A month ago, I started my Things That Made Me Happy Today project. I’ve journaled every day in the month of February, and shared my lists of happiness on social media. Several of you have told me that my posts have encouraged and inspired you, and I sincerely appreciate those sentiments. But as I said in my last post, my main motivation for doing this was purely selfish. I did this for me as a mental health experiment. I’m pleased to share my results/observations with you.

I can honestly say that this has been life-changing for me. By thinking so much about what happy thoughts I can write down every day, I’ve found that I’m able to let go of the things that irritate me a little more readily than before. I’m not dwelling on those negative aspects of my day the way I always have. Now, it’s possible that there are other factors at play. About the same time I started journaling, I began taking an herbal supplement from Advocare every morning that “promotes a sense of well-being and brightens mood”. I’ve also stopped reading articles that are politically inflammatory and gotten better about either scrolling past those sorts of posts on Facebook or hiding them altogether. Facebook is not where I want to get my “news”, anyhow. And with the beautiful Spring-like weather we’ve been having, how could I not feel more cheery these days?

Along with the journaling, I discovered a fun method to track mental health. It comes from the practice of bullet journaling. Basically, you set up a grid for the year. Pick out some pen colors and assign a mood to each color. Then, based on your mood that day, you color in the day on the grid. I started this along with the journaling, but I went back and filled in the chart for January by looking back at my social media posts and from memory. For the month of February, I’ve had more amazing and really good days, and though I have had a couple of exhausted, frustrated, and stressed days, I’ve had NO depressed days (as opposed to about 4 in January). That’s pretty huge for me. Tim can tell a difference in me as well. He notices that I’m not as prone to those knee-jerk freak-outs as I was just a month ago.

Do I think I can just will away the negative in life by trying to think happy thoughts? Absolutely not, especially knowing my history of depression. But science has proven the health benefits of keeping a positive outlook on life. I’m going to keep up the journaling and mental health tracker, though I don’t know if I’ll be sharing those posts on social media every day. To those of you that have shared happy stuff on my Facebook wall, I’m grateful for your encouragement and support of my experiment. And though I’ve done this for my own gain, I do hope that I’ve brought a little joy into the world and maybe helped to start a “happiness movement” on social media.