The Secrets of a Good Life- Part One

“An old Cherokee told his grandson, ‘My son, there is a battle between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, fear, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, resentment, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, inferiority, false pride, superiority, lies and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, interest, humility, inspiration, serenity, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, compassion and truth.’

The boy thought about it and asked, ‘Grandfather, which wolf wins?’

The old man replied, ‘The one you feed.’ “

                                                                                                                               Anonymous

The next two weeks are going to be about how to ‘feed our Good Wolf and starve the Evil one’, giving you a general, condensed overview over some of the most important aspects and strategies for practically enhancing your well-being. Many of these steps are aimed at regulating emotions, which is a skill that can be learnt.^3,7 Your well-being can be improved by decreasing and learning how to cope with negative emotions, increasing positive emotions or both.^1,7 However, because of the negativity bias, decreasing your negative emotions may be the fastest and most effective way of improving your quality of life.¹ As we have previously also discussed, we also need to consider eudamonic components, such as having a meaning/purpose in life, positive relationships, engagement, as well as making sure that our core needs are fulfilled.^1,2,4,7,9,10

Over the year, we will go through all these points (and many others) in more detail. As you know from previous posts, our personalities and individual preferences are an important factor, and you may pick and choose the suggestions, which are most appealing to you. Having said that, it can be sometimes surprisingly refreshing and helpful to explore new ways of thinking and living. I would therefore recommend keeping an open mind and trying out as many methods as possible, even if they do not appear to come naturally to you at first glance.

Practical steps to a better well-being

We perceive our life to be ‘good’ if we feel safe, satisfied and connected but we tend to suffer if these core needs are not met.⁷ It may be that our external conditions are truly depriving us from safety, satisfaction or connection, but for most of us it is probably more common that we subjectively feel that our needs are not sufficiently fulfilled. As discussed in previous posts, we may sometimes need to (wisely!) change our life circumstances, but the main key to a better well-being is to adopt helpful attitudes and intentional behaviours, which make us more independent from external conditions. More specifically, changing our attention, our interpretations and thinking patterns, and our behaviour has been widely demonstrated to be the most effective way of improving your long-term happiness.^1-6,7,10 It is about adjusting our mental and behavioural habits in a way that enables us to experience more positivity, meaning in life, connections with others, get a sense of engagement, direction and self-growth, while at the same time cultivating acceptance and self-acceptance. 

Changing your attention:

• Most of us encounter more positive than negative events in any given day, but because of the negativity bias it may be all too easy to focus on the negative events and overlook the things, which went well. We can increase our mood by paying increased and conscious attention to positive events, thoughts and feelings, and decreasing attention to negative experiences, particularly if these are not important/significant for us.^1,2,7 Paying attention to positive experiences can also help us to store them as good memories, which can be helpful for us in future, particularly if we have otherwise a tendency towards negatively biased memories.⁷
• Similarly, one of the easiest ways to increase our positive emotions is to practice gratitude, that is directing our attention to things we are grateful for.^1,2,4
• Another way to use attention in order to increase your happiness is to stay in the moment and focus on the activity, events, thoughts or emotions at hand, avoiding to worry about the past and future. Mindfulness exercises and meditations can be greatly helpful for this.^1,3,4,6,7 Even when we are experiencing negative emotions and thoughts, mindfulness can help us. With mindfulness, we can learn to acknowledge these emotions/thoughts without identifying with them, thereby making us less reactive. We will come back to this important topic in a few weeks.
•  Pay attention to your values, strengths, goals and preferences, and what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose in life. However, during this process it is very important to avoid excessive self-analysis/self-preoccupation and rumination (=repetitive, worrying thoughts) as this decreases our happiness.^2-4,8,10 So once you are clear about your core values, goals and meaning, attending to others and the outer world rather than yourself is the key to positivity.^2-4
• It is similarly important to pay attention to your physical and mental needs, and get a realistic understanding of your vulnerabilities, again avoiding unproductive rumination.⁷ There will be a separate post on how to achieve self-awareness while avoiding non-productive rumination in the next few weeks.

Changing your interpretation, beliefs, thinking patterns and being aware of common ‘happiness traps’:

• Interpretation of events: Most events are not per se good or bad. Many are ambiguous and it depends on your interpretation as to whether you regard them as positive or negative. For example, if your train is delayed by bad weather, you may get angry, because you get to work late (negative interpretation), or you may be glad to have a bit more time to day-dream or reading a book (positive interpretation).² Positive interpretation also includes finding meaning in a particular event, life situation or occupation.^1,2,4,7
• Making good use of our memories:

o   Our memories are often surprisingly incorrect. When consciously remembering an event, we tend to judge it by forming a combination of its best (or worst) moment, and the way it ended.^1,2 We have also previously discussed that our memories (particularly the ‘unconscious’ implicit memory) can be negatively biased and selectively remember negative events while ignoring positive experiences.⁷ Knowing that our memory may not be an accurate representation of the past can be helpful to re-assess its significance.^2,7

o  On the other hand, we can harness our positive memories by choosing to remember positive events whenever we want.^1,7 It is also possible to overcome the negative bias of our implicit memory with some practice.⁷

• Be aware of the effects of hedonic adaptation: As we get so easily used to different life circumstances, we quickly take things for granted, deriving less pleasure and satisfaction from money, objects, people or situations over time.^2,4 Equally, we may get used to negative life situations and may prefer them to the 'risky' process of changing them. There are some things we can do to reduce the effect of hedonic adaptation, which we will come to in a few weeks time.
• Do not make the mistake to believe in ‘happiness myths’, for example that you can only be happy if you could only change one aspect in your life, such as 'I would be happy if only I would have a (different) partner/child/house/job/better health...' or '...more money, friends, success.' Happiness is multifaceted and does not just depend on one thing or future event.¹⁰
• Be aware that there is also a dynamic relationship between thoughts, emotions and body sensations: Thoughts can trigger emotions, which can in turn cause changes in our body sensations, but the same is true in reverse where body sensations can cause certain emotions and thoughts (also called embodied cognition).⁷ For example, if your muscles are tense, there is a feed-back mechanism to the brain, which can activate the stress-response in absence of other stress-inducing factors.³
• Having unrealistic and rigid beliefs and expectations of yourself, other people and your life as a whole is a certain route to disappointment. Don’t expect perfection. Of course we all need to have some dreams, hopes, aims and ambitions, particularly in areas which are important us. But at the same time it is important to remain flexible. Practicing acceptance and self-acceptance when we fail to achieve our goals, and trying to replace our unrealistic, rigid expectations with a more flexible and balanced view is the key.^2,3,5,10 Remember that people who are happy to accept an adequate solution (satisficers) are generally happier than people who try to get the absolutely best out of every choice (maximisers). So in some situations it is wise to settle for ‘good enough’ rather than ‘perfect’.^2,6,10 Being a bit of a perfectionist myself I know that it can be really difficult to change your mindset in this respect, but for the high achievers and perfectionists among you it will be one of the most liberating life changes you can make. The secret is to adjust your views and increase flexibility in small steps. Again, there will be a separate post on this topic, because I think that it is  particularly important, especially in the veterinary world.
• Disputing overly negative, over-generalised and pessimistic thinking: Blaming yourself personally for setbacks, expecting negative situations to last forever or thinking that one negative event will have detrimental effects for all aspects of your life is just as unhelpful as having unrealistically optimistic expectations. The same goes for always expecting the worst outcome (catastrophizing). Again, replacing these types of mindsets with a more balanced, optimistic and realistic view helps to increase our positivity.^2-5,10 If you are a constant worrier and prone to rumination, it would also be helpful to break this habit- more tips on this in the next few weeks. 
• Try not to compare yourself to other people, which appear to be better off than you (e.g. which have more money, a bigger/nicer house, or appear (to you!) more clever or attractive). Making social comparisons is associated with a lower degree of happiness.^2,10 However, it can be very helpful to use other people as positive examples and role models.²
• An attitude of compassion towards yourself and others leads to a greater well-being, as being kind to yourself and other people directly reduces negative emotions and makes your interactions more effective.^6,7 As we are highly social creatures, connections to other people are absolutely essential to our well-being. It does not matter if you are introvert or extrovert- we all need to feel that we are connected to others and it is important that we open ourselves to this experience.^1,2,4,6-9 This is not always easy. Particularly being kind to ourselves can be very difficult for some of us (again I subjectively think that vets are often bad at this) but there are some things we can do to increase our capacity for (self)-compassion. More to follow in separate posts.
• Try to use an open and creative problem-solving approach when dealing with adverse life events.¹ This includes situations where you want to change your life circumstances as well as times when you decide that you would like to address your vulnerabilities or modify aspects of yourself. In this context, it is important to learn to differentiate between appropriate and useful negative emotions and those, which are gratuitous and not constructive.¹ This is because the situations in which these different groups of negative emotions arise are best dealt with in different ways- there will be several posts dedicated to this important topic in the next few weeks.
• Try to see the funny side of things and staying playful: humour is a great way of increasing positive emotions and a great help when trying to come to grips with the challenges of life.^3,6 

Preview: Next time we will look into specific behaviours, which we can use to improve our positivity.

References and further evidence-based reading:

1. Fredrickson B. Positivity: Groundbreaking Research to Release Your Inner Optimist and Thrive. Oneworld Publications; Oxford, England. 2010.

2. Diener E, Biswas-Diener R. Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth. Blackwell Publishing; Oxford, UK. 2008.

3. Pittman CM, Karle EM. Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to use the neuroscience of fear to end anxiety, panic & worry. New Harbinger Publications: Oakland. 2015.

4. Seligman MEP. Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being- and How to Achieve Them. Nicholas Brealey Publishing; London, UK. 2011.

5. Seligman MEP. What You Can Change and What You Can’t: The Complete Guide to Successful Self-Improvement. Nicholas Brealey Publishing; London, UK. 2010.

6. Seppälä E. The Happiness Track: How to Apply the Science of Happiness to Accelerate Your Success. Piatkus; London, UK. 2016.

7. Hanson R: Hardwiring Happiness: How to reshape your brain and your life. Rider Ebury Publishing, Random House, UK. 2013. 

8. Nettle D. Personality: What makes you the way you are. Oxford University Press; New York. 2007.

9. Eagleman D. The Brain: The story of you. Canongate Books Ltd; Edinburgh, UK. 2015.

10. Lyubomirsky S. The Myths of Happiness: What should make you happy but doesn’t, what shouldn’t make you happy but does. Penguin Books; New York. 2013.

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