The Happiness Project

For the past couple of weeks I have been reading, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Intellectual and informative books always take me longer to get through. But anyway, My book club at church read it. I have always wanted to be part of a book club and now I finally am! I have really enjoyed reading this. Gretchen maps out a 1 year happiness project doing different things to help enhance her overall well being and feeling of happiness. She wasn't depressed or anything she just wanted to be happier. I love this book because she takes charge of her own happiness. She doesn't let the world or whatever happens to her determine it. She doesn't tell you specifically what to do to be happy, but you can learn from her project. Besides, we all have different things we need to do to make ourselves happy.

There are some negative reviews on the book. Some people thought she sounded arrogant because she talks about her great life. But, I didn't feel that way. Possibly because I read reviews before hand, and I decided I didn't want to judge her (or judge her book by it's cover ba ha ha). It's not incredible writing, but I didn't need it to be. I have simply enjoyed learning from her everyday stories. It also helped me to realize that I am personally doing a lot of things to instigate my own happiness. However, I have so much to work on.

Here is one of my favorite quotes from the book (It's kinda long sorry), "To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad and feeling right...To be happy I need to generate more positive emotions, so that I increase the amount of joy, pleasure, enthusiasm, gratitude, intimacy and friendship in my life. This wasn't hard to understand. I also needed to remove sources of bad feelings, so that I suffered less guilt, remorse, shame, anger envy, boredom and irritation. Also easy to understand. And apart from feeling more "good" and feeling less "bad", I saw that I also needed to consider feeling "right."

I just loved that quote when I read it, and I wrote it down in my journal so I would always have it handy. The author goes on to develop her, "First Splendid Truth" which is, "To be happy, I need to think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth."

So I have been working on having more positive thoughts this week. Like when I am feeling stressed out at my job I say, "I love my job, I love my job, I am grateful for the money, It's so convenient." It actually helps. I notice that when I am positive, I work faster. Another time I was craving a candy bar really bad and I said, "It might make you feel good right now, but the long term effects will make you feel worse." And I resisted. I am pretty proud of that one, but I can't always resist the sweets. Not now that we have a Neilsen's Frozen Custard in Rexburg now! Yay!
I hope you enjoyed the review. Peace out sistas.