A picture is worth a thousand words. How photos can help create a happy life.

With high quality smart phones and great cameras now more accessible than ever, capturing our lives and experiences has become commonplace. While some people may think this is a bad thing because it may create even more dependency on technology, taking photos can actually help create a happy life. Here’s why:

1. Photos are usually of happy times, so by capturing them (and even better, displaying them!) they help us savour and reminisce by keeping the happy times vivid in our minds, which can help balance our innate ‘negativity bias.’

2. It helps you find the good in every day. There is a great app called 1SE (1-second everyday), which encourages users to create a ‘theme’ and take a relevant photo every day. At the end of the week, month, year – you can create a video that displays those photos as a showreel of your life. You can add music, text or animations and share it with friends and family. The purpose is that it focuses you to see the good in your life every single day – much like a gratitude journal, but through pictures instead of words!

3. It fosters creativity. Focusing yourself to find something beautiful to photograph every day fosters your inner creative spirit and again, encourages you to seek out the good in every day. If you are convinced you’re definitely not creative, then focus on learning and perfecting the technology!

4. It is SO easy to forget. It is so much easier to capture a moment in time through imagery as opposed to writing about the same event in a journal. As the old saying goes - ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ – and is a perfect way to cement a moment in time so that you never forget it.

5. Owning the beautiful. When you see something beautiful or amazing, it is natural to want to claim or own it for yourself in some way. Taking photos of something you saw that you loved, or really appreciated, will evoke those same feelings of happiness or awe every time you look at it.

Watch the video from The Greater Good Magazine online that talks about the same topic here

So next time you wonder whether it's worthwhile getting the shot - it is!