Boost Your Well-being Using the Wisdom of Positive Psychology

“What went well this week?”

It’s that time of week. You settle into your therapist’s comfy couch and brace yourself to recount the difficulties of the past week and look your demons in the eyes. Surprisingly, your therapist opens the conversation by asking you to share what went well for you over the past week. That is not what you were expecting!

Historically, the fields of psychology and psychotherapy have focused largely on pathology, mental illness, and diagnosis. While all are extremely important, Dr. Martin Seligman, known as “The Father of Positive Psychology,” felt that this orientation to helping individuals was incomplete. When Dr. Seligman took his seat as the president of the American Psychological Association in the late 1990’s, he began popularizing positive psychology , a field dedicated to identifying the factors that contribute to well-being and a life filled with flourishing.

The Five Domains of Positive Psychology

Positive psychology focuses on five domains of life that are thought to contribute to a life well lived. These domains include positive emotions, engagement, relationships,meaning and accomplishment (PERMA for short).

Investing in any of these foundations of positive psychology is rewarding in its own right.

It feels good to feel good! Joy, love, compassion, pride, and gratitude are all examples of positive emotions that can contribute to our experience of well-being. While our capacities to experience positive emotions differ from one another, we all share the ability to grow our positive emotions within our own personal range. Working on cultivating gratitude, mindfulness, and optimism are all ways to feed our positive emotions.

PERMA - The Five Domains of a Life Well Lived

Positive psychology focuses on five domains of life that are thought to contribute to a life well lived. These domains include; positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment (also known for its acronym PERMA).

Positive Emotions

Joy, love, compassion, pride, and gratitude are all examples of positive emotions that can contribute to our experience of well-being.

Engagement

Engagement means being involved in activities that are deeply captivating and enjoyable for their own sake.

This is similar to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s description of flow state, an all encompassing state of being, where an individual is so immersed in what s/he is doing that they lose a sense of time and become fully absorbed with the task at hand.This happen when the individual’s skill and interest levels are well-matched with the level of difficulty of the task, and they get immediate feedback about their performance.

Range

While our capacities to experience positive emotions differ from one person to another, we all share the ability to grow and engage with our positive emotions (within our own personal range). Working on cultivating gratitude, mindfulness, and optimism are all ways to feed our positive emotions and expand our range

Connection

Supportive and loving connections with others in our life contribute to the relationship pillar of the PERMA model. Since human beings are inherently social creatures, nurturing relationships are vital to our overall well-being.

Loving Connections are Pillars Of Joyous Living

Meaning

The domain of meaning refers to commitment to something higher than oneself…

…Be it family, charity, spirituality or religion, to name a few. This category speaks to our inherent pursuit of purpose.

Accomplishment

Finally, accomplishment is about having a sense of mastery and competence in a given area. This domain is most powerful when the accomplishments and achievements are tied to goals that are intrinsically motivating for a person as opposed to a goal that someone else thinks is worthwhile

Accomplishment is about having a sense of mastery and competence in a given area.

This domain is most powerful when the accomplishments and achievements are tied to goals that are intrinsically motivating for a person as opposed to a goal that someone else thinks is worthwhile

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Investing in any of these foundations of positive psychology is rewarding in its own right-it feels good to feel good. On top of that, though, research has identified a host of benefits that can be enjoyed from increased levels of well-being, including a stronger immune system, improved capacity for self regulation, better physical health, more satisfying relationships, and improved job satisfaction to name a few.

The good news is that an improvement to any one of these five domains can yield a boost to well-being!

Pro tip: instead of focusing on a domain where you struggle, pick an area where you’re already doing pretty well and see if you can identify one way that you can deepen and build on what’s already good. (And yes, that tip comes from positive psychology research too, but I’ll save that for another blog)!

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Small Steps Towards Feeling the “Goodness”

If you’re looking at this and wondering what went well- I invite you to start super small. It can be that you challenged a negative thought, and pulled yourself out of a spiral. It may be that you said “no” to the favor that was just too much for you to say “yes” to…or maybe you were present at dinnertime when you’ve been scrolling on your phone the past week.

Let’s start small and grow from there!