Good Life Tips: Have a Good Day

Tips, advice, and pointers for living a happy life with the good days exercise, gleaned from the latest research of positive psychology.

The new and growing field of positive psychology offers much good advice with loads of tips to help your pursuit of happiness and the good life.

Good Life Tip:

We all hear the expression "have a good day," probably many times each day. This is sometimes said as a sincere wish that a good day befalls us, but often it seems an automatic and insincere ending to a transaction. But what if we set out to create a good day for ourselves?

To do this, set up a journal or daily record and record your major activities each day for at least two weeks, preferably for a full month. At the end of each day, evaluate the "goodness" of that day on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is one of the best days of your life, 5 is an average day, and 1 is one of the worst days of your life.

At the end of the two or four week period go back over your records and look for a correlation between good days, i.e. days you scored 6 or higher, and your activities for that day. Look for activities that are present in some form during each good day.

Now look for ways to include these activities in more of your days. In my case, a good day often includes completing one or more activities that I value, especially when I can see some result. Completing an article such as this is one such activity.

Even small activities can combine to provide that good day feeling, especially when I have started the day by listing them and I end the day with a list of items crossed off and completed.

Source: A Primer in Positive Psychology, Christopher Peterson