Happiness Exercises

“I have to work” can sound like “I have a requirement to work,” but it also indicates the opportunity to work. Lucky you! You get to work! If you are unemployed and looking for a new job, the search process may set up pessimistic thinking patterns that can lead to future unhappiness. The good news is that Positive Psychology research can help you practice more optimistic thought patterns that help you deal resiliently with current reality.

In the Positive Psychology Masterclasses that my colleague Miriam Akhtar and I co-facilitate, one of the important topics we cover is how to develop positive relationships. Many people who attend…

If you enjoyed Robert Biswas-Diener’s first book with Ben Dean on the subject of positive psychology and coaching and were craving more ready-made activities you could use with your coaching…

Recently I’ve had several meetings with parents of high schoolers. Like most parents of kids this age, they are consumed with concerns about their child’s achievement: How does my kid…

What highly competent and incompetent students share is this: both miscalibrate the perception of their own and of others’ performance. The difference is that competent students believe their peers have done only slightly better than they have, and so they work to apply success strategies. Incompetent students believe they have done significantly better than their peers and therefore do not work harder. How’s that for a counter-intuitive finding?

“Hands up anyone who studied emotional mountaineering at school?” was Dr Chris Johnstone’s opening question. Had we been taught how to overcome low, negative or otherwise troublesome emotions? Not a single hand went up. Nevertheless said Chris, it is possible to learn how to become more resilient and to find your power. (Second in the series about the 5^th Annual Bristol Happiness Lecture, subject, Positive Psychology Responses to Depression).

Keynote speaker, Miriam Akhtar, described the Positive Emotion Kit (PE Kit) approach to countering depression. To boost mood naturally and experience more positive than negative emotion, people can form personal PE kits by selecting interventions from five essential evidence-based categories.

On an apparently meaningless bus drive home, Gretchen Rubin had an epiphany: “I am not as happy as I could be.” She also realized that the problem might not be the conditions of her life, per se, but with how she lived and perceived it. She wondered if she could change her life without actually changing her life, and made a year-long commitment to work on improving her happiness.

Dear Student,
Don’t worry when people tell you it will be hard to find a job. What the doom-and-gloom folks don’t understand is that they have something as contagious as the H1N1 virus– anxiety. Like the flu, they are probably “carriers” without even realizing it. You can innoculate yourself.

“The future is looking a whole lot better.” It was the reference to that classic film “Back to the Future” in the title of this new piece of research on…

Are you looking for a way to personalize your well-being by adding and subtracting the research-based, positive psychology way? Don’t miss The Happiness Equation: 100 Factors That Can Add To…

Your Holiday Strengths Some people anticipate the holidays with excitement and enthusiasm. Some find it can be a stressful time with obligations to fulfil and busy schedules to juggle. Wherever…

Type in the word “happiness” on iTunes.com and you’ll discover a long list of apps on this topic.  There are two interesting apps developed based on positive psychology research: Live…

Another workbook in the series presented by Robert Biswas-Diener’s Positive Psychology Services, Positively Happy: Routes to Sustainable Happiness is a superb workbook.  Sonja Lyubomirsky and Jamie Kurtz have culled positive…

Failure does not breed success when it comes to the brain, according to MIT scientist Earl Miller whose study of monkeys is cited in the Boston Globe article of August…

BOOK REVIEW: The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar (McGraw-Hill, 2009). Acknowledgment: Many thanks to my colleague and friend, Tom Weirich who is also an AHC graduate and a member…

Positivity is a way of seeing and being in the world. It opens our minds, puts us on upward spirals, and enables us to flourish. Beyond happiness and life satisfaction, flourishing is where we can both be our best and do our best – thus adding value to the world. Positivity, the book, shows us how.