Traditionally, psychotherapy has been about lying down on a couch and having very serious conversations about your problems. A new school of thought, however, holds that positivity may be the key to wellbeing and happiness. Lynne Malcolm reports on positive psychology.
Would you like to be happier? Nobody says no to that question, which is why the massive self-help industry continues to flourish—but is happiness really the goal we should be striving for?
‘I think that once you get into the habit of thinking constructively, those skills develop over time,’
‘I'd like to think about happiness as less of being that sort of over-caffeinated, extremely jolly, big smiley face approach to life, which actually in many cases is really unrealistic, and much more about having a meaningful, fulfilled life in which you are connected to your sense of purpose, your values, connected to who you are,’ says Anthony Grant, director of the Coaching Psychology Unit at the University of Sydney.
‘That certainly doesn't exclude bad times in your life. So I like to think of happiness as really the life well lived.’
According to Dr Grant, scientists are now studying how to increase our levels of happiness and wellbeing. It’s an emerging field, because since the 1920s self-help has largely been seen as commercial and unscientific.
At the turn of the millennium, however, renowned psychologist Martin Seligman and others founded positive psychology with the aim of exploring what leads to wellbeing in individuals and communities.
Dr Grant believes that this approach will be incorporated more and more into mainstream psychology. There’s much hard scientific work ahead, however.
Recently, Dr Grant decided to investigate what leads to happiness in the ABC TV series Making Australia Happy. The producers took eight people from an inner city suburb of Sydney and put them through an eight-week regime of simple positive psychology exercises. These included writing an obituary for themselves, expressing gratitude to people who helped them and healing old wounds by writing letters of forgiveness to people who had hurt them in the past. Exercise and eating healthy food were also hugely important.
Related: What makes life worth living?
As a way of testing the effectiveness of these exercises, they used brain scans and measured physiological changes in the participants through the course of the program. They found that the exercises and activities had a positive impact both on the brain and hormonal states (even if the sample size was small).
‘I think that once you get into the habit of thinking constructively, those skills develop over time,’ says Dr Grant. ‘Whilst you might get knocked back from time to time, I think that people do become stronger in their thinking.’
Dr Grant’s experience with Making Australia Happy got him thinking about the media's ability to help spread positivity.
‘I saw some surveys recently that showed over the last year or so the Australian levels of wellbeing have declined significantly,’ he says.
‘I think the media has a real place to play in spreading positive messages about harmony, about showing examples of how people from different cultural backgrounds can live and work together, how we can discover and enjoy strengths and values of people that are different from us.’
Melbourne University’s Centre of Positive Psychology, meanwhile, has trialled and evaluated a range of simple positive psychology interventions and found that many are beneficial in enhancing wellbeing and alleviating some mental illnesses such as depression.
The centre’s Associate Professor Dianne Vella-Brodrick points to Martin Seligman’s development of a positive clinical psychotherapy program as a sign of things to come.
‘The focus of this is to move away from ... thinking about symptoms, risks, weaknesses and regrets, and to integrate more of a strengths, resources, values and hopes framework. So in this way, this positive psychotherapy is intended to provide a more balanced account of the human experience than the traditional deficit-oriented approaches to therapy.’
Professor Vella-Brodrick and her team found the positive psychotherapy program was equally effective, if not more effective, than the traditional approach to treating depression because it produced higher remission rates. They concluded that activities that focus directly on enhancing positive emotions create high levels of engagement and meaning, and may serve as a useful supplement to traditional depression treatments.
One of the qualities which positive psychologists consider invaluable for a sense of wellbeing is resilience: your ability to bounce back from adversity. The reality is that we all have difficulties in life, but the positive psychology approach helps people move through those difficult times more quickly.
Sean O’Connor of the Coaching Psychology Unit at Sydney University works with employers and organisations to use positive psychology to help staff with personal development, communication and leadership skills.
‘If we can help an individual engage differently with complexity and think more about how they are part of the system rather than being outside the system ... then they let go a lot of their stress, and that can be a very dramatic switch in a person's level of stress and wellbeing,’ he says.
Mr O'Connor has also found in his research that when an individual changes as a result of coaching, it can have a significant knock-on effect to others in their workplace. He calls this ‘the coaching ripple effect’.
Related: The psychology of decision making
Food and beverage company Lion now offers coaching to staff across the whole organisation.
‘We want people to flourish as they are as a whole person,’ says Lion talent director Alicia Purtell. ‘We really believe if you are your best outside of work, you will be your best at work.’
‘In particular we work at building people's personal resources around hope, optimism, resilience, so that when they have situations happen at work, they can really decide how they want to deal with that and work through it positively rather than negatively.’
Ms Purtell says that while many staff personally benefit from Lion's coaching culture, it also improves the organisation’s success as a business because customers increase their trust in employees, and hence the whole organisation.
‘What I think it has resulted in is a more constructive, more authentic culture,’ she says. ‘It's resulted in people really saying, "I can be myself here and I can bring the whole of me to work and experience all of the range of emotions.”’
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Find out how positive psychology is being used to increase our sense of wellbeing by listening to the full segment from All In The Mind.
So what can we do to coach ourselves and increase our own sense of wellbeing? Dr Grant suggests stepping back and evaluate your life—where are you at and what do you want to change?
Second, he encourages personal responsibility. It is too easy to blame others and society for our unhappiness and difficulties. Recognise the things you can change and act on those.
Third, set some clear goals or intentions for yourself and make sure they are aligned with your values. If you find yourself being sucked into a pessimistic or depressive mode of thinking, break it down into small steps, focusing on just one task at a time.
‘From time to time I really like the idea of doing a few small things for other people where you don't get a reward,’ says Dr Grant. ‘Just a little bit of gratitude, letting people in front of you in the traffic, being extra polite to people when they serve you in restaurants, and just try to put a bit of positivity back in the world.’
‘I find little things like that do make a difference.’
An exploration of all things mental, All in the Mind is about the brain and behaviour, and the fascinating connections between them.
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Natasha Mitchell questions whether euphemistic reporting of suicides has left us unable to talk about despair and RN’s journalists explore anxiety, dementia, psychiatry and the history of mental illness.
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