meditation7

We seem to have a happiness set point, according to researchers. They have found that people who win the lottery are about as happy a year from now as they are prior to winning the lottery. Likewise, people who go through a tragedy are about as happy a year from now as they were prior to the tragedy. This even includes circumstances of loss of limbs.

Things that change our happiness set point: psychotropic drugs, such as prozac. Unfortunately they only work for a while and have side effects.Cognitive therapy. If you are able to uncover and discard the thoughts and beliefs that make you unhappy, your happiness will increase. Finally, meditation. Apparently, in meditation the prefrontal cortex part of the brain is actually able to generate the exact same chemicals that psychotropic drugs attempt to generate. except there are no side effects.

... I think it’s time for cleaning the apartment, kicking back, watching films, and personal hygiene… :-) Because, writing over 50,000 words of a novel you’re discovering as you write leaves precious little time for anything else… Cheers to everybody who wrote a novel during the National Novel Writing Month!

Having spent the majority of the month struggling with catching up with the word count (you know, 50,000 by the end of November, all duly apportioned), it feels fantastic to have finally caught up, to be about 80% done and to finally have a sense of what the book is really about and seeing it taking shape.

I need to remember that every time I undertake something like this, it truly is an epic journey for me and requires me to reach deep inside me for resources that I didn’t know I had. NaNoWriMo is truly a transformational experience. It’s fun to come out on the other side with a novel written (or with the skeleton of one written, anyway, to be fully fleshed out later), but while I’m going through it it often feels like I’m lost in the woods and floundering about… Here’s wishing a lot of inspiration to everyone else working on this goal!