The Summer of our Discontent

Miriam Akhtar, MAPP from the University of East London, runs Positive Psychology Training, which provides courses, coaching, and communication in the science. Miriam is the author of Positive Psychology for Overcoming Depression and the co-producer of The Happiness Training Plan. Twitter: @pospsychologist. Full bio.

Miriam's articles for PositivePsychologyNews.com are here.

This summer the UK was rocked by riots with young people playing the major role in the looting of shops. In the weeks that followed children as young as 11 were put in front of the courts. Many of these young offenders had already chalked up a list of previous convictions.

I came across disaffected young people such as these and others known as NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training) when I was carrying out my MAPP research working with the charity In-Volve to apply positive psychology with substance-misusing young people, in particular those abusing alcohol. Given that the motivation to drink amongst teenagers is related to wanting to be happy, to change mood, escape from troubles and deal with stress, surely positive psychology is well-placed to help adolescents to alternative routes to happiness, positive emotions, and resilience?

The Happiness Zones

To test this I ran a small pilot of positive psychology interventions (PPIs) over 8 sessions and tracked the teenage participants over 5 months. The experiment turned out to be a success with positive changes on the inside (higher happiness, optimism, and other positive emotions as well as lower rates of drinking and drug-taking) mirrored by welcome developments on the outside as the teens re-engaged with education, got jobs, and moved into better accommodation. There were improvements across their hedonic, eudaimonic, physical, and social well-being.

This convinced me that PPIs are useful not only as prevention but also as treatment for young people who’ve moved beyond the risk and into the reality of social, educational, and health problems. Here are five practical insights that emerged from that experiment for anyone applying PPIs with disaffected teens.

1. When I asked the young participants about what made them happy, the answers that came back were mainly related to money – for example, getting the latest gadgets. So when they heard about the limited role that money plays in happiness, there was such strong resistance that several participants threatened to walk! But then as part of a savoring activity I asked them to write a list of their happiest memories. And that’s when they got it. They realized that none of their cherished memories of falling in love, babies’ births, and special moments with loved ones came with a price-tag attached. This was a pivotal exercise in helping them to appreciate what really makes us happy and to challenge the familiar media message of consumerism.
    
   
   

   Savoring



   Gratitude- 3 Good Things

2. The participants viewed themselves as deprived with little reason for gratitude, so I used ‘three good things’ as a way for them to check in at the start of a session and report back on all the positives that had happened since the previous week. This got the sessions off to a good start, put the participants into a good mood, and was instrumental in the significant rise in happiness and positive emotions in the experimental group. Gratitude was rated as their most effective intervention and the most frequently-experienced positive emotion.
    
3. A future time perspective was absent in these disaffected young people. They were present hedonists with their horizons set to instant gratification through alcohol, drugs, sex, shoplifting and so on. Coaching helped them to develop more of a future focus. The key here was to make sure that they were setting goals based on what they themselves wanted for their lives, rather than being influenced by family, peers, key-workers and so on. Also helpful was adding both a ‘towards’ and ‘away from’ motivation to the goal. It’s useful when giving up an addiction to have both in place so that as well as creating an attractive vision of the goal you also ask what it might be like if they don’t achieve their goal? Coaching turned out to be a highly effective process to use with disaffected young people.
    


   A Shield of Strengths

4. Most of the teens had dropped out of education and had very little sense of their talents. Taking the VIA test helped them to discover that they had strengths beyond academia. For Danni, 16, discovering that she had strengths in the love/humanity virtue fired her up to pursue her dream of becoming a youth worker. Discovering their strengths led to an increase in confidence, motivation, and self-esteem. Taking a strengths test is an incredibly valuable thing for any young person who has been disenfranchised by the education system.
    
5. Meditation is not an easy sell to disaffected young people (nor is it to some of my high-flying coaching clients!) but if you can get past its hippy image and emphasize the benefits of relaxation, it is worth it. Our route in was by giving young people taster sessions of the physical therapies like foot massage to help them switch into the parasympathetic nervous system. We followed this with a guided mindful meditation, which led one participant to exclaim that she felt so chilled like she’d just smoked a joint! The goal was to show them alternative ways to calm a busy, anxious mind. During the follow-up the young people reported experiencing calm more frequently and also valuing the benefits of tranquility.

Disaffected young people are one of the toughest groups to work with but I was surprised to find that they were receptive to happiness interventions, possibly reflecting a longing to escape from their chaotic lives. Across the experiment the positivity ratio of the group rose from 1:1 and approached the tipping point of 3:1, which marks the start of flourishing. Even at these sub-threshold levels of positivity there was evidence of a transformation from druggie drop-outs to dynamic young people.
 

Editor’s Note: Interested in Miriam’s message? You may also find two of John Yeager’s articles helpful: The Spirit of a Brighter Christmas Future for Children of Rural Poverty and Building Strengths in High Risk Youth.

References

Akhtar, M. & Boniwell, I. (2010). Applying positive psychology to alcohol-misusing adolescents: a group intervention. Groupwork, 20 (3), pp.6-31. Abstract.

Fredrickson, B.L. & Losada, M.F. (2005). Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist, 60, 678-686.

Honess, T., Seymour, R., & Webster R. (2000). The Social Contexts of Underage Drinking. London: The Home Office.

In-Volve: “In-Volve provides prevention and treatment services for young drinkers and we are pioneering new and better ways of working based on national research and the experience of our specialist team at Project 28 in Bath.”

Images
All images are used courtesy of Miriam Akhtar.

Here’s some of the annotation she provided for them:

• Savoring: So this is an example of some of the art activities – we had lots of cards. And this is a savoring a happy memory.
• Three Good Things: What I did was I got them to come up with a list of all their good things and to write a list or draw pictures of their good things in their happiness scrapbooks. Here are some examples here. Did it in groups so that they could bounce off each other.
• Shield of Strengths: This was an art activity. I asked them to create a shield of strengths, their personal armoury. They drew a shield with 4 quadrants:
  • Top Left – 5 character Strengths
  • Top Right – Other gifts/talents
  • Bottom Left – things that put you into flow, often a clue to Strengths
  • Bottom Right – ideas of how you can apply your Strengths in future
  • Across the middle – a motto that sums you and your Strengths up

  This works very well.