Jump Start Jan: Happiness Boosters Day 2

When we think about happiness, there’s a tendency to focus on joy, and the idea of being ecstatically happy. However, this isn’t the full picture of being happy, and those particular levels of emotion are ones that come and go.

It’s good to broaden the definition of happiness to include the more sustainable feelings of being comfortable, grateful, and content. These all make up the day-to-day experience of a happy life.

Today, lets think about feeling comfortable, and focus on our creature comforts.

This is highly personal, and what works for one person may not work for others. Take a few moments to reflect on your own creature comforts, and things that make your everyday life more pleasant.

Now start writing down a list of all the ideas that start to appear. Don’t edit the list as you go along, just let every single idea float up and write it down, even if some of them seem a bit strange, unusual or even ridiculous. Try to come up with at least 10 or even 20 of your own creature comforts.

For example, some of my creature comforts include:

• A tidy bedroom, with no ironing or laundry on view
• Soft cotton sheets
• Fruit to put on my breakfast
• Violas growing in the garden
• Colourful pens and notebooks
• Socks with no holes in them
• A small bar of nice quality chocolate on payday
• Interesting books and ebooks to read
• The list goes on…

There’s nothing there that’s particularly expensive, and some of it’s free. It costs nothing to put clean laundry away on a Sunday evening, for example, and I grow the violas from saved seed every year so they’re free too.

Give it a go, and see what your own list looks like.

Finally, pick out one or two things on your list to do or buy before the end of the week.

What are your creature comforts? What are the simple ways that you can make your life more comfortable?