Humans are wired to pay more attention to negative emotions and experiences than positive ones. Positive psychology changes this by helping you focus on positive day-day events. Often, people in therapy don’t know what influences their happiness from one experience to the other. With positive psychology, your therapist guides you on how you can keep a gratitude journal and record every day’s positive events.
Positive psychology is a technique that helps you focus on the good things happening in your life every single moment. This new branch of psychology helps people lead healthy, happy lives. Most branches of psychology are problem-focused, but positive psychology changes assisting people to become fulfilled.
Positive psychology has its roots in the belief that if you pay more attention to the good things like good emotions and virtues, you will keep seeing more and become happier. It encourages people to realize which emotions excite them the most and indulge in hobbies, jobs, or activities that multiply this emotion. The more you keep employing this emotion daily, the better you will see changes in your life, moods, and general wellbeing. Happiness will be like second nature to you since you’re pursuing it.
Article Contents
What is the Definition of Positive Psychology?
Positive psychology studies strengths and virtues that enable individuals, organizations, and communities to thrive. It can also be defined as the positive influences in a person’s life. It focuses on a character’s strengths to improve the quality of life.
Positive psychology generally covers positive events like;
- Positive experiences like love, joy, happiness, and inspiration.
- Positive states and traits like resilience, compassion, and gratitude.
- Positive institutions like applying positive principles within entire organizations and institutions.
Positive psychology studies these topics to help people flourish and live their best lives. To better understand what positive psychology entails, we will look at the PERMA model created by Siegman. The PERMA model represents the five core elements of happiness and wellbeing. These five elements include:
Positive emotions
Positive emotion is about more than just faking a smile. Positive emotion involves accepting your past self no matter how bad it was and positively anticipating what the future holds. Harnessing positive emotions doesn’t mean that you’ll be happy all the time because that’s impossible. But trying to achieve these emotions actively most of the time will greatly boost the quality of your life.
Engagement
Engagement means something that one can get absorbed or engrossed in. It is positive for a person’s emotions, skills, and intelligence. You get to do something that brings happiness as you get lost in your world. When you are fully engaged in something, you will be happy at that moment and fully emerge yourself in it.
Relationships
Being human has a natural desire of wanting to be connected. Relationships are the third element of relationships and wellbeing. We are wired to need love, affection, interaction, and attention, thus creating relationships to receive emotional support when things get rough.
Meaning
To want to live means you have found “meaning” in your life. Meaning doesn’t come from material possession because if it were so, many of these celebrities wouldn’t take their lives considering their worth. Finding things that make you happy can bring meaning to your life.
Accomplishments
We take great pride in our accomplishments. They help strengthen our self-esteem and confidence, showing us worth something. Achieving something that makes us proud makes us want to do more of the same thing to get that feeling.
Who's the founder of positive psychology?
Martin Seligman is the founder of positive psychology. He has a broad experience of psychology. Seligman’s research in the early 1960s and 70s laid the foundation for the famous psychological theory “learned helplessness.”
Learned helplessness is a theory backed up by science stating that humans and animals have long learned how to become helpless, making them feel like they have lost control over what happens to them. Seligman connected this with depression. Many people suffering from depression tend to feel the same way too. His work on this subject helped develop inspiration, ideas, and evidence to back up various treatments for symptoms of depression and strategies to prevent depression.
While this discovery was instrumental to the psychology community, he figured he had more to offer and kept learning more about the subject. Siegman also grew frustrated with psychology’s narrow focus, focusing mostly on the negative and so much attention on topics like trauma. In contrast, only little is given to happiness and similar subjects. In 1998, he was elected as the president of the American Psychological Association. Siegman chose to use this chance to alter the focus of psychology in a more positive direction.
Since 2000, researchers have paid attention to his theory. Many studies have backed this idea up, influencing the application of positive principles in relationships, coaching, the workplace, teaching, and other domains in life.
What does Positive Psychology Focus on?
The main focus of positive psychology is helping people become happier. Positive psychology has three different levels and strengths. The three levels include:
- Subjective level: focuses on positive feelings like wellbeing, happiness, and optimism and how these feelings transform your daily experiences.
- Individual-level: an addition of feelings from the subjective level with others like love, forgiveness, and courage.
- Group level: includes positive interaction with your community alongside virtues like social responsibility and altruism, which strengthen social bonds.
The three key strengths of positive psychology include:
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is an important virtue that helps sustain long-term relationships between individuals, institutions, and nations. When we wrong others, it results in feelings of guilt and self-loathing. Resentment can also result in intolerance and hate, and both parties suffer due to a lack of forgiveness. When you forgive yourself (on an individual level), it can help attain inner peace, peace with others, and peace with the higher self, the universe, or God. Conflict is built into human nature, and getting long-term peace may seem unachievable. But forgiveness helps repair the damage caused by the existing offense. Not only can forgiveness help relationships heal, but it can also help bring about world peace. Forgiving isn’t about tolerating or forgetting the offense caused by another, but it’s about letting go of the hurt caused by another person’s actions. Forgiveness can decrease anxiety and depression and increase closeness to others and God or higher self.
Gratitude
Gratitude is the feeling of appreciation towards something or someone. Harnessing this feeling not only helps you feel good but also inspires you to do good. Gratitude also helps alleviate the feeling of happiness. Once people start counting their blessings, they focus on that rather than taking things for granted. Because when you remind yourself of things that make you grateful, you will always be in a good mood, increasing happiness in your life.
Humility
Humility is the ability to recognize achievements, mistakes, limitations, gaps in knowledge and be open to new ideas and contrary opinions. Humble people tend to be successful compared to those who let their ego rule. Most people adore the trait of humility. Most successful people are always humble.
3 Great Examples of Positive Psychology
There are so many ways you can incorporate positive psychology into your life. We are going to give you three examples of positive psychology.
Experiencing more positive emotions
The more you do things that make you happy and bring enjoyment into your daily life, the more you will find happiness. Once you feel more positive emotions than negative ones, handling difficult emotions gets easier. The more we experience more positive emotions, the more we start seeing the positive in other situations that we wouldn’t before.
Once you deal with frequent feelings of sadness and unhappiness, you can turn this around by practicing positive habits. You can do this by noticing and writing the positive emotions you feel throughout the day. In the beginning, it will be hard to focus on these emotions. But as time passes, you will be able to note them down. After noting these emotions, you can pick one of them and act on increasing it. For example, when you choose joy, you can do more things that make you feel joyful. As you concentrate on these different positive emotions, you will become a happier person.
Pursue enjoyable hobbies or activities
Hobbies you like make you feel happier. The more you spend time on hobbies and activities you’re in love with. The more your level of stress goes down. Also, it improves your focus, happiness and lengthens your life. A study shows that people who engage in their hobbies tend to be happier, experience lower depression and negative feelings after their practice.
Having a hobby will also help you unwind after a long week or day. If you don’t know your hobbies, you can start by practicing something indoors, outdoors, or practicing something artsy. Once you find an activity you love, your moods will lift, you will be less likely to suffer from stress and depression. It doesn’t matter if you choose to do the activity alone or with a group of people, it will still help if you enjoy it.
Having an activity you enjoy can also help you get out of a depressive state. Depression causes people to disassociate and self isolate themselves. But once you start concentrating on activities you love, they will pull you out of that heaviness that comes with depression and make you want to engage and talk to people. Also, an activity keeps you in the present moment helping you quiet down the chatter in your mind bringing your focus to the present moment alleviating stress and anxiety.
Find a purpose
Seeking out meaning in your life can help you feel so much happier. You can find meaning through volunteer or mentorship activities. Finding purpose in your life will help you feel more in control of your life, more comfortable, and experience less stress and depression. You can find your purpose through religion or a job that fulfills you because it makes a difference.
Once you feel and believe that your life has meaning, you will be happier and healthier. Meaning is vital for happiness and wellbeing. When you have a purpose in life, you will make decisions about your life, career, and relationships. It will help you cut off relationships that no longer serve you so you can embrace ones that do serve you.
A sense of purpose will give you the drive to chase your dreams and goals. You will be less likely to procrastinate and will be able to persevere through life’s challenges. You will also be more efficient at allocating time and resources like money. A sense of purpose increases satisfaction in life, decreases anxiety and stress.
Conclusion
Positive psychology is a great phenomenon that can be used for self-development, stress management, or fostering a positive work environment in institutions. Positive psychology is a growing field taking psychology by storm and helping transform how people view life and happiness.
Check out this article for the best positive psychology certificate programs online.
