Habits

While we cannot change our biology, we can still make progress toward our goals by developing a deeper awareness of what drives us, accepting what can and cannot be changed, and taking action to change what we can. This can be iterative process that moves us toward actually doing what we know is good for us.

The three studies by Crum, Salovey, and Achor suggest that our stress mindset is malleable, and that adopting a stress-is-enhancing mindset can help us handle the pressures that come our way.

Jane Strunk Anderson’s book, 30 Days of Character Strengths: A Guided Practice to Ignite Your Best lays out a month-long series of practices to help people intentionally develop their own character strengths. I did the 30-day practice with a group of friends. We realized that the book also allowed each of us to customize strengths practices to our own personalities.

Watch on YouTube Hi, I’m Carin Rockind. Welcome to PPN Bites, where we give you 60-second helpings of the positive psychology news you need to know. Last year during the…

Tal Ben-Shahar, researcher, positive psychologist and Harvard professor, has proven and shown that perfectionism is a leading cause of unhappiness. A 2017 study shows that perfectionism has actually only increased over the last 30 years.

On May 6-7, 2018, the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) hosted a ground-breaking Summit on Happiness Science in Health Care: Infusing Positive Psychology into Medicine and Health Care. Participants all recognize the need to connect positive psychology and health care.

Mindfulness X was developed in the Netherlands by Hugo Alberts, psychologist, researcher, and entrepreneur. The program combines the practice and psychology of mindfulness for trainers looking to apply a science-based mindfulness approach to their client bases.

Today I want to highlight two compelling concepts from Happy Together that can help you cultivate stronger and happier relationships.

Early in my career I had learned that if you want your product or service to be successful, all you have to do is (ask and) listen and act on what you hear, or don’t hear. We asked. You all spoke. We acted on your suggestions, bringing you Positive Psychology Toolkit 2.0. We also added a community forum so that all of our toolkit users could request new tools and interact with each other.

A few months ago I explored the relationship between health outcomes and explanatory style in 200 executives, including 119 men and 81 women from the main companies in Peru. I divided the executives into two groups based on the Seligman’s Attributional Style Questionnaire: those with predominately optimistic explanatory styles and those with predominately pessimistic explanatory styles. Then I looked at the way their explanatory styles related to two variables of health.

I made a more gentle resolution for 2016, because I am a parent in a world where “mom guilt” is the trend. I want to do the best I can for the kids I love, but sometimes more is unproductive and better is unrealistic. By pairing my natural urges to be perfect with the remorse I carried following my son’s burn injury, I was on a one-way trip to martyrdom. For this reason, 2016 was the year of self-compassion. My year-end reflection reveals a happier, more resilient version of myself so I think this resolution is one I will keep.

What do we want in the near-term?

In the long term?

What are our goals in our work, recreational, relational, and personal lives?

I discovered that developing my strengths didn’t need to take more than 11 minutes each day.

If you’d some help developing your strengths habit, then join us for the next free global Strengths Challenge running from February 8 until February 12 2016. You’ll be guided step-by-step through creating your own 11-minute habit and be given free resources and access to online coaches to help you really put your strengths to work.

We can leverage the power of routines by personalizing them to meet our needs and to match our goals. Using a design thinking mindset, three elements to consider when crafting a routine are habits, practices, and rituals.

A new year is here! With the turn of the calendar page comes a fresh start and a new hope for achieving our dreams. Yet each year only about eight percent of us successfully follow through with our New Year’s resolutions. With the odds apparently stacked against us, why not change it up? This year, instead of a resolution, try a New Year’s routine.

For several years, we’ve ended one year or started the next year by inviting our authors to make a suggestion to people looking forward to the year ahead. This is part 2 of this year’s suggestions, just in time for the new year.

Savoring what we’ve accomplished helps us experience gratitude for the good things in our lives, which puts us in a better frame of mind than just grinding it out. Then we can invest in the six areas that we know have value for us in the long run. These areas fuel us with the sustenance we need to make life worth living. When we do that, we change our to-do’s into ta-da’s.

On Sunday morning at the IPPA World Congress, I heard Barbara Fredrickson give a keynote address about a fundamental challenge of our time, helping people build healthy habits. She suggested that finding enjoyment in healthy behaviors can create an upward spiral. Liking leads to wanting. Wanting affects the spontaneous thoughts that pop up in peoples’ minds. Those thoughts lead to small choices that affect health. Imagine my amazement when I saw her positivity spiral in action in the airport food court just a few hours later.

Engage in change on your own terms: an invitation to a TEDx talk.

If oxytocin helps inhibit fear, and fear keeps us from exercise, can higher levels of oxytocin lead to more physical activity?