Category Archives: Happiness

Cool Counseling, Happiness, Personal Reflections, Therapy with Adolescents, Writing

Let’s Do the “Three-Step” (Emotional Change Trick)

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This morning’s weekly missive of “most read” articles from the Journal of the American Medical Association included a study evaluating the effects of high-dose “fluvoxamine and time to sustained recover in outpatients with COVID-19.” My reaction to the title was puzzlement. What could be the rationale for using a serotonin specific reuptake inhibitor for treating COVID-19? I read a bit and discovered there’s an idea and observations that perhaps fluvoxamine can reduce the inflammation response and prevention development of more severe COVID-19.

To summarize, the results were no results. Despite the fact that back in the 1990s some psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies were campaigning for putting serotonin in the water systems, in fact, serotonin doesn’t really do much. As you know from last week, serotonin-based medications are generally less effective for depression than exercise.

For the happiness challenge this week, we’re touting the effectiveness of my own version of what we should put in the water or in the schools or in families—the Three-Step Emotional Change Trick. Having been in a several month funk over a variety of issues, I find myself returning to the application of the Three-Step Emotional Change Trick in my daily life. Does it always work? Nope. Is it better than feeling like a victim to my unpleasant thoughts and feelings? Yep.

I hope you’ll try this out and follow the instructions to push the process outward by sharing and teaching the three steps. Let’s try to get it into the water system.

Active Learning Assignment 9 – The 3-Step Emotional Change Trick

Almost no one likes toxic positivity. . . which is why I want to emphasize from the start, this week’s activity is NOT toxic positivity.

Back in the 1990s I was in full-time private practice and mostly I got young client referrals. When they entered my office, nearly all the youth were in bad moods. They were unhappy, sad, anxious, angry, and usually unpleasantly irritable. Early on I realized I had to do something to help them change their moods.

An Adlerian psychologist, Harold Mosak, had researched the emotional pushbutton technique. I turned it into a simple, three-step emotional change technique to help young clients deal with their bad moods. I liked the technique so well that I did it in my office, with myself, with parents, during professional workshops, and with classrooms full of elementary, middle, and high school students. Mostly it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

This week, your assignment is to apply the three-step emotional change trick to yourself and your life. Here’s how it goes.

Introduction

Bad moods are normal. I would ask young clients, “Have you ever been in a bad mood?” All the kids nodded, flipped me off, or said things like, “No duh.”

Then I’d ask, “Have you ever had somebody tell you to cheer up?” Everyone said, “Yes!” and told me how much they hated being told to cheer up. I would agree and commiserate with them on how ridiculous it was for anyone to ever think that saying “Cheer up” would do anything but piss the person off even more. I’d say, “I’ll never tell you to cheer up.* If you’re in a bad mood, I figure you’ve got a good reason to be in a bad mood, and so I’ll just respect your mood.” [*Note to Therapists: This might be the single-most important therapeutic statement in this whole process.]

Then I’d ask. “Have you ever been stuck in a bad mood and have it last longer than you wanted it to?”

Nearly always there was a head nod; I’d join in and admit to the same. “Damn those bad moods. Sometimes they last and last and hang around way longer than they need to. How about I teach you this thing I call the three-step emotional change trick. It’s a way to change your mood, but only when YOU want to change your mood. You get to be the captain of your own emotional ship.”

Emotions are universally challenging. I think that’s why I never had a client refuse to let me teach the three-steps. And that’s why I’m sharing it with you now.

Step one is to feel the feeling. Feelings come around for a reason. We need to notice them, feel them, and contemplate their meaning. The big questions here are: How can you honor and feel your feelings? What can you do to respect your own feelings and listen to the underlying message? I’ve heard many answers. Here are a few. But you can generate your own list.

  • Frowning or crying if you feel sad
  • Grimacing and making angry faces into a mirror if you feel angry
  • Drawing an angry picture
  • Punching or kicking a pillow (no real violence though)
  • Going outside and yelling (or screaming into a pillow)
  • Scribbling on a note pad
  • Writing a nasty note to someone (but not delivering it)
  • Using your words, and talking to someone about what you’re feeling

Step two is to think a new thought or do something different. This step is all about intentionally doing or thinking something that might change or improve you mood. The big question here is: What can you think or do that will put you in a better mood?

I discovered that kids and adults have amazing mood-changing strategies. Here’s a sampling:

  • Tell a funny story (“Yesterday in math, my friend Todd farted”)
  • Tell a joke (What do you call it when 100 rabbits standing in a row all take one step backwards? A receding hare-line).
  • Tell a better joke (Why did the ant crawl up the elephant’s leg for the second time? It got pissed off the first time.)
  • Exercise!
  • Smile into a mirror
  • Talk to someone you trust
  • Put a cat (or a chicken or a duck) on your head
  • Chew a big wad of gum

I’m sure you get the idea. You know best what might put you in a good mood. When you’re ready, but not before, use your own self-knowledge to move into a better mood.

Step three is to spread the good mood. Moods are contagious. I’d say things like this to my clients:

“Emotions are contagious. Do you know what contagious means? It means you can catch emotions from being around other people who are in bad moods or good moods. Like when you got here. I noticed your mom was in a bad mood too. It made me wonder, did you catch the bad mood from her or did she catch it from you? Anyway, now you seem to be in a better mood. I’m wondering. Do you think you can make your mom “catch” your good mood?”

How do you share good moods? Saying “Cheer up” is off-limits. Here’s a short list of what I’ve heard from kids and adults.

  • Do someone a favor
  • Smile
  • Hold the door for a stranger
  • Offer a real or virtual hug
  • Listen to someone
  • Tell someone, “I love you”

Step four might be the best and most important step in the three-step emotional change trick. With kids, when I move on to step four, they always interrupt:

“Wait. You said there were only three steps!”

“Yes. That’s true. But because emotions are complicated and surprising, the three-step emotional change trick has four steps. The fourth step is for you to teach someone else the three steps.”

Here’s a youtube link to me doing the 3SECT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITWhMYANC5c

If you want to chase down an early version/citation, here’s a link for that: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J019v17n04_02

Happiness, Personal Reflections, Writing

Dance it Off – Moving for Happiness

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I’m a big fan of exercise and movement as a solution for nearly everything. Below is my famous or infamous “Last Dance” video that I filmed after a day when I got beat up pretty bad by all things Moodle, Powerpoint, and Qualtrics. My solution was to Dance it off, which I share with you all despite the fact that this is the sort of thing one should keep private.

I share this video as a challenge to anyone who feels inclined to make their own 1 minute dance-it-off video. Yes please! And share.

[Unless you read this blog regularly] you may be surprised to hear that exercise is more effective in treating depression than antidepressant medications. If so, that’s likely because pharmaceutical companies spend millions every year to tell you their antidepressants are effective. The marketing budget for exercise as a treatment for depression is considerably less.

Movement—along with sleep and a healthy diet—is probably the best way to keep your brain healthy. Nearly all movement helps. In my favorite exercise study on treating depression in youth, preteens and teens who were depressed had a 100% response to cardio (including Jazzercise and Wii) and a 67% response with just stretching. Exercise does so many good things for the brain that it’s hard to track. Also, other than sweat, thirst, and sore muscles, exercise has no real negative side effects—which isn’t the case for medications.

In conclusion, the researchers wrote:

“Compared to antidepressant medication treatment with adolescents, exercise resulted in (a) a faster response rate, (b) a better response rate, (c) fewer relapses (n = 0) at six and 12 month follow-ups, and (d) no side effects or adverse events” (Hughes et al., 2013). One caveat, at the beginning of the study, none of the participants were exercising.

But who were these researchers? Were they anti-drug researchers with an axe to grind?

Nope, and this is my favorite part. The researchers were prestigious academics who mostly do pharmaceutical research. One of them was the guy responsible for the clinical studies that led to FDA approval of Prozac for treating youth with depression. The two biggest names on the study have repeatedly been funded by Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, and more.

All this leads me to this week’s #MHPHappinessChallenge assignment.

Find your preferred way to move, pair it with your favorite music, and do what the researchers in the Hughes (2013) study did to treat depression. I call this “Dance it off,” because dancing—alone or together—is a fabulous way to make the time fly by while you give your brain a dose of what it’s craving.

Here’s the Hughes et al (2013) study. I’m sharing it because everyone should know about it:

date-exercise-study-2013Download

But you don’t have to dance. You can walk, run, skip, or yoga. You can jump rope, do Wii or Jazzercize, kickbox, or just jiggle your body in the kitchen while you’re cooking. If you ride the elevator, take the stairs. If you’re in a chair, dance with whatever parts of your body that will move. Of course, don’t do anything that’s so excessive that you might hurt yourself.

I’m sure you get the point.

And then, if you feel something-maybe a high or a fun new thought or anything that kicks your mood up a notch, savor it, linger, and then share it with us.

As always, thanks for participating in the Montana Happiness Challenge. Let’s dance it off together this week.

Happiness, Love, Personal Reflections

The Many Paths to Gratitude

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Freud once said, “There are many ways and means of conducting psychotherapy. All that lead to recovery are good.”

Coming from rigid old Freud, that was a pretty wildly accepting statement. I’d like to apply it to gratitude.

There are many ways to practice gratitude. All that lead to meaning and happiness are good.

When it comes to gratitude, there are many “ways and means.” Let us count the ways.

1.       Gratitude for others who are in our lives right now.

2.       Gratitude for others, from the past; these people toward whom we feel gratitude may be alive or may have passed.

3.       Gratitude for a higher power. Many people pray to express gratitude. In Traveling Mercies, Anne Lamott said there are only two types of prayer. “Help me. Help me. Help me.” And “Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.” Obviously, Lamott’s second type of prayer is all about gratitude.

4.       Gratitude for a concept a country or belief system.

5.       Once, during a workshop, I had a teacher say she was grateful to her 16-year-old self for having the courage and good judgment to go immerse in Spanish, even though she didn’t like Spanish much. She went, learned, and is now a successful Spanish teacher. Very cool.

When it comes to gratitude, there are also many means. Let us count them too.

1.       We can keep a gratitude journal. Journals are usually private, but sometimes not. Also, journals can be written, spoken, or video-recorded.

2.       Gratitude can be practiced once-a-week, every day, or at whatever rate you choose.

3.       We can have surface gratitude, or we can dig down deep and keep asking ourselves, “Why this gratitude for this person, place, or thing?”

4.       We can purposefully find a way to communicate our gratitude to the person or persons toward whom we feel it. There are lots of online videos showing what happens when people communicate gratitude. We like this one from SoulPancake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHv6vTKD6lg

5.       You can do a benefit reflection. This means that you take a few moments to reflect on (a) how much someone’s action helped you, (b) the time, money, or effort that a person sacrificed to help you; and (c) the fact that someone helped you on purpose.

Gratitude can have big or small benefits. Like everything, gratitude is in the eye of the beholder (meaning you will have an individualized response to practicing gratitude; it’s not about what you “should” experience; it’s about trying out gratitude and seeing how you feel). Generally, gratitude has small and positive effects on depression and anxiety. Here’s a link to a 2021 meta-analysis, if you want to read the science:

gratitude-2021-meta-analysisDownload

As always, I encourage you to experiment with gratitude. It might make a big difference, a small difference, or no difference at all . . . but it’s hard to know if you’ll benefit from gratitude unless you practice it—at least a little—using the ways and means that fit for you.

Happiness, Love

Experimenting with Gratitude

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In the midst of an online workshop on happiness, I came to the gratitude slide, and asked the Zooming participants for their reactions. One person, a school psychologist, said, “I hate gratitude. I’m sick and tired of gratitude. Everybody talks about gratitude and how we all should be doing it. It just feels fake and trite to me.”

Being aware of the futility of trying to convince anyone of anything, I listened, reflected and validated her concerns, “Yes, gratitude can feel very trite, and it sounds like you pretty much hate it.” Then I kept on rolling.

A few minutes later, I asked for a volunteer to engage with me in a live “gratitude experience.” Of the 40 checkerboard faces on my screen, who volunteered? Of course, the woman who was “sick and tired of gratitude” spoke up quickly, “I’ll do it.”

It felt like a set-up for my gratitude demonstration to fail. But I’m a professional . . . and so I forged onward, encouraging her to think of someone specific—past or present—toward whom she felt gratitude. She cooperated. I nudged her to go a bit deeper, “What do you think it is, in particular, that makes you feel grateful to this person. Tell me the details.” She paused, responded, there was a sparkle of emotion, which I noticed and reflected back to her. In the end, she commented, “That was cool. Maybe I don’t really hate gratitude. Maybe I just hate superficial gratitude.”

This is a great example of the difference of thinking about gratitude vs. taking the time to feel about gratitude. Like everything, if we brush past gratitude like a stranger on the street, it can feel meaningless and trite. And then if people keep telling us we “should” do it because it has all these “benefits” we might become even more entrenched in our dislike of gratitude.

As with all things related to positive psychology, don’t do gratitude as an obligation. Intentionality in choosing to engage in a gratitude practice is foundational. Although random experiences of gratitude are fine, intentionally making the space and time to feel grateful is substantially better.

This week, your gratitude activity is part contemplation, part writing, and part action. Use the following steps:

1.       Identify someone toward whom you feel or have felt appreciation and gratitude. You may have plenty of options. It’s likely a good idea to choose someone toward whom you believe you haven’t yet expressed enough gratitude.

2.       Write a gratitude note to that person. Include in the note why you feel gratitude toward to the person. Include specifics as needed, as well as words that best express your sincere heartfelt feelings toward the person.

3.       Find a way to express your feelings directly to your gratitude target. You can read the note in person, over the phone, or send it in whatever way you find best.

Your goal is to express your gratitude. What that means is that you need to drop expectations for how the recipient of your gratitude should or will respond. Don’t focus on their response, instead, focus on doing the best job you can expressing the gratitude that you sincerely feel.

If the person loves hearing about your gratitude, cool. If the person is uncomfortable or not positive or silent, that’s okay. Your goal should be within your control—meaning that all you can control is your end of the communication and not how the communication is received.  

If you feel moved to do so, please share your experiences on social media. Tell the world (and us), (a) what it was like to write the gratitude message, (b) what it was like to deliver it, and (c) how it felt to express your gratitude. Feel free to repeat this gratitude experiment a second or third time.

There are many other ways to approach gratitude practice.

Here’s one example, from a book that offers teachers and school counselors ideas for how to apply positive psychology interventions in school settings.

gratitude-activity-2013Download

We’ll be sending out additional ideas and variations on gratitude this week. . . so stay tuned!

Happiness, Love, Personal Reflections

Savoring these Savoring Videos

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In the summer of 2022, we held a Strengths-Based Suicide and Happiness retreat at Boulder Hot Springs in Montana. The food was excellent and well-worth savoring every nibble. Additionally, we encouraged all the participants to do approximately 1-minute videos focusing on a practice in their lives that they believe to be helpful to their happiness.

Here’s Charlie, talking about savoring his experiences as a one-man heavy metal band

Charlie — We Rip

I think these videos are incredible. I love what everyone says. . . and appreciate the participants, the messages, and the videographers. I find myself savoring these savoring videos.

Below, I’m including a few links to more of our retreat videos that, more or less, focus on savoring. They’re short, they’re cool, and I hope you watch, savor, and reflect on how you might do even more savoring in your life. Who knows, maybe you’ll even make your own social media video and share it with us and the world!

Joyce – Happy Grandma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP36toKBS4E

Sidney – Feel It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1nQ2uKufNg

Jennifer – Savoring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2WrLATF7QY

Chris – The Savoring Mindset: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHTQiQEbFXk

Dylan – Bring in the Light: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGtO–GhL2U

John – Color and Art: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuFsGa3PhRo

Happiness, Research

Savor This!

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As many of you who know me in-person or through this blog, I’m quite capable of backward-savoring. . . which might be why I find this week’s Montana Happiness Challenge activity especially compelling.

Savoring is defined as a deliberate effort to extend and expand positive experiences. Or, as I learned from Dr. Heidi Zetzer of the University of California, Santa Barbara, “Savoring is amplifying and extending positive emotions, by lingering, reveling, relishing, or something even more active like taking a victory lap! I also stole this photo from one of Heidi’s happiness slides. Thanks Heidi!!

So, how can anyone—or me—do savoring backward? Enter another fun word: Rumination.

Dictionary.com defines rumination as (1) a deep or considered thought about something. Or, (2) the action of chewing the cud.

Essentially, to ruminate is to think hard. You may be ruminating right now, wondering, “What’s backward or bad about thinking hard.”

Well, in the domain of mental health, we focus on a particular type of rumination. For example, according to the American Psychiatric Association, “Rumination involves repetitive thinking or dwelling on negative feelings and distress and their causes and consequences.”

Thinking hard about negative things is precisely the opposite of savoring. And, despite my surface penchant for the positive, both my wife and I would attest to the fact that I’m also an excellent ruminator—as in the psychiatric sense, not so much in the cud-chewing sense.

As we like to say in academia, the research on savoring is damn good. Well, maybe we don’t really like to say “damn good,” but I’m sure someone has said that at some point in time, probably while savoring all the savoring research.  

How good is the research, you ask?

People instructed to savor, depending on the type of savoring, generally report improved mood, increased satisfaction, greater hope for positive life events, increased planning, and a greater likelihood of repeating a previously savor-worthy experience. Just savor that for an extra moment or two. For something so simple, savoring research has damn good outcomes.

This week, our Montana Happiness Challenge savoring activity provides you with a menu of different savoring activities to try out. You can read the details on the Montana Happiness Project website: https://montanahappinessproject.com/savoring

The summary is: For this week the plan is for you to pick one savoring assignment from a menu of research-based savoring activities (below). Each of these activities has research support; doing any of them might make you feel significantly more happiness or less depression. Here are your options:

  • Engage in mutual reminiscence. Mutual reminiscence happens when you get together with someone and intentionally pull up and talk about fun, positive, or meaningful memories. I was on the phone with a friend last week and did a bit of this and it was nice. Now I have memories of us remembering our shared positive memories.
  • Make a list of positive memories. After making the list, transport yourself to reminisce on one of the memories. You can do this by yourself. Retrieve the memory. Play it back in your mind. Explore it. Feel it. Let your brain elaborate on the details.
  • Celebrate good news longer than you would. This is easy. You need to track/observe for a positive message or news in your life that feels good. Then, let your mind linger on it. Notice how you feel. What parts of the news are especially meaningful and pleasant to you? Extend and celebrate the good news.
  • Notice and observe beauty. This activity is mostly visual, but you can listen for beautiful sounds and smells too. Let yourself see color, patterns, and nuanced beauty in nature or in art. Linger with that visual and let its pleasant effects be in your eyes, brain, and body. Notice and feel those sensations and thoughts.

As usual, consider making your savoring public. . . and tag us, so we have more things to savor.

Happiness

Goal-Setting for Happiness

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One of my favorite old New Yorker cartoons, by Tom Cheney, features a man in a cap standing on a street corner next to a paper shredding machine. He’s smoking. A hand-written sign leans against his shredder; it reads,

It took me months to “get it.” Cheney’s man on the street is telling us to shred our ambitions, and not look back.

But why?

Probably because, in a hung-over stupor or on a misinformed high, we set a bunch of DUMB New Year’s resolutions.

Despite Cheney’s cynical irreverence (which I appreciate very much), the evidence on goal-setting is extremely positive. We do better when we set goals. The problem is, much like Cheney’s man on the street, most of us set ill-conceived, unrealistic, poor goals and double-down on that with ill-conceived, unrealistic, and poor plans—or no plans at all, which is another bad option).

We could be smarter. . . at least when it comes to goal-setting and planning.

There is literally a digital ton of information on the internet on what has been affectionately named, SMART goals. If you don’t know what they are do a search and learn. For brevity, and to keep our focus on happiness, I’m limiting my goal-setting advice to three main points.

First, set goals to increase positive behavioral practices in your life. Avoid setting goals to reduce or eliminate negative or undesirable behaviors. Turns out, usually we have greater success adding positive behaviors and using them to “crowd out” our negative behaviors. An example: Instead of thinking “I’ll stop procrastinating,” set a goal to get started on new projects within 24 hours (or sooner) of putting them on your list.

Second, set goals that are completely within your control. Don’t set goals for someone else, “I’m going to get my son to clean his room.” In that case, your goal might be to develop the best plan possible for trying to get your son to clean his room, while recognizing that him cleaning is slightly outside of your direct control.

Third, keep in mind that goal-setting—although a highly effective personal growth strategy—can be fraught. Imagine the athlete or musician who focuses exclusively on perfection. Although perfect performances may be aspirational, when reality sets in and the performance is less than perfect—as it always will be—frustration and disappointment ensue. Realistic and SMART goal-setting, along with self-compassion for facing failure, is a healthier road to success.

For this activity, identify a SMART, achievable goal within your control. Then, in contrast to how Americans approach New Year’s Resolutions, develop an excellent plan for accomplishing your goals. Here are some planning tips:

  1. Our brains are imperfect and so you should develop a sticky-note or smart-phone reminder system to aid you in remembering to implement your plan.
  2. Be very aware of the small and simple behaviors that lead toward your goal. For example, if healthier eating is your goal, when you drink a green smoothie instead of eating pound cake, stop, and immediately give yourself a “high-five” or anything physical to celebrate your very small accomplishment. Even better, say “Yesssssss!” or “Oh yeah!” aloud. Your self-reinforcement should be immediate and noticeable. If your goal is to get a school paper or work project done on time (instead of procrastinating) do a little dance, clap your hands, or sing a few lines from a celebratory song right after you power up your computer and open the document you want to work on. You may need to keep doing this every 5 to 15 minutes to give your brain the neurochemical push to make avoiding procrastination a habit.
  3. Link your challenging “goal” behaviors with something pleasant. The best example I ever heard of was a student in my happiness class who developed and sustained a running routine because she would only let herself listen to her favorite music when she was running.
  4. Get a goal-setting partner. Usually, we all do better with social support.
  5. Consider going public with your goal and plans. Usually, we all do better with social support.

Because there’s evidence that going public with well-thought-out goals and plans can enhance goal attainment, to the extent that you’re comfortable, please share your goals/plans on social media, encourage others to do so, and support them in their goal-setting efforts.

In the meantime, happy goal-setting!

Happiness

It’s Okay to Bitch about Bad Things

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In my cynical and obstinate heart, when someone like Martin Seligman (or John Sommers-Flanagan) tells me I should think about three good things, I immediately start thinking about three bad things. I like to imagine my own brand of oppositionality as normal or natural . . . but I also recognize there is, and always has been, a twisted and angry part of me unwilling to believe that someone else has anything to offer me on how to live my life. [Note: I know the twisted and angry part of me is NOT the best part of me, but it’s in there nonetheless, and as the Jungians might say, denying and suppressing parts of ourselves usually comes back to bite us in the ass.] [Note: the Jungians don’t actually say anything about getting bitten in the ass; that’s just my blue-collar background translation of what the high-falutin Jungians really mean.]

Ironically, for the first four weeks of the Montana Happiness Challenge, we’ve been prodding and pummeling people with “activities” (a nice word for homework) involving happy songs, witnessing inspiration, happy places, and this week, three good things. If you’re like me, I owe you an apology—I’m sorry about all this damn positivity—especially in the face of a world filled with oppression, war, mass shootings, and destructive politics.

The point and purpose of our positive psychology assignments is not to imply that you shouldn’t bitch about bad things in your life or scary things in the world. Please do that. You should. There’s plenty to bitch about. I’d get into my own bitching right now, but the main point of the Montana Happiness Challenge is to encourage people (including cranky old me) to intentionally create space and time for positive thoughts.

The idea that we should focus more on the positive is neither rocket science nor news flash. The bummer of reality includes the fact that most humans find it easier and more natural to bitch about the bad things than remind themselves of the good things. Remembering that there’s something (or anything) positive in the world or in our lives is hard work.

Feel free to bitch about that too.  

If you’re doing the three good things activity, you may find yourself tempted to list your 17 most recent bad things. That might be the unique twisted and angry part of you pushing back on this silly and not so silly assignment. If so, the twisted and angry part of me would just like to say, either, “Welcome to my world” or “Come on, get your shit together, do the effing assignment, and even though it feels like bragging, post it on social media for all the world to see.”

Have a great day, and be sure to bitch and moan as you please.

#MHPHappinessChallenge #MontanaHappiness

 

Happiness

Day Two Powerpoints for the Happiness for Educators Class

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Last Thursday and Friday I had a great time hanging out and learning with Montana educators at the annual MFPE Teacher Conference. Over two days we crammed in 16 continuing education hours. Following an initial Thursday morning organizational blip wherein I was sent to the wrong classroom twice and finally found someone in the hall to lead a couple lost teachers and me to the correct location, I discovered a packed classroom, with several teachers seated on the floor. I also discovered an incredibly dedicated, talented, and knowledgeable group of teachers who are immensely engaged in teaching and connecting with Montana students in ways that should humble us all . . . and inspire us to advocate for raising Montana teacher salaries.

On Thursday evening—after a full day of educational inspiration—my computer decided it was finished with the internet. Apparently my Wifi driver turned into toast (the technical term). Being disconnected from the internet (until Sunday evening) had its benefits, but it’s also why I’m only now posting the ppts for Day Two of the conference.

Here they are:

day-2-2023-595-1-cr-rev-no-videosDownload

Happy Tuesday!

John S-F

Happiness

Three Good Things: Martin Seligman’s Signature Positive Psychology Intervention

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This week, for the Montana Happiness Challenge, we’re encouraging participants to experiment with Martin Seligman’s “Three Good Things” technique. Three good things (TGT) is an evidence-based positive psychology intervention. For example, six months of twice-weekly TGT has been shown to decrease burnout in nurses (Luo et al., 2019) and four weeks of unguided internet-based TGT reduced insomnia in adults (Sato et al., 2022). In Seligman’s (Seligman et al., 2005) original research, TGT had positive effects on mood and depression.  

Like everything, TGT is not one-size fits all. You should use it in any way that works for you. You can start with Seligman’s instructions, and riff on it from there. For me, I like it best at 4am, when I wake up and my brain seems preoccupied with depressing things. If you want to listen to me talking about TGT, here’s a 5+ minute video:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45fsZMDMPOQ

If you want to read the long and winding version of this happiness activity, I’ve pasted it below the references. If not, just jump right in, try it out, and post your thoughts and reactions on your favorite social media platform.

References

Luo, Y., Li, H., Plummer, V., Cross, W. M., Lam, L., Guo, Y., . . . Zhang, J. (2019). An evaluation of a positive psychological intervention to reduce burnout among nurses. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 33(6), 186-191. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apnu.2019.08.004

Sato, D., Sekizawa, Y., Sutoh, C., Hirano, Y., Okawa, S., Hirose, M., . . . Shimizu, E. (2022). Effectiveness of unguided internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy and the three good things exercise for insomnia: 3-arm randomized controlled trial. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 24(2), 1-17. doi:https://doi.org/10.2196/28747

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