A Blog about The Happiness Lab

TLDR: I was on the edge of burnout, and one of the things that helped pull me out of that was listening to the "The Happiness Lab" Podcast. I tried to take one idea from each episode and really internalize it. It helped. A lot. Now I'm going back and writing about those insights. 

And so I call this the Happiness Lab Blog, er, Blab.

I was in a dark spot earlier this year. I know it wasn't just me. Winter number two of the Covid pandemic seemed particularly hard on everyone. Long dark days. Weather too cold to be outside. A lack of access to any of the indoor public spaces that people in the North rely on to get through the harsh winter months. And above all, an exhausted acceptance that we couldn't just wish it away and go back to normal.

With a toddler in daycare, we were also carrying the added burden of constant childcare disruptions. A simple runny nose you used to ignore could now banish a child from daycare for days on end, suddenly adding eight extra hours of childcare responsibilities to a day that was already too short of them. At one point, we went eight straight weeks with at least three days of having to keep our toddler at home. And when we actually did catch Covid, it took three more weeks to clear all the isolation requirements and return to "normal". All while my wife and I tried to hold down two full time, highly demanding careers.

Speaking of work, I was teetering on burn-out there as well. When I had taken the job four years earlier, I knew I was taking on support of IT systems that hadn't been properly maintained for a very long time and there was a lot of urgent catching up to do. It sounded like a fun challenge. But I had underestimated how thin the team was and how difficult it would be to get enough support to increase it. Instead we were all left doing at least two full time jobs and constantly running to fight the next fire before the last one had been properly put out. I had willingly pressed through that under the hopeful belief that better days were always "just a few more projects" away. But the reality was we could never go fast enough to both catch up on years of neglect and stay ahead of a new phase of growth that the company had entered. 

By that winter of 2022, we had started to lose the constant race-against-the-clock. The emergency bandaids we had been slapping on key systems were breaking faster than we could apply them. Outages and system errors were increasing, and so were the complaints and frustrations of everyone who depended on them. Frankly, I didn't think they grasped how much worse it was going to get if the situation kept deteriorating, and that was starting to look like the only possible outcome. It was stressful and exhausting. What had earlier felt like a fast-paced and adrenaline-packed work environment was morphing into a dark and slowly unfolding train wreck. I found myself contemplating just walking off the job on an almost daily basis.

That combination of adrenal-fatigued burnout at work, uncontrollable childcare disruptions, and pandemic weariness got the best of me. I was really unhappy, increasingly cynical, and drifting towards despondent. I barely had enough energy to just get through the day let alone be excited about anything. Even playing with my kid felt like a chore. Coworkers were noticing as I became more and more irritable at work, and my wife was certainly experiencing that at home too. Bursts of barely contained road rage were a given anytime I was behind the wheel. I even ended up in a few honest-to-goodness shouting matches with random strangers in public! That had never happened to me before, and the fact it wasn't an isolated occurrence was alarming.

I realized I needed to find a path back out of this wilderness before it was too late. I didn't have anything left in the tank to just pick myself up and push the bad feelings away, but I knew I was on the edge of personal catastrophe if I did nothing. Best case, I'd snap and walk off the job, and then have to deal with the financial consequences of lost income. Worst case, I'd snap at my wife one too many times or do something else that caused permanent damage to my personal life instead of just my finances. 

So I started feebly trying to find little things I could do to feel better with whatever motivation I could still muster. I turned off the news and watched sitcoms instead. I tried taking a few minutes each day to write down a couple positive things that had happened. And I started walking to work instead of driving to get at least a small bit of exercise with what little time I had. 

During those walks I would often to listen to podcasts, and a series called "The Happiness Lab" kept showing up in my recommendations. I'm not one for mushy, just-think-happy-thoughts "help", but in my search for anything to pull out of the tailspin, I decided to give it a try and played the first episode. Almost right away, the series introduced itself differently than I expected. The phrase "this is what science says about happiness" really struck me. Real studies and academic research? Evidence-based ideas that were proven to increase people's overall happiness? OK, that I could get behind! I was quickly hooked and listened to a new episode almost daily. After each one I would jot down the single idea that impacted me the most and that I wanted to remember and internalize.

It really, really helped, and now I'm writing this blog as a summary of what I learned. Mostly I'm doing this for myself, to help reinforce and better ingrain those lessons because, as the first few posts will soon show, our happiness will inevitably drift lower if we don't push against that natural tendency. But I also thought I'd do it in the open public on the off-chance it helps someone else as well. If you've found this, I hope it benefits you. And if not, well, you got what you paid for.