Continuing from yesterday’s post, Shawn Achor said in his book, ‘The Happiness Advantage’: “Just as it takes days of concentrated practice to master a video game, training your brain to notice more opportunities takes practice focusing on the positive. The best way to kickstart this is to start making a daily list of good things in your job, your career, and your life. It may sound hokey, or ridiculously simple… but over a decade of empirical studies has proven the profound effect it has on the way our brains are wired. When you write down at least ‘three good things’ that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives.—things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future. In just five minutes a day this trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth, and seizing opportunities to act on them. At the same time, because we can only focus on so much at once, our brains push out those small annoyances and frustrations that used to loom large into the background, out of the visual field entirely.
This has staying power. One study found that participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups.16 More amazing: Even after stopping the exercise, they remained significantly happier and showed higher levels of optimism. The better they got at scanning the world for good things to write down, the more good things they saw, without even trying, wherever they looked.
. . . .CEO’s I trained in Africa opted to say three gratitudes at the dinner table with their children each night. … The more you involve others the more the benefits multiply. When the CEOs in Africa brought the activity to their children, they not only discovered more things to be grateful about, but were also held more accountable for keeping up with the exercise. Several CEOs told me that whenever they’d had an especially terrible day at work and tried to skip writing down Three Good Things, their children actually refused to eat dinner until the exercise was completed. This kind of social support greatly increases the chance that these positive habits will stick. That’s why I tell business leaders to do these exercises with their spouses as they fall asleep at night or over breakfast before they leave for work. ~ Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage, p,101-03, 2010, Random House Inc. New York.
(Posts with a preamble asterisk * are for a more general audience, and not specific to teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.)
