Active April for Happiness

Okay the daylight hours are getting longer and generally warmer. What a great time to start doing some little things to raise your spirits. The Action for Happiness daily calendar provides daily suggestions to get you going. However you can always substitute them with your own. Read on to find out how you can get something from Active April for Happiness. What do you have to lose other than the few minutes it takes to read this helpful little article?

Why Using the Calendar is a Good Idea

Using the calendar as a trigger or cue to action will actually kick start you. Waiting to feel in the right mood to do something almost inevitably leads to you do nothing at all. As coaches often say “The first step is the biggest”.

Read on for a few tricks on how to take the first step.

Getting Over The Negatives

Deciding to give this a go is setting up a new habit. Not only that it may mean replacing an old habit with the new one.

The negatives can be numerous and provide an easy option to incorrectly justify why you should stop before you even start. So let’s have a quick look at some of the main objections and how you can get over them.

I Have Good Intentions but Other Things always crop Up.

One of the biggest reasons in not doing something is not scheduling that activity correctly. Even if you have an action that is perfect for you, it may well not happen unless you give some serious consideration how you kick it off.

Try setting a specific time the night before e.g. 9:00 am, 2:00pm etc. You may miss the time slot that you selected and use that as an excuse to say “Well there’s always tomorrow”. To avoid this try another technique referred to as habit stacking. For example the first thing you may do when getting up is make a drink. So that is habit 1. The next action is Get dressed (habit 2). After that you can insert your action for the day. Your action is habit 3. That’s just a simplistic example but it illustrates the point. Instead of relying on a fixed time slot it now becomes a matter of stacking all your other daily habits on top of the first for the day. So you can even use that little trick to incorporate all your other takes you want to achieve in a day or half day etc.

I Cannot Possibly Find Time to do this every Day.

Even if you only manage to do one action per week, it is still better than nothing at all. You can then give yourself a pat on the back. Hey, it can then give you further incentive to do more next month.

What’s the Point if it’s only for a Month?

Who says it has to be? The whole point is that you are adopting a new habit. So instead why not view April being the starting point of the upgraded you.

Yeah Great but the Suggested Actions arent for Me

Well we have already touched on this. Consider the actions in the calendar to be a suggestion. Substitute your own to ones that you feel are more in line with you. Doing so will only help you do something anyway.