Can you hold your sorrow more loosely? Could it be easily blown away with the wind, the seasons? How do you ensure you hold onto your joy?
Most of our happiness is not determined by our genetics, but by our experiences and our day-to-day lives, as found in the study by Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade in 2005. In the Mauss et al., 2012 study, it was found that trying too hard to find happiness often has the opposite effect and can lead us to be overly selfish. Pursuing happiness through social means (e.g., spending more time with family and friends) is more likely to be effective than other methods – study by Rohrer, Richter, Brümmer, Wagner, & Schmukle, 2018.
Harvesting your joy is celebrating it all the time. It’s taking those extra moments to really bathe in the good stuff, so soak in it, to allow the brains pathways to rewire to ’this is what we like’, rather than flitting through it. So this week, really centre your attention on enjoying as much as you can, and when something delightful happens, relish it for as long as you can.
Sent with joy,
Jac x