How to stay happy, plus cycling gear for roadtrips
Psychotherapist Richard Nicholls shares some ‘tricks’ for your routine with Liz Connor
Keeping up a positive state of mind can seem challenging – but research suggests that chasing happiness, rather than success or money, may be the key to good health. Studies have linked happy emotions to healthier hearts, stronger immune systems and longer lives. One 2005 study even found happiness can mitigate chronic aches and pains.
So, short of quitting our jobs and moving to a remote tropical island, how can we foster more of the feelgood factor on a daily basis?
Some 16 years of practice, and poring over research, means therapist Richard Nicholls has grown to gain a good understanding of what does and doesn’t work when it comes to boosting our sense of happiness.
Using his podcast, Motivate Yourself, he was able to share these ideas to see how they work in the real world, examining feedback from his thousands of listeners. Now, he has turned his most successful “happiness exercises” into a book, 15 Minutes To Happiness.
By making the effort to monitor the workings of your mind, Nicholls believes you can improve your wellbeing in just a few minutes’ each day. Here, he shares three of his favourite happiness-boosting exercises to integrate into your daily routine.
Write your feelings in a journal
Keeping a personal journal is a great way to gain a better perspective on things. Research has even shown it to have similar benefits to counselling, but it needs to be done properly. Writing a journal shouldn’t be about wallowing in self-pity; it should be a tool to help you to see alternative ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. Think of it as a way of looking back over what you’ve written, so you can see the changes in your attitude over time.
Doing this will create a wonderful domino effect that will make you even more optimistic for the future. So grab a notepad and a pencil and get writing. If you’re going to write about something that happened that day which made you unhappy, also write about the thoughts you had that allowed the unhappy feeling.
Go back and re-read previous entries from time to time, notice how time and experience can change how you think and feel about what you wrote about.
Use “thought stopping” to quell negative thoughts
“Thought stopping’”is a technique that originally used something such as an elastic band on your wrist to interrupt your thoughts. If you were obsessing over something, you’d pull back the elastic band, let it go and it would give you a little shock and help you move on with your day.
When we actively try to suppress a thought, we find we will have a substantial increase of those thoughts. It’s like telling someone to not think about a pink elephant – all they’ll think about is pink elephants. But if you tell someone to deliberately think about a blue goose, then it’s quite unlikely they’ll think about a pink elephant.
In the case of emotional and mental health, trying not to think about things that would upset you actually encourages your brain to focus on it even more, so you need to take more control over where your thoughts go. This is how “thought stopping” should work. Instead of trying not to think about something, you should instead deliberately think about something else.
Check for double standards
This exercise will help you recognise if there are any expectations you have for yourself that have been set too high. Grab a pen and some paper and sit down for 15 minutes. Have a think about the standards you set yourself in one particular area of your life, whether that’s in your relationship, at work, as a friend or as a parent. Pick one area to work on and write a list of your expectations. Maybe you want to be the employee that always leaves their desk empty at the end of the day, or the dad who never loses his temper? List as many behaviours or traits that you expect of yourself as you can.
Go through the list again, only this time see those standards as someone else’s – someone that you are close to and have great respect for. Pick a close friend or family member and cross off any expectations that you think it would be unfair for you to have of them.
Now ask yourself what effect crossing off those expectations would have if you applied them to yourself. Does everything work out OK despite it? n
Writing a journal shouldn’t be about wallowing in self-pity