Gratitude and Baby Animal Faces

Some things are well known to help people who are feeling good to feel better and people who are feeling bad to feel less bad.

Top among these are?

1. Feeling gratitude
2. Looking at baby animal faces
3. Getting exercise (even getting up from your chair for a minute if you’d otherwise be sitting for more than an hour)
4. Being of service to others
5. Getting back in touch with a friend you haven’t spoken to recently.
6. Use willpower (even very small dosages) to accomplish something (even something very small)

I am planning to do each of these every day. This article series is my way to help me to do this and as a practical matter will generally only report on the first two. Works better for me than waiting for a month to have a new years resolution.

I am grateful to Jane McGonigal for her 2002 Ted Talk that inspired this article and my practice. It’s taken me less than 20 years to get started. If you are enjoying this article you can feel grateful to her as well. You can even watch her talk.

Today’s baby animal face is above.

For exercise, feel encouraged to stand up and walk around the room.

If you don’t have a better way to be of service, feel encouraged to join our #KindWords project jump on Reddit, or any similar site, and give a useful answer to an unanswered question, or a word of encouragement or celebration to someone who isn’t getting one.

I’ve been experimenting with and researching inbox-zero and expect to achieve it by Festivus. But I can still look through my archives for people to get back in touch with. I don’t expect you’ll have any difficulty finding someone to get in touch with. While it sometimes feels awkward for me to reach out, it’s never worked out badly for me. You can do it now. You even blame me and this article.

As for useful use of willpower, there is generally no shortage of candidates, the challenge is to find something small enough. Trying to find some way to use willpower now to reduce the amount of willpower you’ll need in the future is always good. My current plan is to add “next steps” to each item on my to-do list that is missing one. And when that feels too overwhelming, I’ll unload the dishwasher.

Feel encouraged to join me in this new endeavor.

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