My Little Happiness

I have an obsession with colors. I love them. Seeing bright colors as a regular thing keeps me, in a way, sane. And in my quest to become more organized, I realized I could incorporate this love of mine!

So,I went to Office Depot with the intent of finding ways to be more organized. I realized I wanted paper clips, magnets, push pins, etc - normal "office supplies" - and then I saw their assortment of brightly multi-colored things. I just about died. Seriously. And they sell these boxes - Really Useful Boxes, to be exact - that are just perfect for organization.

So now I have what I've been thinking of as my boxes of happiness and my shelves of happiness.

I have three types of pens - some really nice multicolored ones that I got a few years ago and fell in love with, some multicolored gel pens, and my typical go-to pen (all in black). I have more Sharpies than I know what to do with. I have lots of dry erase markers.

I have piles of sticky notes. I have office supplies in all colors of the rainbow!

Just glancing at my shelf makes me happy and giggly; partially because I know where everything is, and partially because it's just so darn colorful!

This was something so simple, but it's impacted me so much already. I wonder what else a little color and organization will improve in my life?

Happiness is: Books

http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141040356,00.htmlNote: Images link to Anthropologie sales pages.

I've mentioned before my not-so-secret love affair with books. I've had it mostly under control for the last little while - since my last book-buying binge I've been very careful when I've gone into bookstores, and I've only bought anything with Tene's go-ahead. In the meantime my GoodReads list has grown to absurd lengths (I will take pictures of books that look interesting while I'm in a bookstore. Then when I get home I'll look up the title, and decide if it's something I might enjoy at some future time or not. If it is, I put it on the list, if it isn't, I simply forget about it) - but I haven't bought anything, and window shopping for books has been quite fun!

But then there's these, which I swear Anthropologie is selling just to taunt me.

Right now they're only offering five titles (although the Penguin website has all the others) - Wuthering Heights, Sense and Sensibility, Little Women, Pride and Prejudice, and The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (the image includes The Picture of Dorian Grey, but that isn't available through the Anthropologie website, while lacking The Sonnets and Little Women; I believe the image is out of date). They also have classic children's titles available - six of them - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Anne of Green Gables, The Wind in the Willows, The Secret Garden, and Peter Pan.

Now, I only have some interest in reading six of these titles - two of the classics (Sense and Sensibility and Little Women) and four of the children's classics (Robin Hood, Wind in the Willows, Secret Garden, and Peter Pan), because I haven't read those yet. But, I want to own all of the books - and the ones on Penguin's website that aren't for sale on Anthropologie. Because they're simply beautiful editions. I'll never read Wuthering Heights again - I hated it the first time, I'm sure I'd hate it again - but the binding and cover are simply to die for, for a bibliophile like me. They're simply lovely and I want to have them on my bookshelf.

I know all of this goes back to something very basic in me - I want to be the kind of person who I associate as owning a lot of books - and who I would associate with owning classic novels. Someone cultured and refined and all of that. It also feeds my desire to be surrounded by pretty things - even if they're not exactly useful pretty things. So far I've kept myself from buying any of these wonderful books - but I think about having them all on my shelf, looking so great next to each other ... and I have to say it's hard not to pull out my debit card and charge the lot of them.

I Should Feel Happy

I should be happy right now. I had a pretty successful day. I made a bunch of phone calls - calling apartments to set up viewings and doctors to set up appointments (and to try to get a prior authorization that was supposed to be dealt with a week ago), I paid all of our outstanding bills, and I had my first therapy session with my new therapist (and I got there early). I cleaned up the kitchen.

Typing it out like that, it doesn't seem like I actually did that much today - but I felt like I was constantly busy, and often doing more than one thing at a time. Added to the stress of calling (I hate talking on the phone) places, and I guess I can see why I'm feeling a bit run down.

All the same, I don't feel proud or happy about what I accomplished today. Rather, I feel unhappy that I didn't do more.

I was going to pick up dry cleaning and do our large loads of laundry (blankets, mostly) at a laundromat. I was going to clean the bedroom and my workroom. I was going to make a delicious primal-friendly dinner for Tene and I, and I was going to drive him out to San Francisco. I was going to end world hunger and achieve world peace, and win a Nobel prize to boot.

No, really, by the time I hung up the phone for the last time today, the idea of making dinner felt about the same as the idea that I could end world hunger. After doing some introspection I realized tell that I've been running low on my overall allotment of "spoons" lately, and I obviously used them all up. I had a number of stressful tasks to do today, and I didn't really let myself get a breather (exception: After seeing my new therapist I wandered around the city a little and found a little used bookstore - on the upside I left empty handed! On the downside, there are now more books on my to-read list. Also, I spent most of my time there worrying about other stuff that needed to get done), nor did I acknowledge what I did do.

So, I should feel happy, but I don't. I'm grumpy and I keep snapping. I also keep taking various things to be active criticisms or intentional slights. To me this means that I should go to sleep. So off to bed I go.

Happiness, Unhappiness, and Satisfaction

Since I began my Happiness Project I've been using OhLife to keep a personal, private journal about how I've been doing. In addition to talking about my day (which ranges from a couple of sentences

Wed, Jan 26 2011

Jaw pain is still the same. Dentist tomorrow. Not much happened.

to a good 250-500 words) I also tried to keep a record of three "mood variables." Happiness, Unhappiness, and Satisfaction.

The scale I gave myself was 1-10 - With one being the lowest and ten being the highest. I figured that with such a scale, and only allowing myself to answer in whole numbers, I wouldn't be in the position where every day was, say, a three, if I were using a 1-5 scale. I don't really have perfectly neutral days. So, even though five and six are right in the middle of the scale, they're tipped just enough that I have useful information.

This was something I thought of doing while reading The Happiness Project (and I'm starting to feel like this is becoming a marketing point for that book - I swear, it isn't. The book just happens to be on my reading list right now, and is the reason that I even started this project). At one point, Gretchen Rubin talks about how she came to find her "happiness formula."

Suddenly ... everything slipped into place, and my happiness formula sprang into my mind with such a jolt that I felt as if the other subway riders must have been able to see a lightbulb appearing above my head.

To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right.

Well, I thought about this and tried to figure out how to best apply it to my own life. I simplified the terms - Happy for "feeling good," Unhappy for "feeling bad," and Satisfied for "feeling right." Then I decided to track, on a day-to-day basis, how I feel in all three categories.

This is what January looked like, for as much as I actually monitored (I ended up not posting most of January, I hope that February is a much larger graph).

I noticed a couple of things right away when I started doing this.

My happiness and unhappiness, feeling good and feeling bad, were independent scales. I could be happy and unhappy at the same time, and they didn't necessarily effect one another.

For example - early in the month I was very upset about losing Moe, one of my rats. I was distraught and unhappy about it (her sickness and decline came as a shock and a surprise). It wasn't until I rescued three rats that I felt some sort of closure about Moe. However, despite feeling a nagging unhappiness (a 1 or 2 on my scale), it didn't really change my happiness level. And being happy about something didn't necessarily make the unhappiness go away.

That isn't to say that the two had nothing to do with one another. When I was happier I was less unhappy, and when I was unhappy I tended to be less happy. But the two were different scales, not part of the same sliding scale. When I first set up the data sets I had separated them expecting something more like this:

Happiness 10 --- Unhappiness 1
Happiness 9 --- Unhappiness 2
Happiness 8 --- Unhappiness 3
etc.

But, as you can see on my graph, the numbers didn't correlate quite that well.

There was also the fact that my satisfaction had little to do with my level of happiness or unhappiness. On days that I happened to be happier, I also happened to feel more satisfied - but not because I was happy. From what I can tell, being happy tends to help me have more energy (or gives me more spoons), which makes it easier for me to motivate myself to get things done (and allows me to use up fewer spoons), which in turn helps me feel more satisfied about myself and my life.

Now I'm excited to see how the whole year will look once I'm done - and to see how much more frequent my happiness level is six or higher and my unhappiness level is five or lower.

Authentic Happiness Inventory

I decided to take the Authentic Happiness Inventory as a baseline for my changes in happiness and contentedness in my life.

My score was 2.96 out of 5.00. Which is ... lower than I would like it to be, but not as low as I was expecting. Perhaps it was boosted by the fact that I'm really optimistic about how this year will turn out, or maybe it's because I'm truly feeling better about my life in general, due to the changes I know I've made and those that I'm going to make.

I believe I will take this test again in six months, and then again in January of 2012. I'm interested to see what the result will be.