Kyla Miller: A Writing Portfolio

Methods

 

So how the heck am I going to make myself happier in a month? After all, haven’t I unknowingly been making myself happier by choosing things to surround myself with things that I love, like friends that are like me, a major that I’m genuinely interested in, etc etc etc. Yes, but I want more. In fact, so many people think that they’re happy enough, but I don’t want to be happy ENOUGH. I want to take the already awesome life that I have, and make it that much better.

 

So…again, how the heck am I going to do this in a month?Granted, the constraints of this course have limited me in my ability to prove long term happiness, but who says that my pursuit for happiness ends when my project does? For now, I have to just work with what I have and try to employ as many methods as I can (within reason).

 

Well, what are those methods, you may be asking.

 

It started with a pledge: “I, Kyla Miller, pledge to try my absolute hardest to make myself a happier person over the next month. I will follow the steps that I have outlined to a “T” and record my data accurately. Although it may seem tedious and unrealistic at first, it will be worth it. This is my happiness, this is MY life. I’m going to make it great.”

 

Based off the methods that I came across online and through my scholarly research, I decided to do several different things. First, I decided to track my happiness via trackmyhappiness.org. I decided this was the best way for me to get solid results that I could analyze, and I unfortunately didn’t have 100 days to complete the 100happydays challenge. This allowed me to get scored 3 times a day doing various activities. My hope was that I would be able to be conscious about my happiness multiple times during the day, which would hopefully improve my mood while also giving me great personal data.

 

Secondly, I subscribed to a service that sends you a happiness quote of the day. I would read the quote that was emailed to me every morning and try to apply it to my day. I would periodically write in a personal journal about these as well. My hope was that this would be a good way for me to start my day and really think about how I can change my day to make this quote apply.

 

I then decided that I would keep a log of 3 main actions: time spent exercising, time spent on facebook, amount of sleep that I got the night before. I found in numerous places that exercising can increase your mood substantially, so I made a goal to exercise 5 times a week for at least 45 minutes. Additionally, there was ample evidence that social media can make you feel more depressed and less confident with your own life (Chou & Edge, 2012), so I made it a goal to spend an hour or less on Facebook a day. Although I do use other social media platforms, Facebook is the one that I spend 90% of my time on. I was able to track my time spent on Facebook by downloading software on my computer that monitored my internet activity. Finally, I made it a goal to get 8 consecutive hours of sleep a night. I already knew that I am much more irritable and stressed when I don’t get 8 hours (some people can function on 6, but that’s just not me!) I logged the time I went to sleep and when I woke up to get a total time for the night.

 

After logging these three things a day, I would also rate my overall happiness for the day on a scale of 1-10. I made sure to do this past 8pm, so I could get a more accurate reading for my overall happiness over the course of the entire day. This allowed me to track my own happiness levels independently of the happiness app, which gave me my own informal validity check. My hope was that the happiness levels were similar between my own log and that of the app upon completion of the project.

 

Well that seems like a lot to do & keep track of…

 

But wait, there’s more!

 

The last goal I made for myself was to spend more time with my family and friends. Being an out of state student, I’m unable to spend as much time with my family and I would hope, but I tried to call my mom, dad and sister once a week. I also tried my best to do more with my friends during the week. Usually, I am so caught up in school, working my 3 jobs, and doing extra curricular activities during the week that I rarely am amble to spend time with my friends until the weekend. Even though I was still just as busy as before, I used what little free time I did have to do fun things with my roommates. After all, this is my senior year, I’ve got to live a little! ;) Instead of keeping a log of these activities, which just seemed way too formal, I added these experiences to my journal. 

 

So...how did it go?