What Is Hygge? 8 Tips for Embracing the Cozy Lifestyle

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Odds are, if you’ve been anywhere on a lifestyle-oriented website recently—or just visited Pinterest or Instagram—you’ve heard of hygge.

No, that’s not just a random collection of letters caused by your cat walking across the keyboard. Hygge (roughly pronounced “HOO-gah”) is a Danish concept that more or less equates to a feeling of being cozy, comfortable, safe, and whole.

What Is Hygge?

Basically, hygge is the state that everyone wants to be in for a relaxing day, but also when they settle down to work: comfy, relaxed, and ready to hit perfect flow.

For obvious reasons, hygge is massively popular; it was even short-listed as a candidate for the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 word of the year. The Danes are consistently ranked as some of the happiest people on earth, despite the often cold and dark climate, so there must be something to their attitude towards life.

There are dozens of websites and books that tell you how to achieve hygge in your own life, usually revolving around wearing big fluffy socks and drinking a lot of tea. But the good news is that you don’t need to invest in fancy blankets or sweaters to practice the hygge lifestyle; I’ll show you how you can adapt the hygge mindset for free and also reap its benefits.

How to Practice Hygge

Here are some tips and tricks to apply the concept of hygge so you can get cozy, work better, and achieve flow.

1. Examine Your Space

Take a moment to look at the space where you spend most of your time, whether it’s your office, dining room table, or even your car. Is it jammed with papers and bills and reminders? Have other areas of daily life crept into that area?

If so, take a few minutes to put everything in its appropriate place. A cozy space doesn’t mean a cluttered or chaotic space!

In fact, hygge is very much about simplicity. A lot of us can’t work in completely spartan environments, but it’s also hard to focus when reminders of your to-do list are staring you in the face.

2. Build a Hyggekrog

Yep, it’s another alphabet soup word that you don’t know how to pronounce: hyggekrog! This translates more or less as “comfortable corner,” and it’s a great little retreat from the world.

You don’t need to designate an entire room as a hyggekrog. Rather, you can carve out some space from an existing room (like a den or living room) that you will use just for reading, meditating, and getting into the right frame of mind. Figure out your personal needs and then work with them—there’s no wrong approach here!

To really create a hygge atmosphere, load your comfy corner with thick, cozy blankets, a few candles, and a good place to set a cup of tea or hot chocolate.

If you’re a writer, you can also check out our tips for setting up your writing space and also apply some of these hygge tips!

3. Read More

Now that you’ve got that cozy corner set up, go grab a book and start reading! Hygge is all about taking time to care for yourself, and that includes losing yourself in a great book.

You might be thinking, “But I’m trying to be a writer, not a reader!” Well, the best writers are voracious readers. It’s how we learn more about technique and style, and it’s how we figure out what works and gain new ideas to add to our toolbox.

Perhaps most importantly, immersing yourself in a world someone else has created can be an amazing reminder of why you decided to be a writer in the first place. And that sense of calm confidence, of knowing that you’re on the right path, is very hygge indeed.

4. Focus on Simplicity

Scandinavians in general are known for taking a very sleek, streamlined, simple approach to all aspects of life (just look at IKEA furniture and Nordic interior design!).

Placing value on interactions and relationships instead of things and focusing on simplicity may be one of the reasons they’re so happy—stuff doesn’t make us happy, experiences do.

Strive for simplicity in your surroundings, interactions, and in your work. We often make things more complicated than they need to be (especially when it comes to communication), and surround ourselves with things that don’t really matter.

Instead, focus on the 2–3 most important things that you need to get done today, and also reach out to someone who matters to you. Don’t overwhelm yourself with distractions, too many details, or things that really might not be a priority.

5. Be Mindful

Stop for a moment and focus on your mindset. What are you thinking about? Are you planning what’s for dinner? Are you thinking about the next marketing idea you want to try?

Hit pause on all those thoughts and bring your mind back to the present. Focus on the feeling of your chair underneath you, the texture of the keys as you’re typing, the scent of the air (do you have those very hygge candles burning?). Take a few minutes to just bring yourself back to this moment.

If you find your mind wandering again, stop and center yourself again. Before you know it, you’ll find a state of mindful flow, where you tune out the distractions of the rest of the world, and are completely immersed in whatever it is you’re doing at the moment.

Learn more about how to practice mindfulness.

6. Breathe

Deep, rhythmic breathing can also help you live more in the present moment and feel more comfortable and relaxed.

If you’re having trouble getting into that state of flow, take five very deep breaths from deep in your belly. Concentrate on the feeling of the air going in for three counts, staying in your lungs for three counts, and then rushing out over five counts.

There! Bet you’re feeling more centered and happily hygge already.

7. Embrace the Positive

Hygge isn’t just about simplicity, cozy corners, mindfulness, and chunky knit sweaters. It’s also about embracing the positive aspects of every day.

Yeah, it sounds like a cheesy self-help line, but there’s something good to be found in every situation. If you’re stressed about impending deadlines, bad reviews, sluggish sales, or difficult relationships, try to flip your approach to these issues.

Yes, you have a ton on your plate. But what else do these situations tell you?

Keeping with the examples above, impending deadlines mean someone values and wants your work; bad reviews mean people are actually seeing your work; sluggish sales mean there’s room to grow; and a difficult relationship means there’s someone who cares about you, you just need to figure out how to communicate.

If you really, really can’t find anything positive in what you’re doing right now, find something else positive to focus on, even if it’s just those fluffy socks. They’re not hygge for nothing.

8. Prioritize People

Spending time with people you care about is a key tenet of hygge. You have to take care of yourself and your relationships to be a well-rounded person, and you have to be a well-rounded person to be good at anything.

But prioritizing people also has direct implications for your writing. It can be really easy to fall into the trap of focusing on your plot, moving along situation after situation without ever developing the characters you’ve created. Truly engaging stories, though, involve some sort of internal journey, too—characters change and develop as they go through the steps of your plot.

Even hardcore science fiction novels are improved by prioritizing people; there’s always a balance to be struck between the world you’re building, the situations you’re exploring, and the people who are doing the exploring. Nonfiction, too, can benefit from a focus on the human aspect: make your point relatable and focus on how your insights can and have helped people and you’ll create a much more powerful book.

What Does Hygge Translate to in English?

There’s actually no direct translation for hygge in English, but it’s essentially a quality of coziness that is best described through examples, like the cozy, candlelit settings we’ve described throughout this post, or just being surrounded by friends and family at home.

Discover more untranslatable words that other languages use to capture even obscure feelings, like the distinct coziness of hygge.

The True Meaning of Hygge

Hygge isn’t just about wrapping yourself up in fuzzy blankets while munching popcorn and sipping rich hot cocoa. It’s a state of mind that embraces simplicity, focus, relationships, and a sense of calm.

All the core aspects of hygge can help you develop a relaxed, focused mindset that make it easier to focus on what really matters in your life.

Go slip on a pair of fuzzy socks and give it a try!

How do you practice hygge? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

For more on mindfulness and improving your writing process, read on: