5 Happiness Hacks for Families

Lindsay Miller  0:07  
You're listening to The Stress Nanny podcast, and I'm your host, Lindsay Miller. I'm here to help you keep an eye on your family stress levels. In our fast paced lives, the ability to manage stress has never been more important for kids or adults. When it comes to stress, we have two choices, we can decrease stress or increase our resilience to it. Here on the number eight ranked stress podcast, I interview experts and share insights to help you do both. When you tune in each week, you'll bring your stress levels down and your resilience up so that stress doesn't get in the way of you living your best life. I'm so glad you're here. 

Hey, there, this is Lindsay, I'm so glad you're here. Some weeks on the podcast, I interview guests. And some weeks I share insights and tips for my own practice and research. And this week, it will be me sharing a few more ideas on how to create a home filled with happiness. There are researchers including Christine Carter, whose work I'm going to be quoting today who study this right who look at happiness, look at Happy Kids, happy parents and kind of identify some of the factors that go into creating long term sustainable happiness. And that's not to say we don't have struggles or frustration or conflict. But it's to say like, in the aggregate, the tenor of our home is one of happiness, like, we can look at the time we spend together, or our kids can look back on their time in our home, and see like a general thread of happiness that will carry with them as they leave our homes and go out into whatever life you know, hands them in the future in the world. So today, I just want to talk through some of the steps that Dr. Carter shares in her book raising happiness. And there are 10 steps, we're just going to go over a few of them today. But she has again, these research based ideas and then practices that we can implement to effectively raise the happiness level of our of our children. And interestingly, the first one, I'm going to share five today, the first one is put on your own oxygen mask. So the first one is take good care of yourself, which is maybe seeming counterintuitive, because sometimes children's happiness does not directly correlate with adult happiness. However, in my own work and study I've seen over and over again that when parents are caring for themselves, it's easier for them to show up with patience, and with a desire to connect with their children, right. And in my own life, I see that too. If I'm strapped and overwhelmed, it's really challenging for me to like dig deep and find that reservoir of patience that I need sometimes as a parent. And so the first step to raising the happiness in your home is to take good care of yourself. So what is something daily that you're doing to care for yourself, maybe it's just taking a few minutes to read a book at lunch or after you drop the kids off. Maybe it's at night having an herbal tea before you go to bed and just kind of sitting and relaxing. Maybe it's going to lunch once a week with a good friend, and what are the things that really build your, your ability to show up fully as yourself and feel kind of refreshed and renewed. That is the first thing to to like concern yourself with if you're interested in increasing the happiness of your kids and your your family. So identify that. And then the next thing that she recommends is building a village. So having good support systems in place. Now I know that the families that I work with include me in their support system and I love that I love offering support to kids in the realm of stress management and emotion coaching and just giving kids another supportive adult to kind of help them process what's going on and then be able to kind of talk freely about life and be met with empathy, support and a village can look like you know, the courses or after school activities we have our kids involved in it can look like any religious or community, you know, groups that were a part of it can look like extended family, you know, it can look like friends that you know, have a close, close relationship with your family that show up for you, you know, that are your go to people and how connecting regularly with that village is so important because it gives kids and adults a sense of being connected to something beyond themselves, which is really insulating, especially during times of stress. Because if you feel isolated and like everything's on you and you don't have support in place, it's really challenging to access that level of resilience that comes when you're like oh, I can lean back into my support systems. I can lean back into my friend group and kind of just engage with life from a place of supported resilience instead of feeling like you got to go with so low, we recently added to our village in the form of a puppy, which you may have heard just now. And she's been adorable. But village is really important for just giving us Yeah, a sense of community and extended help when we need it. So her next step is expecting effort and enjoyment, not perfection. And I love that idea of just having realistic expectations for kind of how life will play out and what will go on. I know there are times when I'm like, have my head down, and I really want to get something done and I hoping for no interruptions, and then I'll get interrupted six times, right, but maybe I've chosen a time when, like me working interrupted, isn't really viable.

Maybe I've, you know, chosen a task that's not quite appropriate for the amount of time that I have. And so I'm rushing and trying to get through it. And that's adding to my stress levels and adding to the amount of strain that comes when you know, I'm interrupted. And so I love this idea of being able to connect with a sense of like, process orientation of rather than outcome orientation when it comes to activities. So if we're making something with our child for dinner, or maybe helping with a project, or, you know, working on art or something creative together, focusing on just the time spent the opportunity to talk, the engagement, that really has so much value, rather than focusing on the end product, right, like if it doesn't turn out exactly how we thought, or we forgot the salt, because we were too busy laughing about what happened earlier in the day. And you know, whatever we're baking didn't turn out quite right. If we get super frustrated about the end result, we're going to miss the value that comes with the process. And again, her book raising happiness 10 Simple Steps for more joyful kids and happier parents has some great ideas on how to be process oriented. But just setting realistic expectations is so important. I know, my good friend crystal has this phrase satisficing, which is like finding the happy medium between like satisfying the requirements. And it will suffice, right like it doesn't have to be perfect. It doesn't have to be just right. But if it satisfies, says, then we can move forward with it. And I really, really love that. So again, having realistic expectations is the third step she shares. And then the fourth one is Choosing Gratitude, forgiveness and optimism. So in any given moment, we can look at life from a perspective of lack or abundance, right. And sometimes when we're feeling stressed and overwhelmed, and we're feeling a sense of scarcity in some facet of our life, maybe it's in time, maybe it's an energy, maybe it's in money, you know, whatever it is, sometimes it can be really challenging to see, you know, abundance and to look at the thing that's happening as something that could serve us or benefit us or find ways to be grateful, even if something hard is going on. And so being able to choose those qualities in life is a really key skill to teach kids because it will insulate them throughout their lives when they have challenges coming up being able to choose gratitude, forgiveness and optimism. I have another podcast about gratitude, several actually. And then, you know, other practices around you just being mindful in choosing our thoughts and letting our instead of letting our thoughts just kind of run rampant. And having the ability to really connect with what we're thinking and monitor what kind of thoughts we're having and how they're affecting our day to day experience is such a key skill. And that's one of the reasons I think mindfulness is so important for kids is so that in moments of they're feeling overwhelmed, in moments, and they're feeling like everything is awful, and life is ruined. They can stop recognize that that's the kind of quality of their mind at that point. And then redirect their attention to gratitude, forgiveness and optimism. And then the last one that I want to talk about today, we'll talk about the other ones on another episode. But the the fifth step in this book is she talks about raising emotional intelligence of kids. And that's one that I'm really passionate about with the kids that I coach with kids in any family around the world is being able to understand emotion in a way that makes us smarter because of it instead of feeling at the mercy because of it. And emotional intelligence is just that right understanding what emotion is and how it's informing us and what to do with it. And being able to do those things skillfully, as opposed to being really reactive and letting emotion kind of run us ragged and it's possible right for us to feel like emotions are running us instead of we're running the emotions. And so if we're just at the mercy of our emotions, and they're kind of chasing us along throughout the day, and we're running from them, or we're not sure what to do with them, we're really reactive You know, as a result of feeling them, then it's really challenging to cultivate emotional intelligence because we're again at the mercy. And so once we can take charge, and become advocates for emotional intelligence in our home, we start to cultivate practices that build emotional intelligence, and then our kids will naturally become party to those practices, see them in our homes, yes, practicing. And they'll benefit from the ways that we raise emotional intelligence in ourselves. So some of the ways that we do that at our house are talking through feelings. So if my daughter is really overwhelmed about something, instead of me trying to talk her out of it, or jump to that gratitude and optimism step, the first thing we do is say like, oh, it seems like you're feeling really frustrated, because this wasn't fair. Or you're feeling really left out, because you can't participate in this activity, because you're doing something else. So really, it's just naming the emotion that they're having. In the book, Dr. Carter calls it emotion coaching. And that's what I do with my practice with kids too, is just will talk through the things they're going through what that emotion is what it feels like, wow, that that's a lot, that would be a lot to navigate, that sounds really stressful. And just showing up with empathy without needing to move through it just yet, we'll get to that point, right. But initially, what kids need is just someone to help them identify what they're feeling and to be comfortable sitting with them in that feeling. I love Becky Kennedy's comparison of like being able to sit on a park bench with your child with that feeling. So if if life is a big park, and there are a bunch of benches with all these different emotions on them, like can we sit with our kids on all the benches, and emotion coaching looks like that, at first just sitting with them on the bench and being like, feeling left up, that feels awful. I know what that feels like, I can really relate. Or oh my gosh, you are so ecstatic. This is like beyond happy, ecstatic that you did so well in that game, you know, or whatever the emotion is that they're feeling, just being able to sit with them in that emotion. That's the first step for emotional intelligence. And then after that, really is helping them identify strategies that are supportive to processing that emotion. And that will include presence, right, like being present with those really uplifting and positive emotions and letting ourselves feel them so that it kind of gets written in our bodies written in our experience, like, I feel happy. So often when I look outside and see the birds that my bird feeder, and I just stop, and I watch and I sit. And I just feel joy at connecting with nature and seeing the birds and the colors and the tree, whatever season it is, you know like that. It depends on how, what season we're in how the tree looks, but just connecting with nature, that's usually some place where I usually feel a lot of joy. And so I'll just stop and sit with that joy. And the more unpleasant emotions can be challenging to sit with. But they're equally as important because they represent the full range of experience. Last week, I shared the emotion app, how we feel that I really love for, you know, helping with this idea of cultivating emotional intelligence and helping kids and adults to come to a heightened intelligence that will inform more authentic and also meaningful living. So those are the first five that I wanted to talk about today. Again, it's taking good care of yourself first, having a village building your village around you having great expectations, not expecting perfection, but kind of expecting that effort and enjoyment, Choosing Gratitude, forgiveness and optimism and raising emotional intelligence. And again, the book is raising happiness 10 Simple Steps for more joyful kids and happier parents. I mean, I'm sharing some of my own ideas. But those steps come directly from Christine Carter's work in the research that she does around raising happiness levels. So here's the raising happiness in your house this week. As always, I don't recommend that you try to do all those things today or tomorrow or even this week. But maybe just choosing one like was one of those steps that I mentioned something you're like, Oh, I haven't done that in a while that might raise happiness in my house, or oh, you know what, that one really spoke to me, I think that I could start there. Because we don't want to overwhelm ourselves by trying to do all the things all at once. But taking small steps toward implementing some of those actions in our homes can make a really big difference in how we feel and how the general happiness level of our home is. And I always love the idea of helping kids connect with higher levels of happiness because kids have a natural tendency to be joyful and being able to help them tune into that and then perpetuate it with intention as they grow up. And sometimes the joy drains out a little bit. It feels like a really worthwhile thing to do. Thanks again for being here. You've just finished an episode of the stress nanny podcast so hopefully you feel a little more empowered when it comes to dealing with stress. Feel free to take a deep breath and let it out slowly as you go back to your day. I'm so glad you're here. If you're a longtime listener, thank you so much for your support. It really means the world to me. If you're new, I'd love to have you follow the podcast and join me each week. And no matter how long you've been listening, please share this episode with someone who is stressed out. If you enjoyed the show, would you please do me a favor and go to ratethispodcast.com/thestressnanny and leave a review. The link is in the show notes. I'm so grateful for all my listeners. Thank you again for being here. Until next time!

Transcribed by https://otter.ai