Introduction

Welcome to Practically Happy, the podcast that helps you apply the science of well-being to your everyday life. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson, a master of applied positive psychology, here to help you access some strategies for lasting happiness and fulfillment. Each week, we’ll dive deep into the latest research and insights from the world of positive psychology.

But this isn’t just another academic lecture. Practically Happy is about getting practical. I will share how you might apply these findings to your everyday life so you can experience real and tangible improvements in your happiness. As a wife and mom of three, I understand the challenges of juggling a busy family life while striving for personal well-being.

That’s why I’ll also be sharing my own stories and experiences along the way. Because let’s face it, life can get messy. Through it all, we can find and create intentional moments of joy. So, whether you’re looking for ways to boost your mood, improve your relationships, or simply add more enjoyment to your daily routines, Practically Happy is your guide to a practical, happy life.

Welcome to Season Six!

Hello, friends. Welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Miranda Anderson. You’re listening to Practically Happy. This is episode number 255. Friends, I’ve missed you. I’ve taken a little break for the end of season five. Leading into season six, if you’re a long-time listener, you’ll notice that there’s something special about this season.

The show has a new name and a new look for the last five years. I’ve been recording live free creative podcast and loving every minute of it. It’s been such a joy. And I decided during my break that I wanted to niche down a little bit more and give the podcast a clearer angle, which is. Inspiring practical happiness.

New Name, Same Great Show

For those of you who are longtime listeners, this is what I’ve been trying to do all along. Help people with ideas and inspiration and stories about how to live a more intentional, creative, and joyful life.

All those things are what it means to be practically happy. However, after graduating in August with my master of applied positive psychology, I realized that I wanted to just be a little bit clearer and bridge the gap a little bit more fully between my intention and the impact of the show.

And I thought that giving it a new life and a new name and a new look would help. Accomplish that goal. If you were a long-time listener of Live Free Creative, you’re in luck. The show is going to feel very similar. I’m going to have fun segments. I’m going to be sharing about specific topics with actionable takeaways and things that you can think about and use in your everyday life and things that you can think about.

If you’re a new listener, what you can expect here is candid, conversational discussions about how to feel a little bit better every day, how to bridge the gap between all the incredible research that’s going on about what makes life worth living and how we can feel better and make that accessible to all of us.

Just going about our lives, listening to podcasts, wanting to. to improve and to progress and to deepen our relationships and to expand our experiences. My hope is that listening to this show will give you some of that information in a digestible format that you can apply as desired. to your own life. In today’s show, I want to introduce you to the idea of being practically happy.

Segment: Life Lately

These last five or six weeks is the first time that I’ve taken that long of a break from the podcast. From when I began in September of 2018, the show was continuous, a continuous weekly streak for five years. I think I took maybe a couple weeks off back in 2021 when I had a paralyzed vocal cord and I couldn’t speak, necessarily, took a little break.

Other than that, this has been an ongoing show and I will tell you, this last year really did a number on me in terms of time, energy expenditure, resources, emotional resources, as well as physical resources, and I finished the summer with this incredible month-long vacation with my family in Costa Rica, during which I continue to work, record the podcast, and do.

A lot of the things that I do at home, just abroad. Once I landed at home and realized how burnt out, I really was after doing a year of full-time school, full time work, and full-time motherhood, I decided to take a real break. And I’m proud of myself for doing that. It’s not very easy to take a break from something that you, one, love, two, feel like you’re pretty good at, and three, is part of your regular life.

It feels as natural to me to sit down and record now as it does to go on a walk or go on a bike ride. That said, I’m super grateful for the break that I took. I’m going to talk more about it next week, but I want to give you a little bit of catch up on our life lately.

Four Updates:

In the last five weeks, I have started a new job. I have planted about 300 bulbs in my front planters. I created new front planters along the sidewalk that leads to my front door. And tried something called the lasagna method of bulb planting. I’ve done a lot of final work and finishing up details for my upcoming couples retreat to Costa Rica that happens in just a few weeks from now. And I’ve started to dig in once again to home design and decor projects that I put off while I was studying last year, and it’s been fun.

A new job!

Let me tell you just a little bit more about each of these things. First, is my new job. Something that I didn’t expect when I went back to school last year was how my identity around work would change so much.

I thought I would go back to school and use the information that I learned in this new credential to do my own job, which is running this company a little bit better. What happened was that I discovered Maybe hidden or I allowed myself to realize for the first time in a decade that I longed to work with other people in a more consistent way.

And so began my hunt for a full-time job. This may come as a shock to some of you. Maybe it feels oh yeah, that seems normal. You finish a new degree; you have life transitions. It was a little bit weird for me to have this realization. But as soon as I started thinking about how it felt to work on a team in school, how to do these projects together and how to bounce ideas together and be one piece of a bigger puzzle, I realized that was something that I wanted in my professional life as well.

And I’ve been. Looking for what that looks like exactly in the just right fit, which I haven’t found that yet. So, I’m looking for a creative strategy or consulting position, learning and development within a company like as an in-house learning and development specialist. What I did start was a faculty position at a local nursing college.

I, in my job search, was looking for ways that I could apply all the different. skills and experience that I have to a teaching, facilitating type position, and a faculty position came up locally. I will tell you all about it in an odd job in an upcoming episode. I will say that I just began last week, I am a clinical nursing instructor, and this semester I’m just taking one class, a clinical class on a psychiatric unit at a local hospital.

It’s been interesting. I haven’t worn scrubs in years. It feels like a different life when I practiced as a registered nurse, which was my first career. And in some ways, it feels good to be back to those roots in a new capacity where my role is not patient centric. It’s student centric and I’m working as an educator rather than as a clinician.

I’m enjoying it so far. And I will continue to do it as I look for a full-time job, which is what I’m really hoping to land in the next few months.

Front Planters and the Hope of Bulbs

Now about my planters. Have any of you heard of the lasagna method of bulb planting? First, I’ve never planted bulbs before, but I decided to do it this year because they just seem so happy in the spring, I love seeing the tulips and daffodils and crocus come up all around my neighborhood and if you want that joy in the spring The work happens now in the fall.

This is the time to be planting bulbs if you want tulips and daffodils and hyacinth coming up in the spring. At Costco, I found these big, giant containers of bulbs that were inexpensive, and so I bought about the equivalent of about 300. bulbs, different types. And the lasagna method calls for burying the late spring, early summer bulbs at the bottom.

They go the deepest, so about six inches deep. That’s where I put the irises and then layering on top of those mid spring bulbs, which for me were daffodils and some Okay. Okay. Tulips and, I did a couple ranunculus which I’ve never planted before. I haven’t planted any of these, but ranunculus is cool They aren’t actual bulbs.

They’re like little They look like little claws, but I got those layered on the second layer and then the early spring Most shallow planting are crocus, or they were in my case. I’m sure there’s other types of things that come up early. All of those get layered in the same section of the planter or pot if you’re doing above ground and just with little layers of soil in between them.

Right now, they just look like nothing because I covered them up and they have mulch over the top of them. Hopefully in the spring, my whole front walk is going to be popping with these gorgeous, colorful flowers starting in early spring with the crocus and then layering through them daffodils and tulips and ranunculus and then finally finishing with the irises as we head into summer.

Cannot wait to tell you how it goes because It’s like a real exercise in hope, just burying these plants and hoping that in six months, there’s something to see.

Novios is coming up!

My third life lately was all about Novios. I’ve been spending a lot of my back-end time ordering fun swag for the welcome kits and designing logos for sweatshirts and hats, finalizing details with the transportation and the venues and the food.

I have been talking on the phone and Marco Polo with my partner in Novios Kristen Hodson to discuss details about the workshops that we’ll be presenting. The whole thing goes down in about a month. We leave on November 4th. It begins November 5th and a year’s worth of planning is going to come to fruition with Five incredible couples who we’ve spent the summer getting to know on monthly group calls, and we’re going to go adventure and connect for six days in Costa Rica.

I’m so excited, and we have our fingers crossed that this event goes well enough, and all the pieces come together that it is something that we want to repeat. And if it is, I will let you know because we will be opening registration for Novios 2024 sometime early next year. If that’s going to happen.

So, if you’re interested in that and you’re like, I for sure would want to go on a couple’s retreat or that’s something I’m interested in. And I’d like to at least get an email about it. Send me an email at miranda@livefreecreative.co and I will put you on an interest list.

Home Design and Décor Projects

Finally, I have been thrilled to dive back into home projects in our house. We moved into this house about two years ago and then soon after I started school and decided that I was going to put all my home design and decor on hold while I finished studying. Having finished up in the summer, I decided to open that can of worms, which is starting to design room by room.

The first thing that I did was design and install custom built-ins in our dining room. And it’s Looks so good. I tell you the whole room transformed by adding these built ins. It doubled the amount of storage space that we have.

Our house has this open format where from the front door, you can see through three rooms all the way to the back door and adding some custom built-ins with a built-in desk right there in the middle just grounds that room. So, it feels separate and intentional separate from the other rooms, the entry, and the kitchen living. I also have put up wallpaper in Plum’s bathroom.

I’m about 25 percent finished with that because I’ve done one wall and I intend to do four walls. This wallpaper I bought probably the week after we closed on this house, two years ago. And this is the first chance that I’ve prioritized it and made space to have that on my schedule that I spend a few hours putting up wallpaper in her bathroom. It looks so good. It’s just cool. It’ll transition well.

She turns 10 this year and it… It is playful, it has like cheetahs and birds, and it’s an Otomi style mirror image pattern. And it’s grown-up colors. It’s this deep green and teal and a little bit of a blush pink. And I think it will age well with her. It will grow up with her.

It doesn’t feel like super adult or super child. It feels very transitional, and we love it. Those are some of the things that have been happening in my life lately.

Why Practically Happy?

Now, let me tell you about Practically Happy. I just want to introduce you to this idea and to where we hopefully will go in the next few years. Practical. is an adjective that describes something being related or concerned with the actual application or the implementation of ideas, theories, or knowledge in a real-world context.

I think sometimes we think of happiness as something a little bit nebulous. There’s lots of different definitions of happiness. There are very, conflicting, and sometimes confusing ideas about what brings happiness in our lives and practical happiness for me will emphasize the ability to apply usefully and effectively and realistically some of these foundational research ideas around happiness, joy, fulfillment, being to our everyday life.

Practicality involves a focus on functionality and pragmatic considerations rather than just theory or abstract ideas. Something practical is suitable for and capable of solving real problems and serving practical purposes. I’m a practical person. I really like application.

I really like taking an idea that I hear somewhere and thinking about how I can squish it as if it were like a piece of clay. And you get just the ball of clay. That’s the idea. But you yourself have a specific mold and your mold is going to be different from my mold and it will be different from your sister’s mold and from your husband’s mold and from your neighbor’s mold.

You take that piece of clay, that idea, practicality says that you can maneuver it, you can squish it down, you can adjust it, you can roll it out, you can flatten it, you can Make it work in some form in your own life if you want to. Practicality doesn’t say take the ball of clay and just assume that it will go as a solid sphere straight into your mold and it will all work.

And often actually I find in ideas around happiness that the ideas themselves are abstract and theoretical. And without a real example of how to use some of these ideas and information, it feels a little bit useless to me.

For example, we know through research that one of the most important aspects of well-being and longevity in life is connection. Our connection to other people. But connection itself is a little bit of an ambiguous term and idea. We’re not talking about, necessarily physical connection, like holding hands with someone throughout your life, or looping your arm around someone. We’re not necessarily talking about relational connection, where you have a defined relationship with someone.

So, what are we talking about when we talk about connection? You can tell someone it’s important to have connection in your life, but without taking that idea. So that idea in the clouds of connection is important and filtering it down into your own life, practical ways that you can connect with other people in meaningful ways on a regular basis.

For example, I can have a conversation with my husband before he goes to work in the morning, and I can decide that conversation will be all about support and encouragement for the upcoming day. That is meaningful connection.

I can decide that a connection I want to have been to invite one family over for dinner at my house once a month to build relationships, to build friendships, to help enlarge my support system within my community.

That’s a practical idea. Inviting a family over once a month starts to build that.

It starts to practically build that nebulous idea of connection without bridging the gap between the idea and the application. It’s a lot easier to let the idea float away. To not tether it to something real that we can write down or we can put on a calendar, or we can remind ourselves or remind someone else about.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do over the last five years with Live Free Creative Podcast and what I’m going to continue to do in a meaningful way with Practically Happy. In each episode, I want to give you some specific ideas of ways you might apply what might seem like a nebulous theory or idea in a practical way in your life.

Sponsor: BetterHelp

Now let’s take a quick break while I tell you about today’s sponsor. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Do you ever feel like your brain is getting in its own way? I’ve recognized with my therapist that one way that I get in my own way is through all or nothing thinking. Sometimes I feel like if it’s not all the way, then I should just drop it.

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Can we practice happiness?

Another aspect of practically happy that I’m really excited about is practice. and practical come from the same root word. It’s a Latin root called “practicus”, which means concerned with action or concerned with doing. Both practical and practice revolve around the concept of acting, but they’re used differently in English.

For example, practice refers to the action itself, the act of doing something repeatedly, while practical refers to something that’s useful, functional, or realistic for everyday use. Practice is a noun and a verb. As a noun, it’s talking about doing something regularly or habitually to improve your skills or apply a specific set of actions.

As a verb, practice means to engage in the repeated performance of an activity to improve your proficiency. My hope is that this podcast and its new name and new branding and new focus will help you both be practical and practice your happiness. And because we’re all different, the things that I’m going to share are considerations that you can experiment with.

Experimentation is one of my very favorite ways to learn about myself. When I hear something new or someone gives me an idea, I don’t automatically think, oh, this is for sure the answer to my problems. I think this might be something that could help me. And the way that I find out whether it does apply to me, whether it will be helpful, is by giving it a try.

When we give things a try and we’re open to the idea that something might make a difference or might help us feel a little better. Right now, in this season of our lives, we automatically open a world of possibility that otherwise wouldn’t be available to us.

My current experiment with Practical Happiness: Deleting Instagram

I want to give you an example of a recent practical happiness idea that I’ve been experimenting with and its result in my everyday life.

This might feel like its own episode. This topic is, can be a big one. But I’m just going to share a little bit about it here. A couple months ago. I, one random day, held my finger down on the Instagram app until it started shaking and then I clicked the X in the corner. I deleted the app off my phone, and I haven’t reinstalled it in the last six weeks.

Why does this have anything to do with practical happiness? What it has to do with practical happiness is, one, for a few years, I have felt like I was being pulled into an endless cycle of social media use, content creation, content enjoyment, online connection, and relationships, and a lot of rabbit holes.

And I didn’t love the way that it made me feel all the time. Not that it was throwing me into depression or that I was having these serious feelings of comparison or even anything that strong. Simply that it didn’t feel like the best use of my time. And despite me feeling like it didn’t feel like the best use of my time, I was still spending a lot of time there.

And I tried a few different ways over the last few years to… I’m going to limit my time, I use the Instagram app Limits, and set up a reminder, and it would work for a little while, and sometimes I would give myself, 15 more minutes here, 15 more minutes there, and sometimes I would change it.

Sometimes I would really feel strongly there was something I wanted to do. I wanted to share. And then sometimes I would acknowledge I just need to scroll right now. It just feels fun to just have a mindless activity that I can do. And occasionally, the idea would pop into my head. I don’t have to do this. I don’t need to use Instagram.

I can just delete it. But I didn’t because I didn’t believe that was possible. And this sounds dramatic and it’s so silly. But I’ve used Instagram since it came out in 2010. I was a blogger for over a decade as a full-time job. And Instagram for a good portion of that was an appendage to my company.

At times I worked as an influencer and a content creator that I was, designing things and campaigns for companies.

It’s been several years since I was operating in that capacity, however, I felt like Instagram was still a place where I could share and connect and be part of a community that has been meaningful in my life. And yet, it still didn’t feel like the best use of my time.

Combine that with a bunch of research that I was able to dive into over the last year as part of my graduate degree program, not only for myself, but also in trying to figure out screen time and social media for my children.

I wanted to understand what is the impact that this is having on me, on my kids, on our communities, on our well-being. And although there is good that can be found, and there are relationships that can be made, and there is a sense of community that can be built. For the most part, the research shows that the detriment of engaging in social media use regularly far outweighs the benefit.

That it’s not all bad, but it is some bad. And while we can use it within limits and restrictions, it’s designed specifically for us to override our own limits and restrictions because it’s built to be addictive. It’s built to give us the exact right amount of randomness. And dopamine and connection and infuriation and entertainment and infatuation keeps us coming back for more.

Going back to the idea of experimentation, I decided that day, I hadn’t planned this, I just decided I’m just going to see what it’s like to take a break and I think I was feeling pretty good about breaks at that particular moment as well because I was in the middle of a break between seasons on the podcast and it was feeling quite healing to have some extra space and time in my own head and in my schedule and I deleted Instagram.

And for the last six weeks, the best way that I can describe it is that there had been white noise playing on a radio in the far back reaches of my brain. And when I deleted Instagram, it turned it off and I could hear silence for the first time in a long time. I could feel clarity.

For the first time in a long time, and the only voice that remains in my head now, several weeks in is my own. My ability to choose what I want to do and how I want to spend my time and what matters most to me feels personal again, because of the separation between who I am and what I’m consuming.

Digital Detox

I’ll call this a digital detox—it is something that Cal Newport, who is a productivity expert and a professor at Georgetown University has talked about a lot and he talks about it specifically in his book, Digital Minimalism.

His recommendation is to take a break for 30 days from any technology that isn’t crucial and necessary for your functioning in your life or your business. And for me as an entrepreneur, I had to give myself that permission that Instagram feels like it’s, necessary for my business. But when I evaluated, it isn’t.

And while there are good things that come of it, and I do have tons of friends and relationships that have built over the last 10 years on Instagram, it also was contributing to a real feeling of discontent. The experiment is turn it off and see how you feel after 30 days. What I feel is better than I have in a long time with regards to that aspect of my life.

What I’m grappling with right now, real time, is that I want to engage in a specific way and a specific time all on my own time frame and with my own set of priorities. And I must figure out how to do that.

So, this is what I’m moving into now with the relaunch of season six of the podcast and redefining my career and looking for a full-time job and a team where I’m going to be able to be valued and add a lot of value.

Reestablishing a new relationship with social media at a new season, at a new stage of my life feels a practical application of research and understanding and personal experience to best feel fulfilled and have happiness and joy and enjoyment, I want to try to see if I can take as much of the good as I can without also being susceptible to all the detrimental effects.

And we’ll see. This is a work in progress. But so, one specific practical application of applied happiness in my life right now is having the courage to follow an intuition that I had that kind of been nagging at me to just see what life could be like without regular social media use, and so far, it feels great.

So how I choose to add it back in and I’m, even as I’m recording this, I’m excited to share about this episode and the new season and name of the podcast on social media, which is a place where people discover things, and they find out things. And it’s a community that I have shared with often over the last couple of decades.

I’m excited to continue to experiment and discover what works best for me to find that balance of practical happiness as it relates to social media use.

Specifically, I can say without hesitation that I am excited to be back on the show and to have season six beginning. I’m looking forward to many interesting and engaging episodes in the months ahead, and I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

Thank you so much for listening in and for being part of this show. Whether this is your first episode or your 255th, to know I appreciate you lending me your ear. And I hope that you enjoyed this introduction to Practically Happy. I’ll chat with you again net week. Bye!