Plan for Joy

Happy New Year! After the rush of the holidays and then some (too short!) recovery time, I’m finally starting to think about the year ahead. I don’t know about you, but to me it seems like time has sped up and the year is already rushing by. Filling your calendar with to-dos, reminders, and appointments can feel overwhelming and disheartening, especially when the weather is gloomy outside.

For a moodboost, consider also planning for joy. This is an idea I first heard about from Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness (which I’ve talked about here before). I read an article by her in which she discusses her annual planning process and says she’s always enjoyed setting goals, but realized she was forgetting something important: to plan for joy.

Lee explains, “Every year we sit down and plan how we’re going to be better people, more rigorous and diligent and considerate people. We write out the achievements we aspire to: the weight loss or the muscle strength, the pages written or published, the milestone markers we hope to see in the sideview mirror as we whizz past. In the process, we forget to plan for joy.

“It’s not that we shouldn’t plan for our big dreams and goals. These are the seeds of future joy, and well worth cultivating. But as we train our sights on these distant hopes, the small joys can easily get lost in the shuffle. …

“I think we forget to plan for joy because we think of joy as something that just happens, not as something that we make happen. In our minds, joy is spontaneous and effortless. Yet if we think about it, many of our most joyful moments — the picnic in the park or the family vacation, the birthday party or the nature hike — exist only because someone thought to plan for them.”

When I read this, I realized that even though I make a practice of being a “joy detective,” I usually think of it as looking for joyful moments, rather than actively planning for them. On her website, Lee offers a free “Joylist Planner” PDF that you can download. It has categories to help you come up with different types of experiences to plan, like people to see, occasions to celebrate, and field trips/local adventures. Here’s the link if you want to give it a try!

This reminds me of another uplifting idea from life coach Katherine North. She suggests that we plan multiple treats for ourselves in advance, scheduled throughout the year—anything from small delights like pedicures or massages to larger indulgences like vacations.

If we go ahead and put them in the calendar now, not only will we ensure that we’ll actually do them, but it also gives us things to look forward to. Research shows that anticipating something joyful can be almost as joy-inducing as the experience itself! (I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy planning trips so much.)

I love this idea, and am brainstorming some fun treats to schedule for myself. But we don’t have to wait for a vacation or other future event; we can also make time for joy every day.  Indulging in what we find pleasurable on a regular basis is a wonderful way to enhance our enjoyment of life.  We can scatter moments of joy throughout the day by indulging in simple pleasures, such as savoring a good piece of chocolate or connecting with an old friend.

In Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, Sarah Ban Breathnach calls these “Joyful Simplicities.” She says: “Joyful simplicities nourish body and soul by engaging our senses. They teach us how to live in the present moment. Life comes together when we seek out the Sublime in the ordinary. …There’s a lot of drudgery to most of our days … To keep our daily round from being all drudgery, we’ve got to savor the art of the small: discovering diminutive delights that bring us peace and pleasure.”

What’s your favorite treat? What little activities do you love? What makes you happy? You can create a “bliss list” of your favorites and then make a point of fitting in as many as possible each week. My bliss list includes sitting in the sun, listening to jazz, and reading.

You can also create “seasonal joy lists”—lists of activities you love to do each season that either can only be done then, or that heighten your enjoyment of the season (like drinking hot chocolate or sitting by the fire in the winter, or eating watermelon in the summer).

I encourage you to try one (or all!) of these ideas and start scattering moments of joy, both small and large, throughout your life! Let me know how it goes!

Scattering Moments of Joy

Happy New Year! After the rush of the holidays and then some recovery time, I’ve been working my way through my email inbox. I just read an end-of-the-year post by Ingrid Fetell Lee, author of Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness (which I’ve talked about here before), in which she discusses her annual planning process. She says she’s always enjoyed setting goals, but she realized she was forgetting something important: to plan for joy.

Lee explains, “Every year we sit down and plan how we’re going to be better people, more rigorous and diligent and considerate people. We write out the achievements we aspire to: the weight loss or the muscle strength, the pages written or published, the milestone markers we hope to see in the sideview mirror as we whizz past. In the process, we forget to plan for joy.

“It’s not that we shouldn’t plan for our big dreams and goals. These are the seeds of future joy, and well worth cultivating. But as we train our sights on these distant hopes, the small joys can easily get lost in the shuffle. …

“I think we forget to plan for joy because we think of joy as something that just happens, not as something that we make happen. In our minds, joy is spontaneous and effortless. Yet if we think about it, many of our most joyful moments — the picnic in the park or the family vacation, the birthday party or the nature hike — exist only because someone thought to plan for them.”

Yes! I realized that even though I make a practice of being a “joy detective,” I usually think of it as looking for joyful moments, rather than actively planning for them. In the post, Lee offers a free “Joylist Planner” PDF that you can download. It has categories to help you come up with different types of experiences to plan, like people to see, occasions to celebrate, and field trips/local adventures. I printed one out and am going to try planning for more joy this year. Here’s the link if you want to give it a try as well!

This reminds me of an idea in another email I recently got, from life coach Katherine North. She suggests that we plan multiple treats for ourselves in advance, scheduled throughout the year—anything from small delights like pedicures or massages to larger indulgences like vacations.

If we go ahead and put them in the calendar now, not only will we ensure that we’ll actually do them, but it also gives us things to look forward to. Research shows that anticipating something joyful can be almost as joy-inducing as the experience itself! (I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy planning trips so much.)

I love this idea, and am brainstorming some fun treats to schedule for myself. But we don’t have to wait for a vacation or other future event; we can also make time for joy every day.  Indulging in what we find pleasurable on a regular basis is a wonderful way to enhance our enjoyment of life.  We can scatter moments of joy throughout the day by indulging in simple pleasures, such as savoring a good piece of chocolate or connecting with an old friend.

In Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy, Sarah Ban Breathnach calls these “Joyful Simplicities.” She says: “Joyful simplicities nourish body and soul by engaging our senses. They teach us how to live in the present moment. Life comes together when we seek out the Sublime in the ordinary. …There’s a lot of drudgery to most of our days … To keep our daily round from being all drudgery, we’ve got to savor the art of the small: discovering diminutive delights that bring us peace and pleasure.”

What’s your favorite treat? What little activities do you love? What makes you happy? You can create a “bliss list” of your favorites and then make a point of fitting in as many as possible each week. My bliss list includes sitting in the sun, listening to jazz, and reading.

You can also create “seasonal joy lists”—lists of activities you love to do each season that either can only be done then, or that heighten your enjoyment of the season (like drinking hot chocolate or sitting by the fire in the winter, or eating watermelon in the summer).

I encourage you to try one (or all!) of these ideas and start scattering moments of joy, both small and large, throughout your life! Let me know how it goes!

Less Worry, More Wonder

“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”

— Corrie ten Boom

A long time ago I had the thought: what would my life look like if I didn’t worry at all? How amazing would that be? I thought about how free I would feel, how easy, how peaceful. I wanted to write a blog post about it, to try to inspire myself and others to do our best to live that way, without worrying…and then of course, life got busy. It was like my head, which had peeked above the clouds for a second and glimpsed another way, sank back down into the murk of my usual stress level, and it just felt hypocritical to write about worrying less when I was actually worrying every day. So I tabled the idea and continued on.

Then one morning last week, I was feeling OK. Despite it being a busy few weeks, everything on the near horizon was under control. And yet, I realized, my mind was actively scanning the future for possible problems and I was beginning to feel stressed. I got PISSED. Here I was feeling fine, with no real reason to be anxious, and yet my mind was trying to find one??

As I considered this, I realized that I do it all the time. It occurred to me that some part of me must think it’s my job to worry constantly. It seems to be my default setting, even after all these years of trying to be more peaceful and positive-minded.

Here’s what happens: I’m always thinking ahead to make sure that I’m prepared for whatever is coming up. I make notes and write stuff on my calendar and figure out what I need to do when, etc. That is fine and actually necessary to make sure our lives run smoothly. And if I stopped there, it would just be a positive, helpful behavior.

But I don’t. Once I’ve made sure that everything in the immediate future is considered and planned for, instead of relaxing and focusing on the present, I keep going. I look further and further ahead to responsibilities down the road, and to potential conflicts and possible problems.

And then, when I think about all of that on top of what is currently going on, I feel overwhelmed and anxious—especially since most of what I’m worrying over is either something I can’t do anything about right now or something that might not even happen. I get either extremely jittery or super tired—but either way I want to run away! Which is not exactly helpful or conducive to managing my current responsibilities, and it feels awful.

So after I got some clarity on this pattern the other morning, I sat down to think about why it might be so. Why would I feel like my job is to constantly think ahead and worry about the future? And why does it feel like if I don’t do this, something terrible will happen? Like I’m shirking my duty?

I thought about my son, who just started high school, and how we’re teaching him to plan ahead so that he gets all his schoolwork done on time. It’s not something that comes naturally to him, and I remembered that it didn’t come naturally to me either when I was his age. In fact, I remembered, I would actually get in trouble for not planning ahead or not thinking about the consequences of my actions, and would often get punished. Boom! Lightbulb moment! When I was younger, if I didn’t think ahead, something terrible WOULD happen! I would get punished! I got the message that I had to always be thinking ahead—and so like any good and obedient girl, that is what I do. Wow.

Once I realized that, I realized I had the power to start retraining myself, and that “less worry, more wonder” might actually be possible for me. I first saw that phrase about five years ago on life coach Carla Robertson’s website and it really appealed to me.  It has been part of my mission on this “joy detective” journey—to feel more open to wonder, and less constrained by worry. Now I think I might have made a breakthrough in how to do that.

Of course I still need to plan ahead, and will always do that—you can’t be a successful adult without that ability. But the key is in stopping myself from going further. Once I am sure that I have thought through what’s important for now, I can rest. It is no longer my job to constantly scan the horizon for potential problems. There is a LOT of trust involved in this, and it’s something I’m going to have to practice over and over. But so far here is what I do:

 I realize I’m worrying about something unnecessarily.  (That’s actually a big first step, to become aware of what I’m doing.) Then I tell my mind that it’s not my job to think about that right now, and that in fact, worrying about the future is harmful to me in the present.

I make a conscious decision to let the worry go, and trust that it will be OK. I’ve even got a mantra to repeat: “I don’t know how it’s going to work out, but I trust that it will all work out for the best.” Some people recommend writing down whatever you are worrying about, putting it in a special box or jar, and giving it over to God or the Universe or whatever higher power you believe in. I’ve done this before with big issues that I had no control over, and it really does help.

Anxiety and fear are so draining. If I can relax about the future, and trust that everything will in fact work out (without my needing to obsess over it constantly), it will free up so much energy! And it will give me an expansive feeling of peace and ease, which is much more conducive to everyday happiness.

So that’s my goal: to go through this process whenever I find myself worrying, and return my thoughts to the present. My hope is that the process will get easier over time, and I will in fact have less worry, which will make room for more wonder. I’ll let you know how it goes! And if you have any tips for worrying less, I’d love to hear them!

Having a Bon Voyage

The big family trip to Europe that I talked about a few weeks ago (see that post) is finally here! I’m in the last few days of packing and prepping. By the time you read this, we will be in the air, headed east! I’m so excited!

I’m trying not to be too frenzied as I make all of the last-minute preparations. As I talked about in that last post, I want to be more relaxed about this trip than I usually am. I want to approach it without expectations of how things will be so that I’m not disappointed when our experiences don’t match those expectations.

And even as I make the lists that I love to make, I keep reminding myself that these are possibilities, not plans. There are many restaurants I’d like to try, shops I’d like to visit, and places I’d like to explore … but I don’t have to do it all.

In fact, trying to do it all would almost certainly make us miserable. While “failing to plan” can sometimes mean “planning to fail,” in this case I think that planning too much can result in failing to enjoy. So although my anxiety level ratchets up each time I think of missing out on something, I keep reminding myself that I can’t possibly see everything in one trip. There will be other trips (hopefully!), and this time I just need to concentrate on the top interests—and leave some room for unexpected surprises.

I will be mostly unplugged for the trip, which I’m really looking forward to, so this blog will take a vacation break along with me. When I get back, I’ll let you know how it all went!

The Thrill of Anticipation vs. the Risk of Expectations

Do you like to travel? For me, it’s a sure source of joy. I love seeing new places, experiencing new things, and meeting new people. I daydream about places I want to go constantly.

And when we have an actual trip on the books and I get to make plans for it? Oh, that’s heaven to me. I just read a happiness tip that recommended booking your trips months in advance, because studies have shown that people are happiest when they’re anticipating a vacation. That makes total sense to me.

We are headed on a family trip to Europe in just a couple of weeks, and I’m beside myself with anticipatory excitement.  I haven’t been there since before our 13-year-old son was born, so I’m really looking forward to going back. Plus, I can’t wait to share the fun with my son. He loves to travel like I do, and this will be the first time he’s been out of the country. I’m having such a good time poring over guidebooks and making lists of possible sights to see and restaurants to try. There are so many options to choose from and so many new experiences waiting to be savored.

This is all marvelous. However, sometimes I can enjoy the anticipation of what’s to come more than the actual trips. In my imagination, everything is perfect. There are no travel delays, no rain, no frustrations. But the reality of a trip often includes at least one of those. And occasionally, because the reality conflicts with my too-high expectations, it can cause me to feel more upset than the situation really warrants.

I’ve been reading Wake Up to the Joy of You by Agapi Stassinopoulos (which I highly recommend—it’s a lovely book) and I recently read a chapter titled “Finding Grace in Disappointment.” She discusses how we can set ourselves up for disappointment with our expectations. She says, “Fundamentally, we are wired by human nature to have expectations. You want things to work out a certain way, your way. You plan and imagine the desired outcome and attach your own fantasies to the experience. You tell yourself stories about how things should happen, and when the reality does not match, you feel let down and experience a loss of energy.”

This certainly happens to me on trips, or even any big event. I’ll picture what it will be like, and if it doesn’t match my expectations, I’ll feel let down. This can happen even if the actual experience is nice, which is a shame. I’m cheating myself out of full enjoyment that way. 

Stassinopoulos suggests that the way to avoid this is to become more present with what is really happening, rather than getting lost in wishful thinking. If we don’t go into something with a preconceived notion of how it will be, but rather we go in openly and with curiosity, being present for whatever unfolds, we can enjoy that without judgment.

I love this idea, and want to approach my upcoming trip in that spirit. But I want to eat my cake and have it too—I enjoy reading guidebooks and sifting through restaurant recommendations way too much to go completely plan-free. Instead, I will make plans, but I won’t decide in advance how the experience will go. I won’t set a high bar of expectations.

My husband likes to travel without much advance planning, which can make me uncomfortable. I definitely need the security of knowing I have a confirmed place to sleep each night! But I’ll admit, the times when we’ve just rolled into a town and “sniffed out” a good place to eat or something fun to do have usually turned out wonderfully. Plus, there’s a specific feeling of accomplishment when you discover something that’s off the beaten path.

Traveling in that way can really broaden our horizons.  Exploring uncharted territory and enjoying (or surviving!) unexpected adventures—this often results in some of the best experiences (and funniest stories). On this upcoming trip, I intend to leave room for those types of happy surprises.

I will also make every attempt to leave my expectations at home, even (or especially) for the parts I do plan in advance. I will “go with the flow” (oh, how this is a challenge for me!) and be present for whatever happens, without judgment.  I think it will result in a richer experience overall. Wish me luck! I will let you know how it goes!