Happiness Strategies | How to be Happy

December can be crazy - shopping crowds, stressful relatives, too much eating, drinking, and spending - too much everything!

When the end of the year is filled with excess it can really put the kibosh on your plans for a great start to a happy new year.

If you want to avoid falling into the same olds patterns as last year - and the year before - then download and print SparkPeople’s calendar of  31 daily tips for better choices through the holiday season (you’ll need Adobe Acrobat Reader).

These are excellent ideas for keeping this December sane - including how to:

• Splurge wisely
• Simplify gifts
• De-stress
• Just say no
• Give back
• Rest up
• Stop when full
• Stay active

Follow SparkPeople’s tips and you can ease into January with a mind, body and bank account ready to enjoy a fresh start and a happy 2008.

Technorati Tags: Christmas,New Year,life strategies,happiness strategies,money,health

Image by donut_p under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

The November 2007 issue of Australian Women’s Health magazine looks at the strategies of that rare breed of weight-loser - the one who keeps it off. The findings are from the National Weight Control Registry (NWCR), which has more than 6000 members who’ve managed to misplace at least 14kg without finding them again.

Founders of the registry, Dr Rena Wing and Dr James O. Hill offer ‘11 golden rules’ for long-term success.

Here’s my summary of the rules from the article.

1. Ditch the diet
Once weight is lost, it’s time for maintenance mode. Dieting doesn’t work long-term.

2. Embrace exercise
In Dr Hill’s opinion, ‘exercise is the single most important strategy’.

3. You can do less, if you do it more
Of the 91% of registry members who exercise 60-90 minutes daily, most break it down into 10-15-minute mini-workouts. They fit walks or resistance exercises in when and where they can.

4. Break the fast
Since breakfast helps prevent overindulgence later in the day, it’s a daily staple of 78% of registry members.

5. Be a dietary creature of habit
People who eat consistently through the week maintain their weight over a year better than strict-weekday, relaxed-weekend dieters.

6. Plan a naughty treat
A small dietary indulgence once a week or so can head off major temptation.

7. Less fat, more carbs
Fat is easy to overeat - it tastes good and doesn’t look like a lot of calories. Carbs are fuel. The average registry member’s diet is 25-30% fat, 15-20% protein and 50-60% carbohydrates.

8. Step up
Registry members walk 11,000-12,000 steps daily. That’s 6.4-8.8 km and more than twice the average Australian’s daily perambulation. For 28% of registry members walking is their sole exercise (delightfully witty pun unintended); 50% do other cardio as well as walking.

9. Weigh in regularly
More than 75% of registry members weigh themselves more than once a week. They aren’t slavish about daily fluctuations, but take increased weight over several days as a call to remedial action.

10. If at first you don’t succeed…
Nine out of ten registry members failed to keep weight off on previous tries. This time they had greater commitment - they slipped up, but they got back on track.

11. It gets easier
The longer the weight is off, the better the chance it will stay off.

If ditching those pesky homing kilos once and for all is one of your happiness strategies for 2008, then why not follow the example of these long-term losers.

I will be, starting with Rule #6. And to show my commitment, I’m gonna do it every day!

Image by Thinking Tree under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

If Monday’s post got you considering your own calling, you may be interested in this week’s TIME magazine article Happiness on the job, which asks the question: Which jobs make people happy?

The answer, it seems, is not necessarily the best-paid ones. According to the article:

- Americans are reasonably happy workers. About 90% rate their jobs as moderately or very satisfying.
- The highest happiness scorers are firefighters and priests, occupations with incomes around the US average.

I won’t go into the hierarchy of happy vocations diagrammed in TIME because I’d hate to imply that a particular job makes happiness more or less likely. In fact, even though I’ve provided the link I don’t recommend you check out where your job sits on the index - unless you’re already pretty happy and won’t be discouraged if your job ranks low. There are happy and unhappy people in every occupation, so knowing the happiness rank of the average person with your job isn’t all that enlightening.

TIME asks which jobs make people happy, but a better question is which job will make you happy. The kind of work that can bring you happiness will most likely:

• Tap your talents and strengths
• Be enjoyable
• Give you a sense of purpose and meaning.

It’s no wonder, then, that firefighters and clerics top the list - you wouldn’t choose either career path to dodge the family business or make a quick buck - you’d have to feel called to it. It’s also significant that these high happiness scorers are average income earners.

Once again, it seems that meaning matters more than money in making you happy. (Hey - I could have said merry.)

As if we needed more convincing.

Related posts:
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion
How to be happy - 10. Don’t keep up with the Joneses

A couple of months ago I mentioned a review of the film The Pursuit of Happyness, taken from a positive psychology perspective. I reproduced the review’s 224-word abstract (journal lingo for short summary provided by the author), duly citing the author, source and relevant copyright notice. I even wrote a short blurb describing the publication in case readers were interested in the whole review. Then, silly me, I checked in with the publishers to make sure it was OK.

Well, I’ve just received a reply and it seems that No, it’s not OK. I can only use 100 words of the 224-word abstract, or ‘there would be a $75 permissions fee and a specific reproduction notice would be required’. Yikes - paperwork! So I’ve edited down the abstract to a $75-and-paperwork-free 98 words (with apologies to the author, who seemed to think his abstract needed 224 words).

It reminds me of the time my holiday bonus was significantly overpaid. I called payroll and told them of the error, thinking they’d say something like ‘Oh, how honest of you. We’ll check into it and correct the error. Thanks so much, and have a nice day now.’

Instead, I was harshly interrogated on the phone, called to several meetings where I was further cross-examined by what I can only imagine were payroll detectives, and subjected to the worst kind of torture - you guessed it: paperwork. There were reams and reams of forms requiring me to call (I’m not kidding) payroll for the answers. (I also have a distinct recollection of asking the payroll gumshoes if they were going to arrest me for smoking, but as I don’t smoke I have an instinct it’s from a movie.)

What did they suspect me of? Placing my own money in my account, hacking their systems to make it look like they’d paid me, then ringing them to take my money and complete the sting? Genius! Someone call George Clooney because he’s gonna want me as his Ocean’s Fourteenth.

Sometimes I wish I were less super-scrupulous - it’s such a pain. But you know, I have enough trouble sleeping at night. The last thing I need is middle-of-the-night visions of being hauled off by the abstract-reproduction police, subjected to blinding lights, bad coffee and - No! God no! Please no more …paperwork!

Technorati Tags: Happyness , movie review , neuroticism

Looking back, there have been clues that I didn’t choose my ideal career. The fact that I was roused from a deep sleep (not study-induced) by an invigilator during a microeconomics exam should have been the first indicator that commerce may not have been my true love.

Determined to make my way in the world, I took my commerce degree and spent the next 13 years in financial-services marketing. The early years were fun and exciting, but the higher up the ladder I went, the more urgently flashed Stephen Covey’s warning that my ladder might be up against the wrong wall. I dismissed it as an after-image indelibly burned on my retinas from all those eighties nightclub strobes. (Steps, anyone? Rogues?)

That was until I got married and things became more skewed - I discovered that my husband (the betrayal still smarts) enjoyed his work. Clearly, something was very wrong with one of us. Probably him, I rationalized.

Then one day I was chatting to a friend. I said, ‘You know when you’re heading back from lunch and you see a truck and you think: How cool would it be to get run over - not seriously hurt, just enough to spend a couple of weeks in hospital…’

Well, I never got to finish the thought - my friend was so alarmed I had to pretend it was a joke and change the subject. That’s when I knew it was time for financial-services marketing and I to part ways.

It took several months to work out what I wanted to do, and when I did it was so blindingly obvious that you’d think I had been hit by that truck and suffered several unsuccessful rounds of remedial frontal lobe work.

Three books were immeasurably helpful - both to me and to the many friends and family members who’ve since sought guidance in navigating their own career crossroads. Each book fills a different role, and together they make a fantastic set of resources for finding your passion - even if it turns out to be blindingly obvious.

Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
by Marsha Sinetar

Do What you Love is like a long conversation with a wonderfully wise friend. It goes the deepest of the three books, encouraging you to think about who you are and to explore the importance of finding a way to express yourself. Don’t be scared though - I’m not a touchy-feely person and I wasn’t freaked out at all. The insights are well worth the journey.

The Money or Your Life
by John Clark

The Money or Your Life is more of a practical workbook.

It’s filled with fun cartoons, motivating quotes, thought-provoking diagrams and good common sense.

Follow Your Heart by Andrew Matthews

Andrew Matthews writes delightful books that he illustrates with great warmth, wisdom and humor. Follow your Heart  is encouraging, motivating and charming. This book is the most ‘lightweight’ of the three, but is still loaded with helpful insights for the career-challenged soul.

Note: The first two are a little hard to find, so I’ve included the best links I could ferret out. The last one is easily available on Amazon or through my Happy Store.