End Your Day With Something That Makes You Happy.
I’ve been using the Exist app to track my activity and measure my mood for over half a year now, and one of the most surprising findings is that my attitude towards my day often depends on how I spent the last hour. …
In other words, if I devoted the last hour of my day to something that made me feel both relaxed and happy at the same time, that feeling would seep through the rest of the day. When I wrote about my day and rated my mood on Exist, I consistently gave the day higher marks if I liked the end – even if the rest of the day was stressful.
Yes, part of this could be due to the fact that I gave this assessment of the mood immediately after I did something funny. But the fact that doing something both relaxing and enjoyable at the end of the day made me think more positively about the day was an interesting discovery.
The idea that you should relax before bed is, of course, pretty well known; Read any article on sleep and it will encourage you to relax a little before bed. (I also know that many of us are so limited in time that it may seem impossible to find an extra hour just to relax.)
But there was a difference, at least for me, between relaxing by doing something soothing and relaxing by doing something that made me smile – like playing puzzles on Steam or watching funny YouTube videos, which I know , is the complete opposite of what we should do before bed. (Yes, I have a blue light filter turned on.) The data proves that I have the best day when I end it with something both relaxing and fun – and if I could find something that made me laugh out loud, I would often give 5 stars all day no matter what.
Then I closed my laptop, brushed my teeth, spent twenty minutes in meditation or reading, and fell asleep happy.