Let’s play a game of associations: close your eyes and write down five words that instinctively come in mind when you hear the word…: “Holidays”. If you’re like me, your ideal thought of the Holiday season involves sitting on a snowy day next to the fireplace wearing a sweater while reading a book. Chances are you used words with a strong positive association like, friends, happiness, snowman, family, gifts…. And, if you are like me, then you keep wondering why your Holiday season never turns out that way.
Every year I experience a moment (usually around December 10th) when I realize that it got to me again: Usually it’s when I walk around with dilated pupils and a racing heart, while mailing cards, buying gifts, and making dinner plans. Holiday stress is almost inevitable, but there are ways to make it better.
Here are a few ideas:
1. Express Gratitude:
Expressing gratitude is probably the most time-efficient thing one can do to regain a sober perspective and be reminded of the goodness in life. Write 2-3 things you are grateful for in a gratitude journal at least every other day. Carry your journal with you if you can, or better yet use happier.com’s iPhone app!
1. Schedule me-time in your calendar:
Schedule a few hours a week where you have absolutely no commitments. During this time do not answer the phone, look at email or do any chores. Try to spend this time by yourself, exercising, reading, or journaling.
3. Give others non-tangible gifts that only you can give:
Think about friends and family members who may long for something only you have: a good word, a smile, a special skill. Sometimes a small gesture goes a long way. Fix your brother’s car, or write a small poem to your sweetheart. Give a gift that money can’t buy.
4. Put a stress emergency kit in your pocket
Carry in your pocket a de-stressing activity that you can do on the go. Use a small pocket book for journaling, or your cell phone’s camera for taking pictures of happy moments you encounter. If you carry a smart mobile device, get one of the many emerging mobile software applications that can help you stay centered and in tune with yourself even in the most hectic scenarios.
5. Get enough sleep
It’s stating the obvious but can’t be repeated too many times. Sleep deprivation is the mother of everything stress and a recipe for disaster. Be aware of that critical time at night when you want to just write a few more cards or drop dead in front of the TV, and just make the decision to turn in.
This post was authored by Ran Zilca. Ran is the CEO of Signal Patterns, developers of assessment and positive psychology applications. Ran’s background covers a wide range of R&D leadership roles including analytics, biometrics, and software development at the IBM research division and the Israeli Defense Forces. You can follow Ran on twitter.
Yesterday, Andrew sat down with the team at Zappos.com to talk about using happier.com as a personal trainer for your happiness.
Melissa, who blogs for Zappos, chatted with us about the site and our team. You can watch the full video below. Please leave comments on the Zappos blog if you’re a fan! Thanks!
“As a neuroscientist, I really like the idea of the program….” – a user review
Measure your happiness. Track Your progress. And record what goes well each day.
Daily awareness and tracking of emotions is one of the first steps toward lasting, sustainable happiness
Two decades of research show that focusing on what goes well, and why, helps you build your life around authentic sources of happiness
Application includes an introductory video from Prof. Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania
Our Mission: We inspire people to be happier.
happier.com inspires people to be happier and more resilient every day. Through assessments and exercises to measure, track and improve happiness, thousands of users have experienced a meaningful improvement. Easy-to-use applications, both online and for the iPhone, provide users with the tools they need to be happier.
Everything we offer is based on leading research. We partner with psychologists including Dr. Martin Seligman, author of “Learned Optimism” and “Authentic Happiness” and the founder of the field of positive psychology.
A new survey indicates that life satisfaction is mostly a matter of perception — but a ready supply of cash doesn’t hurt.
Meghan Daum
March 14, 2009
Oh, no. Here comes another study about happiness. We can’t seem to do enough of these paeans to cheerfulness. In the last few months alone, the British Medical Journal suggested that having a happy close friend boosts our own odds of being happy by 25%; the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological
Sciences pointed to evidence that optimism and pessimism are genetically determined; and the website happier.com, which, according to its mission statement, “measures, tracks and improves happiness,” launched an iPhone application that allows users to keep a mobile “gratitude journal” (just don’t be grateful while driving).
The latest installment comes in the form of the Gallup Healthways Well-Being Index, a huge poll (it used a random sample of 355,000 Americans) designed to measure people’s daily well-being and describe its correlation to where they live and work. The survey revealed which U.S. states (and, indeed, which congressional districts within those states) were the healthiest and happiest in six categories: life satisfaction, work quality, healthy behavior, physical health, emotional health and basic access to necessities such as food and shelter.
The big winner was Utah, followed by Hawaii, Wyoming, Colorado and Minnesota. The state with the worst sense of well-being was West Virginia. Michigan, Ohio, Mississippi and Kentucky filled out the list of the five worst states.
What are we to conclude from this? Well, let’s see: Utah happens to have an unemployment rate of 4.6%, versus the national average of 7.6% (according to January numbers). West Virginia, for its part, has one of the weakest state economies in the country. As for the congressional districts, California’s 14th, which includes the lush, plush Silicon Valley cities of Palo Alto and Mountain View, ranked first. The losers: the coal-mining country of Kentucky’s 5th District and New York’s 16th District, which includes the famously blighted South Bronx.
The study was concerned in large part with quality-of-life issues such as access to outdoor recreation (hence the high marks for Utah and Hawaii) and access to affordable housing and healthcare. But even though spokesmen for the poll may not want to put that fine a point on it — an Associated Press report said a Gallup researcher was “reluctant to explain regional differences without more study, but suspected that some of the variations are explained by income” — it appears that Randy Newman may have been right when he sang “it’s money that matters.” Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s that Puff Daddy’s lyric, “young, black and famous, with money hangin out the anus,” was an encomium to inner peace.
In either case, the current economic calamity has most of us poised for some serious unhappiness. Even if we’re lucky enough to have avoided unhappy friends or pessimistic genes (not so for me; when I was small, my father sat me down and told me “happiness is an illusion” — he then offered me a cherry Life Saver), chances are most of us are suffering some measure of financial anxiety. So does that doom us to West Virginia levels of misery?
Possibly. When I submitted to an assessment on happier.com, which asked questions such as how often I felt proud of myself and what kind of mood I was in most of the time, I scored a rather grim 65 out of a possible 100 (though I guess if I weren’t a pessimist, I’d see 65 as a passing grade). It then suggested I do an online exercise on “controlling negative thoughts,” in which I was asked to quickly solve a series of anagrams and then record how I felt about myself as I attempted to do so.
As it happened, the test made me feel terrible about myself. Then I learned that all but two of the anagrams were unsolvable and that the exercise was developed to help me “gain more control” of my “thinking styles” and “identify the adversity” I was experiencing.”
In other words, I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself for erroneously surmising that “godapoo” was almost an anagram for “dog poo.” I then went back and retook the happiness test and scored a 70.
Of course, even if I were one of the few people who appear to be thriving in this economy — like oil company executives and, rather Dickensianly, shoe repairers (people are getting their shoes fixed rather than buying new ones) — I’d probably still get a middling score on that test. And that’s not just because the well-being index ranked my congressional district 416th out of 435 (I attribute that entirely to the overcrowded parking lot at Trader Joe’s). It’s because ultimately my father was right.
If we believe the results of many of these studies, which suggest that life satisfaction is mostly a matter of perception, then happiness is an illusion. It also happens to be an illusion that can seem a lot more real when paired with cash. Now excuse me while I drop $200 on an iPhone so I can start that mobile gratitude journal.
This post was authored by Ran Zilca. Ran is the CEO of Signal Patterns, developers of assessment and positive psychology applications. Ran’s background covers a wide range of R&D leadership roles including analytics, biometrics, and software development at the IBM research division and the Israeli Defense Forces. You can follow Ran on twitter.
