Or maybe it's the upkeep of the house. You try to keep a clean living environment. But after working and spending time with friends, there's no energy left to pick up the clutter and get rid of the dirt. After all, the clutter and dirt will just come back. So you're left with a feeling of discouragement and frustration.
Or it's the work you do for the kids. Boy, do they take a lot of work. Keeping the baby fed, clean, and happy takes all your time. And then there are the older kids. Soccer practice. Piano lessons. Church youth group. There's just no time to do it all. You're racing through life like little more than a robot. How can you reclaim your humanity?
Life gets to all of us from time to time. It seems to be the price we pay for an increasingly complex world, a world where the Internet has opened up so many choices to us, that we can feel overwhelmed with making decisions.
Fortunately, despite any complexity the Internet has added to our lives, it also has made it easier to insert some little pauses into the day to make life a little more bearable. I call these little pauses micro-breaks. And they can be a great way to step off the fast-track for just a moment to relax a bit and refocus on the things that are important.
Micro-breaks come in all shapes and sizes.
One type of micro-break that many people find helpful is a thought for the day -- a profound, noteworthy, or entertaining saying. The Internet has all kinds of sources for a thought for the day. Just do a search on any of the major search engines, and you'll find how many possibilities there are to choose from.
What kind of thought for the day works best? That depends on your personality.
If you tend to get caught up in the details of life, then you might do best with sayings that focus on more profound statements of life and existence.
If you are inspired by quotes that have stood the test of time, sites that focus on the sayings of famous people might provide the most benefit to you.
If you find yourself taking life too seriously too often, sayings that can make you smile or chuckle would suit your style well.
The most important thing is to find a source of micro-breaks that you find inspiring or relaxing. These will give you the most energizing pauses in your day.
Of course, there is no reason you can't make use of more than one type micro-break.
So, fire up your browser, visit your favorite search engine, and find yourself some places where you can get your thought for the day. Then, either sign up to receive your daily thought in your email, or make a habit of visiting the places you like best for a quick micro-break. Soon you'll be headed in the right direction to maintain a balanced life.
And what if instead of providing stale, you've-heard-it-a-thousand-times-before humor, that site provided fresh, baked-daily humor created on-site in their in-store ovens?
Well ... that's the project I've taken on.
And it's turning out to be quite the challenge to keep up with baking all those daily loaves of laughs.
So how do you go about creating a thought for the day that's humorous without having to be a professional comic?
Here are some tips:
1. Think about the types of things in your everyday life that you find unusual, ridiculous, hard-to-understand, silly or embarrassing.
2. Come up with a way to express one of these things in a way that leads the mind in one direction. Then, suddenly shift direction with the final part. This is the setup/punchline structure of humor.
3. For a given idea, generate as many setup/punchline variations as you can. Keep pushing to generate them, even when you think you can't come up with any more. The ones you fight hard for are usually the funnier ones.
4. Try to make your humor express your final point in an indirect way. It's funnier to say someone could use "subsidies of something" than to say someone "someone doesn't have much something."
5. With each setup/punchline, play with the words to try to make your humor brief and to the point. Wordy "humor" generally is not as funny as brief humor.
6. Try to hide the final destination of your humorous setup/punchline until the very end. You want the punch of your humor to be showcased at the end, with nothing trailing it to drain the funny part away.
7. Practice on a regular basis. Keep what's funny and toss what's not funny. You'll have to use your best judgment here. This is easier to do if you set what you've written aside for a few days. Then, come back later and review it. Many of the lines that lack humor will stick out like a sore thumb.
Here's an example of how I created a funny line:
- The word "imagination" popped into my mind, and I thought about how insulting it is to be accused of having no imagination.
- I wondered what group could I insult without really offending anyone. Politicians are always a good target.
- I then tried to figure out how I could accuse politicians of having no imagination.
- For the setup I wanted to suggest that I was going to compliment politicians by saying they had a lot of imagination. So I thought, "With the amount of imagination politicians have ...."
- I tried to think of a way to indirectly say someone has no imagination. My approach was "... they should qualify for government subsidies."
- The result was:
With the amount of imagination
politicians have, they should
qualify for government subsidies.
If you don't find that line funny, that's OK. Your sense of humor may be different than mine. And that's fine. Humor is very subjective, and there is a wide variety in the things people find funny. Also, analyzing the creation of a joke step-by-step, like we did above, has a tendency to kill the humor as you go.
This is the process I'm using on a regular basis to create fresh humor for my thought for the day web site. It's not an easy task, but it's fun and satisfying when the funny pours out. And it's great to think that maybe I've added a little humor to the middle of someone's day, maybe just at the point where the person's daily stress was about to overwhelm them. That's why I call my humorous thought for the day Laugh Vitamin.
Robert Favero has sinced written about articles on various topics from Entertainment Guide, Family and Web Development. Rob Favero is the creator of the web site. It provides a humorous thought each day for an entire year. Stop by each day for your. Robert Favero's top article generates over 201000 views. to your Favourites.