Live Life Happy Transitional Coaching

Happiness Habits Series: Cultivating Optimism

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Seven for Writing Things Down

7. Get to know yourself and your life better and improve long-term focus on what’s important.

You can use a journal as a way to keep an overview of your thinking over a longer time span and to recognize both positives and negatives in your thinking and actions.

You may, for example, think of yourself as a healthy person but realize when you read through your journal that you have only been out running four times this month. Or perhaps you have an image of your life going pretty well but discover when reading through your notes for the last month that you are negative about your job or a relationship in almost every entry.

By writing things down you can help yourself to spot trouble and get yourself back on track and keep yourself there within a larger timeframe. Or your journal may tell you something that you haven’t really paid much attention to about yourself and/or about your life. And so this can bring clarity.

So those are seven of the most important reasons why I write everything down. How to capture your thoughts? Well, that’s up to you.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Six for Writing Things Down

6. Clear thinking.

You can’t hold that many thoughts in your head at once. If you want to solve a problem it can be helpful to write down your thoughts, facts and feelings about it. Then you don’t have to use your for mind for remembering, you can instead use it to think more clearly. Having it all written down gives you an overview and makes it easier to find new connections that can help you solve the problem.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Five for Writing Things Down

5. Unloading your mental RAM

When you don’t occupy your mind with having to remember every little thing – like how much milk to get – you become less stressed and it becomes easier to think clearly. This is, in my opinion, one of the most important reasons to write things down. Feeling calmer and more relaxed does not only improves your health but also makes life easier and more smooth and effective.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Four for Writing Things Down

4. To remind yourself of what to focus on.

Often we get caught up in our everyday business and lose track of what is most important. To keep yourself on track – instead of just keeping yourself busy with low-priority tasks – simply write down a reminder that can stop your thoughts when you see it and guide you back on track again. It can for example be your current major goal. I also like reminders like: “is this useful?” and “what is the most important thing I can do right now?” Write down your reminder and put that reminder where you can’t avoid seeing throughout your day.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Three for Writing Things Down

3. Written goals are very important.

One thing a lot of very successful self improvement writers – Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar and so on – go on and on about is the importance of having written goals. A written goal brings clarity and focus. It gives you a direction. And by rewriting your goals you not only reaffirm what your goals are.You may also find new insights that bring more clarity and focus to your goal and life.

A written goal is also a powerful reminder that you can use to keep yourself on the right track when you feel stressed and may consider making hasty decisions.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason Two for Write Things Down

2. Ideas don't stay for long.

Fine or awesome ideas can pop up at the strangest times but they tend to not stay for long in your head. So you need to capture them fast or they are gone in the wind.

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Happiness Habits Series: Committing to Your Goals

Reason One for Writing Things Down:

1. If your memory is anything like mine it is like a leaking bucket.

Since I’ve started to write things down more often I have also noticed when reviewing old notes how much my memory can leak. The memory isn’t very reliable. Every time we remember something we recreate what happened rather than just replay a film from our mental archives. The recreation is directed by a number of things such our beliefs, our emotional state at the time and our self-image.

What you remember about an event may differ quite a bit from what someone else remembers. There is a wide variety of interpretations of reality. And then when you try to remember that interpretation of an event later on it can change even more. So we need some kind of system outside of ourselves.

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Happiness Habits Series: Savoring Life's Joys Technique Four

Positive Mental Time Travel (Positive MTT)

Individuals can engage in this technique by “vividly remembering or anticipating positive events.” (Quoidbach, 2010). These two abilities are also very closely related. Many studies have also shown that Positive MTT predicts happiness.

Bryant, Smart and King (2005) conducted a study on this subject. Subjects were randomly assigned to reminisce about pleasant memories using cognitive imagery, using memorabilia, or think about current concerns (control group) for 10 minutes twice everyday for a week. The results show that both the reminiscence groups reported to have greater increase in the percent of time that they felt happy over the past week comparing to the control group. The cognitive imagery group also reported to be happier than the memorabilia group.

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