What’s the issue with my happiness? Where does it hide? Why does it slip away? Achieving happiness is scaling a mountain while all of us are inexperienced trekkers. Efforts put forth for a prolonged time filled with difficulties and failures finally led us to the peak. But when we begin to relish the taste of happiness, the gaze falls upon higher mountains awaiting to be scaled. The taste of current happiness becomes mediocre as the void within wants to be filled again with yet another peak to be scaled.
But what if happiness is not a monopoly of being attained after putting forth strenuous efforts? I have found simple actions can unlock my happiness. There are ways to feel small happiness in the now which do not depend on achievements. A few tiny efforts can change my feelings and reignite my happiness during the darker times.
The happiest memory of your life
This method involves recalling the happiest memory of your life. It could be a recent memory or a memory from your childhood. The memory does not need to be extravagant or what others consider good. It could be your simple life experience that affected you significantly. The first appreciation from your teacher. The playful time with your pet. The time when you thought you couldn’t do something and proved yourself wrong. Or the feeling of being heard in the presence of a loved one. This is your memory. This is what makes you happy.
Once you have selected the memory, please close your eyes and let your brain paint it across your mind. Observe the vivid colours, smell the familiar fragrances, listen to the sounds and allow yourself to feel how you felt then.
Observe what is arising within you. Watch the unadulterated happiness. Let yourself feel this joy. This simple trick I use to revisit my happiness through the happiest memory of my life.
No screen time after 11 pm
When I found out about this, I was confused. How does spending time on a screen between 11 pm and 4 am affect my happiness?
Screen time involves time spent on your phone, laptop or a digital screen. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and Associate Professor at Stanford, states that exposure to screen light between 11 pm and 4 am activates a specific circuit in the brain called habenula that lowers our dopamine levels. The suppressed dopamine levels affect the role it plays in pleasure and motivation, which can lead to a sense of disappointment.
So, it pushes us to be depressed.
Not using any screen after 11 pm is ideal. However, if it isn’t possible, using a blue light filter can decrease the effects of screen exposure.
Five good things that happened to you today
If we ask our minds to recall things that went bad for us, it will create a list we can fret about. But if we try to remember the good incidents, we might have to think more.
It does not mean that good things rarely happen to us and life is just a miserable existence.
Oh, the agony!
If we haven’t trained our mind for it, the default state of the mind is to fixate on the things that went wrong. But that is the pattern we can break by focusing on five good things that happened to us today. Just five, that’s it.
Recalling the good things that happened to us creates good thoughts. And these good thoughts result in feelings of joy and happiness. I have felt my happiness from recalling five good things that happened today. And if you keep this habit, you will soon find that your mind starts recalling more than five things. You would have thus begun a cycle of happiness.
Five things you love about yourself
Adding to the mind’s tendency to fixate on the bad things that happen in our lives is its habit of indulging in self-deprecating thoughts. The irony is that we often derive pleasure through this indulgence in pain. We keep putting ourselves down by chasing perfection and not allowing ourselves to make any mistakes or to fail. Over time, this becomes our go-to habit, where we extract a sadistic pleasure by humiliating ourselves and feeling pain. A comfort we seek in the zone of our own created unworthiness. This heavy indulgence can often engulf us in the depths of sadness.
I have found my happiness can be unlocked with a simple way of tackling these thoughts by deliberately indulging in the opposite of what our minds scream at us. Identify the five things that you love about yourself. They do not even have to be big things. It could be as simple as applauding yourself that you are fighting against your mind’s indulgence. Focusing on the things you love about yourself can pause your default thinking pattern that you aren’t even aware of most of the time. These deliberate thoughts slowly translate to how we feel and boost our happiness.
Take a shower
How can taking a shower affect our happiness? Often, simple things affect the way we feel. And the more intense our emotions, the more significantly these simple things affect our happiness.
The best-case scenario is that you would feel better. A realisation dawns that your problem is either irrelevant or is something to be solved that you haven’t solved yet, like everything else you have tackled in your life.
The worst-case scenario is you bathed, are feeling refreshed and are in a slightly better state to face the issue than you were a while back. At least you are not lying on your bed suffocated in the sadness of your being anymore. You are up. There is hope.
Whatever you are feeling, the simple act of taking a shower will make you feel better than before and thus put you in a better state to approach the difficulties of your life.
The strength to capture back my happiness reignited by simply taking a shower.
Do a physical task for a few minutes
More often than not, the sadness engulfing us is due to our tendency to ruminate on our problems. As the cycle keeps repeating, it grows its tentacles deeper into our being, establishing the painful emotions within us. The tentacles also grow wider, leading to multiple imagined scenarios that escalate our problem, at least in our minds.
I have observed that getting up and doing a small physical activity for a few minutes can break that cycle of rumination and reignite my happiness. Physical movement also tackles the self-loathing tendency aggravated when we do not move our bodies and resort to lying in the comfort of our beds.
But this simple act will be effective if it stays simple. While engulfed by our problems and feeling horrible, we would get up only if the activity is simple and takes less time. It could be as simple as watering the plants in your home, tidying up your desk, putting that laundry in the washing machine, ironing a few clothes or making your bed.
The simple act also affects my happiness by giving me a sense of achievement. It makes me feel worth something and often propels me to do more things, which removes me from the grasp of rumination. But for this to happen, it is crucial to take the first step and keep the barriers to doing it low.
Connect with the present moment
As we have seen rumination or worries can lead to unpleasant feelings that might hamper our lives. Other than doing physical activity, another way to disconnect from these ruminations is to connect with the present moment.
The moment right now in front of us is a moment of purity. It is a space with no baggage of the past or the heaviness of the future. It is just what it is – a simple space of time depicting our actual life.
A simple exercise to connect with the present moment is to indulge our senses. Pay attention to what you are hearing right now. Feel what your body or your palms are feeling. Recognise what your eyes are observing around you. Smell the different fragrances surrounding you. This simple exercise of focusing our mind on the inputs of our senses focuses us on the present moment.
If you think this is too vague and your mind is too distracted, you can add a layer to this exercise. Note three things your eyes can find, three things your nose can smell and three things your hands can feel. This additional layer pushes our mind to focus on the inputs of our senses and thus be in the present moment.
My happiness grows after I become aware of the present moment where all the troubles and pains do not exist, even for a little while. But isn’t this what life is, the present moment? The past is just a memory, and the future is our imagination. The present moment is all that there is.
Give genuine compliments to others
How can giving someone compliments be a small way to boost our happiness? To give someone a genuine compliment, you have to first identify something good in them. A genuine compliment is not just about something superficial. It depicts a quality or behaviour that might be unique to this person or stands out in them. Something that you admire and might want to replicate in yourself. Trying to compliment others focuses our mind on the good things about them, which can boost our mood. Additionally, giving this genuine compliment makes the other person part of our happiness. It can lead to the beginning of great conversations or a genuine compliment received back!
Change your posture
How would you imagine a person feeling sadness? They might rarely make eye contact, their neck stooped low, their chest closed, and their spine curled up. They subconsciously want themselves to be as small and unnoticeable as they can. How we feel internally affects the posture of our body.
But it is also the other way around. The posture of our body reinforces how we feel as well. And this is where we can catch our happiness back.
I have seen that my happiness can be tweaked by subtle changes in the body’s posture.
Try this right now. Let’s first explore the feeling of sadness and being closed through our body’s posture. Let your chest be closed, your spine curled up, your shoulders rolled forward with your gaze fixed on the ground. The facial expressions can be tense or expressionless. Observe how you feel. See what arises within your chest and be with this feeling for some time.
Now, let your chest open and the rib cage expand. Sit straight with the shoulders rolled back and relaxed. Elongate the neck without any stress and let your eyes see at the level of your head. Let there be mild happiness on your face as if you are almost about to smile. See how you feel and what arises in your chest. Be with this feeling for some time.
My happiness arises through subtle changes in my posture.
Do that short task you have been procrastinating
We have that few small tasks or a short chore that we have been procrastinating for a long time. Completing it would take an insignificant amount of time of our day, maybe just a few minutes. Still, the task has been long pending without any reason.
Think of that task that you could do easily but have not. This insignificant pending task had been crawling at the back of your mind. Reminding us of all the times we put off things only for them to either blow up or create a constant lingering anxiety with us, which only vanished when we did the task at the last moment in sheer panic. This task symbolises the false thoughts of our unworthiness. It has the potential to open an avalanche of thoughts just waiting to stomp on our lives and happiness.
Let us do that task right now.
Don’t think, do it.
Get up and do it right now.
What are you waiting for?
I am serious. You will feel better. Completion of this seemingly simple task has the power to boost our mood and reclaim our happiness.
Go!
.
.
.
.
Done?
How do you feel? I believe better than before. That is who you are. It is the real you. Happy and worthy but clouded under the burden of bad thoughts often triggered due to the weight of this insignificant task. My happiness was unlocked by beating procrastination.
Happiness need not necessarily be a mountain to climb, which is exhausting in tough times. But these ten small activities can improve our moods and thus our happiness.