We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem. ~ Douglas Adams

Incremental Steps to Happiness

This week was my first week back to work and I’d forgotten how utterly and completely draining this job is on a mental and emotional level. But, week one in the books. Week two includes a meeting with HR about the retirement process and a return to my “normal” schedule. This idea of normality and how draining work was this week had me doing some thinking. My normal response to stress is to eat comfort food and too damn much of it. So, I returned to work and ate a ton this week, so my blood sugar and weight are also correspondingly up. The way I’ll deal with both, is the way you approach any goal or deal with any problem successfully, and that is incrementally.

No issue gets solved all at once, at least, no personal issues. So the best way to address change that is needed, is to take it step by step, incrementally. So for me it has meant this weekend just trying to do better than I did yesterday. So each day, I’ve walked a little more, ate less carbs and did more self-care types of things like some self-massage, meditation, using my shakti mat, writing and a big one for me, music.

This simple process of doing a little better today than you did yesterday has a lot of benefits. First, it’s not hard, no matter how badly you did yesterday, and in fact the worse you did, the easier it is to do better today. The big secret is to string together a nice stretch of days in a row so that you are able to see the gains. This works no matter what issue you’re addressing and this includes happiness. Happiness is a process and a state of being. I don’t know anyone who lives in an eternal state of happiness, we all have down days and down times. We’ve talked a lot on this blog about all of the various ways of raising our levels of happiness. We’ve discussed gratitude, self-care in all of it’s forms, spending time in nature and as always, making sure the basics, food, sleep and safety are all taken care of first. So on any given day, on any of these fronts, we can do a little bit better each day.

So a short and simple message tonight, don’t beat on yourself, just endeavor to do better today than you did yesterday and you’ll have happier days my friends. ~ Rev Kane