The Science Behind Making Yourself Happier

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You may have heard that the third Monday in January is referred to as “Blue Monday” because it is the most depressing day of the year. Although it may seem spot-on, there is actually no research showing that this date is any more depressing than others and the idea of “Blue Monday” was actually invented as a PR stunt by a travel company to convince people to book vacations in order to cure their January blues. However, there is a reason that this concept has caught on— this time of year often feels bleak. And it particularly feels bleak as a parent, when you are also dealing with constant illnesses and snow days, kids cooped up inside, and a lingering debt from the holidays.

So if you are feeling down this time of year, how can you make yourself happier?

When you become a parent, your own happiness seems to become an afterthought. Parents often become so focused on maximizing their children’s happiness that they neglect their own. That is, until you read research informing you that happier parents are more likely to have happier children. You might agree, in theory, that your own happiness is also important but, by the time you get the chance to focus on your own happiness, you realize that you have no idea how to actually make yourself happy. You may have heard about “self-care” or about practices that you frankly don’t have time for such as meditation, pursuing a new hobby, or journaling but do these actually increase happiness?

Where does a busy parent start when they want to try to boost their happiness?

A recent review article provided a summary of high-quality studies that examined strategies to increase happiness in adults. This review included only pre-registered experiments (translation: studies in which the experimenters had to report what analyses they planned to do in advance so they couldn’t just keep running analyses until they got a positive result). This review defined “happiness” as high levels of life satisfaction, high levels of positive emotions, and low levels of negative emotions. This review found that the following practices may be actually linked to increased happiness:

1. Valuing time over material possessions: Researchers gave participants $40 and told half of them to spend it on something that would save them time (such as paying for someone to clean your house or to mow