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by Christine Carter

Tuesday Tip: Schedule Positive Experiences

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All of our emotions, both positive and negative, have an often profound physiological effect on our bodies and our brains. We are most familiar with what happens in our bodies when we are stressed out: that all-too-familiar fight-or-flight response. Something makes us feel threatened — or physically stressed, as when we deprive ourselves of sleep or catch a cold — and our body releases stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline.

But positive emotions like gratitude, compassion, awe, love, and other positive emotions also affect our bodies and brains, decreasing our heart rate, among other healthy things. This is why Barbara Fredrickson, a positive psychology pioneer, has famously shown that positive emotions put the brakes on the part of our nervous system that creates the deleterious stress response—what she calls the “undoing effect” of positive emotions.

Positive emotions come in a lot of different flavors. When we pursue happiness, we are usually pursuing pleasure and gratification rather than an actual positive emotion. Think about contentment, bliss, engagement, mirth, frivolity, silliness—these are all positive emotions based in the present. We can also cultivate positive emotions about the past (like gratitude) and the future (like faith, hope, confidence, and optimism). A flourishing life is also fed by positive emotions that are global in nature, like awe and elevation and inspiration. Positive emotions that connect us to other people, like love and compassion, are our most powerful positive emotions, and they are the most important ones for creating a better world and a fulfilling life.

Here’s an easy way to add more positive emotions into your life:

  1. Reflect on what has made you happy before. When was the last time you felt a strong positive emotion? Perhaps you felt really grateful, joyful, or excited.
  1. Identify the circumstances and the behaviors that sparked the emotion. Perhaps you felt hopeful listening to a TED talk, or love when a child spontaneously threw his arms around you.
  1. Figure out how to make that situation happen again, and — here’s the trick — schedule it. I know that this might sound a little hoaky… scheduling happiness sounds a little like scheduling sex (which is not-so-sexy). But while research shows that trying to be happier tends to backfire, consistently scheduling activities that have made you happy in the past will likely make you feel happier in the future. (How’s that for the science of the blazingly obvious?)

So whip out your calendar, please, and start planning your time around activities that bring you joy. Or inspiration. Or compassion — whatever flavor of positive emotion is lowest hanging fruit for you. Researchers call this activity “prioritizing positivity,” and it’s best done as a way to spend at least a little time each day on the things things you most enjoy.

This post draws from from my latest eCourse: The Science of Finding Your Flow: How to Create Happiness and Maximize Productivity (launching later this Spring) . If you’re invested in bringing more ease and flow into your life this year, you will love this eCourse! And if you pre-order this eCourse now, you’ll get a FREE hardcover copy of my book The Sweet Spot and $50 off! This is a steal, friends. Plus, if you want to, you’ll get to help me test out the content before the launch. Click here to pre-order The Science of Finding Flow eCourse.

Photo courtesy of Liz Henry.

by Christine Carter

Join me at this Free Event in Bend, Oregon!

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I am so excited to share this FREE workshop with you.  I’ll be in Bend, OR in a few weeks to talk through how to expand the amount of time you have to get things done – while fully enjoying the life you’ve worked so hard to create. I hope you’ll join me:

How to Achieve More by Doing Less Workshop
Monday, February 22, 2016 at 7:00 pm
Bend Tech Building, Bend, OR
Details: Learn more and register here

Register soon as space is limited!

by Christine Carter

3 Surprising Ways to Feel More Loved

Are you focused on romantic love this Valentine’s Day? If so, you’re missing an opportunity! Building stronger connections with those around us can lead to a happier, healthier, more successful, and easier life. Our relationships help us live and work from our sweet spots by bringing us both strength and ease.

Love and the similar emotions that we experience when we feel connected socially—like affection, warmth, care, fondness, and compassion—are a powerful force for a rich and rewarding life. In Love 2.0 author Barbara Fredrickson’s words:

Love is our supreme emotion: its presence or absence in our lives influences everything we feel, think, do, and become. It’s that recurrent state that ties you in—your body and brain alike—to the social fabric, to the bodies and brains of those in your midst. When you experience love . . . you not only become better able to see the larger tapestry of life and better able to breathe life into the connections that matter to you, but you set yourself on a pathway that leads to more health, happiness, and wisdom.

Similarly, the longest running study of human development, The Harvard Grant Study, makes it clear that “the most important influence, by far, on a flourishing life is love,” as one of the researchers behind the study, George Vaillant, put it in Triumphs of Experience.

So if our happiness and our success are best predicted by the quantity and quality of our relationships with others, the question remains: How can we increase the amount of love we get in our lives? Here are a few of my favorite ways to feel more connected:

  1. Talk to strangers — or at least smile at the barista.

A half dozen recent studies demonstrate the power that a simple positive interaction with a stranger has to make us happier. In one study, researchers randomly assigned volunteers to talk to the stranger who sat down next to them on the train during their morning commute. Pretty much no one thought that they were going to enjoy giving up their morning solitude to make small talk with someone they didn’t know and would probably never see again. But guess what? The volunteers enjoyed their commute more than the people in the study who got to read their books and finish their crossword puzzles in silence. What’s more, not a single study participant was snubbed. Other research indicates that the strangers being chatted up in public spaces similarly think they won’t want to talk, but then end up enjoying themselves.

The takeaway is that often the easiest way for us to connect with others is to slow down just enough to make eye contact with someone, smile, and, if we’re feeling brave, start a little conversation. Research shows that even just acknowledging someone else’s presence by making eye contact and smiling at them helps people feel more connected.

  1. Just send loving thoughts to others.

When Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues want to study what happens when people increase their daily diet of love, they simply ask people to do a loving-kindness meditation once a day. This is a private, quick, no-contact-with-others way to give. Also called metta, loving-kindness meditation is the simple practice of directing well wishes toward others. Loving- kindness meditation isn’t complicated — it really isn’t anything more than using your imagination to send love and well wishes to others.

This stuff is more effective than Prozac for many people.If you are going to do only one thing today to bring more love and connection into your life, I recommend you do this. 

Even if you aren’t likely to sit in meditation everyday sending good thoughts to yourself and others, you can use metta throughout the day as a tactic to increase your feelings of well-being, compassion, and connection. Perhaps put a sticky note on your bathroom mirror or refrigerator door or car dashboard — wherever you tend to be most exhausted or overwhelmed or isolated — to remind you to pause and cultivate a loving thought or two.

  1. Master the most important relationship skill in the history of the universe.

Perhaps the most useful skill we can master for building strong connections with others is the ability to deliver an effective apology. When a relationship starts to break down, the best repair, bar none, is almost always an apology.

Think about it: if a relationship is dented or sputtering, someone probably made a mistake. Perhaps it was a benign comment (a well-meaning but poorly understood suggestion) or maybe it was more toxic (you got caught in a lie, or didn’t follow-through on a commitment).

People make mistakes in relationships all. the. time. Not just bad people, or weak people. All people. Our mistakes are what make us human. And even when we don’t think that we’ve made a mistake, other people will often find errors in our ways. We human beings are walking offenders.

So if we’ve done something that offends someone else — whether or not we feel we are to blame — we apologize?

YES.

I believe that it almost always serves our highest good to apologize if we’ve hurt or offended someone else — even if we think the offended person’s anger is unjustified, or if we have a perfectly good excuse for what happened. Or if our intentions were all good.

But all apologies aren’t created equal, of course. (All parents have watched children spit out a forced “SORRY!” and known it was worthless.) So what makes a good apology? After studying that question extensively, Aaron Lazare developed perhaps the most robust criteria to date for effective apologies. Drawing on Dr. Lazare’s work, I’ve created this three-step method for making a good apology.

This post is a little tidbit from my latest eCourse: The Science of Finding Your Flow: How to Create Happiness and Maximize Productivity (launching later this Spring) . If you’re invested in bringing more ease and flow into your life this year, you will love this eCourse! And if you pre-order this eCourse now, you’ll get a FREE hardcover copy of my book The Sweet Spot and $50 off! This is a steal, friends. Plus, if you want to, you’ll get to help me test out the content before the launch. Click here to pre-order The Science of Finding Flow eCourse.

Image by Benjamin Lehman

by Christine Carter

Tuesday Tip: Expect (at Least Minor, Sometimes Major) Failure

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We all understand that when we first attempt to drive a car or ride a bike, we’ll make mistakes. Behavior change is no different; it’s a process of slipping, learning from the mistake, and trying again.” ― John C. Norcross, Changeology

Ah, the beginning of February.

If you made a New Year’s Resolution a month ago, and you’ve kept it so far, take a victory lap. The other (probably half) of you? Don’t worry about it if you are faltering. Worry and self-criticism don’t work. Don’t stress, but also…don’t just sit there.

This may be blazingly obvious, but in order to do better tomorrow, you’ll need to know what causes your trip-ups. What obstacle have you failed to see or plan for in the last week or so? How does your resolution need tweaking? Did you take on too much too soon? Figure it out, and make a specific plan for what to do if you find yourself in a similar situation again.

When I was first trying to squeeze meditation into my morning routine, I felt like I was failing more mornings than I was succeeding. Every day brought a new tweak to the routine. For example, at first I thought that I could get away with seven hours of sleep at night. But after three or four mornings of pushing the snooze button I realized I was too tired and had to turn the lights out earlier. Then I thought that I could read before bed on my iPad; that was a no-go, too, as the light from the screen kept me from falling asleep quickly.

For several days in a row, I didn’t foresee minor obstacles that proved challenging, like it being too cold in the house for me to not leap straight from my warm bed to my hot shower. But after I’d encountered each obstacle once, I could make a plan for what to do the next time. It can take many months to settle into something as large as a new morning routine.

So don’t worry about it if you are faltering — but don’t give up, either! Figure out how you need to tweak your habit to eliminate obstacles, and carry on!

Want more advice for establishing (and keeping) a new habit? Sign up for my FREE 90 day — text, email, and Facebook-based — coaching program to help you make and keep resolutions that stick.

Photo by Tim Ellis