It’s about the little things
Keeping a positive diary can be difficult at first. This is because you have not yet learned to enjoy the little things in life.
Therefore, you automatically start looking for great positive experiences with strong positive feelings.
In other words, things and events that make you really happy and euphoric for several minutes or even hours.
However, this is not the goal. The goal of a positive diary is to learn to enjoy the very little things in life.
These are the things and events that, for one or more seconds — or even milliseconds — make you feel good or put a smile on your face.
Lasting happiness
The key to lasting happiness and satisfaction lies in being able to enjoy the little things in life.
“Enjoy the little things in life because one day you`ll look back and realize they were the big things.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr, American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels
You don’t have to learn to enjoy big positive things. Everyone is happy when he or she wins the lottery or finds true love.
The frequency of things
Big positive things do not happen to us on a daily basis and are usually not entirely within our control.
As much as we’d like to, we can’t win the lottery every day, find our ideal partner, get a promotion, or take our dream trip.
Small positive things happen every day. You just have to be willing to notice them and learn to enjoy them, even if it’s just for a second, or a millisecond.
Every day we can enjoy the sun in our face, the birds chirping, a friendly greeting or comment, a nice song on the radio, and so on.
“Great things happen not just by impulse, but as a succession of little things that are connected.”
~ Vincent van Gogh, one of the most famous and influential painters
Lasting happiness lies in being able to enjoy the little things. Small positive things happen daily, making them a constant source of small moments of happiness.
All you need to do to become happy is to learn to enjoy these little moments and use them to feed your positive mindset, thoughts and feelings.
Make it smaller
When it is difficult to identify small positive things, it can help to break an experience into smaller sub experiences.
Just as each dish consists of different ingredients, every experience also consists of smaller experiences or components.
By identifying the different components of an experience, it is easier to identify small positive things.
So instead of registering the experience “I ate healthy” you can divide this experience into sub-experiences by looking at the individual steps you have taken to make this experience possible.
Sub experiences of “I ate healthy”
- I decided to eat healthy
- I went to the store
- I bought healthy things
- I made a salad
- I made a salad dressing
- I cooked potatoes
- I cooked vegetables
- I fried meat
- I set the table
- I cleared the table
- I put the dishes in the dishwasher
In the same way, you can divide every positive experience into smaller positive sub experiences.
“The smaller you make your positive experiences, the richer your source of potential moments of happiness.”