Melody Warnick's Blog, page 4

The Joys of Going Off the Map

In a heroic act of altruism, my mom, who lives on the other side of the country, offered to watch our two daughters so my husband and I could go on a cruise to Alaska. Her one antiquated request beforehand: a paper map of our town. “I like being able to get a sense of the big picture when I’m in a new place,” she said.

I didn’t even know where to find a paper map! In the age of ever-present GPS navigation, a physical map seemed as antiquated as a horse and buggy.

Then an odd thing happened....

Why You’re Miserable after a Move

No one who packed up a U-Haul this summer would disagree with the notion that moving is a miserable experience. Whether you went 20 miles or 2,000, the sheer stress and exhaustion of packing up your entire life and setting it down again in a different place is enough to induce at least a temporary funk.

Unfortunately, new research shows that the well-being dip caused by moving may last longer than previously expected. In a 2016 study in the journal Social Indicators Research, happiness resea...

A 2-Minute Exercise for Feeling Happier Where You Live

When I was a bummed-out teenager, I hit on an exercise that seemed magically to make me feel better. I called it the Happy List. I took out a few sheets of notebook paper and brainstormed as many things that made me happy as I could.

Sleeping in crisp white sheets.

Sitting in the sunshine.

Cuddling with my cat.

Watching the movie “Amadeus” for the umpteenth time.

I knew intuitively what researchers have since verified: Focusing on the positive and writing it down can lift one’s mood and impr...

Where Do You Really Come From?

Unsplash/Anubhav Saxena

Imagine you’re at a party with a bunch of people you don’t know, and someone asks, “Where are you from?”

How do you respond: With the name of your neighborhood? Your city? Your hometown? Your state?

It probably depends on a couple things. First, the social context. If you’re from Mobile, Alabama, and you’re standing at a Mobile bar surrounded by fellow Mobilians, you’d probably zoom in on your neighborhood. If you’re partying it up in Paris, you’d probably say, “Alabam...

Moving to a New Town: The Impact on Kids

Source: Unsplash

To break the news to our two daughters that we were moving to Blacksburg, Virginia, I concocted a scavenger hunt around our house in Austin that finally led them to a wall map. Next to the state of Virginia, a Post-It note said, “We’re moving.” Ella, then ten years old, looked at us with glistening eyes. “Really?” she said.

Then she broke into a grin and flung her arms around us. “Thank you!”

So that was weird.

More typical, perhaps, is my friend’s daughter Grace, who spent h...

The Power of Public Grief

Source: Ben Townsend/Flickr

For the first couple years we lived in Blacksburg, Virginia, I refused to participate in the Virginia Tech Run in Remembrance. It just felt too weird.

Every April, the university organizes a 3.2-mile run to memorialize the 32 students and faculty members killed in 2007 by a student who’d chained the doors to Norris Hall shut and sprayed classrooms with bullets. The Virginia Tech massacre remains the largest mass shooting in the country, evoked every time another mo...

The #1 Thing You Can Do to Help Your Town Thrive

Image_Less_Ordinary/Flickr

Add this to the list of things you probably already know: Volunteering is good for you. Like, seriously good for you. Various studies have shown that spending as little as an hour a week volunteering can:

Increase your well-being, making you more satisfied with everything about your life: your finances, your health, your accomplishments, your relationships. Basically it gives you a huge self-esteem boost. Help you feel more socially connected. Reduce depression and...

Does Everyone Hate Your City?

Creative Commons

Here’s a startling truth: No matter how much you adore your city, there are people who hate it.

Like, really can’t stand it.

It’s strange, isn’t it, how two people who live in the same place can experience it in such vastly different ways? And yet 99% of the time, the city into whose soil you’ve dropped deep and happy roots is not universally beloved.

Recently, my friend Tana read my post about figuring out how attached you are to your town. She realized that her capital-H ho...

Doing These 3 Things After a Vacation Will Make You Happier

Sofia Sforza/Unsplash

Why does everyone hate tourists? Because we gawk. We rhapsodize about boring stuff like buildings (“Oh my gosh, the architecture!”). We snap pictures of subway entrances and sandwiches.

In short, we pay attention in a way we usually don’t in our owns hometowns, and that focus and excitement reawakens us to the thrilling power of place. In fact, a really good vacation makes us fall in love with our destination. Granted, it’s a low-grade version of place attachment—more in...

What Your Dream Vacation Says About You

Where you go on vacation is usually curtailed by annoying practicalities like bank accounts and work obligations—two reasons why my spring break trip took me on a three-hour road trip to Richmond instead of, say, the UK or a Hawaiian island.

But if money and time were no object, where would you go for your next big trip? Most of us have a mental bucket list of the places we’d like to see, and as it turns out, the kinds of vacation destinations you gravitate toward generally reflect how you s...