Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

In the past I’ve shared various definitions and types of happiness, such as momentary pleasure, overall happiness, and long-term contentment. Today I’d like to add well-being to the list. As some researchers note: “Well-being has been defined as the combination of feeling good and functioning well; the experience of positive emotions such as happiness and contentment as well as the development of one’s potential, having some control over one’s life, having a sense of purpose, and experiencing positive relationships. It is a sustainable condition that allows the individual or population to develop and thrive.” I think that’s what most of us are looking for when we talk about wanting to be happy.   

A few weeks ago, I attended a webinar sponsored by Action for Happiness called “New Ways to Be Happier” with Vanessa King, an expert in positive psychology and author of 10 Keys for Happier Living. During the webinar, she asked the question,

“What practices do you do regularly that you know will help you maintain your well-being long term?” 

That’s a question worth thinking about. 

My personal well-being practices

The first two that came to mind were reading and writing. I don’t feel “right” if I don’t read and write every day. Reading for enjoyment and escape, as well as encouragement, education, and inspiration (see “Some Books That Saved My Sanity” for recommendations from a particularly rough time). 

Writing—journaling in particular—is also a foundational practice.

A few additional practices are important for my well-being, too. These include: spending time outside, regular exercise (primarily walking and yoga), getting together with friends. I also really enjoy art journaling…when I take the time to do it.

More well-being practices

What practices you choose to bolster your well-being are as individual as you are. Some popular practices include:

Practicing gratitude. 

Laughing.

Listening to music.

Finding an inspiring song or quote and writing it down. 

Connecting with your faith through prayer or in community with others.

Seeking help from a counselor.

Practicing mindfulness and/or meditation.

Prioritizing well-being is self-care

When you prioritize your well-being, you’re taking care of yourself—your physical, mental, and emotional health. Yes, self-care enables you to be there for others when you’re needed, but there is no reason to justify caring for your well-being. You are a person, therefore you are “worthy” of care, full stop.

When life gets busy, it’s easy to get sloppy with your well-being practices. It happens to everyone. As soon as you can, though, take a moment and look inside to see what you need. What is your heart, your mind, your body crying out for? Rest? A healthy snack? Fifteen minutes with a good book? A meetup with a friend? A long run (or a short walk)? To stand on the grass with your face to the sun?

Well-being is a topic I’m going to continue to explore for myself and for the blog now that my time isn’t so taken up with major life events. Simply having fewer things scheduled every day contributes to my well-being!

Now it’s your turn: What practices do you do regularly that you know will help you maintain your well-being long term?

For more information:

Tips to Improve Your Emotional Well-Being

National Institutes of Health’s Emotional Wellness Toolkit

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I count myself lucky to have friends I’ve collected through high school, college, mothers’ groups, horseback riding, art, and more. I even stay in loose touch with one friend I’ve known since second grade (hi, Julie!). I have friends online I’ve never met in person, and it’s no accident that I begin every Happy Little Thoughts newsletter with the words “Dear friends.” 

Happiness and friendships

Good relationships are the single most important factor of a happy life. We all hope that our family relationships will be positive and uplifting, but sadly that’s not always the case. We get to choose our friends, and those friends can help fill our emotional needs and provide support when we need it. Fun with friends is one of the best joys of life.   

I count my friends as some of my biggest blessings, and I don’t know what I’d do without them.

To celebrate the priceless love of friends this Valentine’s Day, here are 10 quotes highlighting different aspects of friendship. Which one is your favorite?

“Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’”—C.S. Lewis

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“True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island... to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.” –Baltasar Gracian

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“It’s not that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, but it’s your best friends who are your diamonds. It’s your best friends who are supremely resilient, made under pressure and of astonishing value. They're everlasting; they can cut glass if they need to.”—Gina Barreca

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“Friendship improves happiness, and abates misery, by doubling our joys, and dividing our grief”—Marcus Tullius Cicero

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“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.”—Khalil Gibran

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“Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing.”—Elie Wiesel

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“Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”—Anais Nin

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“A friend is one who overlooks your broken fence and admires the flowers in your garden.”—Unknown

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“True friends are always together in spirit.”—L.M. Montgomery

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“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.”—Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Happy Valentine’s Day to all my friends. I love you more than words can say!

Calendar courtesy of Action for Happiness

Just wanted to pop in to wish you all a happy New Year, and share a few resources to help 2025 get off to a positive start. I have no affiliation with these people or organizations, but I have enjoyed and benefited from their offerings in the past. Here’s to a happier new year!

Check out 10 Days of Happiness—a free online program to boost your wellbeing. 

Click here to download your own Action for Happiness Happier January calendar (see image above). 

Design your year with Gretchen Rubin. 

Instead of charging into 2025, why not enjoy a “Gentle January”? This really appeals to me right now as I sit in my house full of boxes! (But hurry, because the live event is tomorrow, Jan. 2. Replay is available, but I think you need to be signed up in order to receive it.)

Remind yourself that good things happen, even when times feel hard. (Many of the most positive things are happening in countries other than my own. It’s helpful to remember that eliminating suffering anywhere is a good thing.) 

Wishing you all a joyful 2025. Now back to unpacking…

Photo by kike vega on Unsplash

Last week during yoga practice, our teacher, Terry, started us out with an affirmation that used the term “practicing happiness”—and it captured my attention. Despite all my years of thinking and writing about happiness, I’ve never really thought of it in terms of “practicing” happiness or having a “happiness practice.” 

What does practicing happiness mean?

The word practice is both a verb: “to do or perform often, customarily, or habitually,” and a noun: “a repeated or customary action.” 

Using the verb definition, I thought about what practicing happiness would look like. The way you get better at something is by doing it. Therefore, happiness can be something you do, like practicing kindness, or practicing yoga.

Here are some things to think about if you want to practice happiness—and get better at it!

Define what makes you happy. Do you know? It’s not always what you think! I’ve written before about three forms of happiness—momentary pleasure, overall happiness, long-term contentment. Think about what you need to be happy in these three ways. 

Seek out “happiness streams.” Don’t leave your happiness to chance. 

Deliberately look for ways to add fun to your life. Summertime with its more relaxed vibe is a good time for most people to add a little fun to their lives. 

Keep trying. Maybe something you thought would make you happy doesn’t. Don’t give up if you’re disappointed. Maybe you’re simply worn out and don’t want to add one more thing to your mental to-do list, even if it’s happiness related. Rest, then try again later.

(If you need some ideas, see “7 Things You Can Do to Feel Happier.”) 

What gets in the way?

Practicing happiness sounds pretty good, but plenty of things can get in the way. Some things that stop us from practicing happiness include:

• Neglecting your own needs and wants in favor of others
• Feeling guilty for enjoying yourself or being happy when others are not
• Waiting for permission
• Waiting to be invited
• Work and responsibility
• Apathy/low energy
• Grief/sadness

Happiness busters will always be with us, unfortunately. All we can do is keep at it. Even when times are hard, we can still find moments of joy. Ask for help when we need it. Allow negative feelings to pass through us. If happiness is important to you, do not give up seeking it.

Your happiness practice

It may seem like semantics, but if you practice happiness on a regular basis—not just now and then—you create a happiness practice (see the noun definition above). I think of it is as being similar to how I’ve been taught to practice yoga. It’s OK to be imperfect. Each day is a little different. What feels good and right? How can you stretch yourself while still listening to your body (yourself)? Just like a yogi comes back to the mat, you can come back to the practice of happiness whenever you want.

—Edith Wharton

It’s been a while since I read a new book about happiness. When I saw the title of this one, I had to pick it up since my word of the year is build: Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier, by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (2023, Portfolio/Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC). I’m always drawn to the idea that we can do something to create a happier life.

An overview of Build the Life You Want

I think this is a good basic book about happiness, and it’s a pleasant, easy read. While there’s nothing especially new and ground-breaking, it contains some great reminders about ways we can influence our own levels of happiness.

Build the Life You Want is broken into three parts:

1. Understanding happiness and unhappiness.

2. Managing your positive and negative emotions.

3. Building a happier life by focusing on four pillars: family, friends, work, faith.

The book concludes by encouraging readers to “become the [happiness] teacher,” since “The best happiness teachers are the ones who have had to work to gain the knowledge they offer, not the lucky ones who fall out of bed every day in a great mood.” (This one sentence sums up my mission and motivation for creating Catching Happiness!)

A few takeaways that resonated with me

You can have high happiness and high unhappiness at the same time. The two can coexist. You don’t have to wait until all unhappy feelings are gone before you start to get happier.

The “macronutrients” of happiness are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Enjoyment goes beyond pleasure by combining it with communion and consciousness—sharing a pleasurable activity with someone else and making a memory together. Satisfaction is the thrill of accomplishing a goal or something you have to work for. And purpose, or meaning, helps us face our struggles with hope and inner peace.

Regarding emotions: “Your emotions are signals to our conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action—that’s all they are. Your conscious brain, if you choose to use it, gets to decide how you will respond to them.”

I loved the suggestion to “choose a better emotion.” You don’t have to accept the emotion you feel first. You can substitute a better one that you want. Use gratitude, humor, hope, and compassion to find and feel more positive emotions.

I’d recommend Build the Life You Want if you want a refresher course in becoming happier.

What are your favorite books about happiness?

Recently we had some small dead trees cut down, leaving open space we’ve never had before in our naturally-landscaped backyard. The fall of those trees crushed the ferns growing beneath them, and that whole area of the yard wears a shocked look, like it doesn’t know what happened to it. Nearby, a tall pine, uprooted and left leaning by Hurricane Irma, continues its slow decay, occasionally dropping branches onto the ground. Even though we have mild winters in Florida, there’s a lot of dead stuff. While it’s never pristine, our yard currently looks, shall we say, disheveled.

Yet at the same time, new growth is everywhere. Pale green oak leaves burst out beneath their canopies of Spanish moss and some of my favorite flowers are blooming. Simultaneously beautiful and a mess.

That’s kind of how I feel.

As time does its healing work, the internal walls I put in place to keep going when I had to, even though it was unbearably hard, are collapsing and the emotions and questions I have about that surreal period when both my mother-in-law and mom were dying (it’s a blur) are bubbling to the surface.

I find myself with questions and regrets about how my adult relationship with my mom played out. In particular, how far away we lived from each other. I missed out on frequent, “ordinary” things, like going shopping together, and I worry that I neglected her in ways I didn’t understand because I wasn’t there to see her struggles. My mom was my bedrock person, the one who loved me best. Though we had differences of opinion and viewpoint, I never doubted her love, and I did not have to do anything to earn it. I’m coming to terms with what it means to lose that.

At the same time, I’m deeply enjoying creative projects; delighting in beautiful spring weather; feeling love for my family, friends, and animals; savoring simple pleasures and everyday adventures whenever I experience them.

Even while I was going through my mom’s decline and death, sitting by her bedside daily, watching her slip away, even as I felt such great sorrow and grief, I noticed that I could still find comfort and even joy in certain things…many of them small. It was like the dial of my emotional sensitivity was turned up high—even though I was excruciatingly sad, I could take deep pleasure in a walk in nature, eating a favorite meal, or using an app to identify bird songs. I could be both sad and happy—broken and blooming. 

As I wrote in the October 2023 edition of the Happy Little Thoughts newsletter, “This year has brought home to me the truth that even though we often perceive the world in extremes of either/or, life is really more a case of both/and. 

“We can feel multiple emotions at the same time: sorrow over losing a loved one and relief that they’re no longer suffering.

“I’m working on making my thinking more flexible. Allowing myself to feel joy and grief, without judging either one. Allowing life to unfold as both wonderful and challenging...because, frankly, that's what it is, and what it's always been.”

Even though I’ve outwardly held it together and “been strong” for what feels like forever, inside I have broken and tender places. But there are also blooms pushing their way upward, little tendrils of joy reaching for the light.

There is no question that this world holds unfathomable heartache. We see it on our screens, and in the eyes of those we love, and sometimes in our own faces in the mirror. But don’t forget that this world also holds joy, love, pleasure, and beauty, too.

I came across these perfect quotes from @motherwortandrose on Instagram this week:

“You get to experience enchantment even if you are deeply heartbroken by the world.”

“You are allowed to experience beauty and pleasure even when you are heartbroken.”

My mission on Catching Happiness has always been to focus on the simple pleasures and adventures of a happy life, rather than the heartbreak. Over the past year, I’ve found that increasingly more difficult, but I’m still committed to that goal. I hope today holds more enchantment, beauty, and pleasure than heartbreak for all of us. If you’d like to share something that lifted your spirits recently, we’d love to hear about it! Please share in the comments below. 

“Of course you will and can want more. You should want more. But you should also spend time trying to want what you already have. It’s slightly different from ‘practicing gratitude’ or appreciating or thanking a higher force or God for what you have…. It means: Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have—your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate that alternate-you would be to get what you have. Or if you don’t believe in the multiverse, the you from five years ago.”

—“Adam Parkson” in Happiness Falls, by Angie Kim

My decluttered office bookshelves

After a year in which I had little control over my time and even less over my emotions, I’m planning to make 2024 a year for restoring and building. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d like to see happen in 2024, personally and professionally. Today’s post is a check-in to see how things are going.

I thought it might be useful to talk about my goals on Catching Happiness throughout the year—it’ll keep me accountable, and maybe it will be helpful to you to see how I (try to) break larger goals down into smaller steps. I’ll share progress, missteps, and sources of inspiration. If there’s something you’d like to me to write more about, please feel free to comment below, or contact me directly at kathyjohn335 [at] gmail [dot] com. 

Goals and happiness

In January’s edition of the Happy Little Thoughts newsletter, I revealed three of my major goals for 2024 and wrote the following paragraph:

“What do goals have to do with happiness? Having goals to work toward, something to look forward to, contributes to hope, optimism, and, yes, happiness. According to Action for Happiness, ‘Direction’ is one of the 10 Keys to Happier Living.  Goals which are good for happiness are those we choose for ourselves, rather than things we think we ‘should’ do; they’re things we want to move towards rather than things we want to stop doing; they’re personally meaningful for us and reflect our interests and values; and we have control over how we work towards them.” 

(If you don’t get the Happy Little Thoughts newsletter but would like to, click here. Happy Little Thoughts comes out on the last Wednesday of each month, and I don’t share or sell your email address.) 

While I have additional goals that I may discuss later, the three I shared in the newsletter are:

• Write a draft of a book I’ve been thinking about for years.
• Declutter (to some extent) my whole house.
• Complete an online dog training course and train my dog, Luna (hopefully won’t take the entire year to do this one).

How did I do in January?

Welllll, results were mixed. January was a FULL month: we hosted guests from out of town twice (family last weekend, my friend Kerri for the first week of the month) and I dealt with a few miscellaneous life maintenance things like dental appointments and household repairs. Tank was seriously sick and between worry, hospital visits, and trips to the barn to shoot medicine down his throat (you can guess how happy that made him) I didn’t have much bandwidth for anything except getting through the day. Here’s how things went:

Goal 1: In January, I wanted to go over what I already had written and organize my materials, as well as start regular writing sessions three times each week. I knew it would be a busy month, so I wasn’t ambitious. I did collect my materials, briefly look them over, and I managed one writing session total. Not a great start, but considering my stress and busy-ness levels in January, I’m not too surprised or disappointed.  

Goal 2: For my whole-house declutter, I’m working on two rooms each month, pairing a simple one with a more challenging one. In January, I worked on my home office and our guest bathroom. I’m basically finished with both—though my office (the challenging room) still has a couple of minor things that need to be taken care of. It looks so much better and is now a place where I want to spend time working again.

Goal 3: I’ve purchased an online dog training course (SpiritDog, no affiliation) after trying out some of their free offerings, but all I managed to do in January was read a couple of emails and watch a couple of short videos. 

What’s next in February and beyond?

I don’t think February will be as busy a month, but it is a shorter month so I’m still being conservative with my expectations. I want to build consistency and momentum.

These are my plans for February:

Goal 1: I’m considering investing in a couple of online book writing courses, and I’ll decide whether or not either of them is appropriate. I’ve blocked out time for writing and research sessions. I’m planning to experiment with writing in different locations, both to reduce distractions (Laundry! Dishes! Luna wants attention!) and to make writing more fun.

Goal 2: I’ve got my next two rooms picked out: my kitchen and dining room. In January, my habit was to set a timer and declutter for at least 15 minutes a day. That worked well, so I’m going to repeat that process.

Goal 3: I’ll schedule time for reading/watching the dog training course, and short sessions of training with Luna several days a week.

I’m still kind of feeling my way. Each month, I want to review my progress and make any necessary adjustments, but I probably won’t do an update like this on the blog every month. Maybe quarterly? The idea of having to publicly report my progress or lack thereof is pretty motivating! (And a little scary!)

I want to be a person with a mannerly dog, in a decluttered house, who has written a book. These goals will all take time, consistency, and the building of habits. It’s only February, and I’m still filled with optimism. We shall see what the rest of the year has in store.

If you’d like to share your own goals in comments below, I’d love to hear them!

“There are many more ordinary hours in life than extraordinary ones.

We wait in line at the supermarket.

We spend hours commuting to work.

We water our plants and feed our pets.

Happiness means finding a moment of joy in those

ordinary hours.”

—The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, Haemin Sunim

Photo by Prince David on Unsplash

“Everywhere you look, you see people pursuing happiness as if it were something they could capture and cage. But pinning happiness down only destroys it. It’s too wild for that—it needs room to roam. You have to give it time, let it wander, surprise you.”

—Richard J. Leider and David A. Shapiro, Repacking Your Bags: Lighten Your Load for the Rest of Your Life