Your brain has many amazing features, but one of those features is the ability to ignore what it views as irrelevant information. For example: your nose. Smack-dab as your nose is in the middle of your face, every time you open your eyes you should have some amount of your own nose in your field of vision. And yet, we typically live our lives without noticing the shadow of our noses interfering with our view. This is because the brain focuses on what it wants to focus on, and allows other stimulus to be ignored. The brain knows that the nose is not the thing it should be focusing on when your eyes are open, so it “deletes” the image of your nose from your vision. This can be considered a form of “noise filtration,” where the brain helps us out by limiting unnecessary data for us to pay attention to.
But––if you close one eye and actually look for it, maybe you can see your own nose with a little effort!
In our busy world of deadlines, emails, assignments, responsibilities––not to mention the stress of managing numerous relationships of all kinds––it can be easy to move through live feeling almost a sense of victimhood to our own emotions.
Have you ever felt that? That sense of your feelings just happening to you, while you are trying to just get by and make things work out the best you can?
A secret of life is that happiness is like your nose. Like your nose, happiness is an important part of life… but one that can be easily overlooked if we don’t work with our brains to notice it.
Just as we have to choose to look for our own nose, and then we can see it, sometimes we have to choose to look for our own happiness… and then we can see it.
In my own busy life, sometimes I forget to notice the things that make me happy. It can be so much easier to just float along through life thinking about my emails and deadlines and projects, than to stop and actually choose to enjoy the journey. How often do we take our hands off the keyboard and choose to look at the sky instead? How often do we take a deep breath, eyes closed, and revel in the joy that can come from something so simple as breathing?
Every day we have the opportunity to harness the power of choice to live our best life: to choose into the little things that inspire happiness, and to choose into noticing when we are happy.
It can feel impossible to make time for happiness while on the job, but in reality it can be possible. Depending on our situations, we can choose:
- To take thirty seconds (or perhaps a little longer!) to stretch our bodies and shake out the stress of the day
- To stand by a window and enjoy the view
- To consciously remember a happy time in life and choose to smile about it
- To breathe deeply with eyes closed, even just for a moment
- To think of something we are grateful for
Making time to engage in little happiness-boosting choices can make a big difference over time. Doing one of these things once an hour would take maybe five minutes total out of a workday, but could make a huge difference.
The other thing we get to choose is to notice when we are happy.
Have you ever been happy, and didn’t realize it?
Sometimes this happens to me. I am the mother of five beautiful children, and sometimes in the throes of work and childrearing I can forget that my children really and truly do make me happy. In the middle of sleep deprivation and stress, I can forget that my entire life can make me happy. It requires me to make a conscious choice to notice the joy my family and work bring me, and to take those deep breaths, and choose into gratitude.
What in your life brings you joy? Can you choose to notice that joy a little bit more today?
Today I invite you to not just choose to boost your happiness in simple ways, but also to choose to notice when you are happy. You may be happier than you think. Just like our brains filter out our noses from our view, sometimes we can accidentally filter out the joy in our lives that sits in plain sight.
What joy in plain sight will you notice today?