Happiness Hacks

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Episode Transcription

Welcome back to the Road to Life podcast with MacKay and Bennett. What do we got today, MacKay?

We're going to talk about happiness this week.

Yeah. The elusive happiness that everybody, is striving for every day is the goal, right? Yeah. Everyone wants to be happy.

Everyone wants to be happy.

Yeah. Yeah. . I think there's, I don't know, sort of a misconception that if you're happy, you're.

Never ever ever like sad or down.

Like you're happy every single moment of the day. Yeah. And I, it's gonna sound weird, but I remember watching the Sex and the City movie like, I don't know, 20 years ago.

Movie?

Movie. Yeah, after the, after the series ended, they did a movie.

20 years ago, wow.

I don't remember, but quite a while ago, and one of them asked the other one, Are you happy? And she said, or how often are you happy? And Charlotte said, every day. Like, really? She's like, not every moment of every day, but I'm happy every single day.

And from that moment, like, something really clicked there for me: happiness doesn't mean I feel joyful every single second of every single day. But my goal is to feel happiness, at some point, every single day. And that almost made it more achievable. Yeah, like from a realistic yeah, what I'm striving for is to be happy, but that doesn't mean I have to feel only happiness all the time. Because that's just never gonna happen.

So.

Well, it's part of the human experience is going through all the emotions so you're going to feel sadness and frustration and anger and all the things but generally, your goal is to, like a stock chart, trending upwards on the happiness scale most of the time. Yeah.

And so one of the things I've learned over the last couple of years is where happiness exists.

I hadn't heard that before until a couple of years ago.

This is brand new for me in the last few years too.

Happiness only exists in this moment right now. Like right now.

Yeah, it took me a minute to wrap my brain around that.

You can only be happy, if you're present in the moment that you're in, right now. So, sitting here on the couch with you doing this is the only opportunity I have to be happy right now. Yeah. If I'm thinking in the future thinking ahead to the future and all the things that may or may not happen in the future, that's what breeds anxiety that that lets anxiety into my brain. That's not happiness. If I'm worried about what has happened in the past that I can no longer control. I cannot control things that have happened in the past. If I spend all my time, spend my current moments, thinking about the past, that introduces depression, feeling down, because I have no control over that. I only have control in this moment that I'm in right now. And if I want to feel happy in this moment, I have to choose to be in this moment. Which is really cool. And really empowering, because you, that means you get to decide to be happy based on where you choose to be.

And we've listened to lots of books and podcasts and, and we've read lots and... what was his name? Sean. Sean Achor, I think. Had, I think the best approach to happiness and it was like it's four easy to do steps. Four steps that you can do every day every single day and you can increase your happiness.

And I think he's like a Harvard professor like he's, yeah, he's a happiness researcher at Harvard.

The Happiness Advantage advantage that's what it is, the book Happiness Advantage, and so he's talking about the four, these four things, they literally take what? Like less than a half an hour a day all combined.

All together. Yeah. And it's really tactical, like it's really tangible things you can do.

And the first one is gratitude. And it's not enough, I've realized, to just go through the box checking exercise of like, oh, I'm grateful for my house. I'm grateful for food. I'm grateful for...

Especially when you just do it in your head No, right like the there's nothing wrong with an attitude of gratitude.

I think that's a good start, but there's more to practicing gratitude. It has to be a practice of gratitude.

You have to think about it, and feel it for a second, and like really truly be grateful.

Writing it down, I think is a huge help. And so, Shawn says finding, I think it was like three to five things to be grateful for right now in the moment you're in. What are you grateful for right now and be as specific as you can be. To your point, I'm grateful for the roof over my head, I'm grateful for food that's great, but if you can get really really specific about I'm really grateful for the you know the pillow I have under my head right now it's so comfortable, as opposed to I'm grateful for the roof over my head. Yes. So the more specific you can be and getting it out of your head and into your body, and I think writing it down is really helpful for that. And to your point, actually feeling the feeling of gratitude as you're writing it down.

Yeah. The second one is expressing appreciation for someone or something.

Telling someone every single day that you appreciate something about them.

Yeah. Something they have been for you or something they've done for you. Sending a text of, I was thinking about you today and I just really appreciate having you in my life. That right...

An email phone call post it note something.

That right there will increase your happiness right away yeah, and bonus points:

You get to increase someone else's happiness. Totally, right? Like it just getting that text that that's gonna put someone on another level.

For sure. it's gonna lift them up.

Yeah, for sure. Third thing, something that we try to do all the time, is the 30 minute walk in nature.

I think actually Shawn says a 15 minute brisk walk so it doesn't even have to be 30 for your happiness. Yeah.

Getting outside, getting a brisk walk in for at least 15 minutes.

Just getting out with nature. And I can attest to this, I feel great when I go for a walk and hear the birds and see the fish jumping in the pond or the lake or whatever. It's just, it's fantastic.

Yeah. There's something, it does something to your energy, breathing outside.

Yeah. Like a 15 minute brisk walk in a treadmill is great. Like it's certainly better nothing.

Yep.

And then the last one is breathing.

Yeah, breathing exercise. And so there's several breathing exercises that we use more regularly than others. Box breathing would be inhaling for a four count, holding for a four count, exhaling for a four count. Holding for a 4 count. And then do that, you know, 5 times. I like the 4, 7, 8 breathing. Inhale for 4, hold for 7, exhale for 8, and then repeat. or the 5 by 5 by 5 breathing. A 5 second inhale. a five second exhale. Repeat five times. I'd say those are the, the three that we use most commonly.

So it doesn't, it doesn't take long. It takes about a minute, maybe ish.

And you just focus on your breathing and that brings you into the now. It just brings you into the present, which is like we said, where, where happiness really exists. So it's just really getting present with where you are in that.

And that's how focusing on your breath helps with that.

And so those four, those are the four activities and they're super tangible. Like they're the 15 minute brisk walk obviously takes the longest all taken together, like that's a 20 minutes tops part of your day.

And if you're looking for something a little bit more advanced, meditation can help where you just sit in silence and think about your five senses.

What do you feel in this very moment? What do you smell in this very moment? What do you see? Your eyes are usually closed, but you can usually see some light or some flickers of shadows of things going on. What do you smell, hear? All, all your senses.

Yeah.

So like, it's a choice, right? You get to choose to be present in the moment you're in. You get to choose not to think ahead to the next moment or worry about, you know, the last moment. You get to decide to be present and enjoy the moment you're living right now, which I think is really empowering and really cool because the other thing you get to choose is your mindset.

You don't get to decide everything that happens around you in the world, but you do get to decide how you perceive it, how you respond to it. How you respond and how you see what's happening around you changes how you feel about it. So you can't change what's happening around you, but you can change how you feel about it.

And you can choose to see things in a more positive, gratitude- focused way, which again, changes how much you enjoy the life you're living right now. The other thing I think that's cool about that is by deciding to be present in the moment you're in and choosing the mindset through which you're living it, you change how you experience the moment that you live, right?

So like you see it differently and you're in it and A, you just, you enjoy life more by doing that, but B, it changes how you would remember that moment. And so, By choosing your mindset and choosing to be present, you actually change the memories that you have later of the moments that you live. It gives you happier memories to look back on when you enjoy the moments as you live them.

Exponential happiness.

Right? Like, you get to be happier. Right now in the moment and you get to be happier when you look back on the moment you'll have fond memories Yeah fond thoughts of that time. Which was like almost a bit like my mind exploded a little bit when.

Happiness hack.

Yeah, but The fact that I could change my memories, like, almost just through a decision was a wild concept that it took me a minute to kind of wrap my brain around, but it made sense when I thought about it, that if I change how I experience this moment right now, I'm certainly gonna, that's certainly gonna change how I remember this moment in the future, and so then, therefore, it changes my memories, which is, like, pretty wild when you think about it.

So the key to happiness: be in the moment and it's shockingly simple when we realized... when we heard this and started putting into practice and feeling it like I actually do feel much happier day to day now in my current life than I have at any other point in my life.

Totally and it's, it's these little things that we do on a daily basis, you know, being, I wake up and I do a gratitude practice every morning, I express appreciation, I do the walks, I do breathing exercise, meditation, and journaling, and all those things affect my happiness. And, It's a game changer.

It really is. So if you know if you're struggling in this area with happiness and you feel like maybe on the spectrum of zero to 100, zero being unhappy 100 being happy, and you're on the zero end of that spectrum, implement a couple of these practices and just see if it starts to move you to the right side, of the spectrum.

Cause then you get to look back on your life and have like a whole bank account full of happy memories just because you made a few small changes. Yeah. in what you did and how you looked at it. And it really doesn't take a lot of time. It really doesn't. That's the beauty of it. It's like, it's so simple and takes literally like, and the 20 minute walk, you maybe even, I don't, I haven't done it, but you maybe even stack these, maybe do the gratitude on your walk and do the breathing while you walk.

Like you could probably knock out a couple of, you could literally, you could do all this in 15, 20 minutes. Yeah. If you did it on the, on the walk, right? A hundred percent. Happiness hacks today. Happiness hacks. So go and try a couple out and see if that impacts your happiness levels.