Can you spare two minutes a day to devote to increasing your levels of happiness?

Thought so. I’ve got just the experiment for you to do. It will only take a week. So that’s 14 minutes out of 10,080.

At the moment I’m reading Paul Dolan’s Happiness by Design, and one rather interesting idea he comes up with is that happiness can be understood as being a by-product of two things.

Purpose and pleasure.

It’s purpose that helps us carry on when life throws us curveballs.

And pleasure? Well, we are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

How does eating fit in to this?

Most people think that to be healthy, shed weight etc, they must banish pleasure.

Another thing I notice among my coaching clients is how disconnected many of them are from their purpose. A binge is often a powerful distraction from doing the big, hairy, audacious stuff that scares them.

So they way they eat and their food choices are making them unhappy. Not enough pleasure, not enough purpose.

So here’s your experiment:

Every day this week you are going to spend 2 minutes thinking of how you can increase either the pleasure OR the purpose in your life.

For a million bonus points, actually do something you come up with.

Do you notice anything about your eating doing this experiment? Are you comfort eating or bingeing less?

In the next post I will give you some ideas for helping you reconnect to your purpose.