Happiness Hacks: a Summer Series

+ a sleep/gratitude/Carrie Newcomer writing prompt for you

Welcome to new subscribers to Writing in Company. I’m glad you are here! Each week I share some words and a writing prompt. They are meant to be jumping-off points for you to do some writing on your own about what matters. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation ideas, or for another creative endeavor. Grab your pen and paper, and see what happens.

During the first two weeks of the pandemic—when we were supposed to be flattening the curve and then getting right back to everything imminently—I enrolled in an online course on happiness. Based on a popular real-life class at Yale University, it’s offered for free through Coursera, under the name The Science of Well-Being.

I just checked my Coursera dashboard and saw I enrolled on March 20, 2020. Remember that week? Remember all the projects those of us who weren’t essential workers thought we might complete during the two weeks we’d hang out at home? I swiftly completed all the steps in Lesson One of the happiness course—videos, readings, online inventories—then….I stopped. I never logged on again.

I suppose that’s about when reality started to set in. We didn’t flatten the curve or get right back to normal. My work in a local church got complicated setting up online everything. We had one child in the then-hotspot of Seattle, another reluctantly home from college, and elderly parents hundreds of miles away. We upgraded our wifi, rescued a dog, worried and worked, and got on with it. By the end of March, I must have decided I was too busy to learn about happiness right then. The login page stayed on my browser bookmark bar for two years, while the world got scarier. Every time I opened my computer, I saw it—a reminder of my failure to attend to my happiness.

But something else also happened those early days in lockdown. Two days after I enrolled in the happiness course, in another burst of optimism and creative self-care, I posted on Facebook: “Today I'm not letting this pandemic make me afraid. Instead, I dusted off an old dream and website/business plan, and I'm putting it out there. I'm going to write my way through these next weeks and months. Maybe you'd like to join me.” Attached was a link to a blog post, and a poem/prompt from Mary Oliver.

It was the beginning of Writing in Company. There were some fits and starts. Things accelerated when I left my church job, and again when I moved my mailing list to Substack nine months ago. I’ve been posting and sharing writing prompts online since March 22, 2020, in one place or another.

And you know what? It makes me happy.

I’ve written before about how I stumbled into the kind of prompt-based reflective writing for healing and wholeness that I now share, in a one-day workshop for bereaved mothers. I wasn’t truly happy then—not deep down. I was grieving and numb and on auto-pilot. But writing unlocked something in me and gave me back to myself. Twenty years on, I now lead the same kind of writing experiences for others who want to use writing for healing.

There is a deep well inside us that we draw from when we write. When I dip down into mine now on some days, I can bring up a bucket full to the brim of happiness. Other days, what drips from the bucket is still grief, or fear, or doubt. Most days it is a swirling cocktail. Writing helps us strain the contents and recognize what we’ve drawn up. Writing this today, I’ve realized something that makes me deeply happy: sharing writing prompts with you, and inviting you to write—to draw from your well—is the hidden spring underneath my own.

Maybe I’ll finish that Yale happiness course someday, or maybe I won’t.¹ Maybe I’ve found my own course, and it only took me twenty years to decipher the syllabus.

Either way, I’ve found a much shorter list of what makes for healthy happiness, and I’ve decided to combine my two early pandemic projects into a series.

My summer weekly writing prompts will be inspired by an article: 10 Healthy Habits of Happy People from Intelligent Change, and their corresponding deeper dives into each habit. I’m seeking small changes to make each week, that might produce longer-lasting habits of health and happiness, and writing about them. You could say I’m letting the habits of healthy happy people prompt my writing prompts, the writing and sharing of which, in turn, make me happy and healthy. If you write along with me this summer, maybe we’ll all get a little happier and healthier together.

Happiness Hack 1: Get Good Quality Sleep

According to my inspiration article and plenty of other experts, healthy happy people get good sleep. They sleep enough hours. They pay attention to the setting of sleep (the “sleep oasis”)—temperature, quiet, darkness, even good sheets.² They develop and maintain a restful evening routine, shutting off screens, and unwinding with intentional rituals that ease them into rest.

I read the evening routine suggestions in the linked Guide to Becoming a Morning Person, and saw plenty I could work on. What made me pause my scrolling was the suggestion to practice gratitude.

I think I do this. I try to do this. But I don’t do it routinely just before bed.³ Pondering gratitude, I remembered a poem from Carrie Newcomer about falling asleep and knew I’d found my link to a writing prompt, and my own happiness hack for the week.

Gratitude is good for us. If I can settle into sleep with gratitude in my head, rather than a last check of email, or news, or even Substack, I will be.…well….happy about it.

What about you? How’s your sleep these days? Your evening routine? Is gratitude a part of it?

a writing prompt

[If your email program cuts off the poem and prompt, click through to read the whole thing—it’s worth it!]

Read the poem Three Gratitudes below, or listen to Carrie Newcomer read it.

Then write about gratitude

or your evening routine

or sleep

or your early pandemic weeks

or your own happiness hacks

or, as always, whatever rises up in you, asking to be drawn from your well

Sleep well this week, friends.

Three Gratitudes
—by Carrie Newcomer

Every night before I go to sleep
I say out loud
Three things that I’m grateful for,
All the significant, insignificant
Extraordinary, ordinary stuff of my life.

It’s a small practice and humble,
And yet, I find I sleep better
Holding what lightens and softens my life
Ever so briefly at the end of the day.

Sunlight, and blueberries,
Good dogs and wool socks,
A fine rain,
A good friend,
Fresh basil and wild phlox,
My father’s good health,
My daughter’s new job,
The song that always makes me cry,
Always at the same part,
No matter how many times I hear it.
Decent coffee at the airport,
And your quiet breathing,
The stories you told me,
The frost patterns on the windows,
English horns and banjos,
Wood Thrush and June bugs,
The smooth glassy calm of the morning pond,
An old coat,
A new poem,
My library card,
And that my car keeps running
Despite all the miles.

And after three things,
More often than not,
I get on a roll and I just keep on going,
I keep naming and listing,

Until I lie grinning,
Blankets pulled up to my chin,
Awash with wonder
At the sweetness of it all.

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Let me know what you think about the prompt, or come back and add some of what you write in the comments. Know someone who might enjoy this prompt or others? Please share!

Photo by Rehina Sultanova on Unsplash

1. Yale rejected me as an undergraduate applicant, but I’m over it….

2. In a side hack, I’m finally ordering blackout curtains for our bedroom, which we desperately need. Seems like a good plan for the longest day of the year.

3. Intelligent Change sells a 5-minute journal to help connect gratitude and writing. I’ve not seen or used it, but it might help with the practice if you like the format.