What makes you smile?

Stacey Collins
I think most people would agree that January isn’t the cheeriest month of the year. The month hosts the most depressing day of the entire year, people are still trying to recover from the excess of food eaten and money spent at Christmas and news reports seem to fill us with nothing but doom and gloom about the tough economic problems that we can expect to face in the oncoming year.

 In order to cheer you up, here are some things that PruHealth have found make you smile:

• A quarter of people asked in PruHealth’s Feel Good Factor study said that they get a buzz from walking on a beautiful day.
• Other answers included being nice to someone or smiling at them, getting a good night’s sleep, a loved one achieving something .
• The top spot was given to spending time with family, with 56% of those asked offering it as the thing which most makes them feel good.

So what makes you smile? What would you place at the top of your feel good list?

Retail therapy cheers some

Perhaps spending money makes you smile. We’ve been told repeatedly that money can’t buy you love, but it certainly can buy you the things you love. PruHealth found that people enjoy rewarding themselves by spending money on meals, going on holidays. I’m not surprised to see that chocolate found its way into the sixth place onto the chart - with retail therapy not far behind, with 21% of people choosing it as their gloom-buster.

Health and wellbeing expert at PruHealth, Dr Katie Tyron, claims that their research shows that people are incentivised to get healthier when they reward themselves. Or maybe it’s just because people have no money left to buy lots of food after spending money on rewarding themselves.

The study also found that over half of Brits take a ‘glass half-full’ approach to life. I think I probably fall into the pessimistic other half.