Happy New Year

Yes, its been a while - its been the holiday season afterall!!  Generally, this time of year is a great one for happiness, Christmas and buying presents for loved ones confirms what I was saying in my previous blog posts - doing things for others makes you happy.

But then the new year comes along, and all around me I hear of all the pledges and resolutions people are making for the upcoming year (loosing weight is on top of everyones list it seems), and I like that positivity I see in people. The hopes and aspirations that everything will be good this year. This year, everything will be different, I will get to be a size 8....

And like every year, by the end of January, the hope is gone, and despair kicks in. Because the will power is down to zero, and all those aspirations instead of making us feel good, now make us feel bad.  This really makes me think about new years resolutions - often they are the same year on year, and often they fail.  I stopped making them years back.

A recent article in the Independent acknowledges this, and it kind of made me think about my own happiness adventure - is it like a news year resolution, and have I set myself up for disaster?  Is the actual fact of pursuing happiness bound to make me miserable in the longer term?  If you google "seeking happiness" and look at the images that emerge, its true - proverb after proverb says the same, seeking happiness is the path to unhappiness.  I am not really waiting for happiness to spring up on me, I am already happy, but my initial question was, could I be happier?  I know one of my first pledges was to keep this blog updated, and I haven't kept it updated as  much as I wanted to - that makes me feel bad. Do I need to break up my happiness quest into smaller pieces that are easier to pursue?  Do I need to give it up altogether - give me a week to think that through.

time for happiness

Reflect through your day. Surely your mood isn't constant throughout. Mine isn't. Depending on when you catch me, I can be over the moon (usually first thing in the morning) or ready to punch someone (usually around 9:30am, or by being at work for exactly 30 mins).  What I have recently been trying to monitor is whether there are particular parts of the day I feel unhappy, and whether I can channel into this to implement my happiness strategies to make my mood more balanced.

So I googled it.  And here I am with my scientific hat again, I found an absolutely brilliant study which does just that - monitors your happiness throughout the day. The study: look at blogs. Find blogs that are positive with positive words (like awesome, yay, lovely) and those with sad words (like lonely, cry, upset, sad) and look to see what time of day they were entered in.  Here are the average findings:










Lets start the graph when you first wake up, say 7-8am. Misery.  Then as the day moves on you get happier, slumping to an all time low at midday.  Infact, lunchtime is the most miserable time of the day for your average person. Why? Had enough of work already?  Feeling hungry so feeling snappy?  Moods then rise throughout the day, peaking in the evening (probably when the kids are asleep) with another peak at 3am (clubbing time?).  And that's the happiness cycle. I guess in this study you are biased based on the type of people blogging, but there is certainly a cycle of moods throughout your day.  I love this idea. For the next week, I am going to try and monitor my own happiness cycle and I'll share them with you here. Its only when I get to see my own cycle and when I am happiest/saddest that I am going to be able to tap into and realise when my low points are, and to enforce my happiness survival kit. See you in seven days!