The Surprising Power of One Little Exercise

Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,

A couple of weeks ago in this update, I shared the “three good things” intervention – a proven technique for boosting happiness.

Created by University of Pennsylvania psychology researcher Martin Seligman, it’s quite simple. Each night, you write three positive occurrences from the day that has just passed.

These can be as small as a cat settling on your lap, or as large as the birth of your first child.

Eventually, you get into the habit of scanning each day to find suitable entries for that night’s list. As focusing on what’s gone right becomes a habit, fortuitous circumstances start to seem far more numerous.

You become happier.

However, powerful as it can be, this basic version of the exercise asks nothing from the participant except for a certain change of focus.

Theoretically, a rather clinical, detached person could note a daily trio of positive occurrences, regard them as pleasant, but hold them at arm’s length, so to speak. Such a viewpoint would keep the exercise from having a significant effect.

So today, I’ll share an additional Seligman instruction – it’s a little extra work, but it can make this ritual vastly more powerful.

As you write each item on your Three Good Things list, add a one-sentence assessment: Why, in your view, the good thing happened.

To see how this might work, here’s an example from my life.

After the April riots in Baltimore, citizens used social media to gather and begin reversing the damage by cleaning up the city. I saw this grassroots effort on the evening news, and reflected that it would definitely make my list.

That night, after writing Baltimore residents band together to clean and repair looted neighborhoods, I considered why they did it. The conclusion was inescapable:

Because they love Baltimore, and in a real sense, each other.

And I got a little choked up.

With just a moment’s reflection, a simple good thing transmuted to an affirmation of an ageless, infinite, and inexhaustible store of human goodness.

So once you get comfortable with your nightly three good things list, change it to the world’s simplest spreadsheet – column one listing the occurrence, and column two listing your opinion as to why it happened. It takes no more than five minutes a night.

The research clearly shows that this what-then-why intervention, done for a week, boosts happiness for a full six months. But I’ve found it also has a cumulative effect.

Keep it up for a year, and you’ll become a different person.

Like Martin Seligman – who invented the field of positive psychology at least partially to reform his own inherently dour makeup – I’m not a naturally cheerful person.

But the power of this little literary enterprise has surprised me. Over the last decade – the period that I’ve pursued this – many people have told me I am a positive and encouraging fellow.

That’s an assessment I don’t recall ever hearing in my youth or young adulthood, but now… well, I think it’s just the truth. And day in and day out, I simply feel more serene, engaged, focused… happier.

Give it a try. You may discover, as I have, that the word “love” figures prominently in these single-sentence explanations. If you keep at it, you may come to believe in the all-embracing why of the great Bengali poet and politician Rabindranath Tagore:

“Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation.”

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