I’m going to start out with a confession. I’m lazy. It’s not sexy, it’s not something I’m proud of, but there it is. I’d rather read a book than clean the house. Give me a cup of tea over a jog round the park any day. And why am I confessing to you, dear reader? Well, as a lazy person, I hate hard work. So I keep my life as simple as possible. Therefore, any tips you get from me will be useful, tried, tested and easy to implement.
I don’t have the patience or the energy for complicated things that will waste your time and effort for little to no return. And, I don’t want this to be an article you read and go “Oh, isn’t that interesting, I must try that somed….oooh, 20% off at Marks and Sparks, click…”
This is a simple (less than 5 minutes) pain-free exercise that I would like you to do every evening, for one week only. It has been scientifically proven to increase happiness*. What have you got to lose!? It is called Three Good Things. All you need to do is, at the end of the day, write down three things that went well. In addition, provide a causal explanation or reason for each good thing. Nut, meet shell.
An example might be something like – “The kids ate a healthy dinner, because I took the time to shop for, cook and prepare this for them.” Or, “Got great feedback from a customer because I took the extra time to explain something complicated to them”. So something that you are happy about, and what caused it – it is best for the purpose of this exercise if it can be a good thing that you influenced. This exercise forces you to look for and celebrate the good things in your life – the big or little things that make your day.
There’s a fairly large volume of articles about this, and if you Google (or Bing, you know, whatever floats your boat!) it you will find the journals and the evidence based research done that shows people were not only happier in the week they did it, but that the feelings of greater contentment persisted, long after the week had passed.
Personally, I loved searching for the good in the day. I remember a particularly rotten day at work a year or so ago, and I forced myself to find ten good things about my job (so not exactly the same, but same principles). I’ll admit, there was something like “a decent cup of tea at lunch” at about point seven, but I did it, and it may sound trited but it cheered me up.
It’s a lovely question for schoolchildren too if you have them – instead of “What did you do at school today?” (is it just me where the answer is invariably “I forget”….) If you ask them to name two or three good things that happened, they often try to search their memory instead of an automatic response.
Give it a try, it’s quick and it’s easy and it should make you smile 🙂 As a bonus, if you keep it to look back at, you get some lovely memories in a year or two of “a week in the life.”
*Seligman, M. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive Psychology Progress. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.