the large gears: by getting divorced, or married, or moving out of the city or quitting our job. And sometimes it is very necessary to rotate these big gears—but these big ones are always difficult to move. The Sweet Spot is about shifting the small gears, the ones that rotate relatively easily. And because all the gears are interlocking, when we tweak a small gear here, the large gears start to move—effortlessly—as well.

So that is my story, and the story of my new book, The Sweet Spot: How to Find Your Groove at Home and Work. My hope is that it will be your story, too (but without the health crisis!). I want to hand you all the preventive medicine I’ve discovered to start living and working more from your sweet spot.

Take Action: If you are inclined, please pre-order my book! I know that it seems silly to order a book so far in advance, but pre-orders really matter a lot for authors; in most cases, they determine whether or not a book is a best seller. One reason to pre-order The Sweet Spot: Lots of people have read it, and they recommend it. No need to wait for reviews, you can check them out here.

Join the Discussion: When do you feel most in the groove, like you are living or working from your sweet spot? What factors contribute most? Share in the comments.

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Don’t Take a Picture

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?

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Write Down the Good Things

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!

by Christine Carter

Happiness Tip: Fall in Love All Over Again

Last weekend was my first wedding anniversary with my husband, the first of what I hope will be many in a long marriage. But because this is my second marriage, I’m all too aware of how fragile relationships can be. I know how much work a good relationship is. Fortunately, a lot of the work in a committed relationship can be really fun to do; it’s only “work” in the sense that it takes conscious effort.

To that end, I asked Linda Carroll, author of my favorite relationship book, Love Cycles, for some relationship happiness tips — ridiculously easy things that Mark and I can do to celebrate our anniversary and that will help us keep the love alive. Here are her suggestions:

#1 Reminisce about the beginning of your relationship over a relaxing dinner together: how you met, your first dates, and the “eureka moment” when you realized you’d found the right partner.

#2 Find a photograph of your partner as a child, one that is especially endearing. (I found the above picture of Mark in a pile of old photos in a kitchen cabinet, of all places.) Carry it in your wallet or put it on your iPhone and feel your heart touched whenever you see it.

#3 Think of what might make you hard to live with, and list the ways your partner has shown patience, forgiveness, and acceptance of you over time.

#4 List the top three most clever, courageous, or caring things your partner has ever said or done for you (or for someone else). Remind yourself of these gifts bestowed by your partner. Bear them in mind as you go through your daily life.

#5 List the top three qualities of your partner and use them to play a private game where you catch your partner in the act of displaying these admirable qualities.

Take Action: Choose one of Carroll’s tips to do with someone special tonight. If it feels hokey, or makes you feel vulnerable, be courageous and go for it anyway — you’ll be happier in the long run.

Join the discussion: What other ideas do you have for falling in love all over again? What works for you?

In her fantastic book Love Cycles, author and veteran couples therapist Linda Carroll explains that love is cyclical and comprised of five distinct stages: the Merge, Doubt and Denial, Disillusionment, Decision, and Wholehearted Loving. She explains that love’s more challenging stages are part of genuine intimacy, rather than signs of its demise, and promises that the greatest benefit of our intimate relationships is the opportunity they provide to grow and develop as a human being.