Self-Help Happiness Blog

“narge”. What is narge? Well, it just happens to be how both many
daughters pronounced “orange” for the first couple years of talking.
(OK, one of them is still in those first couple years).

What is so hard about the word “orange”. Even when broken down
repeatedly into three sounds - O RAN J - they still can’t pronounce
it.

Don’t make assumptions about what anybody can or cannot do. What
seems simple to one person might be beyond hope for others.

I do search engine optimization for a living. What do you mean you
can’t do it? It’s easy. I’ll bet there are things you do daily that
would send me into knots trying to figure out, too. It’s a good thing,
too. After all, where would we be if all of us were experts at
gardening and none of us were experts at plumbing?

 This inspiration was first published in A Daily Dose of Happiness two years ago.

A paragraph in National Geographic Adventure caught my attention.  This is a tale of leaving the Big Apple to carve out a life in very rural - and isolated - Vermont.

At night, lying in bed with the windows open and ticking off our list of problems, we’d hear a barred owl hooting –”Who cooks for you?”–and be struck by the small scale of our worries. Were we to fade away, Cathy said, that owl would be here anyway, keeping someone else awake with its questioning call, questioning nothing.

Yes, our problems are pretty small.  They just seem big because they are happening to us.  Sometimes it takes the big wide world to put our challenges into perspective.

Over at the Accumulating Peripherals blog, there is a discussion on the pros and cons of happiness research.  Matt offers explains his beef with happiness research and I have commented also on the discussion.

Much of the happiness research out there is based on self reporting.  In other words, it asks you if you feel happy.  OK, so the questions are more complex, but it basically asks for your opinion.  On the one hand, that is poor science, because our perceptions of things are rarely accurate.  A good example is how a couple high-profile crimes can get a city or even a whole country talking about how the crime rate is on the rise and it’s about time we stop the growing menace — even while statistics show that year after year the crime rate has slowly been declining.

On the other hand, happiness is a subjective thing.  It is something we feel, and it could be argued that the only valid measurement of happiness is our perception of it.  Please feel free to go over to Matt’s blog and comment.  And then please come back here and comment, too.

Stand on your head.

You think I’m kidding, don’t you? No, I’m not…go ahead and stand on your head. If this poses physical difficulties, try lying down sideways in your office or in your kitchen.

Spend some time looking at things from a fresh perspective. And, yes, I mean that literally, because the more often we do this, the better we train our brains to be able to approach problems, challenges and opportunities also from fresh angles.

Want to be better able to solve problems and respond to new situations? Train your brain.

 This is taken from a recent edition of A Daily Dose of Happiness.