Come on, get HAPPY

Sometimes I wake up and I’m just not in a good mood. Typically this happens on Mondays. It's always sad waking up and realizing you have to go to work for 8 hours. Especially when the sun is shining, its 75 degrees in January, and the beach is 5 steps from your front door. Warm week days like this kinda tick me off. Maybe it’s because while it’s warm and sunny outside and the unemployed are off running around and getting tan, I’m stuck in a cubicle, in freezing air conditioning.

I was grumpy on the way to work this morning. And I just couldn’t shake it. Even after I got my morning coffee. As I drove to work I thought of something I heard in a college psychology lecture. A lecturer told us he drove to work in the morning with a pen in his mouth between his top and bottom teeth. If you stick a pen in your mouth like this you will find that you are almost forced to smile. I’m sure driving to work like that and seeing other peoples weird stares at you would make you smile even more. By the time he got to work he would find he was in a better mood. In a way, he was MAKING his own happiness. He was choosing to be happy and therefore he was.

Whenever I wake up in a bad mood I want to put on tattered jeans and sweats and go to work looking like a slob. I try to force myself to do just the opposite. I am a firm believer that dressing nice makes you feel better about yourself. Today I dressed up ( I even wore heels!). I tricked myself into feeling happy, good, and ready to go…..and you know what? It worked!

"If you want to be happy, be." ~ Leo Tolstoy

Day 11