What Does Positive Thinking Really Look Like?...In about Ten Minutes a Day

Have you ever heard about Positive Thinking or Positive Psychology and thought "Sure, but what does that really look like?"  Or "How could I even use that in a way that makes sense for me?"  If you have, or if you've ever wondered if there is an evidence-based way to make positive thinking work for you, this is the episode for you.  In this episode we explore one way, taking just ten minutes per day, that you can employ the principles of Positive Psychology outlined by Martin Seligmann in his latest book, Flourish.  We'll look at the structure of a Randomized, Placebo-Controlled study that found significant evidence that folks who intentionally paid attention to, and wrote about, the principles of Pleasure, Engagement, Positive Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment (PERMA) for just ten minutes each night reported higher happiness scores and much lower rates of depression.  Best of all, we can do this ourselves with a pen, a notebook and just ten minutes each night.  Want to learn more?  Tune in!

Want to read more about the theory and science?  See below:

Original research article:

Gander, F., Proyer, R., & Ruch, W. (2016) Positive Psychology Interventions Addressing Pleasure, Engagement, Meaning, Positive Relationships, and Accomplishment Increase Well-Being and Ameliorate Depressive Symptoms: A Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Online Study. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 2016, Article: 686  Retrieved from:  https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00686

More on Seligman's Positive Psychology:

Seligman, M. (2011).  Flourish: A visionary new understanding of Happiness and Well-being.  New York, Atria Paperback.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to this week's positive pod. This week we're going to take a look at what positive thinking and look like with a pen, a notebook and 10 minutes a day. Stay tuned and welcome to the positive pod, as we do each week. We're gonna look at a study this week. This one, a 2016 study that looks at some of the principles of positive psychology and the ways in which those principles have been implemented into a specific intervention might give us some ideas on things we can do for ourselves. So stay tuned, and we'll jump right in, as we do each and every week. We are going to base this week's chat on an article and the article this week from Frontiers and Psychology published 20th of May 2016. The article is entitled Positive Psychology Interventions Addressing Pleasure, Engagement, meaning positive relationships and accomplishment increase well being an ameliorate depressive symptoms a randomized, placebo controlled online study, and this was done by Fabian Gander, Renee Prior and Will Abad Rukh and again dated 20th of May 2016. I'll post a link in the description below. So with that Let's get started. The gentleman that wrote a lot about positive psychology guy by the name Martin Seligman really did some interesting work, and he has, in his latest edition, expanded the principles of positive psychology and touch base on him real quick. The first is pleasure. Things that we connect with that give us pleasure are meaningful and their things from which we can draw significant strength. The second principles engagement. We do better when we're engaged in things, and we do a little bit less better when we're disengaged. The third principles. Positive relationships. We all have relationships in our lives that nourish us, and sometimes we have relationships in our lives that don't nourish. This is much. It's those positive relationships we want to attend to the next principles, meaning one of the fundamental things about being human is finding meaning in the things that we do in the things in which we're engaged. That's an important piece of positive psychology, according to Silly. When moving forward, the next principles accomplishment accomplishment is important. It's important to be able to celebrate accomplishment, and it's important to be able to recognize when we've done something that is meaningful to us. So if we looked at each one of those pleasure, engagement, positive relationships, meaning an accomplishment that would spell out Perma p R M A. What Seligman would argue is that when we find Perma within our lives, we generally do better. Essentially, the research that we're looking at today was a randomized controlled trials I mentioned earlier is really one of the best ways to understand the impact of a given intervention. In this case, the intervention was asking folks to consciously and intentionally look at remembering three things they've experienced that day that we're related to fund amusement or pleasure. Right him down, describing how you feel engagement. Remember three things you've experienced today where your attention was particularly focused and you were not aware of your surroundings. In other words, you're completely in. You were all engaged. Write these things down. Describe how you felt positive relationships. Remember three things you've experienced today that were positive experiences with other people. Write those things down and describe how you felt meaning. Remember three things you've experienced a that were really personally significant meaningful to you again, right him down. Describe how you felt and finally, accomplishment remember three things that you've experienced today in which you were successful and you had an impression you did something really well. You write these three things down and describe how you felt. So that was the intervention that was used in Perma pleasure engagement, positive relationships, meaning an accomplishment. Basically, folks were asked to pick three things from the given day that related each of those Write them down, describe how they felt what was examined later. What overall rates of happiness, depression, symptoms, etcetera. At the end of the day, folks that did that had less depressive symptoms and reported overall happiness. What we can do on any given day is look to pleasure. We need pleasure on a regular basis and remembering those three things that we've experienced in a given day and reflecting back on those reflecting back on the pleasure that we've got orients our brains towards searching our history for positive things in terms of pleasure. Writing about those writing about how we felt about those reinforces that engagement. Same thing when we reflect back on what we deeply engaged in that day that encourages our brains toe look to do that more again the same principle of getting what we fish for is the principle that were really engaging here. So when we deeply engaged in something, and then we reflect back on that deep engagement right about what that meant for us, that reinforces that network in our brain that examines the world for those potential engagement points again, these air self reinforcing principles when we look to positive relationships when we reflect back on those at the end of the day, what we're doing is we're looking through our relationship profiles and we're choosing. We're pulling out those that are positive and nourishing, and we're attending intentionally to those were writing about them were writing about how we feel about those that reinforces those the strength of those relationships and again reinforces those relationships for those days when it doesn't go is well, and we need a network to reach out to meaning. Meaning is one of those things, as we said that human beings reach for the strive for when we write about the meaning we found in the day. What we find is we end up being able to be more present because we know that we're capable of finding meaning in it in any given day and that way the next day, when it's a little bit more difficult for us, or we feel like we're just going through the motions, we tend to be able to pause and say, You know, I'm gonna find something today that means something to me and we end up searching for that and actively searching for that, and that leads to again finding it, getting what we fish for when we expect to find meaning in things we generally do, and we don't expect to find meaning in things we generally don't. Finally, when it comes to accomplishment remembering the three things we've experienced that day, where were successful and felt really successful, we did it well and we're writing it down, writing about how we feel about it and what that does is it reinforces the process by which we engaged in that accomplishment. What we're doing is we're helping ourselves to recognize what was the process that helped me to be successful today, were reinforcing that by recognising it, writing it down and writing about how he felt about it. But we're also recognizing that accomplishment process in a very intentional and meaningful way, and that way, the next day we can start to seek pleasure in what's around us. We can start to seek engagement in what's around us because we're looking for it. We can start to seek the positive relationships around us because we're looking for him. We can start to see them, meaning in what we're doing because we're looking for it. And finally we can start to see the accomplishments in the process of those accomplishments built within our everyday life. The net effect of that gives us the opportunity to experience life from a positive perspective. It gives us the opportunity to reinforce the positive aspects of our lives. And it also gives us the opportunity to be fishing for the positive in these really important areas Pleasure, engagement, positive relationships, meaning an accomplishment at every point in our lives during our day so that we're expecting to see it. We're beginning to fish for the very things that are gonna meet bar perspective, make our lives better. We're beginning to fish for those and sure enough, you get what you fish for. Its a lot about what we choose to attend to during our day, and what we've also talked about before is if we're having a rough time, if we're having a difficult time practicing that radical acceptance of you know what I've had of really difficult run today. I'm feeling sad today. I'm feeling angry today. I'm feeling frustrated today. It's okay to feel that way. We then don't need to let that emotion to find us weaken. Simply accept it for what it is. And then we can begin intentionally. Think about what brought me pleasure today, what I was deeply engaged in today, the relationships that help me today, the meaning that I found in today, and maybe there's meaning in that frustration. Maybe the reason I'm frustrated that that person gave me that feedback is that I really cared about what they think. Maybe that's a more meaningful relationship to me in a positive relationship than I thought. And I can accept that I'm frustrated about that because of because of that aspect, or we can look at it accomplishment and say, You know what? It was really important to me that I accomplished this today and I didn't accomplish it today, and I'm frustrated because of it. But here's what I did accomplish today, so I know that I'm capable of accomplishing it. And tomorrow maybe I could go about it a different way. What it helps to do is refocus our perspective, not just ignoring negative in our life, but being able to radically except that and say today didn't go as well as I was, I thought. But in every day, there's pleasure. In every day there's engagement in every day. There's an opportunity to recognize a positive relationship. In every day there's an opportunity to recognize meaning, and in every day there's an opportunity for accomplishment. Even if that accomplishment isn't our ultimate goal, maybe it's a step towards that goal. May be our accomplishment today is being less frustrated than we were yesterday. Are we fishing for the right thing? We Now I know exactly what we can fish for, and we can do it from an evidence based perspective. So there we have it. One way we can operationalize some of this positive thinking that we've talked about so far ended today. Take a notebook, take 10 minutes, right about any positive emotion you've experienced that day, and when it's meant to you. Any engagement Full, really full engagement you've had in a given day and what it means to you. Any positive relationships that you found major nurtured that day, any meaning that you found in the day and any accomplishments that you have in the day. So if you're interested, go ahead and give that a try. If you want to read more about Seligmann's Perma model, I'll put a link to his latest book, Down in the Description. And, of course, as always, I'll put a link to our article that we've referenced today down in the description as well. Thanks so much for listening. We look forward to seeing you on future episodes of the positive pod. Have a great day. Everybody go get some good in your own life. Take care. Bye bye.