Monday 28th February 2011

1. Boy made me laugh when he tried to pronounce Beethoven (Batehoover), which is his new favourite film.  Put him in such a lovely mood this morning there wasn’t even a fight about getting dressed and out the house for 7.15am
2. My lovely cellmate (office co-habitee) was in a bad mood, so I introduced him to three happy things.  He really liked the blog.  Now I’ve just got to work out how I can talk about him without him noticing.  Hmmm
3. Popping round to my friend later, as the ex is round visiting the boy. Before then I will be going out of the house to the shops for no real reason at all – just because I can.

Sunday 27th February 2011

1. Had a lovely day at the Southbank with my sis and the boys.  Had fun on the train and in Wagamama’s, so the rain didn’t spoil it too much.
2. Made fantastic ribs for dinner which my boy ate all of (very rare for him to eat all his dinner, or any of it for that matter,  so a regular feature on here when he does).
3. Finally wrote my blog about, well, this…. and had some very nice feedback from the esteemed people of Twitter.

 

NOTES

If you do not know what the hell I am whittering on about, you may need to read my first blog which explains all.

You’ll have to excuse the many references to food.  I’ve given up smoking.  It’s all I’ve got.

What is Three Happy Things?

A couple of years ago, the thing I feared most in the world came true.  I became a cliché.

My partner left me for a 23-year-old.  Did I say left me?  Sorry, I meant to say left us.  That was me and my 18 month old son.  Now, my life up until this point had not always been a bundle of hearts and flowers, but this experience was significant in that I had not had a blow of that magnitude whilst being a mother.  My usual strategy of falling apart, weeping for a few months, going out and getting drunk and finding a speedy replacement was not going to work for me this time.  I had a little boy at home who had been left by a father he hero worshipped.  I could not allow him to be left with a manically depressed and neurotically unstable mother.  That wasn’t fair.  He didn’t deserve that.

However, this was a blow, and I had no idea how to deal with it.  I just knew I had to find a way fast, and one that would not cause any further distress to my son.  This strategy also had to be executed whilst holding down a full-time, not particularly inspiring job, whilst not being able to leave the house in the evening or go anywhere other than ‘softplay’ at weekends.  I was a bit stuck.

My usual plan, to wallow in self-pity until somebody rescued me was of no value and had to be abandoned almost immediately.  I was a single mother now.  Nobody was going to give me any sympathy.  It was even on the news – single mothers were a scourge on society and I had brought this on myself.

One day, very early on in my lack of relationship I came across an article discussing the theory of whether happiness was something that was fixed (like IQ and personality) or that could be learnt.  Now I won’t go on about this article, because, fascinating as it was, it is somebody else’s fascinating.  However, the upshot was that an experiment revealed that people writing three happy things every day before they went to bed were able to improve their happiness levels.  In addition, the article clearly stated that this improvement was sustained only for people who maintained filling out three happy things beyond the end of the experiment.

This got me thinking.  Sceptically, but thinking none the less.  Writing down three things a day couldn’t be that hard.  The only rule being that you were not allowed to write down anything negative.  I might be able to do that.  It would be hard, life at the time was not one big parade, but there were harder things in life.  One of them being watching my beloved son grow up feeling like he wasn’t good enough.  Rather spookily, about three months earlier, a friend had given me an ordinary Collins diary for Christmas which I had ungratefully tossed aside.  Just as I was toying with the idea of these ‘happy things’, but quick to abandon due to having nothing to write in, the forgotten diary popped up, right at the top of a pile of I forget what.

Since that day, I have dutifully written three happy things (sometimes even more) in it every night.  The last two years have not been that easy, so sometimes the happy things are really dredging the bottom of the barrel, but I have stayed constant and have never allowed myself to mention the many things that the old me might have considered I was missing out on.

Since I began writing  my ‘happy things’  my life has dramatically improved.  Now before you all think I am a big annoying wet thing, I need to tell you a bit about myself.  I like to think of myself as a glass is half empty kind of girl.  Not so much a pessimist, but a realist, always anticipating the worse case scenario.  In honesty, I have lived most of my life in dread of something awful happening, so was totally surprised that this flippant exercise of writing three happy things would lead to such an improvement in my day-to-day existence.  If I hadn’t been so desperately on the brink of collapse, I would never have even considered it. 

I think the impact of this exercise can be attributed to the following:-

1. Having to write three happy things forces you to search for them in your day, even if it’s only for the reason that you need to add it to your diary, things that, in more negative circumstances, you may have not even noticed
2. Writing only about positive things in your life enables you to apply a filter, which is not to say bad things do not happen, because they certainly do, but you just filter them out.  There’s been many a night when I could not think of a single happy thing, and I could have written a book about all the things that sucked in my day, however, as I was not allowed to write them down, I just moved them out of my head, and replaced them with happier (albeit way more trivial) things.
3. Thinking about the happy things for that day allows you to stay in the present , thereby stopping you dwelling in the past or putting too much pressure on a potentially unrealistic future.
4. Lastly, writing three happy things before you go to bed allows you to go to sleep with a smile on your face.

Two years in, I’m still writing three happy things, and I thought, maybe, and probably not every day, I might start sharing them with you.

I have to warn you though, most of my happy things can be dead dull, and you will have to learn to read between the lines.  If I say I found a parking space, and I can’t really find anything better, you can safely assume my day has been pants.  You must remember, I am not allowed to write anything but happy things.  It’s highly unlikely I will blog everyday, as I am lazy and it can be an effort making my life sound interesting.  Also, because of my extremely limited access to adventure and variety, lots of very small, inconsequential things make me happy.  I love that about my life.