Our Story
Life is challenging for everyone, regardless of who you are or what you do.
As physicians, our lives are inherently demanding. Without much thought, we often sacrifice our physical and mental health in the pursuit of helping others, and that comes at a cost. In our perpetually delayed gratification, thinking that there is always tomorrow, we traded too much sleep, missed too many family events, and lost too many loved ones.
In 2018, after being devastated by another unexpected loss, we realized that something needed to change. We needed to change. Life was too fragile, and we needed a way to take better care of ourselves. We came up with the idea of a little dose of happy® as a major mindset shift: that achieving small wins — a little dose of happy — every day would improve our overall happiness over time.
We built the idea into the name itself. The letters of aldohappy stand for our elements of happiness, and the word spoken aloud, “all do happy,” carries the rest of it: happiness is something you do, not something you wait for.
Over the next year we put up a simple website of news stories, articles, and recipes sorted by those elements. Then, as usual, we got pulled back under. Long hours, no free time, more family tragedy. We were living in the same spiral of busyness, sadness, and burnout we had promised ourselves we would climb out of.
The start of the pandemic in 2020 changed that. We watched burnout move through our profession and through our colleagues, on top of rates that were already the worst anyone had seen. Something had to give, and that was when we finally decided to do something about it.
What we understood by then was that knowing what to do had never been our problem. Holding ourselves to it was. If we were going to help other physicians, and other busy people living the way we had been living, we needed to build something simple, meaningful, memorable, and motivating enough to survive an ordinary hard week.
So, we built the Do Happy® App. One easily accomplishable task a day, cycling through self-care, staying connected to the people you love, and acts of kindness in your own community. Small enough to actually do on the worst day of your week.
One feature matters more to us than the rest. The app keeps track of the important people in your life and the dates that matter to them, and among those dates we included the loss of a loved one. That may seem like a strange thing to find in a happiness app. But we have been on the receiving end of those messages, from the family and friends who remembered, and there is almost nothing kinder. We wanted to make it easy for everyone to be that person.
What Happened Next
The app is still here and still doing its quiet daily work. But over the years since, the writing has become the center of what we do.
What began as a handful of articles is now a blog about how happiness actually works: what the research shows, what it does not show yet, and what has held up in our own lives. Manda writes it. She built a set of standards for how every claim gets sourced and verified, and then published them, because a promise you cannot check is not worth much. You can read exactly how it works in How I Research and Write.
We are two physicians who have battled burnout and come out the other side still believing the world can be a better place. We think it is still okay to laugh, still okay to enjoy being alive, and that kindness, care, empathy, respect, gratitude, and integrity matter more when things are hard, not less.
That is what all of this is for. We hope it brings you a little dose of happy. ✨
Manda & Brett
Co-Founders, a little dose of happy®