Insight: If You Wanna Be Happy

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Recently I listened to part of a podcast featuring a so-called expert discussing her series of books instructing people how to be happy.

The podcast’s host described how this “happiness expert” has sold more than two million books and is one of the most requested public speakers currently in America. Using what she says are scientific resources while pursuing opportunities and experiences fostering growth and learning is this author’s mantra and she advocates that self-knowledge and strong relationships are the keys to unlocking happiness.

Listening to her share her rationale about how to create happiness made me think that I too could detail what makes me happy and not charge anyone a dime for my thoughts on the subject.

Without further ado, here’s Ed’s Happiness Rules, free of charge:

Rule #1: Surround yourself with upbeat people. I’ve found that I’m happiest when I reduce the amount of time I spend with negative people, whiners and complainers, anyone who is easily annoyed or know-it-all Debbie Downers. Anyone who makes me laugh is a great way to start my day and I believe that associating with upbeat, happy and positive people always rubs off on me.

Rule #2: Inject something of personal significance into every day. Hardly a day goes by when I am not listening to music or spending time with my baseball card collection. Music does indeed soothe my soul and remains a huge part of my personal happiness equation. My music makes me feel nostalgic and content and so does reviewing my baseball cards as it produces a similar feeling for me. No matter what it is that is significant to you, I recommend finding out what that is and enjoying it as often as possible.

Rule #3: Eat breakfast for dinner. At least one night a week, forget spending hours preparing a meatloaf, making mashed potatoes and tossing a salad for the family. Trust me, a hearty stack of buttermilk pancakes, scrambled eggs, hash browns, fruit, toast and juice at dinnertime always leads to a very happy evening in my household.

Rule #4: Sleep when you are tired. I do have a regular bedtime that I turn in each night, but during the college basketball season, I occasionally skip that bedtime to stay up late watching my favorite team play on the west coast. Believe it or not, by the time the games are over, I sleep soundly through the rest of the night.

Rule #5: Take a walk. I do not go to the gym each morning and I do not spend hours every day working out or exercising. However, I do enjoy taking my dog for walks and just being outside in the fresh air and trying to keep up with my canine friend does work wonders for me.

Rule #6: Focus on what you can control while watching the news. Whenever I sit down for an extended period and watch the news on television lately, it seems that I quickly become overwhelmed with the state of the world. Multiple airplane crashes, wartime massacres, starvation, looming economic problems, injustice, terrorism, natural disasters and diseases can certainly drive a person to the looney bin faster than any attempt to change the channel. After consuming a half-hour of televised daily misery and conjecture, what I do is try and think of all the positive things happening in my life and discount those uncertain world and national events that I simply have no control over. Turning off the non-stop barrage of cable news is beneficial.

Rule #7. Think only good thoughts about other people. We live in such a divisive society today that makes us distrust everyone and everything. It’s not easy to be kind and compassionate and not find shortcomings in others that you see out and about every single day. I recall Michael Jordan once saying during an interview that he had missed 26 game-winning shots during his professional career and yet he didn’t stop taking them, and he ended up winning six NBA championships. Jordan credits his teammates thinking good thoughts about him and having the confidence that he could accomplish what he did in basketball. During my own career in journalism, I’ve discovered that telling someone something positive about them can truly make a difference in how they view themselves and their work.

Rule #8: Let go of the future. We all have worries about what lies ahead for us down the road, be it old age, poor health, loneliness, a shortage of money because of the rising cost of living or losing our close and cherished friends to cancer or heart disease. I recommend forgetting all the worry and angst and simply taking things day by day. Otherwise, anxiety and depression take charge and control of your life, and that’s not what life should be about, no matter where your journey takes you.

It's my contention that as I go through life, my happiness is not about being enormously wealthy or blessed with athletic talent or possessing movie-star looks. What makes me the happiest are the little things that I’m truly grateful for such as a loving wife and family, a new granddaughter born March 5, and wonderful friends. <

Andy Young: Hibernate, then trade

By Andy Young

Ten hours after leaving for my place of employment in the wee hours of the morning, I returned home, utterly exhausted. Collapsing into a chair beside a west-facing window, I decided to treat myself to a chapter or two of reading before tending to my evening chores. Determined to make the most of the day’s remaining natural light, I opened my book…and promptly fell fast asleep.

Sometime later I woke up in complete and total darkness. Groggily groping my way to the nearest light switch, I cursed myself for not only having slept through dinner, but likely upsetting my sleeping schedule as well.

It was 4:50 p.m.

Seasonal Depression Disorder (SAD) starts affecting people like me every year in mid-December, when the part of the day we most look forward to after rolling out of bed in the morning is rolling back into it that night.

Societies that have existed for centuries at extreme upper latitudes have had generations to adjust to an annual spell of extended darkness; it’s in their collective DNA. But for those of us living where inland bodies of water don’t stay frozen from September through early May, driving to work in the dark and coming home in the dark for what seems like months is the draggiest of drags, particularly when the trip home generally concludes no later than 4 p.m.

While I’ve never been a huge fan of technology, I’ve got to give credit where credit is due. Whoever invented headlights that turn themselves off automatically after the car is shut off should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom, even if their creator resides somewhere outside the good old U S of A. Prior to that bit of inspiration countless drivers (well, at least this one) were annually treated, on some beautiful weekend day in April, to coming back to a motor vehicle with a dead battery. That was thanks to having started their car earlier that morning, reflexively turning on the headlights, driving to their destination, arriving there in broad daylight, and then forgetting to turn said headlights off.

Speaking of technology, I wish today’s innovators would take a break from inventing rocket ships for uber-wealthy space tourists, pint-sized vacuum cleaners, or talking computers that will play their user’s favorite Barry Manilow song (“Siri: Copacabana!”) and come up with something more useful.

Hey movers and shakers: how about conjuring something that will allow an individual to sleep from the day after Thanksgiving through April 16, and while doing so, banking what would be their normal hours of consciousness for use at a later date? Or even better, make it possible to bundle up the hours they’ve accumulated during their hibernation and trade them to some skiing/snowboarding fanatic who’d agree to sleep through their summers, bank those hours of unconsciousness, and then swap? I’d gladly give up December through March in exchange for some winter-lover’s May, June, July, and August. I’d even throw in all of April and early May if they’d give me September and the first half of October.

Were such a deal available, I’d make it in a heartbeat. Sure, I’d be giving up New Year’s Eve and Day, Christmas, and St. Paddy’s Day. But imagine living a year that included two Memorial Days, two July 4s, and two Labor Days. And by generously ceding the second half of October, I’d get to enjoy leaf-peeping season, but leave the drudgery of leaf-raking season to someone else.

Going winterless and having two summers every year is something I hope to dream about when I go to bed tonight.

At 5:30 p.m. <

Andy Young: A chance for some second chances?

By Andy Young

Special to The Windham Eagle 

The clocks get set back this coming weekend, ending Daylight Saving Time for 2021.

Getting an extra hour of sleep will be nice. But there’s something else I’d like to try doing with this Sunday’s bonus 60 minutes.

This impending time change could, if an experiment I’m trying works out, revolutionize life on our planet.

My motivation? Well, like virtually everyone I know, I’ve done some things in my lifetime I’d like to alter.

But what would I undo, assuming I had the power to change history?

Well, I made the last out of a 7-5 loss in the final game of my last Little League baseball season, fouling out to the first baseman with two out and two runners in scoring position. Had I gotten a game-tying (or game-winning) hit, the Easton Hawks would have forced a playoff for the second half championship against the Easton Bears, and had we won that game we would have earned the right to play the Bears again for the championship.

Okay. Maybe that wasn’t a life ruiner. But looking back, I passed on a couple of job opportunities in the broadcast industry I most likely shouldn’t have. I probably whiffed on a potentially life-altering relationship or two, like when I told my then-girlfriend who was returning after a year in Central America that I couldn’t pick her up at the airport when her flight landed because I had a softball game to play. Conversely, I was briefly involved in a couple of short-term liaisons that in retrospect I (and the other party) would have been better off skipping.

I shouldn’t have driven that borrowed moped down a flight of stairs, and even though there weren’t cell phones back then to record my stupidity for posterity, that’s an incident I’d like to erase. I’d love to change the course of events on that day in Montana when some knucklehead barreled through a stop sign, nearly totaling my car (and me) in the process. Had I just left home five minutes earlier (or later) I’d have avoided that fiasco. And I’d have avoided considerable fiscal damage a decade or so ago if I could undo my decision to, after looking both ways and seeing nothing, go through a traffic light in South Portland at 5 a.m. one weekday morning. Who knew a police car manned by an officer with some $230 tickets he was itching to distribute was hiding in a nearby parking lot?

The point of all this rueful reminiscing: I think I’ve stumbled on a way to erase past mistakes, and I’m going to test my theory this coming Sunday morning. The plan: I’ll spill some water on my kitchen floor at 1:30 a.m. (EDT). Then when I wipe it up at 1:29 a.m. (EST), it’ll mean the water was never spilled in the first place. I’ll have successfully erased time!

There are a few minor details I haven’t worked out yet, the primary one being how to negotiate my way through (or around) the space-time continuum. But if my unorthodox theory proves correct and the kitchen floor remains dry when 1:45 a.m. EST rolls around, then I’ll have solved the mystery of the until-now elusive fourth dimension. And if that’s the case, well, it won’t be long before I’m interviewing with ESPN, driving to the airport to meet that incoming flight from Guatemala, and slamming a game-winning home run in a vital Little League game.

And if by some chance the problem of manipulating time proves insurmountable?

Then I suppose I’ll just take the extra hour of sleep. <