Two simple changes that helped increase my happiness and improve my sleep

October 10, 2013health

Three of our key values at Buffer are “Always choose positivity and happiness”, “Have a focus on self-improvement” and “Live smarter, not harder”. As a result of these particular values, in the last few months I have tried to be quite deliberate about living as fully to the values as I can. Specifically, it has meant finding ways to work on improving my happiness and the quality of my sleep. I wanted to share a couple of neat small techniques which have helped me.

Forcing a smile and feeling the flow of gratitude and happiness

"It is not joy that makes us grateful. It is gratitude that makes us joyful." - David Rast

Åsa, one of our awesome Happiness Heroes at Buffer, Tweeted the above quote, and I have found it to be very true. I think there’s a clear link between gratitude and happiness, and this is an interesting correlation to take advantage of.

This morning I was walking to a meeting, and for some reason I didn’t feel as upbeat as I like to be. I was walking along, perhaps a little more sluggish than usual. I think my head was tilted down towards the ground, rather than feeling calm and confident and looking straight ahead.

As soon as I noticed how I felt, I decided to experiment with something. I’d discussed with Leo and others in the team the fact that smiling can actually be the trigger to feel happier, rather than needing to feel happy in order to smile. Leo had written on the Buffer blog about what happens to the brain when you smile.

So, I simply opened my mouth slightly, and started to force a smile. Even the smallest hint towards a smile changed my mood right away. I then adjusted my posture, looked up to the amazing clear San Francisco sky, and smiled wider. I then felt gratitude that I’ve been lucky enough to find myself in this place, and be able to live here in this magical city. These few minutes completely transformed my mood.

I’ve noticed that for myself, I have a habit of walking around with my mouth closed, and this makes it a little less natural for me to easily break into a smile. I’ve started to open my mouth more, and somehow this has helped me smile more (and make me happier). This seems to help me a lot.

Reflecting on why I woke up many times during the night

Back in March we introduced a perk at Buffer where everyone in the team gets a Jawbone UP. Since then I’ve become quite interested in my sleep and how I can improve it. I have always struggled with sleep, and sometimes convinced myself that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t need that much sleep. When studying I would often get by on 5 or 6 hours sleep. The fact is, however, that when I get 7 hours sleep compared to 6, I can feel a big difference in my focus and productivity during the day.

So in the last few months I started to experiment with all kinds of different things to improve my sleep. I tried wearing earplugs, going for evening walks to wind down, opening a window to cool down my room, etc. A key thing I found out by having the Jawbone UP and seeing the statistics of my sleep, was that I frequently wake up in the night. I then realized that I often wake up to go to the bathroom. Once I discovered this, I tried to stop the waking by drinking less before sleeping. This didn’t seem to stop me waking up, however.

I then began to start thinking about what happens when I wake up and go to the bathroom. When going to the bathroom of course I turn the light on, and this immediately starts to wake me up further. It also naturally led to me washing my hands, and in that process I found myself looking in the mirror and noticing sleep in my eyes. I’d therefore wash my face. By the end of this, I was almost completely awake.

Since I had conceded that I might not stop the waking, I decided to try something else. When I awoke, I simply stayed lying in bed and didn’t get up to go to the bathroom. I didn’t really need to go to the bathroom that bad. Interestingly, this small adjustment has improved my sleep massively, and has led to the difference you can see below:

With the same amount of time in bed, I can get around an extra hour of sleep, just by avoiding getting out of bed to go to the bathroom. It blew my mind how that small change could have this impact. And of course I sleep every single night, and so this leads to better focus and productivity every single day. Wow.

Photo credit: Diogo A. Figueira