Do You Want to Live a Richer Life?: 10 Ways to Create Happy Memories Now
“We didn’t realise we were making memories. We just knew we were having fun” (Winnie The Pooh)
Do you ever feel a bit like your life is a drag? It’s day in day out and whoosh! Another year has passed and then you wonder - how did this happen? What did I even do this year?
This definitely was my experience just a little while ago for about 2 years. And it so happened that I had a rude awakening.
My adventurous self seemed to be gone together with my uni days …
When I realised that, I had a little breakdown. I thought – is this it? Is this all there is? (And I am not even talking about quitting your job and going after your dream career!) The daily in and out seemed so boring! I didn’t see my friends as much anymore - everyone seemed so busy! I didn’t take as much vacation, I travelled less and I socialised less. Yikes!
But I knew what I had to do. I knew that it was up to me – and nobody else – to change that. Only I can make a difference in my own life.
I didn’t only want to be more adventurous. I wanted to be more present and I wanted small moments to be more meaningful. I wanted to make more memories and for my years to feel longer and deeper.
For his book The Art of Making Memories, Meik Wiking’s Happiness Research Institute “conducted a massive global study around happy memories” and found out 8 common denominators for the memories that people treasured. They were
novel and extraordinary (23%)
multisensory (62%)
required attention in the moment (100%)
meaningful (37%)
emotional (56%)
involving peak and struggle (22%)
talked about later (storytelling) (36%)
outsourced (7%)
Let me outline and explain those a little for you. They are all beautiful and simple things that you can do on a regular basis – every week, even each day – in order to break the daily grind and live a more memorable life.
1) Make it new and exciting
It’s no news that we often remember the first of something, am I right? The first kiss, the first day at school, the first time skiing, the first time we met a current partner, the first time we got paid, the first time we did a bungee jump – that kind of thing. If you want your life to feel richer, make sure to add some spice to your calendar. It is so easy to get sucked into the daily in and out where every day just swims by in a blur. So, try to add some new things to it for once a month or once a week! Try out a new recipe, try out a dance class, travel somewhere where you haven’t been before, explore a local suburb you don’t know yet. Explore Facebook events (I only just found out about those recently!). And put it in your calendar.
2) Make it multisensory
Oh, the beauty of our senses. If you want to create some beautiful memories in your everyday life, make sure to surround yourself with things that engage your senses. You can start with fragrant flowers in your home, IKEA vanilla candles and freshly baked blueberry crumble to activate your most ancient sense – the smell. Also, surround yourself with things that catch your eye or go enjoy a gorgeous vista. Try out new recipes, new restaurants or new cuisines to play to your sense of taste. And the next time you go for a walk, don’t just walk along the path. Touch your surroundings. Touch the trunk of an old tree and let your fingers glide over its wrinkles. Pick up a beautiful stone or an autumn leaf and trace its texture with your fingertips. When you begin to really engage with your surrounding through touch, you imprint this memory on a much stronger level. In fact, a walk is the best example of a simple activity that you can spruce up with many of your senses. Instead of just seeing what is in front of you, actively look around. Listen to what you can hear. Engage with the people you meet baby saying hello and creating an inter-human connection.
3) Pay attention to the moment
While Wiking does not list “presence” as a particular element in the art of memory-making, he did notice that out of all the people who were surveyed, 100% paid attention in the moment that they later remembered. Makes sense, right? This applies to active happy memories, not all the knowledge and information that we also experience and store through our subconscious. Another survey shows that paying attention to what is in front of us and being present is directly related to how happy we are! When you pay attention, it means you are not thinking about anything in the past and you are not planning ahead or worrying about the future. You are only right here right now in the one moment that matters. When you are, you consciously experience the moment, you are engaged, you are committed. The thing is, my friend, mindfulness is not just this thing you do in your once-a-week yoga class or in your 10-minute meditation. Those are just the moments of practice, the preparation for real life. Because when you manage to be present with your current experience and to savour it and feel enjoyment through all your senses and in the body, this information will be stored in a safe vault.
4) Connect with others
Another way to escape the daily grind is by connecting with others which Wiking filed under meaningful moments. What does this mean? The responses that Wiking received and that he filed under “meaningful” include memories such as, “the day I got married”, “walking on the beach with my husband on a trip to celebrate our anniversary”, “the birth of my son”. But to create meaningful moments, you don’t only need such big events. It can also be “going to the beach with my grandfather on a Saturday morning”. And these are all beautiful and meaningful moments because the connection we have to other people defines somewhere around 40 per cent of our happiness and wellbeing. On a daily level, you can start very simple. Washing the dishes doesn’t sound particularly thrilling, does it? But when you get some help from someone you live with and you have a conversation about your day while one of you fills the dishwasher, and the other one wipes the surfaces, this plain chore has gained the meaning of connecting with another human - very likely even a loved one.
5) Make the moment emotional
You know – being emotional is not a bad thing and in fact your emotional memory can be much stronger and definitely is more ancient than your rational brain. So, let’s start by not shoving our emotions under the carpet and leaving them there to catch dust. Do the opposite. Above, I talked about connecting with other humans and we also connect with others by being vulnerable or via our emotions. You could talk with your partner about your emotions or about a situation and the emotions it evoked for you and thereby create a beautiful memory because you connect on a deeper level. Or create moments of beautiful love or joy. They are, of course, very memorable. But don’t forget about emotions like fear! Get out of your comfort zone and, yes, expect your inner critic to join you. But that’s just their job. When you get out of your comfort zone, you grow. But you also make memories. Do something that scares you! Maybe you are a bit scared of meeting new people or trying out a new sport or a dance class. But if you want to give it a try – do it, even if you are a little scared. You will see that it is safe.
6) Struggle, achieve, celebrate
Do you remember when you struggled through something hard and then you carried away a win? You may have trained very hard for a sprint, you may have struggled to learn your instrument until one day you were able to play your favourite song on it. Or even at the end of the week, after a struggle of 5 days, you achieve another weekend and you celebrate. Or you have a goal in your business that you work toward. That’s very memorable. But don’t only look into the future. Also, look back and capture and celebrate the achievements you already have made. Keep a little achievement journal or make it a ritual on the new moon or your birthday. When we are caught up in our everyday drag sometimes, we forget how far we have come. And moving forward seems so much harder because there is so much more to do and achieve. But when you look back, you see how far you have come from zero. And that is a hell of a lot!
7) Tell a story about the moment you want to remember – before you forget
Do you know what’s really important if you want to actively create memories? You tell the story over and over again. This is also a trick in language learning where you repeat the grammar or vocabulary over and over again with more and more time passing in between. Basically, you want to repeat it just before you would otherwise forget it. In that way, the knowledge becomes automatic and gets stored in the subconscious. When you tell the story of a wonderful walk over and over again, it has higher chances to get stored there, too. Together with your dusty French! For example, when you have a bit of an adventurous day and you want to keep it in mind - tell your partner about it. Tell your friend about it the next time you talk, then tell the story again to your hairdresser and tell it again at a dinner party.
8) Outsource your memory
Outsourcing your memories is an old trick - but it is very effective. The more simple version is to collect memorabilia - even the word itself implies that this is for the sake of keeping a memory alive. So, keep that leaf you collected and dry it in a book - maybe even attach it to your entry in your journal. Collect shells and other natural beauties from your visits to new places. Keep theatre tickets and meaningful receipts. A more modern approach, of course, is taking pictures of the moment you wish to freeze in time. And that is perfectly beautiful. Just watch out for any distracting elements on your phone that may draw you into their abyss while you are just trying to photograph a moment. It’s important to stay present. You can also later send that photo to a friend and tell them about your experience.
And here are two extra tips from me:
9) Savour the moment
To make a beautiful memory, or to simply feel the richness of the present moment, engulf yourself entirely in your current experience. That is where savouring comes in. Savouring means to essentially bring all of the points above into one way of living your present moment. Say, you are out at a cafe with a friend and you ordered a cup of coffee and a piece of cake. You could just eat the cake without paying much attention to it, both you and your friend on your phones. Nobody ever remembered something like this. Become present with your friend, put your phones away, taste the cake slowly, express how delicious it is. Science is actually showing that by doing this, you are enhancing your experience! It may taste even better just by saying how tasty it is. So, don’t shy away from saying, “wow, this is so yummy!”. And share the cake with your friend. Sharing your experience anchors it even more in the present moment and you make a memory, too. Maybe you take a picture of the cake and share it on Instagram later - there is nothing wrong with that. The intention counts. When you share it later and share how delicious it was, you recollect that moment which is just a bit like telling a friend. Just don’t wait for the likes or shares to roll in.
10) Make it a ritual
Rituals are a wonderful way to make memories and meaningful moments. We are creatures of habits, right? When you create a good habit, you do so because you want to do that thing automatically, without thinking about it. And this has a lot of benefits. It saves energy in the brain and it can improve your life enormously to have good habits. The thing with habits, though, is that you don’t remember them much because you are usually not present with the activity – that was the whole point of making it the habit in the first place! But if you want to make the habit memorable – or any situation in your day –, try to shape a ritual around them. Think about your morning routine as a morning ritual. Change your evening routine into an evening ritual. All that requires off you is to make the habits or the activities in your life meaningful and memorable and to give them a bit of magic. In that way, you can turn any boring quick breakfast into a candle-lit morning muesli bowl with flowers and writing a list of 3 things you are grateful for. Boom!
The takeaway
Remember that you have the power and the impact on your own life to create memories, adventures, and to create yourself a beautiful, meaningful and memorable life. Yes, it is a responsibility, but once you get started, it feels amazing.
And you don’t need to plan anything big. Sometimes it is the small moments, the small gestures that remain in your memory vault forever.
References & inspiration include
Meik Wiking: The Art of Making Memories
Melissa Ambrosini podcast episode: Adventures only happen to the adventurous
