It’s been a hard week. Greta Thunberg’s speech at the UN, full of dire predictions and calls to action has people thinking about what we might be facing in the future. The current drama playing out between the White House and Congress has everyone whipped up into a frenzy over how we are divided in the present. It’s easy to look at the world and see nothing but negatives.
That’s why I feel it is especially important to take some time out to talk about self-care and some of the things I learned in school and therapy. As I said previously, I spent a lot of time in both undergrad and grad school studying positive psychology. One of the things I absolutely love about positive psych is that while it does study some of the less tangible things in the human makeup (like happiness, hope, altruism, and justice), it has also produced some extremely practical applications. There is a whole series of what therapists call “interventions”, techniques designed to be applied to turn a bad situation around. My favorite positive psychology intervention is called “Three Good Things”
Three Good Things
The essence of Three Good Things (TGT) is to find and focus on the positive things that happen in your life, rather than just dwelling on the negative. The best thing about all of these interventions is that they are well-proven science. I did a quick search through the relevant research and found a couple of papers relevant to TGT in particular, one published in 2005 and a replication study in 2012 that showed the findings were still good. I’ll post these at the end of the entry. Good scientists always include references.
There are several versions of TGT. The quick and dirty version is to pause before bed every night and pick out three good things that happened that day. That’s it. Just go back through your day and remember three things that are good. I prefer a much more involved version that invokes more self-reflection, but still only takes about 10 minutes a day. Someone else wrote that one up far better than I could, so I’ll post a link to their version below as well.
Leave the Bad, Keep the Good
Some might be asking, why TGT? Why that particular intervention out of all the others that I might recommend, especially when Anonymous Good Deed (doing something good for a stranger), is so much more on-brand for $0$? It’s because of something called “negativity bias”. In short, humans remember bad things much better than they do good ones. The science on this one is even better than TGT, so much so that the Wikipedia article is a plenty good enough place to start.
The psychology gets complicated, but the reasons behind it are stunningly simple. Way, way back when we were still living in trees and trying to figure out what color berries were poison and if that stripy thing in the distance was just trees or a tiger, the monkey that remembered that it was the red berries that made it sick lived a lot longer and had a lot more kids than the one that remembered that the blue ones tasted good. Evolution trained us to weigh negative experiences with greater urgency because Back In The Day, a negative experience often came with the potential consequence of swift, messy death. These days, that potential is vastly reduced, but the instincts that tell us that bad is Bad remain. And in this time of climate crisis and government chaos, there’s plenty of bad to go around.
That’s why it’s important to remember the good. To consciously focus on the things in life that make it worth living, even if that thing is the fact that you had a darn good cup of coffee this morning, or that your favorite tv show comes on tomorrow. Being surrounded by and bombarded with negativity can wear even the most resilient soul down. Three Good Things is just a way to help your brain let go of the bad and remember the good, which is something we could all do with more of.
References
Three Good Things preferred intervention: https://ggia.berkeley.edu/practice/three-good-things
2005 Study – “Positive Psychology Progress Empirical Validation of Interventions”: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e83e/c1739d233acebe78d5df0b56b2c6f6f42691.pdf
2012 Study – “Do PositivePsychology Exercises Work? A Replication of Seligman et al. (2005)”: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Myriam_Mongrain/publication/259956843_Do_Positive_Psychology_Exercises_Work_A_Replication_of_Seligman_et_al/links/5a370f73aca27247ede1c782/Do-Positive-Psychology-Exercises-Work-A-Replication-of-Seligman-et-al.pdf
Negativity Bias Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias
