Forget New Year’s Resolutions. Some Lessons in Happiness Your Dog Can Teach You

Dogs live in the moment. While they can anticipate things based on routine and time of day, they don’t “park their happiness in the future.” Perhaps that is good advice for us as well. 

• Our world has become quite complicated by materialism, consumerism, negative politics and an often-seen disregard for those things that we should hold dear. Things such as, life, our environment and enjoying the moment. Here are some important lessons that we can and should learn from our canine family members.

• Lesson #1: Embrace contentment

  • Dogs may have lived with humans for centuries, but they never seem to have forgotten how happy they should be that they have a nice meal or a warm blanket. Learning to be content is a curious skill to acquire, and so easy to forget; especially in an individualistic society where social and material rewards often result from being competitive and ambitious.

  • Dogs are often happy playing with the same toy every day without a sense that they need a new one to derive more fun. (That is what pet parents usually believe.) It may  help us to think about how we can be content wth basic things in life by thinking about them and savoring them, just like a dog does.
• Lesson #2: Find joy in routine
  
  • Dogs truly love routines. They seek consistency and like to have clarity about what usually happens through the day and what sorts of signs mean that good stuff is on the way — like the outdoor leash signaling a happy walk is on the way.
  • Human attention spans have become shorter, perhaps even shorter than what we teach in obedience dog training. Diminished attention spans can often be confused with multitasking or spontaneity. The result becomes a more chaotic or distracted approach to routines and multitasking adds a pseudo-structure to this mix.
  • Dogs like to know what to expect and they like a sense of repetition in what happens around them, giving them comfort and certainty. Going to sleep and waking up at regular or fixed times are reassuring to our pets and changes in those routines can become stressful to them and possibly without us realizing it, to us also.  People throughout the centuries have used routines (often calling them rituals) to structure activities and add reassurance to a job or an event.
  • If we can add pleasure to our routines, we may actually enjoy them more. Like making work more enjoyable by listening to music or taking a break to take a walk; or savoring a delicious meal and avoiding eating and working at the same time.
• Lesson #3: Make time for play
  • Many people spend their free time doing things that, in retrospect, they would probably consider wasteful. An example of this would be time spent on social media, which research has demonstrated, can make people feel anxious and depressed. The boundaries between work and free time have virtually disappeared. Play is often the last thing on a long list of  ‘things-to-do’ and for some, ignored completely.
  • Add a “seize the day” frame of mind to each day, just like dogs do. For humans, play can involve physical exercise or intellectual exercise (e.g., reading a good book, being engrossed in a hobby, or just laughing with other people). Discover or re-discover what you enjoy doing as play, and make time for it every day. Just as your dog would.
• Lesson #4: Carpe Diem (Seize the Day)
  • Dogs get on with each moment by seizing happiness wherever they can find it, and we know that they look for unlimited opportunities to wag their tail and be joyful. Imagine, if today. we had a tail. How often in the course of a day would WE wag it?
  • Dogs don’t park their happiness into the future and say to themselves, “Well, I’m busy right now but I will be happy after I achieve X, or I will wait until I get Y to be happy.” No, dogs seize the day. It might help us to try to live a life in which carpe diem is a part of our philosophy.
• Recent summer camps and resort vacations have specialized in people getting back to less complicated lives. Upon entering, they confiscate cell phones and computers and only allow person-to-person or person-to-group communication to take place. Simplifying and enjoying the moment, the day and the routines of life, sound very Zen. The lessons that we can learn from our canine family members are these…and we have a lot to learn.  Who knows, maybe we will learn to wag our tails.
• So who needs New Year’s Resolutions? We have dogs!!!!!!!

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