Please fill my head up with good things

May 28, 2012 11:40 AM

I need to fill my head up with good things right now—any suggestions?

I'm trying to maintain a better frame of mind by imposing more happy (a healthy, even, non-saccharine happy) around myself. This is not my normal tendency! It feels awkward and wrong at times. For this reason, I think I need to develop a list of little and big everyday things that work to help one not slide back into a loop. As a side note, I am in therapy, I do exercise and walk everyday. I've also been listening to a lot of upbeat music lately (disco, electronica, funk) and is now what I would describe as a solid habit. So, please tell me what you do—what habits, books, movies, images, websites, or actions you take (naturally or deliberately) on a regular basis that play a major role in managing your mood?

Thank you!

posted by marimeko to health & fitness (31 answers total)

I think a really powerful thing that can help you feel happy is doing something for others. Volunteering. It can be very rewarding helping others and give you a big fat feeling of good stuff, plus feeling as though you have purpose and are contributing can be a real mood booster. Bonus, the types of people who volunteer are often very happy friendly positive types. Having them around as an influence could help as well.

That, and cuteoverload.com.
posted by gwenlister at 11:46 AM on May 28, 2012 [3 favorites]

- taking a walk outside for over an hour

- taking a long rambling bike ride

- using pleasant-smelling creams/oils

- eating food that i like

- hanging out with kids

- going out of town on the weekend
posted by costanza at 11:48 AM on May 28, 2012

Comedy - I watch Community and 30 Rock regularly (even after watching each episode several times, they still make me laugh) and listen to Answer Me This. I overdose on anything that makes me laugh out loud.
posted by smilingtiger at 11:48 AM on May 28, 2012

Cat macros. I'm serious.
posted by St. Alia of the Bunnies at 11:56 AM on May 28, 2012 [7 favorites]

Zooborns. I'm also serious.
posted by davidjmcgee at 11:57 AM on May 28, 2012 [6 favorites]

From another thread: Each night (or whenever), find three positive things you did that day and congratulate yourself on each one.

Also: Once a day, write down something you're thankful for. There's even an app for that.
posted by ceiba at 12:15 PM on May 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Hah, I was going to suggest Cute Overload, as well.

The small: Getting out in the sun helps. I love a good night-time walk, but sunshine has been shown to help relieve depression. (Doubly so, in my opinion, if you can manage a walk along a body of water, with trees swaying around in the breeze. But that last bit is mostly a personal preference thing.) Being in the presence of animals. (Is there a dog park near you? That's my favorite weekend morning pick-me-up.) Having good beer with good friends. Taking a few minutes each day to practice mindful meditation. Making sure to set aside time for reading, which is something I can easily overlook in my daily schedule, but is something I really love to do.

As far as slightly bigger things, what's helped me a lot over the last few years is developing hobbies. I do tend to fluctuate between them (I become obsessed with teaching myself something, fixate on it for a while, and then move onto something else), but being able to do something productive (and, in my case, specifically being able to work with my hands) makes me feel good about my life. It's empowering to be able to say to myself, "Hey, look what I can do!"

And, of course, eating well—both because of the real physical benefits, and because when I'm making healthy eating choices (and learning to cook new, interesting dishes!), I feel more confident. It's silly, but it makes me feel really good to accomplish basic adult things sometimes. If something else makes you feel accomplished, do that! (But still try to eat well.)
posted by divisjm at 12:21 PM on May 28, 2012 [3 favorites]

Wear fabulous shoes, bright colors, costume jewelry, fluorescent hair, awesome makeup/fragrance. Talk to your pets or friends' pets or the animals you see in your yard. It's hard to say anything to a kitten in a sad voice. Disco, electronica, and funk are perfect musical genres for DANCE PARTIES! Find one or make one! Go with friends or meet new ones! Eat delicious foods that you wouldn't normally buy, like fancy berries or fancy meat or fancy sauces or whatever you long for in the grocery store. And yes, nthing cat macros and cute animals and also this, which still makes me cry laughing. Be kind to others, whether that means volunteering, making food, bringing flowers to friends or helping them move/clean/do other stuff where it's so nice to have company. Yay, enjoy your happiness!
posted by Fui Non Sum at 12:21 PM on May 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Movies I watch when I'm feeling kind of shitty:

My Neighbor Totoro

Victor Victoria

My Fair Lady

Uncle Buck

Blazing Saddles

The Mouse That Roared


Also, Beach Party movies. Seriously. The gender politics are terrible, and you pretty much have to ignore any sort of external context, but for some reason they always cheer me up. Where The Boys Are is especially good.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 12:25 PM on May 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

I love being around people. I like going to busy restaurants, busy cafes, busy parts of town.

Also, I stay off of internet message boards, because all they do is make me more fighty.
posted by incessant at 12:33 PM on May 28, 2012

Dancing, spending time with animals, making your apartment or room a place you really like to be, putting all your bills on autopay (to minimize the amount you have to think about them), doing yoga or exercising and then using soaps, lotions, and/or shaving creams that you like.
posted by salvia at 12:41 PM on May 28, 2012

I opt for as much silliness as possible. Watch The Princess Bride (or read the 30th anniversary edition of the book) or The Muppet Show. Listen to Weird Al Yankovic, Tom Lehrer and old TV theme songs. And old comedy albums -- old, as in before comics were angry. Bob Newhart is great for stories, and there's an old album of Steve Allen just laughing...for an entire two-sides. If you can find old Dr. Demento comedy songs, or the kind of songs he played (via YouTube) it helps get the giggles started. (Try typing "Weird Al" or "Tom Lehrer" or whomever into Pandora to create a goofy music station.

Watch toddlers playing or videos of baby animals. (I am not remotely an animal person, and I get a huge grin from visiting Zooborns, previously mentioned.) Search YouTube for "laughing baby" and watch any/all of the videos.
posted by The Wrong Kind of Cheese at 1:31 PM on May 28, 2012

I love watching cute animals on Youtube.

Bathtime for Baby Sloths is bound to cheer anyone up!
More Too Cute Animal Planet videos. Take as many as needed to regain happiness.
posted by Meagan at 1:33 PM on May 28, 2012

Just want to pop in to say thanks—these are great suggestions! Please, keep 'em coming!
posted by marimeko at 1:38 PM on May 28, 2012

I like to have a large creative project to plan (generally not for actual execution, just to think over): like a large, ornamental vegetable garden (that was a good one), or my current one, planning a cafe menu. Having a big creative thing to think about and plan, helps keep my sometimes runaway thoughts in better order, and with plenty to consider, it takes a long time to fell 'done'. It is also pleasurable to imagine the results, and being creative is its own fun too, of course.
posted by thylacinthine at 1:48 PM on May 28, 2012

Also, a mini-dance party is really always a good idea. Pick your most favorite happy song, turn it up as loud as possible, and just boogie the hell down for as long as it lasts.

I always finish happier than when I started, even if I started out super happy. Yay, happiness!
posted by davidjmcgee at 2:02 PM on May 28, 2012

www.reddit.com/r/aww

Works every time.
posted by KaleidoscopeLife at 2:03 PM on May 28, 2012

Here are some of my happy bookmarks:

Things to be Happy About. I keep going through the calendar on this page until I find something that makes me smile. 14.000 different reason to be grateful.

Casteller video that always makes me smile and feel good.

Make Everything OK button that is stupid and useless. I liked it so much that I wrote a small curses application to do the same thing on my computer when I am not online.

Dance Like Nobody's Watching video.

Every Child Needs a Pet page is pictures of little kids with their pets.

I probably got most of these here or from Reddit.
posted by calumet43 at 2:20 PM on May 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

P.G. Wodehouse, particularly the Jeeves & Wooster, Blandings Castle and Psmith stories, but you can't really go wrong with pretty much anything post 1920.

Project Gutenberg offers My Man Jeeves (short stories) and Right Ho, Jeeves (a novel) in all HTML, text and the usual ebook formats.

While you were there, if you needed more escapism, you could do worse than downloading some of Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. Nothing like a glass or two of port, a few select cheeses and an hour or two with Holmes' mighty intellect.
posted by howfar at 2:20 PM on May 28, 2012

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic. I am very extremely serious.
Kiki's Delivery Service
Singin' in the Rain

Beautifully written terribly civilized nonfiction books, like Ex Libris, A Little History of the World, Animal Land, H V Morton's travel books.

Turn off the news.

Random, aimless internet browsing is my most horrible time, energy, and mood suck, so I rely on the nuclear option. Notice what websites and other media make you emotional and stressed about things out of your control (most of them I'll bet) and purge them. Ideally, have a short list of websites that feed you, put them on an rss reader, and limit your internet browsing to that. It may be down to Zooborns, Damnyouautocorrect, and Hark A Vagrant..

Exception: Horse Playing with Dog

Make things. I bake, knit, and draw, but anything that you make will improve your mood. On preview: making Big Projects is good, but balance with little relaxing no-pressure projects, like 'making cookies' level.

Get some plants!

I used to be given worry dolls as a kid, it may be something to take up again.
posted by Erasmouse at 2:22 PM on May 28, 2012 [1 favorite]

Dance more.
posted by egypturnash at 3:26 PM on May 28, 2012

I'm a little bit negative. Well, okay, recently a friend told me that I'm the most negative person he's ever met. I think that was a bit of hyperbole based on his lack of understanding of the way in which I relate events, but in any case, I am just not one of those exuberant cheerful woo-woo people. Not that there is anything wrong with exuberant cheerful woo-woo.

Listening to happy music or watching happy movies feels weird to me, too, like "why would I listen to that schlock when I could listen to Bob Dylan moaning about having no direction home?" However, I've been trying to do more happy-making things recently, if only for the sake of my mental health. Here's some stuff I've tried recently.

Last weekend, my great-uncle invited me to some dinner party with a bunch of his old people friends. It sounded dreadful. Before, I would have turned him down pretty much immediately. This time, I said yes. I regretted it. I thought about telling him I couldn't go after all. But since I said I would, I went to this party at a retirement home where I was the youngest person in the room by at least 45 years, and I had a blast (aided by a few glasses of wine). It turns out that old people are no more boring than I am. Some of them are even hilarious. They asked about my job and school, and were genuinely interested (or really good at faking), and they told me about their own experiences as twentysomethings. I helped one lady learn how to remove the DRM from her Kindle books and told her about a better program for managing and organizing her eBooks.

I made the worst, cheesiest 80s playlist ever. I call it "The Time Machine of Dubious Taste" and I queue it up when I've been listening to too much sad bastard music. By "worst" and "cheesiest" I mean things like Mr Mister's "Kyrie" and Toto's "Africa." Known fact: it's impossible to be sad while listening to Mr Mister.

I started going to bar trivia with a group of people every week. I sort of don't like people, but I really like trivia and am good at it. It's fun to socialize with people who appreciate you and want you around, even if it's because of something utterly silly, like your skill at answering questions about words of Greek and Latin origin. It's also secretly really satisfying to be right about stuff, and even more satisfying to have people acknowledge it. There, I said it.

Also, and I think this is the most important: every night, I make a list of everything I'm grateful for. Sometimes, it's dumb things, like "a really good sandwich," or "Mr Mister's song 'Kyrie'," but other times, they're actual big things. It is always good to be aware of all of the ways, even the sandwich-based ones, in which you're fortunate.

Despite my best efforts, I do slip up occasionally. I watched Leaving Las Vegas last week and then read the book as additional punishment. Then I read Battle Royale, which is depressing in both content and quality. My literary and cinematic choices still tend toward the dark and negative. I think some of this is just personality, and I don't worry about it too much. I'm really not unhappy, I just like unhappy things. And that is okay, to an extent.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 5:19 PM on May 28, 2012 [6 favorites]

Oh, and another one, which is small and silly: when people make spelling or grammar errors in their text messages or emails to me, they often correct themselves in a subsequent message, probably because I work in a language-related field and have kind of a serious personality.

I hate for anyone to feel self-conscious about stuff like this (plus, to be honest, it drives me nuts to get a bunch of *spelling? messages), so I've started replying with, "No worries, I'm not a prescriptivist!" and then we laugh. Well, maybe not laugh exactly, but at least my friends know that I'm not maintaining a secret database of all of their morphosyntactic errors for judgmental purposes after all.
posted by easy, lucky, free at 5:25 PM on May 28, 2012

The most important actions I take to deliberately put myself in a better headspace:

I work my figurative ass off at making my home environment as awesome as possible. That's something that I can control and make better.

I have a LOT of color and natural light in my house, but if it's dreary outside and I have to crank on the lights for a while to clear away some of the yuck in my head, I go ahead and do it. Using the good dishes, and playing happy music, that kind of stuff. Looking at my home through "guests eyes", what does a guest see when they come to my house? Bumping things up, a notch at a time. Brighter. Nicer. I got rid of any item that had a bad memory attached to it. If I looked at something, and it made me sad or mad or full of regret or whatever, it had to GO.

I continually, habitually change my home environment every single day.
posted by Grlnxtdr at 6:21 PM on May 28, 2012 [2 favorites]

Smile at inanimate objects. At the lamp, or the doorknob, etc. Doing this makes me instantly happy.
posted by whalebreath at 7:10 PM on May 28, 2012 [4 favorites]

In the morning when I'm going to work or getting ready for the day, I take 10 seconds to grin at myself in the mirror so that I go through the day knowing that someone was happy to see me and showed it with a smile! Sounds goofy, but it lifts up my mood right when I need it.

Also, sun, awkwardfamilyphotos.com, doing exactly whatever it is I FEEL like doing in a moment of freedom
posted by ramenopres at 8:59 PM on May 28, 2012

I'm reading through these, smiling :) This is great!
posted by marimeko at 9:08 PM on May 28, 2012

Grow some plants from seed to sprout, then plant them outside and take care of them until they mature. Gather your harvest. Gather the seeds, bottle and label them, and plant them again next year.

What kind of plants you grow is up to you and where you are, but maybe some flowers, maybe some fruits or vegetables, maybe some herbs, maybe some nice green stuff you could keep on your desk at work or give to people you love. You could focus on just one or two, or you can start a little green wave of them.

If you want to learn while you're at it, botany is a vast science to dabble in. If you want to grow herbs, there are millions of things to learn about plants in cooking, medicine, and perfume. Learning how to photograph plants could take ages.
posted by pracowity at 12:50 AM on May 29, 2012

I have a song playlist which I listen to when I'm feeling down which is full of 5-star-totally-awesome-happy songs and more often than not it works.

If I'm in a terrible mood, I write some of the negative thoughts on a piece of paper and send it through the shredder. Failing a shredder, tear it up, burn it, whatever just make sure you can't even read it any more. Sometimes the brain gets caught in a loop of negativity and for some people just getting it out of the brain gets it uncaught.

Also:

http://thenicestplaceontheinter.net/
posted by daysocks at 1:39 PM on May 29, 2012 [2 favorites]

Almost every day I have an excellent double cappucino from a really good coffee shop near my house. I try to pay attention and enjoy it. It makes me happy.

Find things you enjoy, and make them a habit. Eat really good food and pay attention while you're eating it. Visit beautiful places and really enjoy them. Keep social connections with people you like and who are good for you.
posted by overleaf at 2:47 PM on May 30, 2012

I subscribe to TUT's Notes from the Universe emails. They show up in my inbox every day and give me a little lift and/or shift my perspective. They're positive and fun.
posted by ejvalentine at 4:42 PM on May 31, 2012