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Being happy while eating healthily and exercising has lots of advantages. Watch this 2-minute video to find out how:
Intro from the video:
We all know that weight loss is not only a physical journey, but a psychological one as well. A positive attitude can do wonders for your mind and your body as you work to shed pounds and get fit. Learn how happiness can help with weight loss and lead you toward more mindful living.
I would like to take this time to thank you for all that you do on a daily basis and have
been doing my whole life….I am so thankful that I get to drive in with you [to school]
everyday and that you listen and care about the things going on in our lives. I also
want to thank you for all the work you do for our church. Every week you work to
provide a great lineup of worship that allows everyone to enter in and glorify God
every Sunday….I thank you for being there whenever I need you. I thank you that
when the world is against me that you stand up for me and you are my voice when I
can’t speak for myself. I thank you for caring about my life and wanting to be
involved. I thank you for the words of encouragement and hugs of love that get me
through every storm. I thank you for sitting through countless games in the cold and
rain and still having the energy to make dinner and all the things you do. I thank you
for raising me in a Christian home where I have learned who God was and how to
serve him….I am so blessed to have you as my mommy and I have no idea what I
would have done without you. I love you a million hugs and kisses.(this letter is from a scientific paper entitled Gratitude in Adolescence: An Understudied Virtue by
Jeffrey J. Froh and Giacomo Bono.)
The NEF well-being survey is used to assess the well-being of European countries. (Denmark wins; the Baltic States do rather badly.)
The questionnaire takes about 10-15 minutes and asks 50 questions on a broad range of topics to assess your well-being.
At the end, you get your overall well-being score and your scores on the individual components.
Here is a list of the well-being components being measured:
From the latest national accounts of well-being report:
Personal well-being is made up of five main components, some of which are broken down further into sub-components. These are:
1. Emotional well-being. The overall balance between the frequency of experiencing positive and negative emotions, with higher scores showing that positive emotions are felt more often than negative ones. This is comprised of the sub-components:
- Positive feelings – How often positive emotions are felt.
- Absence of negative feelings – The frequency with which negative emotions are felt, with higher scores representing less frequent negative emotions.
- Satisfying life. Having positive evaluation of your life overall, representing the results of four questions about satisfaction and life evaluations.
- Vitality. Having energy, feeling well-rested and healthy, and being physically active.
2. Resilience and self-esteem. A measure of individuals’ psychological resources. It comprises the sub-components:
- Self-esteem – Feeling good about yourself.
- Optimism – Feeling optimistic about your future.
- Resilience – Being able to deal with life’s difficulties.
3. Positive functioning. This can be summed up as ‘doing well’. It includes four sub-components:
- Autonomy – Feeling free to do what you want and having the time to do it.
- Competence – Feeling accomplishment from what you do and being able to make use of your abilities.
- Engagement – Feeling absorbed in what you are doing and that you have opportunities to learn.
- Meaning and purpose – Feeling that what you do in life is valuable, worthwhile and valued by others.
4. Social well-being is made up of two main components:
- Supportive relationships. The extent and quality of interactions in close relationships with family, friends and others who provide support.
- Trust and belonging. Trusting other people, being treated fairly and respectfully by them, and feeling a sense of belonging with and support from people where you live.
5. In addition to these indicators, as an example of a well-being indicator within a specific life domain, a satellite indicator of well-being at work has also been created. This measures :
- job satisfaction
- satisfaction with work-life balance
- the emotional experience of work
- assessment of work conditions
1. Why is Psychology good? by Martin Seligman, the founder of Positive Psychology
In this TED talk, Martin Seligman talks about psychology — as a field of study and as it works one-on-one with each patient and each practitioner. As it moves beyond a focus on disease, what can modern psychology help us to become?
2. This is another good video by Martin Seligman:
3. And this panel discussion with Martin Seligman, Ross Gittens and Ellen Langer:
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.)
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”.
I have created this website to show you simple, proven ways to improve all aspects of your life.
I hope the practical ideas I present in Practical Savvy help you become happier and more effective in all aspects of your life.