Project Happiness Articles

Who am I to preach? I spend a minimum of eight hours in front of my computer screen when I’m at work, and a couple of hours extra on my phone and in front of the TV when I get home. However, I’m well aware of the bad influence this has on my health, so I try to give my brain the opportunity to rest. It’s what digital detox is all about.

I know that’s how I got through my undiagnosed celiac life. I was super focused on family, living by my mom’s example, and making sure everyone was healthy, a good person, and discovering the things that made them happy. That was my focus. It gave me this unbelievable strength. I could not fail, even when I was ill.

Thoughts precede action! But the key word in that phrase is action. If we have our “ideal” life only in our heads and written out as lists that we look at occasionally throughout the year-we most likely will never reach our “ideal” self. 

There's a common misconception that you can excel at work or at family life – not both. We tend to think of those people who seem to have it all together as some rare breed of a magical unicorn. We can’t possibly hold ourselves to those standards, can we? It’s an interesting question because it holds both the problem and solution: Standards.

Need more NOW in your life? Are you finding that you, or your kids (if you are a parent or work with children), haven’t enjoyed the present moment because you were all stuck in your thoughts? Have your minds run amok leaving your family in a haze of mental chatter, all the while missing out on the beauty of the present, the NOW? Well, if this sounds like you, or someone you know, here are some simple tips to come back to the NOW.

For someone who has spent a lot of time fighting for a more positive, fulfilled life and committing to never give up on attaining mental freedom, surrendering wouldn’t have come up as a word I ever particularly resonated with. It didn’t ooze the strength and tenacity that I wanted to exude; my mind equated it with weakness and would stubbornly avoid that idea of it.

I am at this gorgeous new mall and I want to buy a new dress, but I can’t decide. Time is running out, I am getting late and I have to make it quick. Have you ever walked out of a store simply because you don’t know what to buy? Well then, welcome to the ‘don’t know’ block.

I've developed a simple rule over the past couple of years which initially seemed somewhat self indulgent - and I was sure would need to be knocked on the head after a short time. But two years on, it still seems to work incredibly well. The rule to live by was quite simply to: "Stop doing things I don't love".

Everyone wants to be happy. Behind our every action is our desire for happiness. However, unknowingly we have certain mindsets, I call those happiness stealers, which as the term suggests, keep us from being happy.

I used to be what you’d call extrinsically motivated. Meaning, when things went my way I was happy and when they didn’t, well, I was a pill. I didn’t get that allowing external circumstances (more often than not, beyond my control) to dictate my happiness was actually making unhappy...