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When I saw a napkin that said You Can’t Have Too Much Happy on it I knew that would be the theme for this year’s Happiness Happens Month.
The Secret Society of Happy People started celebrating Happiness Happens Day on August 8, 1999 to encourage people to talk more about their happiness. It sounded simple enough, after all, who doesn't want to be happy and talk about it?! We even got governors in 19 states to give us proclamations for the day. In 2000 we expanded the day to Happiness Happens Month, held every August henceforth.
Talking About Happiness
You’d think that getting the world to talk about happiness would be easy enough. But happiness is one of those interesting experiences. We love to cheer people on in their hunt for happiness. We value when people want to be happy. Yet, ironically we’re tongue tied when people are actually happy. We’re not sure how to talk about happiness ~ either our own or someone else’s.
No one is going to be happy all of the time, because that’s not realistic. But people can be happy most of the time. Much of our happiness is about our perspective. We can either let challenges rain on our parade or we can embrace them and grow.
Ironically, when we grow from our challenges it can provide several types of happiness: Relief, Satisfaction, or Spiritual. The Secret Society of Happy People identified 31 Types of Happiness to help people recognize more happiness. This then lets people realize how much happiness they actually experience.
Noticing the Happy Moments
We really can’t have too much happy. Happy moments take place around us all of the time but we often take them for granted. We just assume they will happen again, or that’s how things should be. We may not even realize that we were happy during a period of our life until we view it through the perspective of hindsight and it becomes nostalgic happiness.
Happiness Happens Month reminds us to recognize all of our happy moments so that we have a habit of knowing that we can’t have too much happy.
About Pamela Gail
Pamela Gail Johnson founded the Secret Society of Happy People to celebrate happiness and was recently named in the Top Five Global Thought Leaders. She’s happy when tasting new wines with friends, doing social media, cooking for Tater — her dog, practicing yoga to discover new muscles, and reading books while acclimating to Kindle. She’s the author of the Secret Society of Happy Peoples Thirty-One Types of Happiness Guide, writes the Ask Pamela Gail: Where Happiness Meets Reality blog and speaks to groups of all sizes.
