PUT POSITIVE PSYCHOLOGY INTO ACTION
One joy scatters a hundred griefs.
—CHINESE PROVERB
It’s difficult to feel stress and joy at the same time. One strategy for minimizing stress is to maximize feelings of happiness and meaning in life. The field of positive psychology moves beyond mere positive thinking and has identified research-backed strategies for creating a more enjoyable lifestyle as well as maintaining a happier and more relaxed frame of mind. This chapter will explain some of the main concepts and techniques that have been identified as delivering the greatest benefits in this area. You’ll learn how to experience flow, enjoy pleasures, and engage in gratifications throughout the week and discover how to create a life that is not conducive to stress.
The Hunt for Happiness
Sophie wanted to feel happier, so she worked hard to attain things that she thought would bring happiness: She threw herself into a career that gave her a nice income, and she met each goal she set for herself professionally. However, she always seemed to slip back into feeling dissatisfied with life a few weeks after she reached her goals; she discovered that they didn’t bring lasting happiness. She also found that when she bought herself nice things, she was happier for a short while, but then the happiness went away, and she couldn’t understand why. She felt that something was missing in her personal life, so she turned to online dating to find love, but as she came home disappointed from date after date, unable to find someone who wanted the same things she wanted, she wondered what, ultimately, would bring the happiness she sought. One night, she realized that most of her journal entries were complaints about things that weren’t going well in life or were about disappointments she was facing, and she knew she needed a change. She wasn’t sure what she could do differently to feel more joy from day to day and to make her happiness last, but the hunt for happiness was bringing considerable stress!
When we talked about research in positive psychology, she found some answers. We discussed why certain things bring fleeting happiness and other things create happiness that is longer lasting and why both types of life ingredients are valuable. We focused on activities that would cause a more positive overall mood so that Sophie didn’t have to rely primarily on events outside of herself in order to be happy. Understanding what would bring more lasting happiness, as well as different types of positive feelings, helped her to feel that she had a road map in life and could know which direction would lead her to the type of life satisfaction she craved. After only a few days of focusing on different things suggested by positive psychology research, Sophie felt much happier, and her new levels of happiness remained in the weeks and months that followed.
Positive Psychology: Why It Matters
Positive psychology is a branch of psychology that studies what makes us resilient, or as Martin Seligman, the originator of positive psychology, put it, it is “the study of what makes life worth living.” As president of the American Psychological Association in the year 2000, he set out to forge a new focus to illuminate solutions from the perspective of what contributes to wellness, resiliency, and happiness. In doing so, he provided us with a wealth of new answers for important questions on happiness and life satisfaction. He created a new paradigm from which we can approach our lives.
This relatively new field centers on studying what makes us healthy and happy, rather than looking at factors that contribute to pathology and disease. This is an important distinction that provides a unique and valuable perspective on how to live and what our goals should be. Traditional psychological models have focused on factors that create stress or lead to a stressful experience, so we know what to try to avoid in our lives. Positive psychology, on the other hand, focuses on what factors are common among people who are thriving, and it gives us insight into which traits and lifestyle features we may want to adopt in order to thrive even more and which specific behaviors will get us to that healthier place.
Is Positive Psychology Just About Looking on the Bright Side?
While positive psychology involves techniques for developing a greater sense of optimism, such as focusing on the areas of life for which we are grateful and concentrating on our strengths and increasingly using them in the course of our lives, there is more to this field and its techniques than a mere shift in perspective. Positive psychology shows us what activities and lifestyle features are more likely to bring happiness and meaning into our lives and in this way work to drive out unnecessary stress. The activities recommended by practitioners in the field of positive psychology tend to operate on an internal level as well as an external one. Positive psychology practices include specific changes that involve adding certain features to one’s lifestyle—gratifications and pleasures, for example—and eliminating elements that impede happiness on a consistent basis. So positive psychology can bring a greater feeling of optimism, but this comes from more than just a shift in perspective. These techniques can work well not only by cutting down feelings of stress but also by adding positive feelings, which can make us more resilient to stress in our lives.
How to Manage: Popular Positive Psychology Interventions
The field of positive psychology has yielded several promising strategies that have been proved to promote our experience of happiness. These activities can be used by just about anyone and can help relieve stress, enhance meaning in life, and deepen our positive experiences. They tend to be enjoyable to practice as well, so adding one or several of these experiences to your life can be enjoyable and effective.
Pleasures
Pleasures are exactly what they sound like—things that bring us pleasure. They can be things we buy, things we eat, or things we do. Here is a list of common pleasures:
• Things to buy
° Clothes
° Books
° Games
° Toys (yes, adults can still play with toys!)
° Collectibles
• Things to do
° Movies
° Walks outside
° Parties
° Vacations
° Nights out
• Food
° Favorite meals
° Desserts
° Chocolate
° Drinks
° Snacks
• Experiences
° A warm bath
° A massage
° A day off
° A thrill ride
° A concert or favorite playlist
• The absence of something we don’t enjoy
° A day off
° Hiring a housekeeper
° Eating out (instead of cooking)
Activity to Try: List of Pleasures
What are some of your favorite pleasures? Take a moment to think about what you enjoy the most. Then make a list of as many of them as you can think of. This list may include some of the ideas above, as well as some of the things you have enjoyed at different times in your life. Include as many as you can think of, and you’ll be able to draw from this list when you need a pick-me-up.
The Benefits of Pleasures
These enjoyable experiences bring a temporary lift to your mood and can bring additional benefits because of this. Psychologist Barbara Frederickson initiated a significant body of research that studies the effects of positive emotions (which can come from the experience of pleasures), and discovered that there are many benefits. Her work centers around what is known as broaden-and-build theory, which maintains that positive emotions have a beneficial function for the survival of our species as a whole. This acclaimed theory holds that positive emotions broaden our existing intellectual, physical, and social resources, building up reserves we can use for coping with threats we may face in life. Indeed, when we are in a positive mood, our relationships do run more smoothly, which is quite beneficial for coping. Here are a few of the benefits that have been discovered:
• Improved cognitive functioning. Those who are in the throes of positive emotions have been found to have a broader attention span, greater working memory, increased verbal fluency, and a greater openness to information. All these advantages can improve performance on the job and in relationships, which can bring yet further benefits.
• Quicker recovery from anxiety. One study demonstrated that those who got an emotional lift (from watching a short, happy film of a puppy playing with a flower or waves crashing on the beach) tended to recover from an episode of anxiety more quickly. (Specifically, their heart rates returned to normal levels sooner than those of people who saw films that produced feelings of sadness.)
• Greater physical health. Those who tend to be happier also tend to be healthier. Many studies have shown a correlation between happiness or overall life satisfaction and health measures such as absence of disease and increased longevity. Even maintaining a lower reactivity to stress (which seems to be linked to positive emotion) is associated with greater levels of wellness. Because positive emotions are an easy route to happiness, pleasures are worth including in your life.
How Pleasures Work—and Stop Working
Pleasures work by giving us a quick emotional lift. They work quickly and can pertain to our senses—they bring a pleasing taste, sound, or feel—or can appeal to our emotions and memories. They work quickly to bring a little joy to our lives, but their benefits also fade quickly. And they fade in two different ways.
The first way in which pleasures are fleeting is that they may bring a quick mood boost, but they generally do not create lasting happiness. The positive feelings that they bring can be prolonged (and we will discuss how to do this in a minute), but they generally bring some quick positive feelings. For deeper, more lasting happiness, they work better in combination with other strategies.
The second way pleasures have fading effects is that the same pleasure loses its strength rather quickly upon repetition. The fifth time you ride a roller coaster, the experience will not be as intensely exciting as it was the first time. A day at the beach isn’t as amazing if you’ve gone the previous day. The third bite of chocolate will not be as deeply delicious as the first, no matter how good the chocolate. This means that you can’t use the same few pleasures over and over again and expect the same effects, and you should be careful not to “overdose” on them in a single session, either. You do not need a full chocolate bar or a week at the beach to get a good dose of pleasure from the experience.
How to Manage: Prolong the Effectiveness of Pleasures
There are a few tricks to getting the most out of our pleasures. While the joy they bring may be fleeting, there are a few ways to stretch out those good feelings. Consider the following:
• Use the power of anticipation to your advantage. When we look forward to exciting things in our future, we get to enjoy them before they happen. Have you ever found that your whole morning was more fun because you knew you would get to take the second half of the day off? Or do you find that your excitement begins on the first few days before a vacation? You can find this type of anticipation with pleasures, too. To maximize the benefits of anticipation, try to plan some of your pleasures in advance, rather than finding them spontaneously every time, and you will maximize your enjoyment. Knowing that you have a treat waiting for you in the afternoon, for example, can make your lunch hour more fun.
• Savor the experience while you are enjoying it. You can turn virtually any experience of pleasure into a practice of mindfulness (see Key 4 for more on how to do this), and in doing so, maximize your enjoyment of it. Positive psychology has found that the act of savoring experiences is an important, effective way to increase our joy in life. Particularly for those who are prone to rumination, savoring experiences by noticing every detail as they unfold, remaining in the present moment, and capturing a vivid memory of the experience can be ways not only to enjoy life more, but also to teach ourselves how to more effectively let go of the negative and hold on to the positive.
• Remember these good times. Whether formally cataloging your positive experiences in a gratitude journal (a highly recommended practice—see Key 8 for more on this) or simply looking back on them as you go through your day, actively enjoying our memories is another way to get the most out of our pleasures in life. In fact, one study found that recounting happy memories brings not only prolonged feelings of happiness, but also decreased sensations of pain. Specifically, researchers asked participants to recall their happiest day and relive it in their memory for 8 minutes, 3 days in a row. At the end of the session, and when measured again 4 weeks later, those who relived happy memories scored higher on measures of well-being. Specifically, it was found, these participants showed increased long-term positive affect (they had lasting positive emotions) and decreased pain. What’s more, they scored higher on measures of personal growth and overall wellness than did subjects who wrote analytically about their experiences. If you find yourself dwelling on things that make you unhappy, or if you find yourself engulfed in stress, you can take a quick mental break from negative feelings by recounting your happy memories of the pleasures in life.
Activity to Try: Work More Pleasures into Your Life
The key to using pleasures to boost your mood is variety. Because their effectiveness diminishes over time, the same pleasures will not carry the same benefits if you experience them repeatedly, as mentioned earlier. (At least these pleasures will not bring the same type of benefits—rituals are something else, which we will discuss more in a minute.) There are many ways to add pleasures to your life without sapping them of their effectiveness, however, and there are many ways to introduce these little treats into your daily life. The following are some effective ways to work pleasures into your week:
• If you are new to the concept of pleasures, and it feels like work to come up with a collection of them to add to your day, start with just one. Enjoy one new food, one new activity, one new experience, or one small treat for yourself. This one pleasure you allow yourself can brighten your whole day as you anticipate it, savor it, and remember it.
• Some people really like the idea of adding pleasures to each day, but have trouble coming up with variety. (I could think of only different types of chocolate to have each day at first; this is great if your goal is to add pleasures and pounds to your lifestyle, but not as helpful if you want to stay physically fit.) If this sounds like you, you can add at least one type of pleasure to each day—a new kind of food, a new activity, a new small purchase, a new experience, and so on. This makes it easier to create variety.
• Enjoy your pleasures on a “rotation,” whereby you change them regularly, but cycle through a collection of them. This way, you can maintain a sense of novelty, but you do not have to constantly come up with new ideas. This is a nice strategy for those who enjoy routine.
• Swap ideas with friends. Ask others what their favorite treats to themselves are. This can also become a bonding experience, as it can help you to feel more connected to another person when you enjoy what he or she enjoys, and it gives you something to talk about later.
• Look at your schedule and think about the times when you generally feel a little more tired, frustrated, or stressed. Then see what type of pleasure might fit into that space. For example, if you find that midafternoon your enthusiasm for life wears a little thin, remind yourself to take a quiet tea break or walk outside. Or if you find yourself running errands at that time, you may want to create a playlist of songs that always make you feel good or buy an audiobook you know you’ll enjoy and let yourself get a little more enjoyment while on the run.
• Plan ahead and create a list of pleasures you can choose from when you feel you need a pick-me-up. (There is a worksheet coming up for you to use, or you can create a list on your computer or mobile device, so you can always have your list with you.)
• Create rituals. One exception I have found to the pleasures-lose-their-strength-over-time rule is the use of pleasure-based rituals. Enjoying the same type of tea each day as I write is an example. I may not appreciate each daily sip of Vanilla Rooibos tea as much as I loved it the first time I tried it, but I enjoy it each day, more than I would if I didn’t have it as part of my routine, and about as much as I enjoyed it the day before. Having a special place to sit and enjoy my work is another example. When I climb into my familiar chair, the fond memories of other productive days mixes with my experience of this one, and I find that I enjoy it more than I would enjoy working in any other spot. That pleasures do not bring the same intensity of experience time after time is true; however, they can still bring joy when incorporated into a ritual or routine. Just don’t forget to also cycle in new pleasures, to keep things fresh.
Gratifications
Gratifications are another gift from positive psychology that can help us to relieve stress and enhance our enjoyment of life. When incorporated with care, gratifications can add extra meaning to our lives, help mitigate the stress we may feel from a boring job or a grueling schedule, and provide the type of fun that makes time fly.
Gratifications and Flow
Gratifications are activities that employ our special skills and talents. They provide the type of eustress that can make life more exhilarating and enhance our self-esteem. When we engage in gratifications, we experience a state of “flow” in which we lose our sense of time and become less self-conscious. The concept of flow was first popularized by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who discovered that certain activities that challenge us in just the right ways can bring a feeling of total absorption. We slip into this near-meditative state when we engage in activities that include just the right level of challenge—activities that are not necessarily easy, but are engaging and enjoyable. When we experience this state of flow, we lose track of time and self-consciousness, and we feel less stressed when we are finished.
Gratifications are activities that incorporate flow. Many people organize their lives specifically to include these activities, and those who do not would be wise to try it. Gratifications can help with stress relief in a few ways:
• When we engage in gratifications, we can experience that sense of flow that leads to total absorption in what is going on around us. This can lead us to feel less stressed about what we are experiencing in life. Losing awareness of our stressors can help with issues such as anxiety and rumination and can help interrupt a cycle of stress that can result from too many stressors occurring with no breaks in between. Gratifications can provide the downtime that we need, to afford us a break from the stressors in our lives.
• Gratifications can build our self-confidence and an awareness of our own strengths. Because stress can result when we feel that we are not up to the challenges we face, this boost of can-do can extend beyond the activities we are engaging in and remind us that we may be more capable and powerful than we realize. Simply put, persistent stress can erode confidence in our own abilities; gratifications can help to bring that confidence back.
• Gratifications can give us a boost of positive emotion that can help move us through the day. They can give us reasons to be excited about getting out of bed in the morning. This can counteract feelings of exhaustion we may experience when we are under too much stress.
Key Differences between Gratifications and Pleasures
While both gratifications and pleasures can bring feelings of happiness, make life more enjoyable, and help to relieve stress, there are some key differences. Gratifications and pleasures are not interchangeable, and they both can be used for different purposes. Ideally, because they can both enhance our lives, we can incorporate a mix of them into our lifestyles. Here are some important differences between gratifications and pleasures:
• Gratifications require more effort, and bring a higher payoff. While it is easy to buy an ice cream cone to give yourself an emotional lift, it takes more effort to complete a karate class to develop skills and get an aerobic “high.” However, the positive feelings and other benefits of the karate class (or other gratifications) will generally last longer than the emotional boost that comes with pleasures like dessert.
• The benefits of gratifications increase over time, while pleasures lose their strength over time. This is one of the most important benefits of gratifications, so it bears emphasis: gratifications can become more enjoyable as we continue to enjoy them! For example, you might get as much (or more!) enjoyment from the final stroke of a painting as you would when you put that first streak of color on the canvas; the final kick in a kickboxing class may come with a wave of positive feelings that may not have been present when you first dragged yourself to class and started moving.
• The benefits of gratifications increase with repetition. As you develop the skills that are involved in gratifications, you tend to enjoy these activities more, rather than getting less excited with them over time. This means that a longstanding meditation habit does not lose its luster; your fondness for the habit will likely deepen with each month of practice. The same is true for hobbies like knitting or wood carving; as you get better at them, you can grow to enjoy them more than you did when you were a novice. Jobs that require skills can bring the same joys; this is why some people love what they do and don’t want to retire at a specific age. Gratifications can bring meaning to our lives because they come to be increasingly important to us, and they become more tied to our identities and self-esteem.
What Are Common Gratifications?
Gratifications can take many forms. Perhaps even more than pleasures, they are highly personalized in the appeal that they hold; one person’s gratification may be another person’s tedious task, depending on natural talents, skills, and tastes. The following are a list of common gratifications that appeal to many people. They can provide you with inspiration and the right frame of mind to come up with your own list of gratifications that are targeted to your own personal make-up. See what appeals here:
• Gardening
• Crafting
• Woodworking
• Learning a new language
• Playing music
• Completing crossword or Sudoku puzzles
• Writing (short stories, books, poetry, or even personal letters)
• Martial arts
• Cooking and baking
• Computer programming
• Drawing, painting, and other art endeavors
• Games of strategy
• Meditation
• Hobbies not listed here
• Jobs that play to our strengths
How to Manage: Work More Gratifications into Your Life
Creating a lifestyle that includes a mix of several gratifications is ideal for stress relief. However, even adding one regularly practiced gratification can help quite a bit. The following are different areas of life that can include gratifications, and some potential ways to introduce these activities into your existing lifestyle:
• At work. Ideally, we should all work in careers that require our own unique mix of talents and that challenge us in just the right way to feel inspired and vital, but not so much that we feel overwhelmed. If you do not have such a job, gratifications can help in a few different ways.
° On the job. If there are any ways to work in new responsibilities at work that use your special skills, it would be worth doing what you can do to make that happen. Interestingly, even if it increases your overall workload, adding some tasks that engage and challenge you in a way that you enjoy can feel less stressful than having slightly fewer tasks that all feel mundane or overly taxing. If you can trade some tasks that feel overly difficult for a few that you would experience as gratifications, the way you feel at work could shift in a significantly more positive way.
° Off the job. If you cannot alter the types of responsibilities you have at work, you can still gain from engaging in gratifications outside of work. Engaging in stimulating activities outside of work hours can alter the way you feel overall, and these benefits can seep into your job performance. This can potentially alter for the better your confidence level at work and perhaps even provide you with extra enjoyment of the challenges you face there; instead of seeing certain tasks as difficult enough to feel threatening, you may be able to approach them in a more relaxed way and see them as challenges. (See Key 4 for more on how this helps with stress.)
• At home. During your off hours, you have more time and freedom to play with gratifications in your life. You can add hobbies to the mix, even if you need to cut out other activities in order to make time for them. Given all the benefits of gratifications, you can see why such a move would be worth the effort.
• Gratifications with friends. There are many gratifications that can be satisfying as group activities, whether we enjoy them internally or as part of being among others. Games that require interaction—whether in the form of physical sports or intellectual strategy games—can move a group of people into a state of flow. Knitting in a group can be an enjoyable way to engage in this gratification. Making gratifications a group activity brings a few benefits:
° Sharing an enjoyable activity creates a social bond.
° If you engage in gratifications as part of a group, you may be more likely to continue with it, as seeing friends may pull you into making this activity more of a priority.
° The idea of not wanting to cancel on friends and let the group down by your absence might also push you to continue. Remember, many of the benefits of gratifications strengthen over time, so it can be helpful to have these outside factors to encourage you to persist with the habit.
Gratitude
Cultivating feelings of gratitude has been shown to have a very positive impact on health and happiness. Studies find that cultivating a sense of gratitude can help you to maintain a more positive mood in your daily life. Increasing your levels of gratitude is one of the simpler ways to increase emotional well-being and resilience to stress and can also bring higher overall satisfaction in life and a greater sense of happiness. This can contribute to enhanced emotional well-being and can also improve your relationships. Those with greater levels of gratitude tend to have stronger relationships, because they appreciate their loved ones more. That appreciation is felt, and the people in their lives tend to do more to earn this gratitude. In addition, those who feel gratitude tend to sleep better and enjoy improved health.
Activities to Try: Cultivate Gratitude
You can enhance the feelings of gratitude you experience in simple ways. The following techniques have been shown to create a tangible shift in the amount of gratitude you experience. See what works best for you:
• Gratitude journal. Maintaining a gratitude journal can be so enjoyable that many people find themselves looking forward all day to their journaling time, and this inspires them to notice more and more things in their lives for which they are grateful. There are a few different ways that a gratitude journal can be maintained:
° It can be a long list of items that are appreciated each day.
° It can be a declaration of one or two things that are appreciated, announced via social media.
° It can be one thing written about in great detail in your journal.
° As mentioned in Key 4, the gratitude journaling technique that has been found to be most helpful is writing about exactly three items at the end of each day. It is a manageable number, and it provides just enough space for really experiencing gratitude without feeling overwhelmed by the amount of writing involved.
• Gratitude letter. A favorite gratitude-enhancing technique from the field of positive psychology is the gratitude letter. This exercise involves honoring someone in a slightly grander gesture. It works as follows:
1. Choose one person from your past who has done something for you that you really appreciated.
2. Write a detailed letter to this person, outlining what it was that they did for you and, more important, the impact that their actions had on your life, and how you felt about it. Let them know that you appreciate them, and why.
3. Read the letter aloud to the individual in person.
• Everyday gratitude. It’s easy to express gratitude to people in your life on a daily basis: Just say it. If you’re not in the habit of letting people know how much they mean to you or how much you appreciate the small gestures they do for you, this may take some getting used to. If you are already in the habit of doing this, try branching out and letting more people know—people you encounter at work, in a class you take, or when you go out to eat. This is the simplest way to share feelings of gratitude, and it brings an immediate payoff.
Questions to Ask Yourself
• Are there areas of my life where I could be happier?
• What pleasures might I enjoy the most?
• How many pleasures can I comfortably add to my week, and what should they be?
• Am I experiencing enough flow in my life?
• What one gratification would I like to experience more often?
• What would be my preferred way to increase my feelings of gratitude for what I have and for the people in my life?
Evaluate Your Answers
As you read over your answers, notice which ones seem to jump out at you. Do you get excited at the thought of adding pleasures to your life? Do you look at the areas of your life where you could be happier and long to make changes there? Let your interests guide you. If you have a special feeling that you need more flow in your life or need to focus on gratitude, for example, go with that. Use the activities in this chapter to create a happier life.