The Happiness Project

|| positive quotes || mental health tips || Inspirational illustrations || etc.

[thatbooknerdy]

[bujopapercreationz]

I’m starting July with a four-step plan to cultivating more happiness in my life. Since there are no summer classes this year and there’s a pandemic, I haven’t had too many tasks and due dates. I decided to take this as an opportunity to reflect, explore, and create mini goals that would bring me closer to my long term goals and the life I want to live.

[sapphiac]

One of those “hard to swallow pills” as far as mental health advice goes is stopping negative self talk. I understand that making self deprecating jokes and and poking fun at the topic of depression can be a coping mechanism for some people, and it’s miles better than actually doing something self destructive, but it perpetuates a negative mindset. It doesn’t facilitate any progress to continue to constantly put yourself down, and joking about wanting to die propagates casual suicidal ideation.

I understand that I’m absolutely guilty of indulging in negative self talk. I don’t mean to sound hypocritical. It’s not terrible if you can’t find a way to stop your negative self talk, and you shouldn’t feel guilty about it, but it definitely inhibits any progress towards recovery you could be making, which isn’t ideal. I’m only saying that it’s something that people who struggle with mental health issues should be mindful of.

Please be kind to yourself. You don’t need to over-emphasize your negative traits to be funny or relatable. Sometimes it’s ok to just be.

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

“We can’t hate ourselves into a version of ourselves we love.”

— Unknown

[positiveisabelle]

If you find happiness in even the little things, it matters.

[aspiritualwarrior]

“Everyone should smile. Life really isn’t that serious. We make it hard. The sun rises. The sun sets. We just tend to complicate the process.”

— Ram Dass

[harmony-is-happiness]

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

“Failure is an event, not a person. Your mistakes do not define you.”

— Unknown

[xenxone]

🌱

[warm-suggestions]

sometimes you just have to do what it takes to drown out the bad thoughts. whether its music, exercise, netflix, reading. there’s no shame in just blasting away the negativity. 

[slaughterkeys]

[surprisebitch]

this is so sad omg please give the snail a happy ending :(

[louchie]

@oodlemcdoodle can.. You…give him a happy ending..

[oodlemcdoodle]

Okay, hold on bud

[oodlemcdoodle]

@garecc

[somethingmissingthiswaycomes]

Okay but this can be interpreted as a lesson about disability, illness, and mental health. It might take *you* ten seconds to draw a big old orange line, but for some people it’s an enormous accomplishment. People whose hands shake, people with executive dysfunction, people with poor hand-eye coordination. This snail.

It may be easy for you to go out for groceries. Some people barely manage to get out of bed.

It may be easy for you to express yourself. Some people were never given the tools.

[resiliencewithin]

I recently told my counsellor how silly I felt about how hard it was to sometimes even send a message on my phone. She broke down how hard it can be just to answer a question like “how are you”, particularly if I want to be honest - processing my mental/emotional state, deciding how much of that state I want to share, formulating how to express it.

What might be easy for one can indeed be extremely challenging for another.

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

How to Overcome Apathy

1. We often feel apathetic when we’ve picked the wrong goals or when have no goals, or direction for our life. So, look at what inspires you, or makes you feel alive.

2. Stop listening to others, and their views on what’s important. Success is doing what’s important to YOU.

3. Try to think of some small action that improves the way you feel – and just do one small thing, and note how good it makes you feel!

4. Look for someone who could function as a role model for you – who didn’t have advantages but made something of life.

5. Visualise how great you’ll feel if you work for success, and get what matters to you, and have an awesome life.

[anatomyandcappuccini]

A little post for perfectionists

You may be thinking you’re a fraud, that you don’t deserve to be where you are and that you’re totally incompetent. You think that what you’ve accomplished is only due to luck or because « anyone could have done it ». You only focus on the small mistakes you made instead of being proud of what you’ve achieved and, as a consequence, you feel like a total failure. Well, this is how I feel 99% of the time and tbh we’re a lot out there to feel the same way. 

This post is for us, for the perfectionists and for all the people that set ridiculously high expectations for themselves. Performance anxiety  is part of our daily lives and even if it forces us to do a great job most of the time, the darker side of it is that it can totally make us sick in a psychological and even in a physical way. For me perfectionism was a huge shield that I used to carry around to protect myself from any criticism, judgment or shame. Well, guess what, it didn’t work. AT. ALL. 

There are a lot of reasons that may have caused me and you to think like that, it can be so engraved in our beliefs that we don’t even question it. We just believe it 100%. But the good news is that it can be fixed. 

What can you do to slowly change this belief and finally starting realizing that you deserve to be where you are? Here is what I’ve learnt throughout the years : 

Acknowledge your thoughts and how they make you feel. Once you’ve identified these thoughts, you can observe them and question them : how do they make you feel ? From a scale from 1 to 10, how much do you believe these thoughts? What makes you think they are true? Don’t you think they are a bit exaggerated? How can you reframe them in order to make you feel better about yourself? 

Talk about it. Last week I had to call a friend because I was feeling like shit just because I couldn’t answer to a simple question from my professor. She reassured me and reminded me that lots of people feel like that. 

Practice positive feedback. Write down the good things you did during that day, even the smallest ones. By doing that, your brain will recognize them more easily and you’ll pay more and more attention to them 

Comparison is the thief of joy, and most of the time we compare ourselves to the embellished and flawless version of the people we meet and/or see on social media. We tend to forget that EVERYONE can have self-doubt and feelings of not being good enough. Like come on, even Albert Einstein didn’t think his work deserved all that attention! 

Be patient. It takes lots of time and energy to reframe and change beliefs we’ve had for such a long time. But knowing we have them and that we can change them is a great start :) 

Instagram 

[vortexsophia-deactivated2022110]

[geekygothgirl]

I don’t know what we did to deserve Mr. Rogers but I’m so glad we had him. 

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

7 Ways of Dealing with the Winter Blues

1. Stay active - Make sure you build exercise into your life.

2. Stay warm – Wear plenty of clothes, and have hot drinks and meals as feeling cold can make you feel depressed.

3. Go outside – And get all the light you can. The days may be short but you can still grab some fresh air.

4. Eat a healthy diet – As high carbs affect our mood, and a drop in sugar level will cause feelings to slump.

5. Spend time with other people – Don’t isolate yourself. Being with good friends and family can keep your spirits high.

6. Keep busy – Try a new activity or do something you might love, as feeling bored and empty exacerbates the blues.

7. Play your favourite music – The kind that lifts your mood, and blows away the cobwebs, and leaves you feeling good.

[captainjellystudio]

[kindnotestoself]

[slow down]

[onlinecounsellingcollege]

“The one thing you can change is how you treat yourself. And that one thing can change everything.”

— Unknown