Cultivating The Happiness Habit: Why Writing?

I was perusing our local used-t0-be-alternative-but-now-is-filled-with-advertising freebie newspaper, and came upon an article about happiness experiments conducted by a UC Santa Monica professor, Sonja Lyubomirsky. In case you don't know, positive psychology is an academic field growing by leaps and bounds. Everybody's doing it.
Ms. Lyubomirsky developed these particular experiments to attempt to discover whether people can rise above their genetic happiness set point (yes, apparently, happiness, like everything else, is about 50% genetically determined). Her objective is to find out how happiness works.
The conclusion she has come to after various studies is that, yes, happiness can be affected, can be increased by specific actions people take. In her studies, she has people keep gratitude journals, and "kindness interventions" (the article didn't specify how). The results indicated that as long as people practice happiness, they really are happier, but a few months after they stop, they become less happy. So habit seems to be key. The happiness strategies have to become habitual to keep working.
Which brings me to the real point of this post. Why writing? Why can writing be a great tool to practice happiness? I think because writing is already habitual to most of us. Besides breathing, speaking, walking and reading, it is probably the most habitual act we perform. Even if we don't think of it as real writing, we e-mail, we text, we write memos and lists and phone messages every day. So it should be easy to make the leap to using writing as a tool to create other habits, like the habit of happiness. That's my theory, anyway. You don't need to think of it as real writing, but like e-mails and lists, as a means to an end. You don't have to be a writer, you don't have to be an artist, you just have to PAY ATTENTION. Like Ann Lamott says in her book about writing, Bird by Bird, "...we may notice amazing details during the course a day, but we rarely let ourselves stop and really pay attention. An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift." So, think of yourself as the author of your own life. Make yourself pay attention, write it, record it for posterity, which may be you ten years from now, or your kids or grandkids. Or maybe you'll be the Samuel Pepys of your generation, the great diarist of the common man or woman.

Anyway, enough proselytizing. Here's the exercise. Which I have not done yet, bad me. Not that I haven't done it in the past many times, but...I usually bake a cake or cook something, and right now I can't, mum has a hissy every time I use the stove for more than five minutes, so I have to get over myself and just do something else then report back Monday. I call this exercise, for the reason above, Bake a Cake.
Think of one thing that gives you a real break from your daily stuff. It should be something solitary this time, so you can really concentrate and commit a good Act of Attention. A bike ride, or baking a cake, or just driving or walking to a pretty spot in your neighborhood. Something pretty tranquil.
Find an hour at least to do this exercise. Just before you start, take your anxiety pulse. Are you an anxious 7 on a scale of 1-10? Write your 'score' down. Then start your activity. Really pay attention to the experience. Take notes if it's not dangerous, don't perch your notebook on your steering wheel (I've done it and can't recommend it). If you can't take notes, just try to remember as much as you are able. The misty day, the dewy feeling on your skin. Remember the shiny smoothness of batter, the intense, grainy sweetness when you taste it.
Or do any people who may pass seem preoccupied, energized, exhausted? What are they wearing? What expressions are on their faces? I once noticed while driving that most people had angry expressions on their faces. Another day, they all looked crazy. One was driving through a sea of balloons packed into a tiny car.
Try to remember any details you can, even if they're not bizarre. Then, as soon as you're done, write your experience and/or draw it. Every detail. Then take your anxiety pulse once more. Is it lower? Is it a lot lower? Bet it is.