I was listening to the Huberman Lab podcast with Dr. Laurie Santos on Happiness and an interesting idea stuck with me: Scandinavian people (in Finland, Denmark, and Iceland) are found to be the happiest according to the World Happiness Report (Canada has ranked number fifteen in 2024). The researchers hypothesized that it has to do with their not just high standard of living, but the cultural traditions of finding joy and delight in ordinary moments in life, as simple as a sip of coffee, a laugh with a loved one, a gentle touch of a favorite cashmere blanket and so on.
Interestingly, the US with its sunny California or Costa Rica did not make it to the top ten of the list. So it’s not only about the daylight and temperature exposure, as I falsely believed. This gives hope to us in Canada with a similar climate and long winters. The problem of Northern Americans might be that we are too future-oriented, past-ruminating, hustle culture prophets. We rob ourselves of our lives by simply skipping to the next urgent thing, or to the next quick dopamine hit from food, social media, alcohol (or other substances), or workaholism.
As the new year begins, I want to make an intention to learn to notice more. A regular meditation practice brings a lot of benefits and I am starting to notice more in life. Not just the nice and beautiful things, but all of them, including unpleasant feelings. By the nature of our brain wiring, we often react to negative impulses with a stronger intensity and focus compared to the positive ones – that is a survival thing. And this is how we often miss out on so many small moments of happiness in our life. One way to derive more joy from life is learning to pause when we notice a “feel-good moment”.
Have you ever said something to yourself like “ok, I did a good job on this project, but on that other one I sucked!” and you go on beating yourself up on that. Or you look back at your day and all you can remember is the negative encounter with a coworker, not the sweet gesture from your friend who took you for a coffee and laughs? It’s almost like we spotlight the negative and dismiss the positives in out lives.
So how do you learn to find more delight in ordinary life? It takes a bit of deliberate practice, but we can train our minds to focus on positive feelings and strengthen those neuronal pathways one day at a time.
Let’s begin a simple habit. I invite you to pick five ordinary and nice things from your life you commit to notice more in the next month. Write down in your journal what those things are for you (I will share mine for inspiration, but you pick your own: sipping my morning coffee with the milk foam, smelling evening bedsheet scent, experiencing putting on my favorite hand lotion, actively listening to my husband for five minutes about his day, petting my cat’s silky fur). Of course, not every day will be a “hit all five”. But if you get one per day – that’s a win! In the comments below, let me know what things you picked and what changes have you observed. Hope this helps!
