The Happy and Helpful Blog

Here’s a fact for you today. – You can’t care about everything in the world without driving yourself insane. You can’t be emotionally invested in every person’s sob story or every issue that comes across your path. It’s impossible. Over the years the concept of indifference has taken on a

Are you getting to that age where you feel “worn out”? Maybe you passed that milestone a few years back. Around the age of 65, Lucious Seneca, a first-century Roman philosopher and statesman, said: “You may rate me in the worn-out class of those that are nearing the end.” Maybe

Well, here in Canada we just survived another Thanksgiving weekend. For those of you in the USA, you’re going to have to wait a while to be thankful. And that’s the point of our talk today. The tricky thing about having a holiday where we are supposed to be thankful

We all have a natural inclination toward something – whether it’s gardening, music, crafts, carpentry, etc. So, we take off on a quest to get better at that “one thing.” And, depending on our innate abilities in that area, we can get ahead of ourselves and create unintentional unhappiness. How?

We’re coming into the fall here in Cape Breton, and I’m sitting in a park writing, watching the leaves fall off the trees. The trees have worked since spring to grow those leaves, now they have to let the leaves go. To keep the leaves throughout the harsh storms of

Today is the first day of a new national holiday for Canada, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. In the words of parliament, “this day honors the lost children and survivors of residential schools, their families, and communities.” While it remains to be seen what impact a national holiday

Marcus Pacuvius was a Greek poet who lived from about 220-130 BC. He nearly singlehandedly carried on the tradition of the Greek tragic plays during his lifetime. But the thing for which he may be most remembered is his daily funeral. Yes, you read that right – daily funeral. Each

Legendary football coach, Vince Lombardi, said, “Mental toughness is spartanism with qualities of sacrifice, self-denial, dedication. It is fearlessness, and it is love.” In his book “The Mental Toughness Handbook” Damon Zahariades states that “mental toughness is our durability in the face of adversity.” Here’s the truth. Any fool can

There may be nothing worse than walking into a situation blindly with no firm grasp on who is there, what they want, and what it’s all about. Our happiness often takes a hard hit from somewhere out in left field when we don’t do our homework before we enter unfamiliar

In her New York Times Bestseller, The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin writes, “What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.” For many – maybe most – people happiness is something that they view as coming in bursts connected with something enjoyable they do