A CULTURAL COZINESS: Perhaps Better Than “Self Care”

By Sophia Memon

Denmark is known for being one of the happiest countries in the world. Perhaps I just have Europe on my mind (with a semester abroad in Edinburgh coming up), but maybe there’s something to be learned from a place well known for joy, contentment, and general peace. I decided to look into if the Danes have a secret to happiness.

Apparently they do, and it seems like it comes down to hygge: a Danish word for a way of living that prioritizes comfort, coziness, and every day happiness. 

In our own lives, it can feel natural to chase in-the-moment happiness, the doable and immediate “solutions.” That’s where the self care industry comes in, with products galore to “cure” whatever it is that we’re going through: luxury massages, candles upon candles, bandaids for anguish that can tangibly help you right now but also only right now. A massage can relax your shoulders and ease your mind today, but tomorrow might still come barreling in with yesterday’s baggage. Self care as it exists in our society is a temporary solution to problems that are actively built into our culture. A side note: countries with the consistently highest happiness ratings specifically emphasize the importance of not intertwining consumerism and self care (we’ll get back to this in another article).

Hygge is about creating a lifestyle governed by long-term peace rather than sparks of bandaid joy. Oh how lovely it would be to live in a society guided by this kind of communal priority. Luckily, we can try to create this for ourselves in our own lives no matter where we live. Of course, the Danes' consistently high happiness is definitely also a result of free public healthcare, functional and achievable work-life balance, and economic security, which cannot be overlooked, but the cultural coziness that is encouraged and so widely practiced certainly must help.

So, here are a few ways to incorporate hygge into your life, regardless of where in the world you are. 

Create a warm safe haven of your own space.

Warm lighting, or lack thereof, is perhaps the most defining feature of any room. A hygge lifestyle is characterized by dimming the lights, lighting candles, and finding physical comfort and warmth. It gets quite cold in Denmark, and here in Chicago, but if we can take initiative and build an ever-warm corner in a sometimes freezing world, the cold might not matter quite as much. Every tiny, cozy decision we make can transform our space.

Being present.

When I visited a friend in Minnesota this spring, I completely shut off my phone and spent less than an hour on it in the entirety of the multi-day trip. Now, that was easy because I was surrounded by joyful people and constant adventure, but in that time, I genuinely realized how much happier I am when my phone isn’t involved. A major element of hygge is turning off phones and disconnecting with the never-calm technological world. Focusing on the exact moment we are in opens us up to the little joys that every moment has the power to bring, and it allows us to slow down and to calm down in both the short and long term.

Shared joy.

Every year, I host Friendsgiving. The people I love dearly arrive at my doorstep and together we cook, drink tea, and laugh wildly for hours. The days before and after my gatherings leave me with a healed, glowing-light kind of feeling: a reminder of all the love that exists in my life and of its power. Hygge is about making and drinking coffee together, sharing meals together, taking the big and little opportunities to be together and to enjoy living in the village we’ve spent our lives nurturing. 

Equality and harmony.

American culture is quite individualistic: we learn to take care of ourselves, to focus on ourselves, to make decisions and sacrifices in order to be good enough to clear the high standards our society requires of us. Other cultures prioritize leaving behind our big egos, disregarding competition, and ditching drama at the door. If we can shift our mindsets and our interactions away from comparison, commonly known as the thief of joy, and leave more room open for positivity, our moods will be less susceptible to the never ending and impossible pursuit of being the best and being better on our own. 

Comfort.

Clothes, blankets, candles: change out of your work clothes when you get home, put on a fuzzy sweater and physically relax. Your stiff suit has no place in your dimly lit, friend-filled oasis from the world. 

Intentional lingering.

Making grand life changes can be hard. Maybe warm lighting and a bustling social life aren’t in the cards right now. But, in the fashion of whimsy hunting, lingering in the tiny moments of peace and joy consistently can create a baseline of joy in our daily lives. Hold the coffee a moment longer, let it warm up your fingertips and palms. Swallow it slowly. Take mental photos of the moments that make you feel safe, the small details that douse your life in warm-light hues.

Stop going after the extremes.

Constantly chasing the high of happiness can lead us to crave cold, hard solutions. After a long week of work, a big conflict, or heartache, we search for the potion that will fix things for us right now. Instead of making lifestyle changes that encourage a general sense of content, we let things get bad enough that we need a dramatic cure. And sometimes that works, but sometimes it merely makes a moment more bearable before disappearing and leaving nothing behind. Thinking about ways to improve our general quality of life can not only serve as prevention for hitting rock bottom, but it can offer continuous, reliable, and intrinsic healing. 

If we can learn from practices like hygge, we can learn to lower our general stress levels and anxiety, to prioritize and genuinely benefit from being grateful, to notice the daily small joys, and to be happy with ourselves and our lives in a non-momentary way. Doable and consistent self care that can be maintained even when things are hard will foster comfort, community, and cozy togetherness in profound ways over time.