14 Feb Is It Possible to Program Your Happiness?
via Psychology Today by Susan Krauss Whitbourne
Happiness researchers base their work on the fundamental idea that psychology needs a better understanding of the factors that help people feel better. Rather than just focus on psychological disorders or problems, happiness studies use positive psychology as their theoretical basis.
From your own experience, you know that life goes better when you’re happy than when you’re not. You wake up in the morning eager to start your day, focusing on what you’d like to achieve. However, a thought enters your head reminding you that you have some unpleasant tasks ahead of you in the coming hours. Perhaps, instead, you remember an argument you had with a close friend the day before, filling you with regret and disappointment in yourself. Your good mood disappears, and your happiness starts to plummet.
What if you could overcome these detours to your feelings of well-being by shifting your focus away from those negative thoughts? Researchers in positive psychology propose that you can increase your happiness levels by thinking not about what’s going wrong but instead about what could go right.
The “best possible self” intervention is a simple exercise in which you visualize your best possible future. Going one step further, you could also take a few minutes and write down what you would consider your best possible future life. A “hoped-for possible self” is, as the term implies, the sense of who you could be rather than who you are at the moment. On the negative side, a “feared” possible self is one you dread.
According to a new study by Johannes Bodo Heekerens and Michael Eid of the Freie Universität Berlin (2020), there is considerable evidence suggesting that the best-possible-self intervention, in which you focus on your hoped-for possible self, can improve feelings of optimism and positive affect…
… keep reading the full & original article HERE