Happier Habits 

Programme 

Mattering more in your own midlife

Week One - 

Check-in

Hello and welcome to Week One of your Happier Habits programme! 

Below is a short video to say hello and then I get stuck into this week's theme of Check-In as we head off on this adventure.  You can download the PlaySheet below and I really hope you take a few minutes for yourself to sit quietly with a glass of wine / water / kambucha and invest this time for you. 

 

“Ask yourself this. Is my life a reflection of who I want to be, or a reaction to people I don’t want to upset?”

Brit Barron, author of Worth It.

Download PlaySheet here
 

Week 1 -Check-in 

Brain power

Your evolutionary brain has two primal goals: to survive and reproduce. It doesn’t care if you’re necessarily happy. In fact, when you're enjoying life, and having wonderful new experiences, your evolutionary brain is going noooo! It screeches on the brakes with fearful thoughts and self-limiting beliefs because it wants you to stay in your safe, little cave. Anyone who has a cat or dog knows that even when they’re asleep, their ears prick up when they hear something. Their brain is constantly vigilant and alert for danger and so is yours. In fact, it actually wants you to be slightly anxious and paranoid, because when you’re all happy dancing and clapping you’re not watching the horizon for danger that could be coming your way. Thankfully, most of us now live in a stable environment, and that vigilance isn’t as necessary. However, your brain doesn’t know that! Your unconscious brain is still fully charged on its mission to help you survive and reproduce. Our ears are picking up messages even when we’re not consciously aware of it so somebody will drop a comment or an email will come in, or your teenager will grunt at you, or your partner doesn’t thank you for something you do, which triggers your survival instinct in your brain that this might mean danger, danger danger! It creates feelings in you  (flight, flight or freeze) and your body can start to react with tense shoulders, or a lurch in your stomach, or a flood of anger. Your brain scans the situation for the worst case scenario, vigilant for a slight, looking out for the negative, thinking of your lack rather than your abundance.  So, you have to be proactive about happiness, and balancing the negative with the positive!

Who are you?

Mid-life -  now a decades-long stage - is a magnificent time. We are a unique generation of women with unprecedented opportunities and choices, with an extra 20/30 years of life expectancy - to be lived in midlife, not old age. As I say in my book, Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter, we now get to redefine the out-dated version of middleage - redefining careers, marriage and kids (we don’t even have to have them if we don’t want), post-marriage life, post-marriage relationships, travel, learning (so many women I know going back to college or retraining in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s!). So much is now possible. Instead of raising a family and then being fecked into the corner to knit, desexualised and devalued, we now get to continue to live vibrant, valiant lives in our own right đŸ’Ș

However, it can also be mayhem, incorporating and juggling so many changes for women: single life, marriage, fertility issues, periods, children, parent-care, child-care, partner-care, divorce, menopause. We are constantly asked ‘How are you?” but how often do you really take a beat to really answer it? How am I now?  Who am I now? Where am I now? At this age and stage of life, whatever that is.

I liken women to the Nesting dolls. We start with our innate core - our intrinsic selves. Then we quickly take on the first layer from the family, time and culture we’re born into. Then we take on another in terms of the career we choose. Then another perhaps as a partner, Then another perhaps as a parent. Until the outer doll is the one we show to the outside world. And often, especially in the that mayhem of things we go through, those layers can smother your core, rather than the core colour and form the layers.

Happiness Audit.

So your brain is geared to be slightly negative, and women in midlife are the busiest cohort of society. And the least supported.

Add these two things together and woman can loose all sense of themselves. You can feel overwhelmed with it all. Underwhelmed with what you get back for the amount of work you’re putting in. Realise life is all practical and no play.

Happiness is not a destination. It’s an active, proactive, intentional commitment. There is no short-cut on this journey (and yes, most of us have tried the wine route).

We can get so busying doing, we can forget to be.  

We can be so consumed with the practical, we can bypass the playful.

We are rarely really happy in one area while miserable in all the others, because happiness - connection to self and mattering more to ourselves,- is connected to and from all areas of our life.  If you improve your health, that will likely impact your emotional health which will impact your sense of fun and fulfilment which will impact your relationships which will impact your health and it’s a cycle.

Doing an audit of checking in exactly where you are and how you are at this stage of life is really important because the things that made you happy in your 20s may not be the things that make you happy now. The things that you thought were going to give you the life you wanted, might not have turned out exactly that way. You might have experiences, you’ll have loved, lost, learned and laughed, and so we need to check in and see what you need and want now.

So as we embark on our Happier Habits Adventure, to put more LIFE into your midlife, we will be grabbing life by the love handles and start to shift the light - the light you shine so brightly on others - back on yourself a bit more.

And before we head off on our exploration, we need a map. Before we decide where we’re going, we need to know where we are. We need to check what we have in our backpack .

So we are going to take a whole life approach first to see where and how you are.

Who am I?

In the PlaySheet, just have a play with the idea of your nesting doll layers. What parts of your core flow through the layers, and which roles perhaps smother the core? There is no judgement here. Just a checking in to see how parenting might have affected some aspect of you for example (for me, it has meant less freedom and travel. Not a judgement, just an awareness that that is a part missing right now).

Check-in.

In the PlaySheet, I want you to ask yourself three questions this week.

What makes me feel alive?This can be everything from running bare breasted through a field of sunflowers to sitting quietly in the sun reading a good book; dancing to Abba in your kitchen to howling with laughter with some gal pals; sea swimming to solving problems; whatever tickles your fancy? Go back and remember things from all phases and stages of your life, just throw it all down on the sheet.

What makes me feel me? This can be that feeling of the ‘old’ you from some time before, an activity, a person, the real you only a couple of people see, a you in a certain situation, the you separate to all the Nesting doll layers?  Throw as many versions of this down as you can.

What makes me feel strong? Love? Sex? Chocolate? Exercise? An empty laundry basket (ok don’t put that down), An accomplishment, overcoming a challenge, helping someone, teaching, learning, a day out by yourself, a trip alone, planning, joining in, finding space?

Happiness Audit.

In your PlaySheet there is the Happiness Audit, looking at the six main areas that affect our lives:

Mind - your emotional health

Body - your physical health

Soul - your connection to self and the world (and beauty) around you

Work - your sense of satisfaction and purpose

Play - your sense of self from joy, connection, aliveness

Love - the nourishment and nurture around you in all it’s forms, including your love of yourself.

These areas are not mutually excludive but intrinsically linked. Mark each section from a scale of 1-10 with 1 being low and 10 being high. It’ll likely look like a Spider’s web as it’s unlikely all sections will be the same score. That’s ok. At different times of our life, we will be focussing on different things. This is just to check in and decide where you need / want to invest some thought and energy.

Enjoy! I hope to see you on Thursday 


  • I'll be explaining how to build on the Happiness Audit 
  • Tell you my own revelations
  • Focus on the Play section with some tangible tips 

I'll also be answering and questions you have!