Can Happiness Be Learned? Positively!
Positive emotional states — such as happiness, joy, love, fulfillment, awe, or amusement — not only feel good but are good — for health, relationships and resilience. They are linked to enhanced communication within groups, teams and families, as well as creative thinking and problem-solving. Great, if you can get, you know, happy. But what if happy seems out of reach? Can positive emotions be conjured up? Can we learn to make ourselves feel happier? And are the positive emotions we realize through effort as helpful as the ones that emerge organically? Yes, as it turns out. And when we have to reach and stretch to produce the positive experience, when it requires action and choice-making, it has brain-changing implications. These questions arise because it is clear to most of us that attaining happiness — or at least a greater degree of positive feeling — is desirable but daunting. Aiming for it can work against us. The happiness we do achieve is, like all emotional states, a passing thing. And we tend to be more naturally attuned to the negative because of the biological imperative to which the survival response is linked.
“It is evolutionarily adaptive for bad to be stronger than good….A person who ignores the possibility of a positive outcome may later experience significant regret at having missed an opportunity for pleasure or advancement, but nothing directly terrible is likely to result. In contrast, a person who ignores danger (the possibility of a bad outcome) even once may end up maimed or dead. Survival requires urgent attention to possible bad outcomes, but it is less urgent with regard to good ones.” “Why Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Review Of General Psychology
The whole idea of generating or “inducing” positive emotions seems contradictory. “How” to do that is a fair question, because this is a tough old world and we never know when we are going to be up against a hard truth that hurts going down and changes everything. There are heartaches we won’t see coming. There are times so dark that getting to a state of unhappiness would be considered a blessed relief from grief or despair. We will not get anywhere trying to avoid the pain and darkness of life, but there is much we can do to manage it creatively. “It is in-the-moment positive emotions, and not more general positive evaluations of one’s life, that form the link between happiness and desirable life outcomes,” according to researcher Barbara Fredrickson, Phd and her colleagues in “Happiness Unpacked: Positive Emotions Increase Life Satisfaction By Building Resilience” published in the journal Emotion. They report that “happy people become more satisfied not simply because they feel better but because they develop resources for living well.” This research, supported by a persuasive and growing body of knowledge, shows that positive emotions widen the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind. The idea is that positive emotions engender more awareness of connections between ideas, an expanded pool of possible choices and richer creative options. We do better, the theory goes, because we see better. We notice, and listen, and have more energy to take up the opportunities we now perceive.
Improvisation is a model that may be a way through the apparent paradox of positive emotions .There is a radical positivity associated with it that makes it exactly the kind of experience that develops “happiness skills.” It can only occur when a group of people- who my or may not have any deeper interpersonal connection beyond the creative collaboration — agree to support one another through a process of great uncertainty. To make that dynamic process even possible, improvisers must generate good will, humor, warmth and a high energy that drives spontaneity. If anyone is going to take a creative risk — which is, in the end, putting our ideas and our sense of self on the line and therefore a genuine emotional risk- there must an atmosphere of support and sense of trust. Improvisers develop the positive emotions through the action. It is real life writ large, with the interesting wrinkle that an authentically positive emotional climate is being manufactured. It is being orchestrated. And it works. Through warm-up games and exercises that unify the body, emotions and thinking process, improvisers shift their attention toward a common cause and away from suffering and pain, and even though that shift may be temporary it is real. Improvisers lose some of the defensiveness we all carry around that inhibit our self-expression, and engage with a creative uncertainty that activates the reward circuitry of the brain and makes the experience self-rewarding. The positive emotional climate in the group yields novelty and invention, broadening the field of perception and building on them.
Improvisation games and exercises are a work-out for the brain and emotions with just the right combination of challenge and reward, and because of that supplies big, bubbling bursts of dopamine, the “feel-good” brain chemical. Creative engagement — the search for what is interesting and useful rather than what is threatening in the space of uncertainty — expands the field of attention and ramps up the brain chemistry of reward. Applied improvisation is a way to channel creative engagement and interpersonal connection in ways that shape it into responses to the real world.
The fact that improvisation can be challenging makes it even more ideally a model for how this broaden-and-build theory works in real life. The strengths we gain from leaning into uncertainty, from risking, become available to us when under pressure. And skills-based creative activities can include anything from arts-based experiences such as painting, writing or practicing an instrument to playing games or building furniture. One of the most important dimensions of the creative work is the personal freedom involved, doing something that is internally-driven and deeply rewarding.
Negative emotions, like fear, anger or sorrow narrow our field of attention, linked as they are to the fight-flight-freeze stress response that is necessary for survival. When we are running from danger or engaged in an important conflict, our brain and body are intensely focused on eliminating the threat, which is fine when we need to get out of the path of an incoming punch, but not so great when the punch is psychological or emotional. “Positive emotions are unique and adaptive because, in the moment, they broaden people’s thought–action repertoires,” writes Fredrickson, Phd, who developed the “Broaden-and-Build Theory” of positive emotion. Creative experiences generate all the elements associated with positive emotional states that broaden the field of attention. Such experiences, especially when repeated over time “build people’s enduring physical, social, intellectual, and psychological resources.” Her research as well as the groundbreaking work of Sonja Lyubomirsky, Phd, author of The How Of Happiness: A Scientific Approach To Getting The Life You Want, shows that positive emotions widen the array of the thoughts and actions that come to mind, they engender more awareness of connections between ideas and expand the pool of possible choices.
Whether solo or in a community, we need to seek out experiences that activate the brain’s sense of reward in a way that makes us want to do them again and gain more mastery, which in turn increases the enjoyment and desire to continue. And its not so much about being happy at any given moment as it is about knowing we can be unhappy about some difficult life circumstances and at the same time engaged in something that makes us feel good. As a psychiatric inpatient I treated years ago once told me after a long afternoon in which the group improvised a sad, serious but often hilarious play and wrote a theme song, “even when your life is falling apart, you can still have a really good day.”
“ Another approach involves what I call “prioritizing positivity”: deliberately organizing your day-to-day life so that it contains situations that naturally give rise to positive emotions. This way of pursuing happiness involves carving out time in your daily routine to do things that you genuinely love, whether it be writing, gardening, or connecting with loved ones. Prioritizing positivity also involves heavily weighing the positive emotional consequences of major life decisions, like taking a new job, which have implications for the daily situations in which you will regularly find yourself. This way of pursuing happiness means proactively putting yourself in contexts that spontaneously trigger positive emotions. For years I’ve studied prioritizing positivity, and through scientific research, I’ve found that it goes hand-in-hand with optimal mental health. That is, the people who pursue happiness by seeking out pleasant experiences as part of their everyday lives are happier.” Barbara Fredrickson, PhD, quoted in A Better Way To Pursue Happiness
Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, CGP, MT is a consultant/trainer and writer/performer. She is an approved provider of Continuing Education for social workers in NYS, provider #0270, and host/creator of (mostly) TRUE THINGS, a show that features true stories — with a twist — told by people from all walks of life, ages and backgrounds.
