Richard Nicholls - 5 Minutes to Happiness: Easy, Everyday Exercises to Help You Be the Best You Can Be

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Paperback 978-1-911600-58-9

eBook 978-1-911600-61-9

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Text copyright by Richard Nicholls, 2017

Richard Nicholls has asserted their moral right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.

Blink Publishing is an imprint of the Bonnier Publishing Group

www.bonnierpublishing.co.uk

To my wife Dawn, for over twenty years of love, support and patience.
Thank you.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Hello to you!

Welcome to my little book. I hope that it can inspire you to take action that helps you to become a happier you. You dont have to be unhappy to gain benefit from the words; they may simply help you to understand a little more about what makes you tick so as to prevent any future problems, or to help you understand others better.

Throughout the book there will be many ideas or exercises written inside some dark boxes, just like this is, for you to practise. These exercises will be varied both in their type and how much time and effort youll need to put in, but everything should fit nicely into 15 minutes or less (in some cases much less).

Ive been working as a therapist in private practice since 2001 and have been absorbing decades of research to gain a good understanding of what does and what doesnt work when it comes to boosting happiness, so all of these are tried and tested methods of improving your wellbeing.

Since 2011, Ive been using my podcast, Motivate Yourself, as a platform to share these ideas to see how they work in the real world, and in listening to the feedback from my thousands of listeners it gives me even more confidence in these concepts.

So even if they might feel out of character or even a little random to you, do recognise that by embracing these ideas you will obtain tools that can boost self-esteem, help you to appreciate life more and regulate your emotions. Once youve mastered these, feel free to tailor them to your own needs and figure out what works best for you.

You can dip in and out of the book and come back to various exercises at random, but, theres also a bit of detail in here about why these things work, which I would advise reading as well. Its very important to understand how these exercises and attitudes will help you, for many reasons but partly to encourage you to take them on.

This is hopefully going to be an interesting and worthwhile journey. On the way well meet Chinese pianists, sabre-toothed tigers, The Joneses next door and a plethora of participants in scientific research. Thank you very much for letting me join you for your ride. Im very happy to be part of your journey that helps you be the best you can be.

So, shall we get started then?

Chapter One:

Think Happy, Be Happy

About the Brain

Right at this minute in between your ears, 100 billion neurons are ready to fire off electrical signals. These signals trigger the laboratory in your brain to start creating the most amazing chemical cocktails. It can make dopamine to boost pleasure, it can send signals to the adrenal gland to make you feel as if you need to fight or run away, and it can even trap you in an endless loop of the opera section of Bohemian Rhapsody. Whatever your brain is doing, though, an enormous amount of it is totally unconscious to you. Your brain is continually busy, ticking away in the background outside of your conscious awareness, regulating body temperature at the same time as keeping an ear out for a sabre-toothed tiger. These are our instincts and we wouldnt be here without them; theyve kept us alive in one shape or form since we first came down from the trees around six million years ago.

Back then, unconscious instincts were all we had, until evolution developed our brain, giving us problem-solving skills and eventually the ability to worry about whether theres enough charge in our phone battery.

So here we are some six million years later with a three pound lump in our head that instinctively sends signals to the lungs to breathe in and out and make the heart beat 100 thousand times per day. Abilities we were born already knowing how to do. At the same time though, we can also learn a multitude of skills. We can learn how to walk, how to talk and how to hold a pencil abilities that we werent born with. But these abilities are just stepping stones to bigger and better things. We can turn walking into amazingly complex gymnastic moves, turn talking into singing the most sophisticated of arias and turn holding a pencil into drawing such intricate artwork that it looks photographic. Yet, complicated as these things are, when they become skills they go beyond conscious thinking, we do them automatically. They become unconscious abilities, just like instincts, which we do without needing to think about them. Being able to perform these abilities unconsciously would have been a very useful evolutionary trick; any species that needed to stand still while it considers its next move is soon to be tiger food, but the one that can run, dodge and throw spears all at the same time is going to do well. So turning conscious abilities into unconscious abilities frees up our brain to do other things. If youve ever driven a familiar route and pulled up at the end of it with very little recollection of the journey, then youve learned a new instinct.

So, given enough repetition, we can do almost anything without thinking, and thats not always a good thing.

Some of the things we repeat until they become automatic will hinder us in life, though. Thats when we may think of them as bad habits, which arent always about speaking with your mouth full or picking your nose.

When I was a teenager I had a skateboard and would skate around and perform little tricks with an average level of skill. I was nothing particularly special but I had good balance. When my son was around ten years old I bought him a skateboard with the expectation that I would demonstrate exactly how to ride it and make him super proud of his cool dad that could ride a skateboard. Im not sure exactly what happened next or quite why the bottom half of my body wanted to go one way and my top half the other. What I do know is that it hurt when I hit the concrete. I had forgotten how to ride a skateboard the skill had gone. This reminded me of a friend of mine who, after 20 years, decided to start playing the guitar again. At school he was a very impressive classical guitarist but became bored with it as a teenager the guitar just couldnt compete with the PlayStation and girls. After all that time away from it, the effort required to get even halfway towards his old skill level again was demotivating and he almost gave up. But he stuck with it; now he plays at open mic nights throughout his town and hes never been happier. But it took a lot of repetition to make it all stick again, because his skills were only conscious skills; the ability to play guitar without thinking had gone. The expression If you dont use it, you lose it. isnt just a catchy rhyme its true. Its what happened to me when I stopped skateboarding, its exactly what happened to my friend when he stopped playing the guitar, and its precisely what can happen to you if youre ready to unlearn something.