Positive Emotions Open Our World

If you have not read anything by Barbara Frederickson then stop what you are doing and read something. Or watch a video of one of her talks. Her work is a gift. She has long researched positive emotions and the role they play in our lives.

I used to roll my eyes at the positive psychology movement. I thought it was shallow, and only about making us feel good and asking us to ignore our pain and hardship in the process. I was wrong. Very wrong. And, largely, I was wrong because I had not actually spent time exploring what people in this field are actually saying.

In fact, they don’t ask us to ignore anything, or suppress anything. This movement, if anything, is about expanding our emotional range rather than shrinking it. What people like Barbara Frederickson teach us is that we can actively pursue positive emotions in order to broaden our experience of our lives. Positive emotions lead to greater creativity.

Positive emotions lead to greater resilience. Children perform better on math tests if they think of a positive memory before taking a test. Doctors make better decisions about complex cases when given a bag of candy just before having to make the decision. (A weird experiment if you ask me- but helps us see that even a tiny boost in positive emotions can have an unexpectedly large, positive impact.)

Positive emotions create more trust, they lead to better compromise, and they increase our ability to focus on the needs of others rather than just ourselves.

Given all of that information, we may be limiting ourselves if we are not actively seeking to add positive experiences to our lives. We may be limiting our emotional range, our creativity, our flexibility in relationships, and our ability to serve our loved ones and our community.

What can you do, today, that will give you even just a small boost of joy?