How does it feel?

A few years ago, I went through a period of feeling particularly fed up. Not depressed, as such, but what Alan Partridge would described as “clinically fed up”. So I decided to try an experiment that I’d seen somewhere on my travels across the internet.

Each night, when I went to bed, I would pause and think of three good things that had happened to me that day. They didn’t have to be major things – anything that I had enjoyed or which made me feel good, I wrote them down in a little book. It wasn’t a very invasive exercise and only took a minute, literally, each day.

At first, I found it difficult to think of three things – the third one (and sometimes the second one) would feel forced or not significant enough. I’d think of a bag of crisps I’d enjoyed at lunch, or a joke someone had told me and it felt like I was almost making stuff up just to get to three items. However, I persevered and eventually the three things would come to me quite easily.

But then it started to get difficult again. Only this time, instead of struggling to get to three things, I was struggling to keep the list down to three. I started to find that I was sorting and sifting the things that had happened to me, rejecting some of them as not being good enough to make the top three things for that day.

It taught me a valuable lesson. The good things didn’t start happening to me just because I decided to keep a list of them – they were happening all the time but I just wasn’t paying attention to them. Keeping that diary refocused my attention on the good things, rather than the bad things, and brought me out of a low period in my life.

Today, apparently, is “Blue Monday” – you can find more details here. How many people will pay attention to the random bad things that happen to them today simply because they’ve been told that today is the most depressing day of the year? Rather than just accepting that today is going to be a bad day, perhaps today might be a good day to pay particular attention to the good things that happen…