This Simple Practice Can Make You Happy and More Resilient in as Little as a Minute a Day

This Simple Practice Can Make You Happy and More Resilient in as Little as a Minute a Day

When it comes to happiness, it’s not always as easy as it might seem.

And when it comes to happiness, it’s implausible to think any one thing will make a massive difference.

But happiness, ultimately, does come down to the sum total of many small things done consistently and so, here’s a simple practice that will almost certainly enhance your happiness AND resilience relatively easily …

via Inc.com by Minda Zetlin

Here’s how to get started.

Science has spoken–the simple act of writing in a journal is extraordinarly good for your mental health and your physical health as well. It can increase your emotional intelligence, help tame worries and anxieties, give you better sleep, and can even lower your blood pressure. It seems clear that if you’re not in the habit of writing in a journal, it’s a habit you probably should start.

But just how do you get started? For some of us, journaling is almost an instinct–using a pen and paper or perhaps a keyboard or smartphone to explore or manage our own ideas and emotions comes as naturally as breathing. For others, it can seem like an awkward or even slightly weird thing to do. If you fall into that second camp but want to try journaling and see if its many benefits work for you, here are some easy approaches you can try. Experiment with each, or mix and match them to see which works best for you.

1. One sentence a day.

If you feel like your time is already stretched to the breaking point, this can be an appealing approach since it literally takes less than one minute to do. At the beginning or end of the day (or sometime in between, if that’s better for you), write down one sentence about yourself and your day. It could be a record of what happened that day, the day’s accomplishments, or your favorite and least favorite things that happened to you during the past 24 hours. Or, start with the words, “I feel…” and then write down how you’re feeling at that moment. Research suggests that you’ll get greater mental health benefits from writing down your feelings than just writing what happened that day. On the other hand, writing what happened will give you a handy record of the day you can look back on later on.

I use a slight variation on this myself. Right before going to sleep, I write down the things I accomplished that day, as a counterbalance to my usual frustration that I didn’t get more done…

… keep reading the full & original article HERE