Building Happiness Habits

Based on a TED talk, I'm going to spend the next 21 days trying to form some habits which I hope will make me happier.

Every day I'm going to:

• think of 3 things I'm grateful for,
• relive in my mind one good experience I had in the past day,
• do at least 5 minutes of exercise,
• "meditate", and
• do one random act of kindness (ARK from Evan Almighty) like sending a nice email to someone.

When I say meditate, I'm adapting that a bit to mean being mindful and present in the sense that David at raptitude.com talks about. I tried the sitting and opening doors scheme briefly and it didn't quite click, although to be fair I didn't give it much time. But I feel like trying something similar for this: whenever I sit or drink something, I'll try to be fully present.

I'm not sure if this counts as meditation in the way Shawn describes in the video, but I like the idea of it and this is my experiment so I'm going to do it!

I'm going to try to make each of my "things" unique each day. For example, I won't reuse things I'm grateful for.

My wife and cousin in law have talked about doing this too. We'll see how that goes!

If I feel like it, I'll write a short post each day with what I did that day.



Today (April 3) was the first day.

I'm grateful for my wife being so patient with all my crazy plans and ideas, especially when they cause her to change the way she does things.

I'm grateful for living in a place where we have law and order. I walk around without worrying about being hurt by other citizens or my government. I conduct business and know I'll be paid fairly and that I don't have to worry about my money being stolen.

I'm grateful that I'm never hungry. At any time of the day there's an unlimited quantity and an almost unlimited variety of food available to me for so little money. Whatever I happen to be in the mood for, I can eat. Amazing.

I relived my lunch. I had a really nice lunch with my friend at work. It was beautiful out and we had some really nice and fun conversation.

As has become usual for Wednesdays, we had our workout group at the office so I definitely got in more that 5 minutes of exercise.

I forgot to be mindful when sitting and I just decided on the drinking part of it at the end of the day. I'll try again tomorrow!

For my ARK, I gave change to a guy on the subway. Somehow that doesn't seem like it should count, maybe because that's not unusual for me. Ah whatever, I can use it for one of my days :-)

Day 1, pretty awesome! 20 days to go.