“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”

—Martin Luther King Jr.

A couple of Sundays ago, I spent the entire day in my pajamas. It was cold and rainy outside, my husband and son were sick, and it just seemed so much more pleasant to drink tea and read a book than go out. I even baked coconut chocolate chip zucchini bread. Without thinking about it at the time, I was practicing my version of hygge.

Hygge—pronounced approximately “Hoo-gah”—is a Danish concept that has recently been attracting plenty of attention and popularity. While hygge is most often translated as “coziness,” Danish researcher and hygge expert Jeppe Trolle Linnet suggests it would be translated more accurately as “homeyness,” with home being a place to shut out the negativity of the outside world. You can hygge at home, or in a cozy café, or even picnicking in the park—it’s the atmosphere that counts the most. Hygge can be used as a noun, a verb or an adjective!


Pia Edberg, writing in The Cozy Life, describes it this way: “the art of creating warmth, comfort, and wellbeing through connection, treasuring the moment, and surrounding yourself with the things you love.” And while many factors go into making the Danes some of the happiest people in the world, hygge surely must be one reason.

In the fullest sense of the word, true hygge is often planned carefully. It usually involves other people you know well or feel comfortable with, and often some element of the homemade, such a bread or cake. Hygge equals people bonding together and helping each other, especially during the cold, dark winter months. To experience hygge, stay off electronic devices and interact with others. Enjoy simple, old-fashioned pleasures like telling stories or reading aloud. Some equate hygge with mindful living and simple pleasures—things like:

Hygge traditionally involves togetherness, but why not create that cozy feeling even when you’re alone? Slowing down, pausing, relaxing, taking time to think about what you love and value, and making time to enjoy those things is hygge-ligt, or hygge-like.

Prudy is a hygge expert

Hygge is all about simple pleasures, about helping people make it through a cold, dark, and difficult time, such as a Scandinavian winter. I can’t think of a more Catching Happiness-like concept! 

What simple pleasures contribute to a feeling of hygge for you?

If you want to explore hygge in more detail, check out the following books:

The Cozy Life, Pia Edberg

The Little Book of Hygge, Meik Wiking

The Book of Hygge: The Danish Art of Contentment,Comfort, and Connection, Louisa Thomsen Brits

How to Hygge: The Nordic Secrets to a Happy Life, Signa Johansen

Introduction by Ted Kooser: We constantly compare one thing with another, or attempt to, saying, “Well, you know, love is like...it’s like...well, YOU know what it's like.” Here Bob King, who lives in Colorado, takes an original approach and compares love to the formation of rocks.

Geology

I know the origin of rocks, settling

out of water, hatching crystals

from fire, put under pressure

in various designs I gathered

pretty, picnic after picnic.

And I know about love, a little,

igneous lust, the slow affections

of the sedimentary, the pressure

on earth out of sight to rise up

into material, something solid

you can hold, a whole mountain,

for example, or a loose collection

of pebbles you forgot you were keeping.

Reprinted from the Marlboro Review, Issue 16, 2005, by permission of the author. Copyright © 2005 by Robert King, whose prose book, Stepping Twice Into the River: Following Dakota Waters, appeared in 2005 from The University Press of Colorado. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. The column does not accept unsolicited manuscripts.

“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”

—William Butler Yeats

For the past week, I’ve found myself waking every morning from anxious dreams. I’m OK during the day when I can use my conscious mind to relax, but by night, my subconscious takes over…and evidently it’s worried. I suspect this is a reaction to the level of anxiety in my nation and the world right now. While I can’t seem to help being anxious and worried about the future, I realize that those feelings are completely useless and are robbing me of joy. Maybe you feel the same? So I’ve been actively trying to reduce my anxiety levels instead of pretending things are fine or simply distracting myself. Here are four things I’m doing to combat anxious feelings:

There’s nothing ground-breaking here, but that doesn’t mean these practices are either easy or worthless. They are within my power to do, as so many other things are not.

As Corrie ten Boom said, “Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.” Now if only I could convince my subconscious of that.

How do you soothe yourself when you feel anxious?