Schlagwort: positive psychology

Positive feelings: The result of questions

Feelings are the result of emotions. Positive feelings are a result of our thinking. According to Barbara Fredrickson, everyone can enable positive feelings through self-exploration:

  1. Happiness: what observation would make me happy under different circumstances?
  2. Gratitude: What can I be grateful for in this situation? What have I learned and what will I be grateful for in the future?
  3. Cheerfulness: How can I change the context so that it cheers me up? What elements would I enjoy under different circumstances?
  4. Interest: What was unexpected, what made me curious and what would I like to understand better?
  5. Hope: What can I change to make a difference next time? What can I do to make it more fun?
  6. Pride: What was I proud of in this situation? Which skills did I use best? What thought patterns got me this far?
  7. Pleasure: What could I have laughed at because it came as such a surprise?
  8. Inspiration: What behaviour, what message from my conversation partner did I find inspiring?
  9. Awe: What was so fascinating, wonderful, and heart-warming and made a deep impression on me? What is the big picture that is different from normality?
  10. Love: Was there a moment when all the above feelings came together?

This is challenging in many situations, but it helps us to build resilience. Practicing this promotes positive feelings, which lead to positive thinking, which leads to behaviour change.

In the long term, such thinking will transform challenging and static thinking patterns and beliefs into a growth mindset and positive thinking, and appropriate, empowering behaviour.

Give it a try!

For more information, read my book from side 114 forward:

Erfolgreich Gespräche im Berufsalltag führen:
Der Einfluss von Haltung, Deutungsmustern und Unterbewusstsein auf Gesprächssituationen
| SpringerLink

Positive psychology: Importance of meaning

Barbara Frederickson is well known as the pioneer for positive psychology in research explains with her colloquies in her latest article “Positive psychology in a pandemic: buffering, bolstering, and building mental health” which abilities helps us to stay positive even during the pandemic.

In the next articles I will summarize the key points of the recent publication of “The Journal of Positive Psychology”.

 Meaning:

To have meaning in life means, to see sense of your live and the world around you. When you see your live as having inherent value and that is worth to live. Therefore, you need to have the three elements, which are:

  1. coherence,
  2. significance
  3. purpose

 

Meaning is a foundational component of wellbeing like many studies show.

People who found their meaning in life:

  • are happier,
  • express more frequent and strong positive emotions,
  • endorse and use their character strengths more,
  • have more satisfying relationships
  • are viewed as more desirable potential friends,
  • help others more,
  • feel better subjective health,
  • report fewer health symptoms,
  • have better functioning immune systems,
  • lower levels of inflammatory cytokines,
  • engage in less risky sexual and substance behaviors,
  • show slower advancement of cognitive decline
  • Alzheimer’s disease,
  • live longer

(for reviews, see Cohen et al., 2016; Roepke et al., 2014; Steger, 2012)

 

Meaning plays an important role in

  1. coping with stress,
  2. trauma, and adversity,
  3. including greater use of effective coping strategies, such as using cognitive reappraisal of stressors and
  4. avoiding emotional suppression.

 

Meaning has both buffering against pessimism and building effects for Optimism.

Positive Psychology Part: Did you know that coping strategies could lower your stress level?

Stress is defined by Lazarus and Folkman (1984) as the internal or external demands appraised as taxing or exceeding the resources of the individual.

 Studies shows that positive psychology can help you to increase the experience of positive cognition (e.g., positive reappraisal) and positive emotions (e.g., gratitude)

hold significant promise for helping people bolster their mental health.

 These have demonstrated effects on a number of indicators of psychological well being such as:

  • positive affect
  • meaning and purpose
  • depression.

Study results suggest that positive psychology interventions have much to offer to help everyone cope better with both day-to-day stress as well as more major stressors.

 If you ask yourself: Which positive psychology intervention are possible to integrate them into my daily business?

Here are some examples you could use with each other in your daily communication:

  • noticing positive events,
  • savoring,
  • gratitude,
  • mindful awareness,
  • positive reappraisal,
  • personal strengths,
  • acts of kindness,
  • self-compassion
  • appreciation and recognition

 “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” Ghandi

Positive Psychology: The power of self-compassion to overcome adversity

Self -compassion means to treat your self with care, kindness and concern you would show to your be loved when they are struggling.

In this way, treat yourself like you would behave towards others.

 Often we are more cruel and colder to our-self than to others. Self-compassion turns this around and we have against us compassion as well.

To be able to be compassion against our-self we need to be mindful with our feelings and pains we have.

There fore we have to observe them, accept them and acknowledge them instead of ignoring and suppress them. We need to look at the chance of the situation than to focus on how bad things are.

 Instead of feeling isolated and lonely we should assume that nobody is perfect and has to deal by them self with challenges in their live.

This is what differentiates self- compassion from self-pity.

 Instead of trying to replace bad feelings with ‘better’ ones, we can create sustainable positive emotions through dealing with our suffering with kindness and care. In this way both sort of feelings can be felt in parallel. Such friendly and benevolent ability helps us to come over the difficulties we are coping with and explain why self-compassionate people are happier, more optimistic, and satisfied with their lives than those who don´t care for them self.

From a scientific perspective strengthen such behaviour your immune system and enhances physical health by decreasing cortisol and increasing heart rate variability.

Positive Psychology: Power of Gratitude

To work in harmonious and force human flourishing you should be grateful and demonstrate gratitude to reach this aim. This is scientifically proven.

In order to get a positive emotional reaction to one’s own behaviour, it is necessary to promote goodness in itself through gratitude in and towards oneself.

Gratitude is well proven in many studies that this is beneficial for your well-being in the psychology, physical and spiritual level. Gratitude supports you to have in orientation in your life it lowers the stress level and increase the positive emotions, and through gratitude social relationship will flourish and maintain.

With your appreciation you support the interrelationship between each other.

Studies shows that gratitude helps you to overcome critical situations in live and see the tragic in your life with more distance.

Like Solomon a lecturer on Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and other said in the Oxford University press 20002:

Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself.