“For 18 years, I thought I thought I was depressed. Then, I found out I was just tired!”

Though ‘Sleeping Better’ may seem like a strange topic for a Happiness blog, it’s importance could hardly be over-stated. If you are not sleeping well, you will struggle to maintain a happy state of mind.

However, I have come across a number of people – my former self included – who have simply concluded that they will never have a good sleep pattern. It seems to work something like this:

Have trouble Sleeping >>> Define oneself as an ‘insomniac’ >>> Lose any sense of sleep routine >>> and back to square one!

I’ve even heard of a schoolgirl being allowed to play computer games until three in the morning, because she doesn’t sleep well at night any way! Take it from someone who’s been there, this is a nightmare!

The label of ‘insomniac’ is as unhelpful as it is meaningless. It simply means, ’someone who has trouble sleeping’. Yet, doctors throw it around as if the tired patient in front of them has a hopeless disease that they will be burdened with until the day they die. In fact, to be labeled as an ‘chronic insomnia’ – which certainly sounds serious! – simply means that the patient has had trouble sleeping for at least 3 nights a week for more than a month. Obviously, that’s a hard thing to have to endure, but it’s made a hell of a lot worse by being given the impression that you have a ‘condition’ that may or may not be treatable.

So, if I could give one piece of advice to those struggling with sleep, it would be this: ditch the labels and get practical! (Okay, that’s two, but whoever complains about getting 2-for-1?) Don’t give-in to the idea that you’re just one of those people who can’t sleep well. That may have been your experience so far, but that doesn’t mean that you should just resign yourself to be this way forever. Instead, treat this like you would any other problem you’re currently experiencing – work at finding the solution!

I’m pretty sure that if the teenage girl, mentioned above, was told by the GP that she had acne she wouldn’t just accept that was her set-in-stone destiny. She would research and discover how to live with and deal with acne. She might try new cleansing routines, or buy products to fight acne. At the most, she would accept that she would be this way for a couple of years.

The difference is that she hasn’t been told by the GP that she has insomnia. She’s been told that she is an insomniac. This, according to her doctor, isn’t just something she is experiencing. This is who she is.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on doctors. And it may well be that there is an underlying medical issue affecting a very small minority of people struggling to sleep. I’d certainly recommend getting that ruled out. But don’t stop there. Ask your GP to recommend sleep tips, or teach you some relaxation techniques. In fact, ask him to do anything other than label you!

In fact, I would say that if you are wanting to get beyond the label and start addressing your sleep patterns, there is no better way to begin than with recording the when, why, where, what and how of your sleeping. You might just find that you actually sleep more than you thought you did. Or, you might find that you had somehow picked up the crazy habit of having a Coffee or a Malt Whiskey just before retiring for the night. Either way, it will be useful to start a Sleep Log to document your sleep habits and begin to do something practical to overcome this issue.

There’s one exception and one group of people that I would not recommend keeping a sleep log for, but I’ll come back to that next time.

The amount of sleep you get – and its quality – can radically change your life, for better or worse.

Researchers at the University of California found that people who live the longest are consistently seen to sleep for six to seven hours each night. Other studies seem to show a connection between sleeping more than 7 to 8 hours a day and increased mortality.

Of course, sleeping too little is hardly a healthy choice either. Aside from falling asleep at the wheel, making rash decisions, or over-reacting to stressful situations, there are a whole host of dangers from not getting enough sleep. Lack of sleep increases the risk of having high blood pressure and can more than double the risk of death from cardiovascular disease.

Professor Francesco Cappuccio, working with researchers at the University of Warwick and University College London, has concluded:

“Short sleep has been shown to be a risk factor for weight gain, hypertension, and Type 2 diabetes, sometimes leading to mortality. …In terms of prevention, our findings indicate that consistently sleeping around seven hours per night is optimal for health, and a sustained reduction may predispose to ill health.”

Perhaps it’s not surprising to find out that up to 90% of adults with depression are found to have sleep difficulties. There’s a question of cause and effect, of course, but the connection is undeniable.

This is such an important topic – and one that I’ve seen the effects of in my own life – that I’ve spent more than a little time investigating it. So, I’m sure you’ll understand if I spend a few future posts discussing how to sleep better and why. For now, you might find this article from the BBC interesting:

Problems are solved by sleeping

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.

They tested whether “incubating” a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep – when most dreams occur – were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

In the morning of the test day, 77 volunteers were given a series of creative problems to solve and were told to mull over the problem until the afternoon either by resting but staying awake or by taking a nap monitored by the scientists.

Compared with quiet rest and non-REM sleep, REM sleep increased the chances of success on the problem-solving task.

The study at the University of California San Diego showed that the volunteers who entered REM during sleep improved their creative problem solving ability by almost 40%.

The findings suggest it is not merely sleep itself, or the passage of time, that is important for the problem solving, but the quality of sleep.

Lead researcher Professor Sara Mednick said: “We found that, for creative problems you’ve already been working on, the passage of time is enough to find solutions.

“However for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”

The researchers believe REM sleep allows the brain to form new nerve connections without the interference of other thought pathways that occur when we are awake or in non-dream-state sleep.

“We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use,” they told PNAS.

Dr Malcolm von Schantz of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre at the University of Surrey said: “Whatever the importance of the dreams themselves are, this paper confirms the importance of REM sleep, the sleep stage when most of our dreaming takes place.”

Felicia Lettieri, a 72-year old woman from Italy, visited New York at Christmas. On Christmas Eve, she left her purse in a taxi. That would be bad enough, but this purse contained traveling money for her and six relatives… $21,000 to be exact!

The Police told her not to get her hopes up for recovering the money. I guess I would have told her the same.

It turns out, I’ve got quite a bit to learn about the goodness at the heart of every person.

The cabbie, a man named Mukul Asaduzzaman, drove 50 miles to Long Island, to an address he discovered inside the purse. No one was home! However, he left a note with his phone number and a message saying:

“Don’t worry Felicia… I’ll keep it safe.”

When interviewed by the New York Post, Mukul Asaduzzaman said:

“When I was 5 years old, my mother told me, ‘Be honest, work hard and you will raise your station.”

Isn’t that incredible? Yet, most incredible of all is the end of the story, that may both take your breath away and bring tears to your eyes…

Mr. Asaduzzaman refused any kind of reward.

Is it just me, or is that what Christmas is really all about?!

HT: Seeing Good

However, I’m now fully qualified and busy getting my new hypnotherapy practice off of the ground. So, if you happen to know anyone looking for hypnotherapy in northampton, feel free to send them my way!

The thing is, I can’t shake the feeling that I need to do more writing and exploring on the topic of Happiness. There’s just not enough basic – and yet practical – stuff written on this topic. No one really seems to discuss the basic stuff, like, is it selfish to seek happiness, does spirituality bring happiness or what can we actually do to be happy? It’s that delightful tension – between basic and practical – that I always hoped would characterize thinkhappy.org. And it’s the lack of any other sites or blogs concentrating on the same topic that makes me think this site may actually be worth preserving.

You see, I’m not trying to sell another site, or a book, or a CD, or anything else. I’m not secretly trying to entice you into buying my book, or become an affiliate. I genuinely believe that happiness is important. And I really am just trying to pass on any practical tips I can find that might help you be happier.

It’s not profound. It’s not clever. And it’s not gonna make me a fortune. It’s really very simple: I think I could share some tips with you (based on my failures, as well as my successes) that could help you live a happy life. And it’s that sharing that is at the heart of Think Happy!

Happiness, for me and many other people, is the only spirituality worth seeking in 2010.

So, welcome to 2010! And welcome back to Think Happy!

So, over at the Online Universities blog, there’s a nifty little post on 50 Ways to Make Your Memory More Like an Elephant’s. You might remember (or might not, given the nearly three-month absence!) that memory is a passion of mine. Well, this blog post contains both some insightful and very simple steps to improving your memory.

To give you an idea of why I really appreciated this article, here are the headings that the 50 ideas are categorised under:

1. Diet
2. Lifestyle Habits
3. Clever Hacks
4. Tools
5. Brain Exercises

I know a fair bit about memory development and became something of an expert in “clever hacks” when competing in the World Championships. It comes as a welcome relief then to see someone taking seriously issues like Diet and Lifestyle habits.

So, check it out and – Enjoy!

But you’d be completely wrong.

Mike, a hypnotherapist and health coach from New Zealand, has come up with a book that possesses a rare quality nowadays: it is actually worth reading! At the very least, the book presents tested, simple techniques of personal change as well as easy-to-follow information about how to become healthier and happier people. Much of the information here is nothing new. A lot of it is simple common sense. Yet, there is so much good information here, collected together in one place, accessibly written, than this is a book I will be recommending far and wide.

Although much of the content is based on material from Mike’s blog, Living Skillfully, the blog posts have been re-ordered, edited and made to flow as more of a whole. The book is accompanied by an MP3 CD of 20 hypnotherapy tracks, which include all of Mike’s Healthy Lifestyle and Transformation Skills recordings. The book and CD actually work surprisingly well together, with a section at the end of each chapter demonstrating which tracks to listen to in order to ‘help you make the shifts of thinking, feeling and behaviour’ that have been discussed in that chapter.

Initially, I thought that I wouldn’t get on with the CD, as I had expected Whale music and all of the other stereotypes associated with hypnosis/relaxation tracks, not just Mike’s voice. However, it is actually very effective, with my favourite track being the simple relaxation one. (Check out the Blue Sky induction and Blue Sea deepener. Excellent stuff!)

The sheer scope of this book is impressive. The first section deals with ‘Health Behaviours’ and starts with what Mike calls ‘the Big three’ : Being Smokefree, Eating Well, and Being Active. The material on smoking is some of the best that I have read in one place. He then moves on to ‘The Supporting Cast’ and discusses dealing with stress, getting good sleep, alcohol in moderation, and Positive Relationships. As someone who has suffered with insomnia, I can enthusiastically recommend the material on getting good sleep, along with the accompanying hypnotherapy track.

Section two discusses ‘Change Techniques’ and looks at Habit Change, Emotional Management, Change Planning and Execution and Self-Hypnosis. This section provides simple techniques to change your health behaviours for the better. A couple of my favourite techniques demonstrate both the simplicity and effectiveness of Mike’s writing:

1. One Simple Step Towards Managing Emotions

…What’s happening when we put our feelings into words? Matthew D. Lieberman and colleagues did a brain imaging study, reported in Psychological Science. They found that when participants in the study labeled the emotions they were feeling, it disrupted the activity of the amygdala (which isn’t a Star Wars princess but a part of the brain involved in emotion). The use of words activates a different part of the brain, and appears to shift the mental activity there, away from feeling the emotion.

The way that I show my clients to exploit this effect is based on Mary Mrozowski’s “welcoming prayer”, which isn’t actually a prayer at all. It’s simply a practice to use when you notice yourself feeling an emotion: saying “Welcome” and giving it a name – “Welcome, fear,” “Welcome, anger” or whatever the emotion might be.

In doing so, you are paying attention to the emotion – so it won’t go behind your back and manipulate you into doing something you may regret. You are accepting the emotion as being part of your conscious experience, which then enables you to let it go more easily. And you are naming the emotion, which brings into play the mechanism identified by Lieberman and his team.

I practice in the shower most mornings, when I’m relaxed, just welcoming the four main negative emotions – fear, anger, sadness and guilt. That way, when one of them comes along during the day, I’m in the habit of the welcoming practice and can immediately discharge a lot of the energy of the emotion.

2. A Simple Mood Control Technique and How it Works

One of the simplest and most powerful techniques in my hypnotherapy repertoire is anchoring, in which you associate a touch with a mental state or mood. Anyone can use this; it doesn’t even require hypnosis, though it will certainly be more powerful with hypnosis…

The easiest form of the technique is this: Imagine yourself as vividly as possible into the mental state or mood you want – calm, confidence or whatever you like. Start with a memory of being in that state, and make the memory big and bright, loud and clear, firm and strong; see what you saw, hear what you heard, feel what you felt, if there are smells or tastes include them too, and turn up the power on the memory as if you were adjusting the controls on a TV or radio.

You could use Michael Breen’s “nested images” technique to build it up even more strongly. Imagine yourself in the state as if you were looking at yourself from outside, and notice what you look like. Then mentally “step into” the image of yourself in that state so that it’s you who’s experiencing it. Once you’ve done this, imagine yourself from outside again experiencing the state even more strongly, and repeat until you are as deeply in the state as you can manage.

When you have the state or mood as clear as possible, and are experiencing it very strongly, touch your thumb to one of your fingers – it can be any one, though most people pick the forefinger – and press firmly for a few seconds.

You need to practice this a few times, but once you have done so, that mood or state is available to you at any time simply by using the thumb-and-finger press. Try it.

I’m sure that the first idea could sound a little wacky, if it’s the first time you’ve encountered this. However, it has a lot in common with practices like The Sedona Method, that many people find helpful for releasing negative emotions. (At this point, I’m tempted to use an analogy from Aikido, but I’ll save that for another time!)

As for the second, all I can say is that it really does work, as a number of people I’ve used this with can verify.

So, now I’ve got all of my gushing out of the way, are there any downsides to the book? Not many, actually! All I would say is that the editing and internal design could have done with a little more work. The Contents Page, for example, reeked of self-publishing and the sections within the chapters could have been spaced-out a bit better. But, hey, if that’s as bad as it gets then you know you’ve got a good book on your hands.

The Verdict

For anyone who wants to improve their health and lifestyle, but is cynical of much of the esoteric ‘fluff’ that passes for personal development these days, this book should be warmly welcommed. It does exactly what it says on the tin, offering practical advice on what a healthy lifestyle consists of and effective personal change techniques that enable you to begin to enjoy that lifestyle.

Would I recommend it? Well, the CD was great and surprisingly effective, for something so simple. The book is immensely useful and unceasingly practical. It includes a basic practical introduction to self-hypnosis…

I would more than recommend it! Trust me, you’re going to want to buy spare copies, some to give away and one to ensure that you’ve always got one for yourself.

Our beloved Macbook fell down the stairs on Tuesday morning and was officially declared dead at the scene. We’re now waiting on the insurance company to find out what they can do for us. I am not yet able to get excited at the prospect of a new laptop, because I still feel nauseous at the sight of the last one in mid-flight!

There are a couple of posts waiting to be polished-off and posted. I’ll try to get to those over the weekend at some point, but online time is obviously scarce at the moment.

I passionately disagree with both extremes – and I consider them both detrimental to the pursuit of happiness. Instead, I am committed to what I like to ambiguously call Loving Happiness. In short, this is the belief that it is not seeking our own happiness that is selfish; it is seeking our own private happiness at the expense of others that is so. However, a true hedonism – an ethical pursuit of happiness – loves to see happiness spread and recognises the need to take responsibility for that. Ethical hedonists recognise that happiness begins at home.

Ironically, those who are determined not to seek happiness – out of an apparent higher regard for those in need around them – are likely to spread sadness and depression to those they are trying to help. What’s loving about that?

Chris Edgar writes about this, reflecting an old belief which I can unfortunately relate to:

Eventually, I even started believing unhappiness actually made me a good person.  The less happy I was, after all, the more I must be placing others’ needs and desires above my own, and the more morally upstanding I must be.

Can anyone else relate to? I spent many a year in a religiously induced self-righteousness that almost revelled in melancholy. I was miserable because I was too busy helping others to worry about my own happiness. The thing is, my committment to my own unhappiness – as a gauge of my own goodness – was about as self-centred and deluded as it is possible to be. I’ve already quoted Pascal on this, but he bears repeating:

“All men seek happiness without exception. They all aim at this goal however different the means they use to attain it.”

It’s obvious now, but I wasn’t shunning happiness. I was just going after it half-heartedly. I had chosen to seek my happiness in misery. In the words of Garbage, I was only happy when it rained!

Chris also moved beyond this, eventually learning that:

…Because others sense and respond to my happiness, I understood, one of the best ways to serve others is to be happy.  And I don’t mean faking happiness, as some do when they smile and claim to be happy but are fearful and resentful on the inside.  Consciously or otherwise, people can sense whether the way you’re behaving is consistent with how you’re really feeling.  I mean actually improving the quality of your emotional life, by doing things that give you satisfaction.

And indeed I found that, when I approached my life in a peaceful and centered state, others seemed more peaceful and welcoming as well.  Strangers would say hello to me, where before they would quickly look away.  My friends and family started contacting me more often, and my connections with them felt stronger and deeper than before.  I could create more happiness in the world, it seemed, simply by being around others in a happy state. I didn’t have to tell people I was feeling good, or even smile, to produce these effects—they could experience my “happiness energy” for themselves.

I now look back on my previous shunning of happiness – in favour of a selfless (but miserable!) focus on the needs of others – with some embarrassment. What I couldn’t see at the time now seems blindlingly obvious: if you want to make other people happy, you need to know what that feels like! When I would feed the hungry, it was to preserve a life – but to what end? Ultimately, did I just want to feed someone so that they could live another day, to enable them to keep begging for the rest of their life? Of course not! I always held onto the hope that they could Live – that they could find a way out of their current circumstances, develop as people and flourish in life. That they could, ultimately, be happy.

I wanted to pass onto other people, as of ultimate importance, something that I myself was completely lacking. If life is worth living, if flourishing is worth aiming for, if happiness is really worth pursuing, then why the bleep wasn’t I doing it?! What did I really have to offer to the hungry and homeless that I was reaching out to, if I couldn’t demonstrate that it was worthwhile fighting to live another day because happiness was worth it?

I’ll let Chris have the last word:

If you believe seeking out happiness in your life would make you “selfish,” consider the possibility that being happy actually makes others happy—and that making yourself unhappy through a life of martyrdom actually hurts others.  If you want to serve others, attending to your own happiness isn’t a “luxury”—it’s a necessity.

Strong words, but, O, so true. Thanks, Chris!

Read the whole piece here.

You can read the full piece here, but I’ve included the main points below:

1. Turn your shower into a relaxing ritual
2. Knead away stress with a hand massage
3. Pause for a few soothing seconds
4. Take a nice, sleep-enhancing soak
5. Brush your way to relaxation
6. Chill with aromatherapy

Simple, to the point, but good advice nonetheless. Read the full post here.

Well, I can blame it on starting a new job, or on spending increasing amounts of time on my hypnosis practice. However, that wouldn’t really get us any where. All I really need to do is get blogging!

So, this is just a quick heads up to say that I fully intend to be posting more often, particularly on the primary topic of this blog that remains close to my heart: practical steps to happiness. I’ll also share a few useful memory tips, as well as share some of my thoughts on hypnosis. (On that last point, look out for an interview with the exciting young hypnotist, Nathan Thomas.)

First off, tomorrow I’ll post my review of Mike Reeves-Mcmillan’s excellent book, Changing Health Behaviours.