By DS, 4th year accounting student
The Happiness Book
As college I chose to enroll in a class this semester that focused on motivation and learning because I was hoping it would give me some tips to help me to focus and be more motivated when it came to learning for school and my job. The main project that we were to work on for the semester was to choose from a list of books and work on two life goals from the book. I looked through the list of books and thought to myself, what would be something that would really benefit myself to improve? Then it hit me, what should be one of the most important things in a person’s life? It is one things that I think most people do not prioritize enough, to be in happy in whatever you are doing. Once I decided on this topic, my choice of book was simple. I chose The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky because it goes into three important topics: how happiness works, why it matter and ends with explaining some good happiness activities to incorporate into your life.
How the Book Changed my Perception
One of the first points that really opened my eyes on how I was trying to find happiness is that most people are looking for happiness in the wrong places. As college students, what does society say will make us happy? A relationship, more money, looking better, drinking too much alcohol on the weekends, a bigger house? The book says some of these may make you temporarily happier, but will not amount to a substantial long term change. If happiness is the highest goal for most people, why do most people never stop and think about what really makes them happy? I decided that I was going to start prioritizing my day in order to increase my happiness by studying my moods that related to certain things I was doing. I think a lot of us are worried too much about working more hours and getting a 100% on every assignment than being happy. I am not saying those things are not important, but sometimes you need to focus on your mental health more. The book gives a pie-chart theory on happiness. It breaks down what determines your happiness into three things: genetics (50%), external circumstances (10%) and intentional activity (40%). External circumstances is things life how much money you have, marriage, house, etc. Intentional activity is the things you choose to do and think about on a daily basis. This the intentional activity was such a large percentage, I decided I should work on that part. I looked at my daily activities and I thought, does scrolling through twitter, sitting in my room watching Netflix or picking up extra hours really make me happy? The answer was easy, NO. I decided that I would limit these activities and start trying out some of the “happiness” activities given to me in the book.
Applying Happiness Activities
After reading through the explanations of the 12 happiness activities, I decided to attempt to incorporate 5 into my life. I tried to avoid overthinking about situations throughout my day. For instance, I think a lot of us stress for days after our exams waiting on our grade; however, if we really put in the effort to start hard and get a good grade, then we should be happy with whatever grade we receive. Also, I think a lot of people dwell on things like getting yelled at our boss or fighting with a friend and I told myself that I don’t need to keep thinking about this and I would move on and try to avoid this happening again. Another big activity I chose to focus on was taking care of my body through physical activity. I have always been an active person through sports and working out. I decided I would go to the gym five days a week and try to walk 7 miles a day. I tracked my workout minutes and miles walked using my apple watch, but you can use other apps if you don’t own an apple watch. Here are a few pictures of the app I used.
The circle represents how close you are to your goal and seeing it move and trying to close the rings motivated me to accomplish my goals. I like this app because I feel motivated to close the rings and it is nice to be able to go back and look how you do each month or week. The book explain that this can make you feel in control of your body and for me personally, it helps alleviate stress and clear my mind whenever I put my headphones in and workout for an hour. Not everyone needs to go 5 days a week, but I think it can be helpful to go a little bit of time if that’s something that they enjoy. One other goal was to go to church each week. I have always been a religious person but I have struggled to make it to church each Sunday since I have been in college. The book explains that practicing religion can increase happiness because it helps to belong to a fellowship of people. It can grow social networks and also it helps me because it helps affirm my sense that God has a purpose in everything in my life. One last activity that I felt was extremely important was to nurture my social relationships with people. I find this extremely important because I think having a sense of belonging can be huge when trying to find happiness. I think that a lot of people take it for granted that they will also have a relationship with the people in their lives. This is really important in college because the fact is, a lot of the friends we have now, we will not see much of once we graduate and enter into the real word. Everyone needs to have a few people that they talk to on a daily basis. It could be someone at work, a significant other, parent or a friend. Having social relationships and spending time with a group of people provides us with a sense of belonging that everyone really needs. The book explains that people with strong social support are healthier and tend to live longer.
Challenges in my Process
As easy as everything I said sounds so easy to do, it’s just not. I faced some obstacles. For instance, sometimes it is really hard to control your emotions in certain situations. We have all been in a situation where a teacher, boss or any authority yelled at us for some reason and it tends to make us feel upset and a little uncomfortable. Even though the book says to not overthink the situation, it’s hard to just brush off. I found that focusing on learning and improving on whatever the mistake you made was made it easier to not overthink than to just dwell on the incident. Another thing is something we all experience, being too comfortable and tired lying in bed to get up and exercise. I was able to overcome this by thinking about how my future self will feel based on the decision I made. I typically came to the conclusion that I would end feeling way happier and better about myself if I just got up and was productive and exercised. This whole idea of thinking about how my decision will affect my future happiness was extremely helpful in overcoming any obstacles that came between myself and my goals.
My Schedule Planner and Journal
I decided that in order to really utilize the happiness activities then I need to plan them out in a schedule. This was really difficult for me because I never plan out anything and I end just doing things whenever I think about them. But I decided to write down two happiness activities that I would do for each day during the week. Here is an example of what I did one week.
At the beginning of each week, I would write down a few activities to do each day. This helped to spread them out throughout the week in order to make it easier to get them all done and also to give myself at least two happiness activities a day in order to eliminate some setbacks on bad days. Another thing I did was create another excel document in order to track stuff I was doing during the day that made me feel happy or proud. This is different from planning out my happiness activities because this allows me to reflect on my day and think, what was some things that I did or experienced that really made me feel good? Here is an example of one week that I wrote about.
The picture of the excel document above just included one thing each day that I looked back on and thought that it made me feel good about myself. This ended up being super helpful because it showed me what things I need to being doing in order to increase my positivity and it feels good to go back and think about things that made me happy.
Tips for Other Students
The main takeaways that I got from this project was that people are looking for happiness in the wrong places, it is up to us what makes us happy and we have to work for it and being a good person makes me feel better. If I could give a freshman or any college student a tip about happiness in college, I would say quit telling yourself “if I was a good looking, as rich, as smart or popular as that person, then I would be happy”. Find happiness in the life you have through some of the happiness activities I explained earlier in the blog. You need to study what makes you happy on a daily basis and then prioritize your daily schedule based on that. It takes effort to be positive but managing your day better with the right activities can be a huge help. Everyone deserves and wants to be happy, they just need to stop looking the wrongs places.