Happy Is a Nibble — How I Found Joy Six Feet Under Okay 🌞

Happiness felt like a fantasy — reserved for people with love, financial stability, and vacations. Not for someone managing lifelong health issues, traumatic memories, and a brain that betrayed her daily. In Daily Dose of Dawn #222, resilience coach Dawn Super shares the distinction that changed everything: the difference between happiness and happy. Happy is smaller, more accessible, and easier to binge. A flower from a stranger. A giggle from a baby. A piece of candy you forgot was in your pocket. This is the episode that explains where Happy Matters came from — and how 3,000 things in 30 days proved the happy was always there.

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If you're living a challenging life, if you wish you could be happier, if you're looking for ways to make that happen in your own life and you want to think about that for a few minutes, welcome in to your daily dose of Dawn at Dawn — videos designed to expand your thinking.

At the time I was dealing with all of this, I was about six feet under okay. Happiness was a movie Will Smith starred in. It wasn't for people like me — who were dealing with lifelong health issues, managing a bunch of traumatic memories, slogging through financial and relationship and other issues while trying to manage a meatsuit that was faulty and a brain that betrayed me.

To me, happiness was a fantasy. Happiness was for people who had love in their life, were able to pay their bills on time. Who took vacations.

But happy — happy is a nibble. It's a flower from a stranger and a giggle from a baby and a piece of candy in your pocket you forgot you had. Happy is easier to hold on to and to look for and to find. Happy is also easier to binge.

It was that binging on happy that led me to create Happy Matters.

I had done a gratitude marathon where I listed 100 things a day that I was grateful for, for 30 days. That's 3,000 things in my everyday life — and I didn't repeat on the list. So if I was grateful for my family on day one, I had to get more specific — something about my family I was grateful for on day two — and bring in things that were happening on a daily basis.

And when you do that, you realize that you have a lot of things around you to be happy about. And so that's how you live Happy Matters. You remember that it matters.

You notice the happy things around you. They're always around you. And then most importantly, you allow yourself to let the happy in.

🧲 Hey, Dawn Super here. If you thrive on repetition, if you love little phrases to help you with your memory, and you're looking for effective tools to help you on your personal growth journey, take a second and check out my Fridge Philosophy magnets at happymatters.guru. Whether you're trying to survive starting over by yourself, working on ending generational trauma, trying to find your patience in an impatient world, or teaching your traumatized brain how to actually regulate your nervous system — because there's no reason that doing the work can't be fun. Okay, back to it.

You deserve to feel happy even if your life is hard. Even if you're not going to get better, even if you owe people money, even if you yelled at your neighbor, even if you got a speeding ticket, even if you lost your job — the circumstances in your life can't take away the 3,000 happy things that are floating around you if you look for them.

But not taking the time to look for them and then lamenting that you're not happy is a double-edged sword.

Everyone has things that go wrong in their lives all day long. Whether they're related to themselves or to their jobs or to their neighbors or to their family members, there are constantly things going wrong. So it's super important that you remember happy matters — and it matters because it gets you through the times when things are going wrong.

Am I always happy? Oh, absolutely not. But as soon as I'm able to regulate myself and soothe myself back into a calmer state, the sooner I feel better. And of course, the people around me also feel better.

And if you work on it, you can get to a place where you process all of that without including anyone else. And then you're a lot more fun to be around.

Someone asked me the other day how I was doing and I said I was awesome. And they said, "You always say that, that you're awesome." And I said, "Well, I always am awesome. As long as air is going in and out of these lungs, it means I have another day to enjoy being a human being again. I'm not going to waste that."

No matter what you do today, do it from your own side.

🧲 Grab a Happy Matters Fridge Philosophy magnet — magnetize yourself to the life you want to be living: happymatters.guru

I have a five week program coming up that's going to help you learn to let go and then to also build yourself up.

Click the link below to get on the waitlst and receive an early bird discount when registration opens. https://dawnsuper.com/freeyourself

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