Happier Habits 

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).

You can get so busying doing, you can forget to be.  

You can be so consumed with the practical, you can bypass the playful.

You are rarely really happy in one area while miserable in all the others, because happiness - connection to self and mattering more to yourself - is connected to and from all areas of your 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 you embark on our Happier Habits Adventure, to put more LIFE into your midlife, you will be grabbing life by the love handles and starting to shift the light - the light you shine so brightly on others - back on yourself a bit more.

But before you head off on your exploration, you need a map. Before you decide where you’re going, you need to know where you are. You need to check what you have in your backpack.

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

Healthy or harmful habits?

Habits are how you live your life. They make it easier because you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you repeat tasks often. The downside however is also that you don’t reinvent the wheel, therefore performing the habit without thinking at all. Researchers believe at least 40% of our days are lived this way and for some people (especially overwhelmed people) that can be much higher.

Which is why at midlife, it’s really important to check in to make sure your routines and habits are serving you well. We think goals bring us the future we want, but in actual fact, it’s our day to day habits and routines that take us there.  Healthy habits can shape our health, fitness, career, relationships, emotional health and energy. And so can unhealthy habits.

But habits can be hard to break and exhausting to start.  So this is where habit hacking comes in. You can upgrade an existing habit or routine, or use an existing habit as a prompt.

For example, when I decided I wanted Michelle Obama arms, I balked at the 364 gym visits a week I reckoned that would require. As I perused my repertoire of habits to use as a prompt, I chose the kettle since I’m boiling it 2353 times a day. I placed a pair of hand weights beside it and do my arm crunches every time it boils. (My arms may never look like Michelle Obama’s but they’re definitely a lot firmer than they used to be!). I simply used an existing habit or action to prompt a new one.

Your routines are created from a series of habits, and once set in motion, huge swathes of your day can be run on automatic. Morning, get ready for work, exercise, post-work, after dinner, evening, bedtime, self-care routines, are all made up of a series of habits. Hacking a routine either removes or replaces a habit within it, adds a new habit, or shifts habits to get a better result. It’s a bit like inserting new code into a programme, or upgrading your phone.

Recently, I decided to create small pockets of quiet throughout my day; little bubbles that weren’t filled with noise, chatter, or thinking. I knew that trying to find spaces for that in a packed and busy diary was going to make it a failure before it started. So I found a routine where I could insert this new habit easily. When I’m walking the dog I usually listen to the news or a podcast. I’ve hacked that habit slightly by switching the programme off for 15 mins (during the sports and business news!) or before the end, to experience silence, tuning in to birdsong instead.

Simple shifts are much more likely to work than seismic overhauls.

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 exclusive 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.

Habit & routine audit 

In the PlaySheet, have a look at your routines and see if you can break them down into the main habits. Which of those are either redundant or wasting time or causing friction? For example, one night I was setting the breakfast table and was so tired I could hardly speak. Then I realised I'd started that habit when my kids were too young and small to reach the cereal cupboard. Now they were older and quite capable of getting their breakfast sorted I realised that habit was redundant.