How to Create a Pride Shrine in Your Home

From the Blue Zones of Happiness: optimize your home environment to boost your pride, one of the three strands of happiness. A “pride shrine” is a place with family photos, mementos, and objects that display your accomplishments. Every time you walk by, you’ll be rewarded with a surge of pride and a reminder of how you fit into the world.

One facet of happiness is the sum of positive emotions. Ed Diener, one of the leading pioneers in scientific research on happiness for the past twenty-five years, said that happiness is the frequency of positive feelings and that “evidence suggests positive affect—the hallmark of well-being—may be the cause of many of the desirable characteristics, resources, and successes correlated with happiness.” We like the idea of a “pride shrine”—a place in your house that you pass a lot where you put items that trigger pleasant memories and positive emotions.

Take one area in your house, ideally a well-trafficked area, maybe between your bedroom and your bathroom. And you create a pride shrine of pictures that trigger positive memories — pictures of your kids when they were young, a remembrance of a parent or a grandparent, pictures of your vacation spot, diplomas, articles that you’ve liked that make you feel good. Anything that makes you feel pride in something that you’ll see several times a day because when it comes to happiness, one important component is how you feel the sum of joyful moments day to day. And you can set up your house so you’ll feel more of those.