Last week I was talking with my friend, Paul. While I know him as Paul, his patients know him as Dr. Berkowitz (psychiatrist extraordinaire.) As I was yawning, we discussed sleep, and or my lack of it. He asked me about my “sleep hygiene.” I didn’t know how to answer – because I had never heard of “sleep hygiene.” As I came to learn, “sleep hygiene” is roughly defined as how you control both your behaviors and environment that may interfere with a good nights sleep. For example, the University of Maryland recommends several habits such as: (1) going to bed at the same every night and waking at the same time everyday; (2) Avoiding alcohol consumption 4-6 hours before sleeping; and (3) Exercising on a regular basis, but not immediately before sleeping. The topic of sleeping is one I want to address more in-depth in this blog, but for now I want to stick with the application of the hygiene concept beyond how you smell.
This idea got my mind spinning. That is, it got my mind spinning the next day after I got a good nights sleep. If we applied the hygiene idea to happiness could we find some behavioral and environmental factors that effect happiness. It seemed a topic worth exploring considering “Happy Lawyers” is a topic of this blog. As a matter of fact, of the thesis questions of this blog is how lawyers can be “happy” in the current state of the law business?
If hygiene is “a set of practices perceived by a community to be associated with the preservation of health and healthy living” then it stands reason this concept could easily apply to happiness. So I put “happiness hygiene” in Google. The result: the rough draft of this post came up as the number one search result, on Page One of Google. Thus, it is safe to say that while there are countless volumes written about happiness, the research has not yet been framed it in these terms.
Consequently, Dr. Berkowitz (or Paul, as I know him) has agreed to help create the happiness hygiene recommendations for lawyers. The results will be found in the Happy Lawyers section.
Stop + Drink the coffee + Reinvent