The “Three Good Things” Intervention

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

It was almost exactly 10 years ago that the eminent psychologist Martin Seligman sat across from me in his rose garden in a leafy Philadelphia suburb.

Unprepossessing in baggy shorts and a blue T-shirt, sipping iced tea from a plastic tumbler, he smiled at me from his lawn chair.

“I am by nature a gloomy, depressive, pessimistic sort of person,” he confessed as the sun shone, the flowers glowed, and the bees buzzed.

But, he added, there was a bright side to being constitutionally dour.

“Happiness is too important a topic to be left to happy people.” His naturally somber mein, he told me, was the spur that drove him to invent an entirely new field called positive psychology, one featuring therapeutic exercises that he used as enthusiastically as any patient.

“I am definitely one who takes his own medicine,” he murmured into his tumbler.

While it’s been a decade since I spoke with him in person, I’ve followed Seligman and his work ever since, read his many books, and personally use several of the happy-making interventions he pioneered.

Even more than I did in 2005, I believe this field is vitally important.

As a young, brilliant psychology researcher in the 1970s, Seligman questioned traditional psychology’s emphasis on fixing what’s wrong. It was all about “making dysfunctional people functional” he said.

Why, he wondered, couldn’t psychology take the next step? Why couldn’t it make functional people happy?

If the secret of achieving robust physical health is emulating great athletes, Seligman reasoned that the way to an uplifting emotional life was likely via copying the habits of the happy.

(By the way, everyone in the field is well aware of the semantic pitfalls resident in the term “happy” — they use it as convenient shorthand. If the word has too much baggage for you, swap in “contented” or “engaged.”)

So he zealously pursued happy people for decades, seeking the common denominators that let them see past the muck and mire of this daily, wearying samsara and instead regard the world, and themselves, as worthwhile.

Then, Seligman created “interventions” to help the less gifted among us replicate the mental habits of the happy.

I’ll discuss some of these specifically in the coming weeks. For now, let me focus on one of the most powerful: the “three good things” intervention.

The “Three Good Things” Intervention

It’s simplicity itself. At the end of each day — on a notepad kept at the bedside, where it won’t be ignored — one simply records three positive occurrences from the day that has passed.

These need not be dramatic. A taxi driver’s smile qualifies.

The “three good things” intervention trains the mind to begin scanning each day to find and isolate positive accomplishments and happenstances.

It works. Having done this now for years, the world seems much more richly populated with beneficence than it did before. This has also been shown scientifically: In Seligman’s studies, most people who did this for just one week reported less depression and more happiness for a full six months.

And I believe that I am noticing more good things not just because I am self-trained to do so — but because more good things are actually happening to me.

“You get more of what you focus upon” is one of those old ideas that straddles the line between mysticism and plain common sense. Whether this is an “observational selection effect” or something more, I can attest that over the last 10 years, I’ve found the world full of many more smiles, selfless gestures, and overall worthwhile experiences than I did before.

I urge you to check out Seligman’s work. But in the meantime, give the three good things intervention a shot.

Sincerely,

Brad Lemley
Natural Health Solutions

Citations

Martin E. P. Seligman & Tracy A. Steen et. al., “Positive Psychology Progress: Empirical Validation of Interventions,” University of Pennsylvania, 2005