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I have been procrastinating on writing this post because I haven’t wanted to think about how I would benefit from more exercise. In my post What is happiness? I listed exercise as one component that was suggested in the book Making Happy People: The Nature of Happiness and Its Origins in Childhood. I can fully understand that exercise is a component of happiness because when I’ve been regularly exercising I’ve had more energy and felt more of the opportunities offered by life. However, I am currently in an exercising dip and have been for a few months (OK at least six) and I’m struggling to get out of it.

Of course, exercising will also help me towards the other two components of happiness I’m considering at the moment; sleeping and attractiveness. I’m particularly keen on the last one, because I’ve noticed I’m starting to get a little podgy so some of my clothes don’t fit as well as they should. Additionally, Penelope Trunk suggests there are also business related benefits such as increased IQ and increased resilience to difficult times, in fact she feels regular exercise is no longer optional.

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.