I came across a really cool little website the other day on Facebook:  http://100happydays.com/

It’s a very simple idea that really appealed to me – every single day, for 100 days, take a photo of what made you feel happy that day.

Quite apart from the fact that it’s a photography project (and I love photo projects!), it also follows the same principle as the Three Gifts exercise I often set for my clients.  If I know that at the end of the day I have to have taken a photograph of something that has made me feel happy, I’ll consciously be looking for that happy moment throughout the day.  Do it often enough and regularly enough, and that act of consciously searching for the happy moment gradually becomes more and more unconscious, until you’re automatically noticing the positive stuff in life because that’s just what you do now.  It becomes a natural way of how (and who) you are in the world.

The temptation was too much and I decided to take part.

I’ve chosen not to register on the site, preferring instead to conduct my own little personal experiment via my blog.  I’m starting the project today, and I’ll be posting every ten days with a summary of the stuff that’s made me happy.

But before I begin, I need something to calibrate with at the end of the project so that I can figure out how much of a difference it has made to my happiness levels.

As a standard part of the Cognitive Hypnotherapy work I do with my clients I use short questionnaires at the beginning of each session I have with them, which form the basis of the research project that I’m involved in.  They’re designed to map and measure a client’s progress over time in three main categories – levels of anxiety, levels of depression and levels of general mental wellbeing.  With the anxiety and depression questionnaires the lower the scores the better – the minimum scores being zero.  With the wellbeing one, the higher the score the better – the maximum score is 35.

I’ve only ever filled in these questionnaires once, when I was trained in how to use them with clients.  My results surprised me, even though I knew I wasn’t in a particularly good place at the time.

I’ve decided to fill these questionnaires in again for the purposes of this personal project, and as of this morning, these are my total scores:

Anxiety – 8

Depression – 8

Wellbeing – 21

I’m planning to fill in the questionnaires at days 25, 50, 75 and 100 of the project, and I’m really curious to find out the results.

I’d love to hear from you if you decide to take part in the project via the website too – feel free to leave comments throughout the series of blogs with your experiences 🙂