Hacking Happiness. Part 1: The Morning Routine

Today I want to share a morning routine that I am still experimenting with. My goal is to hack happiness and I'd love to hear everyone's input and own experiences.

"If you can't even find ten minutes for yourself, you can't have the life you desire." — Tim Ferriss

It's simple. Every morning, I dedicate ten minutes of my time to focus my mind on what truly contributes to my own happiness. The first five minutes are spent meditating — doing breathing exercises, emptying the mind, or doing guided meditation such as envisioning the previous day.

Once my mind is clear, I spent the next five minutes filling out a full page of my little notebook. It focused on four aspects that impact happiness: memories, gratefulness, desires and improvement. Let me show it before going in depth :

Memories

The purpose here is to remember what made us who we are. We are shaped by what we experience. Unfortunately, our brain is tricky, and some of us (e.g me) have a memory like a goldfish. So my first line is to write down one thing that made my day. When you later on go through your book, you'll see each day passing by like it was yesterday and your life appears to be a gradually developing story full of purpose. You simply remember.

Note: Very similarly, you can write down Why did my day count ; the only difference is that a negative event can make your day, while only events that you value make your day count.

Gratefulness

"If you're grateful, there is no fear." — Tony Robbins

The purpose here is to never forget to be appreciative. If you can be grateful for everything, you won't fear to lose anything and you will be free of mental constraints. So I write down three things I am grateful for — just to remind myself that I am nothing, and that nothing can be taken for granted.

Note : I try to include one aspect that I feel in the very moment that I meditate or write it down ; although it's not the case for this morning, it could be something like "feeling the cold on my face" or "being able to breath in deeply".

Desires

The purpose here is to find time for things you truly care about. Unfortunately, the world is nowadays moving so quickly that we often forget the difference between what is urgent and what is important to us. So I write down three actionable items that are important to me and for which I should find the time for, no matter what the world expects.

Note: I am not referring to purely animalistic desires like food, sex or sleep. The desires I'm talking about come from the heart and reflect your own values.

Improvement

The purpose here is to never stop on growing and developing yourself to become the person you want to be. So I mentally go through my last day and write down three things that I should improve — it could be very precise such as "helping out more my mother" or general such as "eradicate feelings of frustration". And yes, even "take more time for the morning routine" should be something to improve ;)

This is it! Oh, last thing — I write down the hours I sleep. The purpose is to understand your daily productivity over time and understand when you were able to experience more of the day and why. And in today's case, I recovered from a couple of rather sleepless days ;)

So, dear reader: how do YOU hack your happiness? Comment below!

[Post-Edit] After some input, here some more things to try out soon…

• Keep track of how happy / grateful / awake you feel on a scale from 1–10 to further analyze correlations
• Meditate longer — twenty minutes morning and evening
• Ask yourself every morning: If today were my last day, what would I do? If you can't identify yourself after a few days with your daily life, it might be time to change