Saturday, November 16, 2013

If Eeyore and Debbie Downer had a love child...

It may be hard to tell from my cheery exterior, but I'm actually quite a neg-head. I gravitate toward bad news, focus on the things that went wrong, and obsess over what might go wrong in the future.

 Hardly a recipe for joy and very much against the spirit of the season--Thanksgiving.


In a famous experiment by psychologist Martin Seligman, patients were shown to drastically improve their mental well-being by doing simple things to boost their sense of gratitude. Among them, was to list 3 things they were grateful for each day.

Well, being the neg-head that I am, I very much doubt such a simple exercise could really make a dent in my strong Debbie Downer tendency, but what the heck.  It couldn't hurt.

So...three things that I'm thankful for today...(and of course instantly I'm thinking of numerous things that I'm NOT thankful for today--like how I realized I forgot my wallet as I was checking out at Target, doh!)

Okay, thankful, thankful, thankful...

(1) Didn't have to cook dinner--bought soups and sandwiches at our local grocery store.

(2) (Aside--this is taking a really long time...I've been staring at my screen for literally 5 minutes now...) Printed out some easy worksheets for Judah downloaded from a free website.  He loves doing stuff like that and it should buy me at least 30 min of peace tomorrow.

(3) Made Noah giggle like a madman for a whole 5 minutes today.  I know that sounds like a small thing, but it really was a highlight of my day!  Interpret as you will.

2 comments:

Megan said...

Hi! Love reading your blog! I wanted to update you a little on the happiness research. My husband studies this stuff, and later research after Seligman showed that you should write in your gratitude jouurnal once a week. If you do it every day, it can become more of an annoyance than anything else. The book he recommends for making yourself happier is "Happier" by Tal Ben-Shahar. But if writing about gratitude every day works for you, then keep going! Good luck on your journey. Taking care of children all. the. time. is really hard!

Alice in Wonderland said...

Thanks Megan! I'm so relieved I don't actually have to do this every day...it's so time consuming, ha ha. I'll definitely check out that book rec! I'm reading so many books on my kindle while nursing these days.