I Signed Up for a Happiness Challenge
Today is the first day of the New Year, and I just signed up for the New York Times Happiness Challenge “for a more fulfilled, connected 2023”. Each day, starting tomorrow and for a week, I will receive a new challenge designed to address a different aspect of my “social universe” to help me strengthen my relationships.
Research unequivocally points to solid relationships as essential in leading a happy and fulfilling life. Starting tomorrow, with the arrival of the first “science-backed” challenge, I’ll document my experience. All my naturally inclined ideas are just a bit too heavy for a January posting. Maybe next time, I’ll write about NIMBY Entitlement regarding Land Use Policy or Gender Bias in the Workplace. To start the year, I’ll take a more positive self-improvement approach.
Day 1
Today’s challenge is super easy – a quiz to assess my current “social fitness.” Akin to physical fitness, treating the health of our relationships is as important as our physical health. Relationships don’t survive without sustenance – they can atrophy like our muscles. The questions were developed by Dr. Robert Waldinger at Harvard Medical School and will give me my baseline of the range and strength of my current relationships.
I was asked how satisfied I felt about the number of close friends I have, even the number of people I could call in the middle of the night if I had an emergency. This question reminded me of the relationship label we gave to best friends (a long time ago!) who we could call if we had a one-night stand, and in the morning, the stranger you had the fling with was lying dead next to you. (Is that an 80s thing?) We all need a friend like that, just in case, though my risk of finding myself in this situation has always been zero.
After the thirteen questions, I was assessed at “You are in tip-top social shape,” which was a little disappointing. This challenge is not off to a great start.
Day 2
Today, I am to call someone I love. The call should be pre-arranged and scheduled only for eight minutes. Hearing someone’s voice versus just texting increases the quality of the interaction, but a common problem and the reason many of us shy away from communicating by phone, apparently, is the problem of a call going on just a bit too long and not wanting to be impolite and ending it. It’s true that I am too often aware of time, like it is nipping at my heels. Not sure this will work, though, since a quota of minutes seems a bit rigid and unfriendly.
So, I did not text in advance and just called G. She surprisingly picked up and was perfectly amenable to an eight-minute call after I explained the purpose. She thought it was a great idea and was super on board with the time limit since she also didn’t have much time. After the eight minutes were up, we were not even close to feeling done but said goodbye, nonetheless. It was invigorating, and the eight-minute setting was brilliant, leaving us both wanting more. I can see that this quick call method would provide more points of connection, but not sure if it’s more meaningful over the long term. The fact that it was novel and unexpected was what made it fun. But I get the point – phone calls are a valuable way to stay connected that we often neglect because it seems easier to text or email. Point taken.
Day 3
Today, I am to talk to a stranger. This should be easy as I encounter strangers regularly on my way to and from work on the little ferry boat that takes me between Science World and the West End.
Dogs – such an excellent conduit for a conversation with a stranger. As I waited for the little ferry, I struck up a conversation dutifully with an elderly gentleman holding a small dog. He told me his dog loves the ferry, and it was a daily round trip for them and often their only outing in a day. It reminded me how easily strangers approach me when I’m with Roger, my Golden Retriever, and how so many people in my neighbourhood seem to know Roger. I swear I have never met these people, but somehow, they know Roger. His social fitness is through the roof.
Day 4
Day four has me doing a living eulogy. I will do this, but I will not include it here since it will be too long. Instead, I will share the bonus-points task of writing a short gratitude list, and it will be for Johnny, my husband and Good-Hearted Knight, his self-conferred title when trying to convince me to date him when we were just eighteen.
Thank you for insisting, back when we were in first-year university, that I must be your girlfriend. I had never had anyone fight for me as you did, and your efforts were foreign and overwhelming. But you didn’t give up and showered me with Safeway bulk candy, stolen daffodils, hundreds of photocopied love notes littered all over campus and even convinced your friends to dress up as jesters and show up at my residence door in tights holding giant banners. You got pulled out of a tree outside my window drunk as a skunk by campus cops waiting for me to come back from a date. Though flattering, all this made me think you were pretty odd and not my type. After we finally dated for a few months, at the urging of my single friends, I broke up with you but again, you were insistent that it was a big mistake, and the breakup only lasted a few hours. Decades later, I am grateful you pushed through my idiocy.
Thank you for taking care of our family and me in such a wholehearted way. You are always looking to fill us with your soulful (and sometimes experimental) cooking and have no expectations of me. You are often alone cleaning the kitchen while I am doing goodness knows what.
Thank you for being my best friend. If anyone ever asked me who is the best person I know or have ever known, I would, hands down, without a doubt, say you are.
Day 5
This task is asking me to connect with a work colleague. This is a regular occurrence already, so no need to document it, and I will skip writing about it. Social connectedness at work is also a whole separate post which I hope to do one day. And this is getting long!
Day 6 - Last Day
The final challenge is to commit for the year to be more aware of the work it takes to keep our social bonds alive and well. Maybe I unconsciously took this challenge, feeling safe that it would not be too hard and that I was, in effect, setting myself up to get a nice pat on the back. So, here is one area I will commit to change. I will try to spend more time with my parents. They are 80 and 86, fiercely independent and self-sufficient. Who knows how much longer they will be around? I want them to fully understand how much I admire and appreciate them. As requested by the Day 4 task, I am committing to writing a living eulogy for both of them before the year is done.
I am also grateful for the things that allow me to have a full social plate quickly. I have a job and great work-mates. I have a family. I am easily mobile. Those are all aspects that help me to be social. Not everyone is so lucky. Loneliness is a documented killer and affects so many people today. When I speak to someone in my apartment building, I realize that may be the only conversation that person has all day. And that leads me to my second commitment. I will get out of my head as often as possible and chat with strangers I encounter in my building rather than rushing through. Maybe that will make me the annoying person in the corridor, but I’m willing to take that risk. Human connections, even fleeting ones, are much better than none.
And finally, even though the thirteen questions in the base-line quiz gave me the validation of “tip-top social fitness shape”, admittedly, I know that if I took the view of how I impact others, I could do a better job with the people in my life right now. This challenge has allowed me to see that maybe I need to compartmentalize my working life more to make meaningful time with my friends and family. I am going to try and keep my laptop closed all weekend and take control of how I use my time. As my daughter pointed out to me recently, just because I am in my PJs, doesn’t mean I’m not working. Hello, 2023, wish me luck.
Reference Article: Well’s a seven-day challenge here
