"It's sort of like filling a well. And then what happens is when you go through a rough time, if you're depleting the well, you still have enough resources at the end not to fall into a depression," said Louisa Jewell, president of the Canadian Positive Psychology Association. "A big portion of your happiness level is controlled by activity."

I imagined myself receiving a piece of seriously bad news - a fire, a death in the family - and scraping at the bottom of my empty positivity well. "If only I had spent more time volunteering and less time making snide remarks while watching Jersey Shore!" I would wail from my bed, unable to rouse myself from my dark depression.

I designed a plan. I would make a conscious effort to savour and be mindful of positive experiences. Negative thoughts would be banished, or reframed in a positive way. I would use my bike commute along the river (bonus points for happiness-boosting exercise) to consciously clear my mind, thinking about nothing but the flowers and the water.

That worked fine - up to a point. 2) Work in a newsroom Let me describe my workplace to you. We sit at long desks with no dividers, which is supposed to facilitate rapid communication, but mostly means all cursing, phone-slamming, venting and griping is heard by everyone. A scanner tuned to the fire and paramedics dispatch chatters all day, spewing static and such uplifting messages as "female, 35, suicidal."

Many positive thinking gurus advise people to stop watching and reading the news. Fire, car crashes, corrupt politicians, unemployment - this is not the stuff that refills the happiness well.

Not only that, but the paper is in the process of cutting jobs and completely changing the way we lay out the pages. "I can't shake this feeling of impending doom" has replaced "Can you believe this heat?" as the standard co-worker greeting.

On the first day of my experiment, every time I was tempted to slam the phone down and curse after a bad interview, had a mean or negative thought, or just generally felt crummy, I wrote it down. For the thoughts I couldn't reframe in a positive light, I tried to replace them with a mental image of Scout, my four-monthold miniature Labradoodle and the world's cutest puppy.

That part of the experiment was a success. On the very next day, I noticed I had to do that less often, with fewer negative thoughts popping into my head in the first place.

3) Learn the value of strategic negativity.

Here's the thing, though - I often find negativity useful.

For one thing, if I was really committed to optimism and seeing the best in people and situations, I would have to quit my job. Journalists didn't break the Watergate scandal by being convinced Nixon was an upstanding guy. People love to criticize the news for being negative, but they need to know about the things that are going wrong to be informed citizens.

For another thing, I'm a compulsive planner, constantly thinking of everything that could go wrong in every situation and making to-do lists of steps to take to avoid disaster. I often stress out the people around me, but I also got good grades in school, finish my work assignments early and pay all my bills on time.