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Simple activities to generate a positive mood

June 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment
  1. Make kindness a habit:

    “Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested …  Find one wholly unexpected kind thing to do tomorrow and just do it. Notice what happens to your mood.” (Martin Seligman, Flourish, p 20-21)
  2. Make gratitude a habit:

    “Gratitude can make your life happier and more satisfying. We we feel gratitude, we benefit from the pleasant memory of a positive event in our life. Also, when we express our gratitude to others, we strengthen our relationship with them … In this exercise, called the “Gratitude Visit,” you will have the opportunity to experience what it is like to express gratitude in a thoughtful, purposeful manner.

    Your task is to write a letter of gratitude to this individual and deliver it in person. The letter should be concrete and about three hundred words: be specific about what she did for you and how it affected your life. Let her know what you are doing now, and mention how you often remember what she did.  Make it sing!

    Once you have written the testimonial, call the person and tell her you’d like to visit her, but be vague about the purpose of the meeting:  this exercise is much more fun when it is a surprise. When you meet her, take your time reading your letter. Notice her reactions as well as yours. If she interrupts you as you read, say that you really want her to listen until you are done. After you have read the letter ( every word), discuss the content and your feelings for each other.

    You will be happier and less depressed one month from now.” (Martin Seligman, Flourish, p 30-31).

    Special Gratitude letter:
    Write a gratitude letter to your parents.

  3. Make acknowledging excellence in others a habit:

    Write a letter to your child on her or his graduation day telling them all the ways you admire them so much.
  4. Making savoring the positive stuff a habit:“Most of us are not nearly as good at dwelling on good events as we are at analyzing bad events … To overcome our brains’ natural catastrophic bent, we need to work on and practice this skill of thinking what went well.

    Every night for the next week, set aside ten minutes before to go to sleep. Write down three things that went well today and why they went well. You may use a journal or your computer to write about the events, but it is important that you have a physical record of what you wrote.

  5. Make allowing-others-to-savor-their-good-news a habit:

    “Shelly Gable, professor of psychology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has demonstrated that how you celebrate is more predictive of strong relations than how you fight. People we care about often tell us about a victory, a triumph, and less momentous good things that happen to them. How we respond can either build the relationship or undermine it. There are four basic ways of responding, only one of which builds relationships:

    Your partner shares positive event: “I received a promotion and a raise at work!”

    Active and Constructive: “That is great! I am so proud of you. I know how important that promotion was to you! Please relive the event with me now. Where were you when your boss told you? What did he say? How did you react? We should go out and celebrate.”

    Nonverbal: maintaining eye contact, displays of positive emotions, such as genuine smiling, touching, laughing.

    Passive and Constructive: “That is good news. You deserve it.”

    Nonverbal: little to no active emotional expression

    Active and and Destructive: “That sounds like a lot of responsibility to take on. Are you going to spend even fewer nights at home now?”

    Nonverbal: displays of negative emotions, such as furrowed brow, frowning.

    Passive and Destructive: “What’s for dinner?”

    Nonverbal: little to no eye contact, turning away, leaving the room.

    Listen carefully each time someone you care about tells you somethings good that happened to them. Go out of your way to respond actively and constructively. Ask the person to relive the event with you; the more time he or she spends reliving, the better. Spend lots of time responding. Hunt all week long for good events, recording them nightly in the following form:

    Other’s event
    My response (verbatim)
    Other’s response to me

    If you are not particularly good at this, plan ahead. Write down some concrete positive events that were reported to you recently. Write down how you should have responded. When you wake up in the morning, spend five minutes visualizing whom you will encounter today and what good things they are likely to tell you about themselves. Plan an active, constructive response. (Martin Seligman, Flourish, p 48-50)

  6. Make immersing ourselves in the uplifting behavior of others a habit:Movies that have characters demonstrating strong character virtues are an effective and fun way to expose ourselves to elevating behavior. Watching a character act out uplifting behavior is heaps more fun — and more  effective — than just listening to or reading about someone sermonising about the virtue of behaving well.

    By actively exposing ourselves  to elevating movies, we benefit in two ways:  first by experiencing the positve glow that comes form watching another human being behave in a morally admirable way, and second, by having this positive modelling trigger a desire in us to emulate that positive behavior in our daily lives

    Martin Seligman, in his book Flourish, wrote about he schedules movie nights  in his Applied Masters course in Positive Psychology :

    “Each month, I hold an optional movie night with popcorn, wine, pizza, and pillows on the floor. I show movies that convey positive psychology better than lectures full of words, but devoid of musical sounds and cinematic sights, can. I have always opened with Ground-Hog Day, and , even after having seen it for the fifth time, I am still  stunned by how much it presses us, yearning, toward positive personal transformation.” (p 75).

    Identify a list of movies that demonstrate strong character values. Then watch them. Better still,  schedule regular movie nights and watch them with your family and friends so you can enjoy the positive glow of watching human beings behaving admirably and have uplifting discussions afterwards.

    Here is Martin Seligman’s list of movies demonstrating strong moral virtues:

    Groundhog Day
    The Devil Wears Prada
    The Shawshank Redemption
    Chariots of Fire
    Sunday in the Park with George
    Field of Dreams

    You can add to this list:

    To Kill a Mockingbird

  7. Make savoring the good times a habit:The Three-Good-Things Exercise

    Write down three good things that happened to you at the end of each day for a week. The three things can be small in importance (I answered a really hard question right  in language arts today”) or big (” The guy I’ve liked for months asked me out!!!”). Next to each positive event, write about one of the following “Why did this good thing happen?” “What does this mean to you?” “How can you have more of this good thing in the future?”(Martin Seligman, Flourish, p 84)

  8. Special signature strengths exercises

    (a) Develop a family tree of signature strengths. Interview each family member and ask them what they believe are their signature strengths.
    (b) As you read a novel or watch a movie, think about  the characters’ signature strengths.
    (c) keep a diary of how you have applied the 24 signature strengths in your daily life for a week. Include missed opportunities too.
  9. Make savoring the postive emotions a habit: Review the list of positive emotion words each day and try to imagine feeling that emotion as you read them. Try to recall a time during the day where you experienced these emotions, no matter how weakly or fleetingly.
  10. Make choosing to respond positively over negatively a habit:Increasing the 3:1 Losada positive to negative ratio
  11. At your child’s 21st birthday party: give a speech where you talk about 21 positive things about your child.
  12. Select 50 quotes that best sum up the guiding principles of life for you.
  13. Your own philosophy of life:”In twenty-five words of fewer,” instructed Pete Carroll, the hottest of American college football coaches, fresh from his 2009 Rose Bowl victory with the University of Southern Californian Trojans, ” write down your philosophy of life.” (from Martine Seligman’s Flourish, p 126).

    My suggestion: Use just single words or simple phrases. Try to pack in as much meaning as you can. For example: to live rather than just exist; to conquer my fears; to grow every day. To love fearlessly; to throw myself into things worth doing. To practise loving kindness, compassion, equanimity and unconditional joy for others’ good fortune.

  14. In one exercise that Dr. Albert Ellis promotes, patients are encouraged to imagine situations that normally provoke extreme fear, panic or rage. Holding the imaginary situations in their minds, the patients are asked to change the feeling to acceptance. Practiced daily for a month, the exercise can help people change their most deep-seated feelings about situations, he said. (reported in New York Times article From Therapy’s Lenny Bruce: Get Over It! Stop Whining!
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