Barbara Fredrickson shares insights from her years of research on ways to boost your positivity ratio:
Action for Happiness Suggest this 4 step action plan:
1. Track your positivity ratio
- Check out your current Positivity Ratio – to see how it is today – using this free, quick and easy free test (it’s one that psychologists often use).
- Try doing it each day for a week or so, noting down your ratio and see if it changes. What do you think made it change? Do you need to boost your level of positive emotions?
2. Explore your positive emotions
- Make a list of ten positive emotions that you can think of. For example, these might include joy, inspiration, contentment, serenity, amusement, pride, interest, or gratitude.
- Pick one emotion from your list and then note down things that tend to generate this emotions for you.
- Think back to the last time you felt this emotion… what was it that you were doing? Where were you? What was happening around you? What other things could make you feel this way?
- What could you do to bring more of this into your life today or this week? Being more conscious of these things will help us to spot opportunities for to experience them.
- Now repeat this for each of the other emotions in turn. You may wish to pick one per day or per week, to reflect on.
3. Put together a positive pack
- Think of a positive emotion you’d like to feel more of. Collect together things that you associate with this emotion. This could include music tracks, pictures, photographs, poems, lines or quotes from books, video clips, objects that bring back memories etc. Depending what you collect keep these things in a box, online or in a note book or scrap book).
- Find a few minutes to spend with your collection reflecting on the emotion you want to feel. Remember the action doesn’t need to be big and feeling the emotion doesn’t need to be earth shattering – a passing moment is fine.
- Your pack could also include actions – simple things you can do that you know often bring you that emotion. For example if you want to try joy, you might have listed singing your favourite song at the top of your voice. For serenity it might be a walk in your favourite nearby green space.
4. Keep it up. Mix it up.
- Of course there are times when positive emotions come easily and there are times when it is harder. Even when things are tough try to think of something that will distract you for the positive for a moment. And don’t forget to try different actions and emotions – some will work better for each us at different times than others. Have fun!
Strengths Mined: