OCD part II
2012-07-26 || 10:13 a.m.

So this is Part II of the last entry.

After hearing what I had to tell him, my husband put on a Youtube video by some guy called Shawn Achor - or something like that. It was about happiness. The guy was an entertaining speaker and the talk was 12 minutes long.

My husband knows I am never really happy. When we first got married he wanted to change that. He saw his only goal in life as to make me happy and he tried everything in his power that he could think of to try to make this so. But still I remained resolutely unhappy. There were things I perceived as causing my unhappiness. i found my job incredibly stressful. i wouldn't say my job made me unhappy because it didn't but it certainly made me into a psycho bitch because the stress levels were just totally intense. Which I guess made everyone else unhappy.

I missed my dog that I'd had to rehome. It seems a small, silly thing to be unhappy about. After all, plenty of people don't have dogs and are perfectly happy but for an unhappy child/teenager/adult having a dog gave me love. Love I never really got from anywhere else. Dogs probably don't even love you anyway, but it feels like they do and I am needy.

I lived in a pretty bad location and in a very dilapidated house.

But mainly, greatly, tremendously, I wanted another child. And this had been consuming me for years and years and years. i thought I'd dealt with it but when I became accidentally pregnant in March 2006 I found that I had not dealt with it at all.

So my husband had done everything he could. He got a job in a different part of the country and moved me to a much nicer location and better house - in a building sense. It was smaller so I had to get rid of my books and things which then made me unhappy!

He got me a dog. In all honestly I think the most beautiful dog that has ever wagged a tail.

We had a child together. My totally longed for second child.

But still I often feel unhappy.

I just feel unhappy about different things now. Which means there really is no helping me from outside. It has to come from inside.

So my husband showed me the Shawn Achor video and this is what I have to do for the next 21 days:

List 3 things every day that I am grateful for - and they have to be three different things each time. No repeats.

Blog every day about something good that has happened over the past 24 hours.

Exercise.

Meditate.

Random acts of kindness.

Now, the first two I am thinking are pretty straightforward.

Exercise - should be okay.

Meditate - I have never meditated. I have no idea how you do this. The only time I have tried anything like this the obsessive thoughts of my last entry will take over. This is worrying me and I am wondering whether just reading for 15 minutes or listening to music for 15 minutes will work because I can do those. I imagine the point is to relax and clear your mind. Its something I can google at any rate.

Random acts of kindness: This is the one I like the best. I can't remember how many you are supposed to do. It seems like three would be a good number but i am sure you could do more. i tried to watch the video to check but my laptop is being cranky and I didn't want to persist as I would probably end up losing everything I have written here and then the first thing I will have to be thankful for today will be that I raised my typing speed if not my number of diary entries :)

I am thinking this should be a retrospective thing. Like, I write the next day about the things i was thankful for and the description of something good. So I guess I will start now with yesterday. And therefore, that will be my next entry.