The stresses of day-to-day life can be overwhelming. Maintaining your relationships, advancing at work, keeping a healthy lifestyle — all of these take time and effort and can be hard to keep up with.
Luckily, there are quick and easy ways to help ease stress and anxiety. To start, “give yourself the opportunity to feel those emotions,” says happiness expert Jessica Weiss. She suggests carving out 15 to 20 minutes per day to be sad, angry — whatever you need. Spend that time sharing your feelings with a friend or do some exercise to cycle them out.
Your next step is to “flip the script on that overwhelm,” Weiss says, and up the joy in your life. Here are three simple ways.
1. Start a joy journal
Keeping a joy journal is an easy way to start feeling better fast.
Grab an empty notebook and “at the end of the day, write down three things that brought you joy that day and why,” says Weiss.
The moments of joy that make it into your journal do not have to be monumental. “It can be, like, ‘Oh my God, I had the most amazing, delicious cappuccino,'” she says. “Or it can be, ‘my boss gave me recognition finally on this work that I had been working on for six months.'”
The point is to scan your day for anything — however small — that lifted your spirits, which can help boost your mood overall.
2. Create moments of surprise gratitude
The benefits of showing gratitude toward others have long been proven. “You’re sort of releasing a dopamine hit inside yourself by expressing how much another person had an impact on you,” says Weiss. The person receiving that gratitude gets those “feel good chemicals” as well.
“But the surprise gratitude moments are really the moments that pump up the joy,” she says. By surprise gratitude, she means moments in which you give thanks to someone long after the event you’re thankful for.
Let’s say you visited the hospital for a procedure a couples of months ago, but are sending the nurses who helped care for you a thank you card now, that would be an example of showing them surprise gratitude. Because of how much time has passed, it’s so unexpected and can feel like “gratitude on steroids,” Weiss says.
She recommends expressing surprise gratitude every quarter.
3. Savor the moment
Finally, Weiss recommends savoring special moments.
Whether there’s a beautiful sunset on your walk home or you just received a compliment, “you can’t let it wash over you,” says Weiss. “You need to take a moment, acknowledge the joy that you’re feeling.” Take a mental image of what you’re seeing, notice that sensation in your body — whatever helps to really take it in.
There’s research that shows savoring the moment helps our capacity for happiness grow, Weiss says. “Savoring is one of the best exercises for building up that happiness muscle.”
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