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Delightful December Can Make You Happier

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Delightful December - Smiling woman with computer
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels

Delightful December is a challenge to make yourself happier by eliminating negativity and focusing on the positive on social media.

There are two parts to Delightful December:

  1. Avoid saying anything negative on social media for the month of December.
  1. Every day in December, post the following:
  • Something you’re grateful for
  • Something in the last day that made you happy
  • Something you’re looking forward to in the upcoming day

The purpose of Delightful December

One of the most well-supported ideas in psychology/self-improvement is that a gratitude journal will dramatically improve your mood.

When you write what you’re grateful for, you train yourself to focus on reasons to be happy. Which makes you happier.

But most people treat social media as an ingratitude journal.

They complain, mock, insult, and argue. They focus on all that is wrong in the world. Which trains them to be miserable.… Read more

10 Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier

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Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier
Photo by Lidya Nada on Unsplash

Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier continues the series on Incredibly Easy Ways to Improve Your Life.

See here for what this series is about, and scroll to the bottom or click here for a list of other entries in the series. Also see the end of the post for details on submitting your own incredibly easy life-improvements.

Note: Some links here are affiliate links, meaning I get a small commission when you purchase them, at no additional charge to you. I only suggest things I honestly believe in.

Incredibly Easy Ways to Be Happier

Happiness is the single most important aspect of self-improvement.

Every other self-help endeavor – productivity, health, finances, relationships, and achieving your goals – they’re ultimately in service to making you happy. If that’s not the end result, what’s the point?

But a lot of self-help advice, especially that coming from super-achievers, ignores this.… Read more

Try Jovial July to Improve Your Mood

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Jovial July woman with smiley baloon

Jovial July is the updated version of the challenge I created six months ago, called Genial January.

The idea is to spend the entire month without posting anything negative on social media, in either my own posts or comments.

I found it to be an extremely worthwhile exercise.

I repeated it for Affable April, and again found that it made me happier, more productive, and a much more pleasant person.

Which is why I’m going to repeat it again, for Jovial July.

How This Affects My Own Mood

We don’t realize just how much time we spend complaining, criticizing, and insulting, especially online.

I’ve worked very hard to become someone who does that far less often than most people.

I spent very little time on social media in January due to being crazy busy at work. Yet I was still shocked at how often I had to stop myself from writing something negative.… Read more

Feeling Overwhelmed? Try Tangibly Improving the World

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Feeling Overwhelmed - woman mentoring child.

A lot of people are feeling overwhelmed right now.

Just when it seemed like the quarantine was winding down, there’s been a spike in new COVID cases.

Despite all our efforts, our society is still plagued by systemic racism.

Our ever-increasing climate of political hate continues to grow, with no end in sight. In fact, we all know it’s going to get much worse as we approach the elections in November.

None of us knows what we personally can do to fix any of these problems, so the common reaction is to resort to screaming at the internet.

Which doesn’t help, and only means that on top of everything else, we also have to deal with half our friends on the internet screaming at us.

We like to feel in control of things. We like to have a sense of self-efficacy.

When you see a horrible problem that is ruining people’s lives, it’s natural to want to fix it.… Read more

How to Stop The Spread of Social Media Garbage

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Social Media Garbage

Social media garbage is something we’re all interested in stopping, but we all consider to be someone else’s fault and therefore someone else’s responsibility.

I wrote a Twitter thread with some thoughts I had on this, and decided to turn that into a short post. Since it was already written, I’m posting it before part two of How to Win Allies.

How I Was Fooled by Social Media Garbage

I have a confession to make.

Recently I laughed at a photo a friend posted, that made people I’m not a fan of look ridiculous.

Later that night, it occurred to me I had no evidence the photo was real. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that it was fake.

But I fell for it because it matched the stereotypes I have of “the other side.”

This is exactly the sort of social media garbage I always warn against.… Read more

Sometimes It’s Better to Be Less Informed

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Woman shrugging to show she's less informed.

There are times in life when being less informed is better than being more informed. I know that sounds shocking. We’ve always been taught that becoming well informed is a virtue; our civic duty. It seems appalling for someone to advocate ignorance.

But let me illustrate why being less informed may be beneficial with three recent examples from my own life.

Being Less Informed Can Help You Accomplish More

Two weeks ago I accomplished very little. I wrote a short post asking people to click on my affiliate links. I dashed off a quick funny story about kittens Friday afternoon just so there would be some content on the site. And I did one other thing that ended up being a waste of time, which I’ll come back to in a minute. That’s about it.

Last week, I accomplished a ton. I should take time to be proud of getting so much done, but I won’t bore you with a long list.… Read more

Affable April

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Affable April

Three months ago I created a challenge that I called Genial January. The idea was to spend the entire month without posting anything negative on social media, in either my own posts or comments.

I don’t know how many people participated. Maybe I was the only one. But I found it to be an extremely worthwhile exercise. Which is why I’m going to repeat it, for Affable April.

We don’t realize just how much time we spend complaining, criticizing, and insulting. I’ve worked very hard to become someone who does that far less often than most people, and I spent very little time on social media in January due to being crazy busy at work, yet I was still shocked at how often I had to stop myself from writing something negative.

There’s a saying in sports: How you practice is how you play. Every time you write something negative on social media, you are training yourself to focus on the negative, which is training yourself to be unhappy.… Read more

13 Things I Learned From Reading 50 Self-Help Books

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A stack of books, recommending self-help books

Over the last few years, I’ve read over 50 self-help books. And I’ve noticed certain pieces of advice that tend to come up over and over again. (At least in the better, more scientific ones.) The reason these come up repeatedly is because they work, they’re true, and there’s evidence to back them up.

You shouldn’t expect any of these to completely transform your life. As I said in my last post, expecting any sort of self-help advice to provide a radical change overnight is unrealistic. But each of these is very likely to make your life a little bit better and make you a little bit happier. Taken all together, they just may build up over time into making your life a lot better and making you a lot happier.

1. Keep a gratitude journal 

Every night before you go to bed, write down at least three things that you are grateful for.… Read more

Genial January

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What if I told you there was a quick and easy way to significantly improve your happiness, that would take absolutely no time out of your busy day. In fact, it will even give you an extra bit of free time.

One of the most common pieces of advice in happiness literature is to keep a gratitude journal. That’s not what I’m talking about here. (I do recommend a gratitude journal – it only takes a few minutes a day. But that advice is hardly novel, and I promised you something that takes no time at all.)

Let’s talk about why gratitude journals work. When you build a habit of sitting down every day to think about someone or something you are grateful for, you are training yourself to focus on what is good in your life. This shift in your perspective will make you happier overall.

By contrast, many people treat social media (especially Facebook) as a sort of ingratitude journal.… Read more