The purpose of International Day of Happiness is to, “recognise the relevance of happiness and wellbeing as universal goals and aspirations in the lives of human beings around the world”. Here at the Network of Wellbeing (NOW) we have marked this important day in a number of ways, including a special blog and video series on happiness habits and a #HappyHaiku competition. In this post we share some highlights here for you!
Happiness Habits
We decided to focus on happiness habits as a theme for much of our online content this International Day of Happiness, because we see happiness not as a fleeting emotion, but as something we can build up over the long term through the daily actions we take.
In the beautiful video below (put together for NOW by freelance designer Stuart Hodgson), mindfulness teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo suggests ways we can put happiness in to practice, through doing something that makes us happy each day.
Other contributions to our International Day of Happiness series have included:
Implementing Gross National Happiness, From the Bottom Up: Nima Tshering and Felipe Viveros from the Gross National Happiness Centre in Bhutan explore the best ways to create bottom up change and promote wider levels of happiness.
Do Good, Feel Good: Insights gained from author Gretchen Ruben’s work. Gretchen (picutred here with Oprah, image credit Harpo, Inc./George Burns) is the author of instant bestsellers, including The Happiness Project and Happier at Home, and her latest book – Better than Before – is about how we change our habits to achieve a happier life.
Training the Happiness Muscles: Successful athletes know they have to focus on winning, not on losing. So why do people who want to increase their happiness, often focus on their unhappiness? This is explored in a guest blog post by Miriam Akhtar, a positive psychologist who specialises in creating training programmes to develop the happiness muscles.
What Are Your Top Three Happiness Habits? We invited friends working in happiness, wellbeing, and related areas to share their top three happiness habits with us, and we also suggested some happiness habits framed around the Wheel of Wellbeing.
Please help to share these blogs and videos far and wide to help raise awareness about International Day of Happiness!
Happiness Haiku competition
We’re also running a Happiness Haiku Competition, and we’d love you all to join in! You can base your Happiness Haiku on your own happiness habits or simply what makes you happy.
Hopefully putting together a happiness haiku will be a joy in itself, but to encourage you to share your haikus, we are offering some great prizes too!
To enter your haiku you simply need to share your haiku on social media with the hashtag #HappyHaiku, ensuring that you tag NOW (on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram), or email entries to florence@networkofwellbeing.org.
The deadline for entries will be Monday 21st March at 10am UK time. We’ve received some lovely entries so far, and we look forward to sharing the winning entries with you soon!
Happiness Every Day
There is lots of guidance out there on how to create more happiness for yourself and others, not just on International Day of Happiness, but every day. We hope the material we have shared offers you some inspiration. Other very useful resources include:
- Action for Happiness Free Guidebook
- Greater Good Science Centre
- Project Happiness’ Happy Habits Library
What are your favourite happy habits, and which happiness-related resources do you find most useful? Share ideas in the comments section below!