Thursday, May 1, 2014

The Happiness Project: May

Hello friends and happy May Day!  Today is actually a public holiday here in Singapore, but I've spent the day working in order to catch up from my time away in Sydney.  Tonight, I'm taking some snacks and my picnic blanket over to Fort Canning for Shakespeare in the Park!  It feels like last year's Shakespeare in the Park was just a few months back.. time flies!

Speaking of time flying.. it is time for another Happiness Project update!  So let's review how I did on my goals from April:

Sing in the morning - I started out super strong, and then somehow I fell off the wagon hard.  I skipped an entire week of working out all together, but I managed to get (mostly) back on track.  Exercise definitely lifts my mood, and getting it out of the way early in the day is a great way to start the day.  When I lived in Nashville, I was really good at getting up and working out, but I still find it very hard here in Singapore.  A work in progress...

Acknowledge the reality of people's feelings - I thought this one would be a slam dunk for me, but honestly, I didn't write in my bullet journal the entire time I was in Australia.  Major fail.  But it did make me realize how much I enjoy writing things down (and how much easier it is to remember to do things!), so I'm going to try to get back into the habit.

Be a treasures house of happy memories - I'll be honest.  I totally forgot about this one.  Like, I had to just re-read my previous blog post to refresh my memory.  And clearly, I did not blog ten times in April.  Oops.  Oh well - life happens!

The focus for the month of May is leisure.  A lot of the narration in this chapter resonated with me, and I found myself nodding along at some of her points, but when I went back to the chapter to think about how I could apply this to my life, I was kind of stumped?  I generally don't think that I have a hard time carving out time for leisure - some of you may read this blog and think all I do is travel haha!

I did recently comment to a co-worker that although I find that, since moving to Singapore, I'm much better at really "disconnecting" from work when I go away, I still feel a terrible level of anxiety on my first day back to work.  Even though I know that not every email needs to be answered right away, I still know that my inbox is overflowing and that stresses me out.  So actually, maybe I should approach this month not necessarily focusing on creating time for leisure, but rather, I should think of having a more relaxed approach about things that stress me out?  I often let really insignificant things overwhelm me or give me anxiety, when really, all I need to do is just take a deep breath and start doing one thing at a time.  So I guess that's what I will focus on for May.  Just relaxing and making progress bit by bit.

I'm not sure if this post makes any sense to anyone but me.  (I guess this is what happens when you just start typing instead of thinking about what you want to really write.)  But I guess as long as it makes sense to me, I can still set an intention for the month.  So that's what it is - relax, breathe, take it step by step.

No comments:

Post a Comment