Answer:  Practice this recall exercise every day:

Try to recall in just 2 minutes 50 positive things that happened to you in the last 24 hours !

I got this idea from a from an article Build a Positive Attitude With the 4 Day Attitude Diet by Dr. Alan Zimmerman. He suggested:

Keep a journal and write down 50 wonderful things that happen to you on Day 1. Include even small things… like finding a quarter on the sidewalk… or a stranger greeting you with a cheerful “good morning.” After awhile, you’ll realize that most of the things that happen in your life are positive.

My exercise of coming up with 50 positive things that happened in the past 24 hours in just 2 minutes isn’t easy–but I reckon it’s  definitely do-able. And if we did the exercise every day, it must help us develop a healthy positive outlook.

I tried this exercise out on myself just then and managed to come up with 25 good things in about 5 minutes. I presume I’ll get better with practice! It’s a bit like one of those games:”See how many words can you think of starting  with “S” in just one minute?  Or “See how many uses for a brick can you think of?”

In this positive recall exercise, however, instead of training our brain in fluency or creativity, we’re training it to be more conscious of the positive stuff that happens to us.

Why don’t you try it right now and see how you go? Then do it every day to see how long it takes before you can effortlessly think up 50 positive things in 2 minutes?

Just to show you what I mean, here are the 25 positive things I recalled happening to me in the past 24 hours: (When you do the exercise, you wouldn’t write down all these words–you’d just need to write down one or two words for each thing.)

1. pleased movie time was a good one
2. pleased to hear about how our daughter is going with new job
3. pleased with the omelet I cooked us for dinner
4. pleased my husband is happy about us doing an interesting-sounding course for next few Monday nights
5. pleased it worked out everyone could go to movie last night
6. really enjoyed going to movies with  our friends last night
7. pleased we got to movie on time
8. pleased we got good seats and could sit together
9. enjoying the movie a lot (Red Dog!)
10. enjoyed having ice-creams with our friends after movie
11. enjoyed our conversation with friends
12. enjoyed receiving email from my brother
13. felt pleased he enjoyed the article I sent him
14. pleased I lost half a kilo in my morning weigh-in
15. pleased I did my stretching exercises
16. pleased I got to 5 -back
17. pleased I got to 35 ( a PB!) on another brain game
18. pleased I accomplished lots of things on my goal tracker
19. enjoyed my walk
20. pleased I did well with my mindfulness on walk
21. enjoyed getting some sun
22. enjoyed going on the new path
23. pleased I ticked off so many of my goal-tracker tasks
24. pleased to get email from M-I-L
25. pleased I solved the riddle she sent me
26. pleased with the stir fry I made for lunch
27. enjoyed the berries and yogurt
28. pleased the phone call from tax office was a scam!
29. enjoyed fun phone call from my husband
30. pleased for him that he got some more grant money
31. pleased with my meditation session
32. enjoyed reading  book on mindfulness
33. enjoyed reading up on positive aging
34. enjoyed my afternoon siesta
35. enjoyed dog cuddling up with me
36. pleased with my positive mood all day
37. pleased I stumbled across this positive thinking exercise
38. pleased it worked so well and that it looks like a “keeper”
39. pleased I finally did something about the Pilates voucher

That was interesting.  I managed to think of another 14 things while typing up my original 25 ideas!

I’m pretty sure this will get a lot easier with practice, and we could all easily think up 50 tiny good things that happened to us during the day.  In fact, I think doing this exercise every day would make us more mindful of positive events as they happen. We’ll say “That was enjoyable. Must remember to include that on my list when I do the recall exercise.”

And by recognizing an event is enjoyable as it happens means we enjoy the event more–all that mindful savoring!  And, of course, the act of recalling enjoyable events means we enjoy the events all over again by re-living them in our mind!

Wow!

________

The next day:

I tried this exercise at the end of today and managed to think up 30 nice things that happened to me today in about 4 minutes. I was pleased with that effort, considering nothing much happened in my day today. I was definitely more mindful during the day, thinking ” yes, this thing will count as a positive event”. I presume I’ll get better at “catching” positive events as I practice. I think it’s definitely a good high-yield exercise.

———–

And then the day after that:

This time I thought of 32 things. It took a few minutes. Again, I was conscious during the day of thinking “This is fun. I must remember to count this”.