How do I have more positive experiences? Our current series talks about multiple ways to feel more positive, but sometimes it’s tough to notice the positive things we already experience.
Purposefully tracking those positive experiences can make us feel more positive because it makes us turn our attention to more positive events. Otherwise, as humans, we tend to give more focus to negative experiences. Activities like writing down positive experiences and doing things to make positive emotions last longer can counter that negative process and help train our brain to focus more on positives. Research has shown that this helps us feel more positive emotions more often!
This video describes the first of multiple specific strategies you can use to feel more positive! If you are interested, you can also check out a good book on positive emotions research and strategies to feel more positive.
I’m Dr. Matt B, and these are your Emotional Minutes. I talked in the last episode about positive emotions, and doing intentional things to boost your positive emotions as opposed to just thinking about feeling more positive has been shown to promote positive emotions. It also helps undo negative emotions and focus our attention away from negative things and on to more positive things. Additionally, it enhances things like creativity and open-mindedness.
Positive Event Tracking
The first strategy I want to talk about is what we call positive event tracking. When we fall into a negative thinking pattern, it’s easy for adverse events or thoughts to build up and capture our attention. Tracking your positive events brings your thoughts into balance and helps you recognize there were good things that happened. You may also notice that these are the things that were enjoyable during your day. It helps you remember those moments or events better.
We, as humans, are built to think more about negative stimuli or events for survival reasons. However, this is no longer beneficial to our survival and causes us to get stuck in our negative thoughts. Positive event tracking helps even the playing field and brings in more positive events.
How to do it
There are a couple of different ways you can track your positive events. The primary way people do this is to write down positive events. I usually do it on a computer and use an excel spreadsheet. However, you can also do it via a journal. An effective way to do this is to try to get about four or five events in a day. You may want to consider doing this at the end of the day. For instance, after dinner or before you go to bed. This way, you can reflect on the day and write down four or five positive things.
It’s good to do this daily, or at least multiple days a week, and track these things when they occur. These events can be small-scale things like somebody smiling at you or the weather being nice. Writing down four or five things that occurred throughout the day can be a helpful way to focus attention away from the more negative content and on to the more positive things that happened. Doing this can help boost your mood and enhance your creativity.
Mixing it up for Positive Emotions
One of the things that can also be helpful is something that I mentioned before: Adding some variety to your positive events. For instance, write a positive event about the weather and a social interaction you had. These can be pretty small, but mixing it up has also been found to be a powerful action.
When recording these positive events, it can be very effective to write down a short line or sentence about what happened, what the positive event was, and how it affected your emotions. You can also include what you were feeling before the event and what you were feeling after. You can even put a rating on your emotions from like 0 to 100!
It can be good to write down what some of the things you did to respond to that event were. Your responses to the event are ways that you can capitalize on the positivity of that event. So, you might take a moment to pay attention to what happened in the event and savor your feeling about it. Describe to yourself what you’re feeling and sit there enjoying that feeling. If you want, you can also journal about the event later, and that could be a brief paragraph on what happened, how it made you feel, and why it was good. These can increase and enhance the amount of positive emotions you feel. They can also up the amount of focus you put on the positive you experience.
Re-experiencing Your Positive Emotions and Experiences
You can also reminisce about them, tell someone else about the cool thing that happened today, or allow yourself to fully experience those emotions without trying to suppress them. So, give yourself a minute to sit and think, “Hey, that was really cool today” when that happened, or that event that just occurred was very nice. All these things help you be in the moment, increase focus on positive events, and help move toward that upward spiral or help that positivity snowball.
Writing down these elements for your moments lets you review them later and reminisce on the positive experiences. As you do this more often, it can also be helpful to notice patterns. What are the things that boost your mood the most? You want to find more than one of these so that you can create a variety in the future. What are the events, the places I was at, the things that occurred, or activities I was doing that brought about positive emotions? It helps make you smarter about what fits well for you. Everybody is a little bit different, so what brings about positive emotions for you could be different for others.
This is a good segue into our following videos, where we talk about some strategies everybody can use and how they can be tailored to your individual interests. I hope you found this video on tracking positive emotions helpful. I’m Dr. Matt B, and there were your Emotional Minutes. We will see you next time.
