Happiness QHS
Work-life balance, mindfulness, and the ambiguous search for happiness….it’s all anyone talks about anymore these days. There are many articles out there giving advice on these topics (some I’ve written as well), but sometimes acknowledging what makes you happy can be simple.
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine from medical school one night. She reminded me of something we used to do for each other during our third and fourth years of medical school, and I thought I’d share.
What Led Us to Focus On Happiness
So third and fourth years of medical school are some of the most fun, yet also the most tiring and stressful. It’s not just the clinical rotations but also the stress of figuring out what you want to do with the rest of your life and then applying for residency training spots and traveling for interviews.
Trying to balance all that as a student can make you feel lost. Plus, the time commitment of medical school brings on this mundane day-to-day schedule: eat, sleep, work, repeat. This results in misery, feeling like you don’t have a life and dreaming about days of the future when you’ll be happy again and have the time to enjoy yourself.
Sound Familiar?
Unfortunately, as we all know, that feeling doesn’t go away when you enter the real world. The stressors are the same, just at another level.
Email Accountability
Something my friends and I started to do to help each other out was to send each other emails each night. The subject line was “Happiness QHS.” QHS is medical speak for “before bed.” We held each other accountable for these emails; if someone didn’t reply or do her part, there would be an immediate text or phone call to check in and see what was wrong.
Happiness QHS
So what exactly did we mean by “happiness QHS”? In the emails, the aim was to jot down the things that had made us happy that day or brought a smile to our faces.
Sometimes the things we wrote down were super basic:
“I love my minty toothpaste!”
“Hot cup of tea”
“went to taco bell.”
The idea was to identify something positive each day, no matter how mundane, how bad the day had been, or how “blah” you may feel about life. It was meant to force us to pay attention and look for the happy, especially because we held each other accountable for it each night.
The Result
It worked. The accountability and the simplicity of what we did helped all of us. We paid more attention to the little things, and by sharing our happiness, we multiplied its effect. Plus, it strengthened our support system. During interviews and travels, we knew we had people to check in with and to lean on if we needed to.
How Can You Identify Your Own Happiness
We used emails because back then (ha), group text wasn’t so big of a thing (or maybe we were just behind the times). But I encourage you to try something like this. Ultimately, the little things make up our lives, and it’s so important to identify and appreciate them.
Find your people, or person, and establish a pattern where you are each accountable for checking in and for showing that you are making an effort to look for the happy in your everyday. Hopefully, once you start, it’ll become easier until it’s just a natural thing that you do!
Final Thoughts
Happiness is not about getting to the next step in life or accomplishing the next big thing. It’s about what we already have and do and finding contentment right where we are.
You can boost your mood by identifying the little things each day that bring you happiness, even a little bit. You’ll also come to realize how much you have to be grateful for.
So, start looking around and see everything you have going for you.
Pinnable image courtesy of unsplash
