Chats: Happiness Jar

On Facebook I follow Elizabeth Gilbert, the woman who wrote ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ and over the last year or so I’ve noticed a lot of feeds about Happiness Jars. The concept behind these jars is that at the end of every day you write down the best thing that happened to you that day on a small piece of paper and put it in a jar. It’s supposed to help you see that even the crap days have positives, or at least show you how to pull a positive out of a pile of negatives. It also helps to dig into it on terrible days and pull out a random positive thing to remind you that this bad day is just one day in your life and there have been and will be more positive things.

 

Over the last few months I’ve been feeling really down and was fearful of falling back into the depression I’d spent years crawling out of. So on January 1^st I decided to start my own Happiness Jar. Initially I had more of a Happiness Tin because that’s all I could find. I just write my positives down on Post-Its, fold them up and put them in my tin/jar.

Its affect it had on my mood was really surprising. By forcing myself to find positives in each and every day I found myself feeling happier and less negative. Of course there have been days when it was harder to find the positive, but that made the discovery of one even more rewarding.

I know this all might sound really wishy-washy. I know it did to me every time it came up on my Facebook feed, but it has really done wonders for me in the last couple of months. I haven’t missed a day and it just feels good to think about the positive things that have happened throughout each day. I’m also finding myself feeling more relaxed and thinking more positively in general. This is not just from the Happiness Jar alone, but I know it has been a major contributing factor. At the start of the year I made myself a list of goals and maintaining the jar was one of them. I’m so proud of myself for sticking to it. It’s such a simple goal and it would’ve been really easy to give up on it. I’m glad I didn’t.

I’m thinking about doing a sort of belated New Year goals post soon to kick of a series about how I’m going in achieving them. I’d love some feedback to see if that’s something that would be interesting or not! Until then I’m off to write up today’s positive!