blog to discovery

This has been an interesting week so I wanted to write a quick summary to share two of my successes and one annoyance.

My blog

As I mentioned in my May review I ‘lost’ my blog; in the end it was for almost two weeks before I got it up and running again. However three days later it went down again and then again yesterday. I think I’ve now found the code which was causing the problem, but I still have no idea why it was intermittent. I am still trying to fully recover my blog as I gradually reinstall everything, but hopefully this time it will be stable.

I still have two more posts which I wrote while my blog was down which will be up over the next few days. The first is the next in my organiser series and is about my today planner and the second is my review of HDBizBlog’s calendar page which I trialled recently.

The second component of happiness I’m going to consider is attractiveness. I know there is little I can do about my features (without taking drastic action) but I know I can do more with what I’ve got. It may just be women, but when you have the perfect outfit for an occasion you know you look good so it adds to your happiness. The biggest experience I’ve had of this was my wedding day, I would have been happy however I looked, but having the whole outfit certainly helped. Unfortunately I don’t look as good as I did on my wedding day every day, but it highlight the reasons why not:

• I was wearing a designer dress
• I spent months finding the dress
• some else put my hair up
• some else did my makeup

I’ve chosen to consider how sleep affects my happiness first because I think it has the most obvious effect. You know when you’re tired everything will be just that little bit harder, things will irritate a little bit more and its more difficult to remain calm, positive and, well, happy.

I’ve never been a good sleeper. In fact, my mother tells me I only slept for 3 hours a day as a baby. Wouldn’t it be great if that was the case now, all that extra time to get things done.

However my problem, now, is not being able to get to sleep; I don’t understand people like the husband who can fall asleep in the middle of a sentence or if he sits still for too long. So it frequently takes me an hour or two to get to sleep and I will then sleep until the alarm goes off when I wake up tired. What I would like, is to fall asleep quicker so I got more sleep and would then hopefully feel less tired, happier and may wake up earlier and have more time in the day.

For many years, whenever I’ve been asked what my goal in life is I’ve said happiness. However, I’ve never really thought through what that means. I think I always thought that happiness was something that happened to you, so one day I would wake up and be happy. Nice idea, but I’ve now learnt it is something you need to work at.

I recently read Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origins in Childhood (read my review) and fairly soon afterwards came across these two posts Happiness formula and What is happiness? which both also consider the components of happiness. As I came across these close together, I took this to be a sign that I should consider my happiness. I don’t want to give the impression that I’m unhappy because I don’t feel that way, but I don’t see any harm in trying to identify ways to make myself happier.