Improving Positive Emotions
Well-Being
Well-being is about strengthening positive emotions, resiliency, and happiness. We begin with the principle that “What you practice grows stronger.” There are many habits that, when practiced daily, will lead to improved happiness and well-being. The most difficult aspect of developing happiness is remembering and actually doing the things that will help you achieve a more positive state of being. Through this practice effect, lasting changes occur in the brain.
Research supports the effectiveness of several practices in bringing about healthy changes; we will try to cover the most frequently cited strategies. We will also try to cover strategies to help you build new habits through engineering reminders, prompts, or cues to support positive daily habits. It is essential to develop a personal eco-system of balance between Thoughts, Emotions, Attention Connections, and Health. All of these areas work together to control stress and develop healthy coping skills. Some of these practices may seem huge, but when you break them down into small, easy-to-accomplish skills or steps and practice them daily, they come together and move you closer to a better place. Start small and let the skills compound over time. The secret is consistency and daily practice.
Managing and Maintaining Positive Emotions
To strengthen positive emotions, look at the strategies listed below and determine where you think you might be able to gain a little more joy. Think about ways in which your life can have more meaning or purpose. Determine how you might improve relationships by reaching out to others. Discover new strategies to help you get into flow or positive emotions that can be felt or appreciated internally. These feelings are derived from specific skills that contribute to the state of happiness, and these skills can be strengthened by anyone willing to put forth effort.
For many reasons, happiness or well-being might be elusive, and these strategies alone may not get you where you want to be, but they will help. Some individuals will need help with cognitive reappraisal, or discovering thinking obstacles that degrade their quality of life. There is even a name for people with a cognitive bias against happiness. It is called Cherophobia, someone who avoids activities that could lead to joy or happiness. This is associated with high anxiety or thinking that something bad will happen if you allow yourself to become happy.
Whatever the case, anyone can recognize negative patterns in their thinking and change their narrative into one that is more helpful but still based in reality and acceptable to them.
This section is divided into 10 parts to help improve positive emotions.
Gratitude
Practicing Acts of Kindness
Positive Outlook Journaling and Expressive Writing
Managing Thoughts (Get out of your own way)
Increasing Flow Experience
Savoring Beauty, Excellence, and Joy
Managing Attention
Reduce Distractions
Self-Compassion: Letting Go of the Need to Be Perfect
Mindfulness
Learning About Empathy
1. Gratitude
Possibly, the most widely researched strategy to boost happiness is the practice of gratitude. Robert Emmons is well known for his work in this area. His studies, along with others, demonstrate expressing gratitude more often and with more emotion or intensity brings about meaningful and lasting changes in happiness and well-being.
The more you practice counting your blessings, the more aware you become of them, and the more you notice the good things you experience in life.
Gratitude encourages optimism, helps us focus on the present moment, focuses attention on the good or bright side of life, and protects us from taking goodness and wonder for granted.
Gratitude balances against negativity by savoring or increasing positive life experiences.
Gratitude helps us cope with stress through improved mood.
Gratitude builds social relationships.
Specific Practices Include:
Write about things for which you are thankful. (Dr. Sonya Lyubomirsky suggests writing about five things for which you are thankful on one day each week for six weeks).
Write a gratitude letter to a friend, family member, co-worker, or mentor. Call or visit the person and read the letter directly whenever possible.
Go on a gratitude walk. Approach the walk to notice things for which you are grateful and holding your attention on the feelings of gratitude for as long as possible. When your mind wanders away, bring it back and refocus on feelings of gratitude.
Express gratitude through art, drawings, photography, crafts, baking, cooking, or making something for someone or yourself.
Look at the sources of meaning in your life, capture five to ten images about them, and display these to remind you of their importance.
Call or arrange a time to give, appreciate, visit, or share positive things or events with a friend.
Acknowledge the good. In the evening, write down three things that went well during the day and how these things made you feel.
Tell or write a meaningful story about gratitude, about how lucky we are and how gratitude helps to keep us calm, or about the things we are grateful for, from big things like parents or family to midlevel things like a safe, comfortable home and car, to smaller things like having coffee or tea each morning.
Studies suggest that gratitude is more helpful when it is more intensely felt, when you choose to do it on your own, and when it is sincere and initiated in a natural and honest way.
Pictured: a graphic with bullet points telling what gratitude can do for you, like encourage optimism, help you focus on the present, and protect you from taking good things for granted.
What Gratitude Does For You
Remember: Most studies suggest that gratitude is more helpful when it is more intensely felt, when you choose to do it on your own, and when it is sincere and initiated in a natural and honest way.
2. Practicing Random Acts of Kindness
Thinking about others and noticing when you can help someone has been shown to boost happiness. Being generous and willing to share or help someone will make you and the other person happy.
Examples of Small Acts of Kindness:
Helping someone with a task or homework
Pushing empty grocery carts back into the store
Giving a larger-than-usual tip
Writing a thank you note
Volunteering to help with a chore
Buying/giving flowers for no reason
Texting someone Happy Birthday or Holiday or just let them know they are on your mind
Baking or cooking something for someone
Examples of More powerful Acts of Kindness:
Making a financial contribution
Volunteering your time
Visiting an elderly or sick person
Making something by hand to give to sosmeone
These large or small actions can help relieve negative feelings about yourself, help others perceive you more positively, and help you perceive yourself in a more positive way.
Strike up a conversation with a stranger. While waiting in line for coffee or at the office, when someone new comes in or at the store, try to engage with a total stranger with questions or comments such as, “How is your day going”? Comment on things you like or that you notice, ask open-ended questions, and try to engage with the person for as long as they are willing.
Give the gift of your time to someone you care about. Spend as much time as you can with the person and give your complete attention to them, asking questions about how they have been doing or about some of their recent accomplishments or perhaps things that have given them happiness or well-being. Make the conversation about them rather than yourself.
Pick one day each week and commit to one new large act of kindness. Alternatively, commit to three to five small acts of kindness during a week. Notice and write down the ones you perform. One more powerful act of kindness each week has been a bit more effective, but people report a significant boost in happiness either way.
Perform five acts of kindness per week over a period of six weeks. People who performed five actions in a day gained more happiness than people who spread out the acts of kindness over a week.
What Kindness Does For You
3. Positive Outlook and Journaling
Journaling is an effective way to express and gain more control over emotions. Gratitude is about seeing good in the present, but optimism is about the future, an attitude that everything will be the best it can be. Optimism is about anticipating good in the future—writing about both helps you imagine a path that will take you there. In other words, it helps you to be hopeful and visualize long-term goals.
Writing about daily events, emotions, things you judge yourself about, or difficult experiences can help you develop a plan for how to cope with things in the future. Writing about positive experiences you are grateful for will help you remember and savor or follow up with someone. Write to gain closure or develop specific actions for your “to-do” list for the upcoming day(s).
1. Imagine your best possible self. Spend 15 to 20 minutes writing a narrative about where you would like to be in 10 years if everything goes as well as possible. Vary the best possible self-exercise to include what you want to happen in the next few weeks.
2. Writing is a structured, systematic way to organize your thoughts, develop more hopeful thinking, and identify long-range goals. Jim Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million for services rendered and carried it around in his wallet for 10 years before he actually received 10 million dollars for his performance in Dumb and Dumber.
Pollyanna Syndrome: A Cautionary Note About Optimism
Being optimistic is great, but there is always a need for balance. The “Pollyanna Syndrome” describes an overly optimistic positive attitude in the face of challenging or negative circumstances. It suggests a tendency to focus on the positive aspects of a situation and to downplay or ignore the negative aspects of a person’s situation, which are sometimes more realistic.
Amishi Jha, a leading researcher in the neuroscience of attention, points out that positivity training might be more stressful and counterproductive, particularly for persons in high-stress occupations. She makes the point that trying to get people to reframe or reappraise their situation in a more positive light actually depletes attention and working memory, particularly in soldiers or first responders who are facing life-threatening situations. Her research findings recommend more emphasis on mindfulness practices, which focus on being present with the situation, acceptance of what is, and seeing things more clearly without judgment or interference from the default network in the brain, known to be associated with “selfing” (resisting, forming judgments, liking or disliking, cravings, emotional processing, self attributions and past and future “self” forms of thinking). She recommends daily meditation practices to help people strengthen attitudes toward mindfulness and strengthen attention through a guided meditation practice five days a week, twelve minutes a day. This formula has been shown to be very effective at improving focus and meta-awareness, which is more helpful in conditions of high stress when people are under threat or when experiencing challenging mood states which are known to deplete attention or possibly shift attention away from the situation to areas of the brain involved in managing these states. Her point is well taken that trying to increase positivity or optimism or spending cognitive energy in this way may take away from optimal performance for some individuals in some conditions. The idea of training yourself to smell the roses, savor the good, notice the little things, and use mindfulness to be more aware of the good things in your life may be much more effective when things are actually good rather than when you are in a high-stress situation.
In some cultures, pursuing happiness for the self is considered arrogant or selfish. Suffering is important in the development of character. In these cultures, the gratitude letter did not improve mood, but acts of kindness did. Dr. Lyubomirsky recommends finding strategies that work for you, getting social support (a friend to walk with you), and accountability, and she notes that more effort yields more benefits.
Practice forgiveness, drop grudges
Give thanks
Become more mindful
Love, connection, and acceptance are your birthright. To claim them, you may need to look within yourself.
4. Managing Thoughts: (Getting Out of Your Own Way)
Thoughts obviously play a huge role in happiness. It is helpful to identify barriers or difficult thoughts that might prevent you from becoming a happier person. Excessive negativity, biases, or constantly searching for all the leaks and cracks in ourselves and others will move us in a less positive direction. The happier you are, the less you need to compare yourself or your fortunes to that of others and the less you criticize or judge yourself when you fail. Overthinking can increase sadness, foster negativity, increase biases, reduce motivation, worsen fears, reduce concentration, and diminish motivation and initiative.
To manage thoughts more effectively, notice or observe them, hold them in awareness, and consciously focus on thoughts that align with your intentions and values.
Notice when you are overstimulated or getting stressed take a moment to breathe and regroup before you respond
Nature walk or mindful movements and experience embodied self (true and present self rather than narrative self)
Visit the Managing Thoughts section of our website to learn more about how powerful thoughts are and additional strategies to manage internal chaos.
5. Increasing Flow Experiences
Dr. Mihaly Robert Csikszentmihalyi first recognized and named the psychological concept of flow (also called engagement). He describes flow like this:
“[It’s] a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”
In other words, it's like getting lost in a project. Characteristics of flow include:
Having a clear goal
Receiving immediate feedback (in some form) from one’s efforts
Having a balance between skill and challenge
Merging awareness with action
Excluding distractions from your consciousness
Not worrying about failure
Abolishing self-consciousness
Distorting one’s sense of time
Happiness can be strengthened through the practice of flow, but it requires focus and determination. Happiness requires expression and actions, which may take the form of the following:
1. Establish a goal or identify a task you want to achieve. This can be something you want to achieve at work, personal challenges or setbacks, or anything that requires planning a process and overcoming methodical challenges.
2. Create a plan. It is common to reverse-plan, start from the end, and work your way back to the beginning. Set tasks as milestones to allow you to go back instead of starting over.
3. Once you set your plan in place, be present and eliminate all distractions. This is where the concept of flow may begin, so remaining focused is essential. Remember that our attitude when we do something affects the outcome.
4. Talk to yourself and remind yourself of what you are doing and what you are doing it for. Do not be discouraged by your appearance if someone sees you talking to yourself. Think: “It’s just me and my goal.”
5. Make this a common practice of achieving your goals or accomplishing your tasks. Create good patterns of work that support goal achievement and spark creativity and happiness.
6. Rest is the best way to decompress from the stresses of constant pressure. Meditation gives you the ability to reflect and refocus your mind.
Happiness is an emotion that is simple to achieve but is challenging to maintain. By applying the fierce focus of flow, one can foster happiness and find joy in life.
“Happiness is an inherent emotion that everyone deserves to experience. Live in the present and be positive, have dominion over your thoughts, and maintain a fierce focus.”
Flow The Secret To Amplified Happiness
6. Savoring Beauty, Excellence, and Joy
Savoring involves focusing on positive things for as long as possible, recalling positive events, or remembering and thinking about good things. It helps us cope with negative things in life. When we practice savoring, we do not wait for the next good thing to happen; we find beauty in nature, relationships, daily activities, or challenges and intensify the positive emotions we naturally experience.
Pictured: a graphic on the different types of savoring.
*Focus intently on ordinary experiences.*
Chew food slowly and thoughtfully.
Drink slowly and attentively.
Listen to a friend with intensity. Keep your mind quiet as you listen.
Notice simple daily experiences like walking.
There are three main kinds of savoring (numbers 2 and 3 both fall under the "Time Travel" category):
1. Direct - Direct savoring involves being in the moment and suppressing thoughts that are unrelated to the experience.
2. Anticipatory - This might involve thinking about an upcoming trip and discussing how much fun you anticipate or hope to have with your partner.
3. Reminiscent - This may take the form of remembering a past event and recalling a positive impact on mood. Looking at photographs or telling friends about a trip is a great way to ramp up reminiscent savoring.
Savoring can be done individually, with another, or when you ask another person to share a savored experience with you. All three types of savoring have been shown to boost happiness.
Like other happiness strategies, savoring improves social connections, improves resilience, and increases motivation and positive energy. Savoring should be easy, not something you try to do but something you allow to happen. Simply notice the physical sights, smells, and sounds around you and how you are feeling, and notice which parts of the moment are the most enjoyable.
7. Managing Attention
Dr. Amishi Jha frequently comments, “Attention is the boss of the brain.” Wherever attention goes, the rest of the brain will follow. By developing awareness of where our attention is directed, we can hold our attention where it will do the most good or help us achieve the goals we set in life, including happiness. Without awareness, attention automatically goes to the highest—bidder shiny lights, glitter, and bling (especially digital)—that rob us of attention (and time) without our knowledge.
Attention & Happiness in High-Stress Environments
Dr. Jha points out that positivity training might be more stressful and counterproductive, particularly for persons in high-stress occupations. Her point is that trying to get people to reframe or reappraise their situation in a more positive light depletes attention and working memory, particularly in soldiers or first responders facing life-threatening situations.
Her research findings recommend more emphasis on mindfulness practices, which focus on being present with the situation, acceptance of what is, and seeing things more clearly without judgment or interference from default networks in the brain, which are known to be associated with “selfing” (involving things like resisting, forming judgments, liking or disliking, cravings, emotional processing, self-attributions, and past and future “self” forms of thinking).
She has trained military and first responders to strengthen the three sub-types of attention through four specific types of meditation training.
The first meditation is Breath Awareness, which teaches participants to hold attention to their breath, notice when their mind wanders, and bring attention back to the breath. The second type of meditation is a Body Scan in which attention is systematically focused on each part of the body, starting with the feet and going through the top of the head. The third type of meditation is Open Awareness, designed to strengthen situational awareness; the fourth is Loving Kindness, a practice designed to strengthen connections with others.
The idea is to hold your attention on a specific object, feeling, or thought, notice when your attention wanders (you start thinking of something else), and gently bring your attention back.
This formula has been shown to be very effective in improving focus and meta-awareness, which is extremely helpful if not essential in conditions of high stress, when people are under threat, or when experiencing a challenging mood state, three states that are known to deplete attention. Under these conditions, our attention resources are naturally reallocated to help us cope with the physiology of being highly stressed, threatened, or in a bad mood. We can’t just depend on a positive mindset to help us cope with these highly stressful conditions. We need to develop practices to help us calm down and become more regulated physiologically. Then, positive practices will be much more effective to help increase and fully experience more positive emotions, which will lead to increased happiness.
Visit the Managing Attention section of our website to learn more about how attention works and to view general Attention Strategies.
8. Reduce Negative Distractions
Our cell phone is one of the best thieves of our attention and our time—therefore, a possible negative influence on our happiness. Everyone seems to have become so dependent that we experience separation anxiety if we are away from our phones for more than a few minutes, and many people compulsively check their devices up to eighty-five times a day.
A helpful strategy to strengthen and gain more control over our attention and our lives is to reduce unnecessary distractions. In Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World, he describes what he calls "digital minimalism.““
A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value and then happily miss out on everything else.
The Principles of Digital Minimalists
1. Clutter is costly. Digital minimalists realize that cluttering their time and attention with too many devices, apps, and services creates an overall negative cost that can swamp the small benefits that each individual item provides in isolation.
2. Optimization is important. Digital minimalists believe that deciding that a particular technology supports something they value is only a first step. It’s necessary to think carefully about how they will use the technology to extract its full potential.
3. Intentionality is satisfying. Digital minimalists derive significant satisfaction from their commitment to being more intentional about how they engage with new technologies. This source of satisfaction is independent of the specific decisions they make and is one of the biggest reasons that minimalism tends to be immensely meaningful to its practitioners.
Examples of Ways to Practice Digital Minimalism:
Not allowing yourself to watch Netflix or other streaming sites/shows alone.
Use Instapaper to clip articles from online news feeds and read them all together in one setting without distracting ads.
Reduce social media down to one account. For example, use Instagram and post one picture every week of an art project you are working on and only follow a small number of accounts of artists you enjoy.
Restrict digital information intake to a pair of email newsletter subscriptions and a blog that you check less than once time a week.
These may seem very extreme, but remember they’re only examples. You may benefit from taking the idea of digital minimalism and adapting it to your life.
9. Self-Compassion: Letting Go of the Need to Be Perfect
Kristin Neff, Ph.D., is widely known for her work in the area of self-compassion. She claims there are three main components for self-compassion:
Being kind to ourselves
Recognition of the common human experience (the interconnected nature of our lives)
Mindfulness
When we develop self-compassion, we can love ourselves, remain calm, and not react impulsively or defensively when we make a mistake, are challenged, or do not feel love from others. We win some battles and lose others, and no one always wins. To expect perfection is a setup for disappointment. Being kind to yourself means treating yourself like you would a good friend or loved one.
But self-compassion is not just a mental trick to let ourselves off the hook or excuse inappropriate behavior. Just be alright with imperfection in yourself and the world. This is not to condone mediocracy.
When we make a mistake, do something without thinking, forget or get distracted, or get caught up in a pattern of rumination, we need to not condemn ourselves (or others) with labels such as stupid, not thinking, distracted, or forgetful. If we say we are human and allow ourselves to ruminate, make mistakes, and that not all of our approximate ninety billion brain cells did their job perfectly today. It’s perfectly understandable if a few (million) of them get out of line occasionally.
10. Mindfulness
Mindfulness involves increasing positive thoughts such as Acceptance, Gratitude, Empathy, Generosity, and Positivity. It also involves practices of breathing and forms of meditation and yoga. These practices have been around for many years, but more recently, they have been studied using the tools of neuroscience and positive psychology. Studies have shown that practicing mindfulness, even for just a few weeks, can bring about various physical, psychological, and social benefits. These benefits extend across many different settings, for example:
One study found that practicing mindfulness meditation after just eight weeks of training boosts our immune system’s ability to fight off illness.
Veteran studies suggest mindfulness practices can reduce symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in the aftermath of war.
Practicing Mindful eating encourages healthier eating habits, helps people lose weight, and helps them savor their food.
Mindfulness changes our brains: Research has found that mindfulness practices increase the density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy.
Mindfulness helps us focus: Studies suggest that mindfulness helps us tune out distractions and improves our memory and attention skills.
Mindfulness helps healthcare professionals cope with stress, connect with patients, and improve overall quality of life. It helps mental health professionals reduce negative emotions and anxiety and increase positive emotions and self-compassion.
Mindfulness Helps Prisons: Evidence suggests mindfulness reduces anger, hostility, and mood disturbances among prisoners by increasing their awareness of their thoughts and emotions, helping with rehabilitation and reintegration.
Studies have found that mindfulness may be as good as antidepressants in fighting depression and preventing relapse.
Mindfulness can be used in all aspects of life and thus is often described as a “way of being.” It changes the way we respond under stress but also impacts daily activities. For example, listening, walking, eating, sleeping, dealing with cravings, and awareness and control of emotions and thoughts.
Examples of Daily Mindfulness Exercises:
Meditations Through Apps: You may want to try Long walks, 10% Happier, Calm, or Headspace
Mindful Practices: Think about trying body scans or nature walks
Mindful Movements: Designed to bring your full attention to the present moment to experience the here and now. This practice brings awareness to our movement and focuses on our breath or how our body feels as it moves, experiencing embodied self (true and present self rather than narrative self).
Open Monitoring Practices: Attention is receptive and broad, with no particular object, just noticing whatever comes up in awareness, letting thoughts, emotions, and sensations arise and pass away.
Loving Kindness Meditation: well-wishes toward the self and others. Focus on connections, and learn to look at yourself as worthy of receiving well-wishes for your happiness, health, safety, and ease. Allowing yourself to receive these wishes increases the capacity to be connected and caring toward others.
Breath Awareness is a great place to start.
Start with a short and simple three-minute practice. Keep time demands to about 50% of what you feel is comfortable, then slowly increase. Sit in a comfortable, upright, and alert posture, and focus all your attention on the sensation of breathing.
Select a region of the body to focus on.
Maintain attention to the sensation of breathing. Notice the sensation of the air entering through the nostrils or the movement of the abdomen in and out.
When your mind wanders from those sensations to other topics, thoughts or memories gently bring it back to the sensation of breathing
Some people refer to this as the NSR Technique, Notice … Shift….. Repeat…..
There are several other Acronyms for Mindful Living In Everyday Life.
Pictured: a graphic depicting the acronyms STOP and RAIN
Some people use the acronym STOP when they’re in the middle of a task to check in and deepen awareness. This can apply to any kind of task, one that you don’t want to be doing, one you enjoy, or a moment of neutrality in the day.
S = stop what you're doing
T = Take a few breaths
O = Observe what's happening internally and externally
P = Proceed with intention (choosing what would be best to do next)
*Note the "choosing—starting—doing—finishing" task sequence with this.
Other people use the acronym RAIN to be able to experience difficult feelings in a non-overwhelming way.
R = Recognize and label the feeling
A = Accept the feeling without criticizing yourself
I = Investigate your experience by noticing the sensations that accompany the feeling and your reactions to the feeling
N = Non-identify: We are bigger than our thoughts and feelings; they are part of us, they are not us.
11. Learning About Empathy
