‘How can I stop feeling so stressed all the time?’
‘I just don’t want to feel low any more’
‘How do I get rid of this anxiety?’
As therapists, we hear things like this a lot. This isn’t surprising – after all, nobody wants to go around feeling terrible all the time, and people don’t usually come to therapy because they’re feeling good! The whole point of therapy is to help people to overcome difficulties in their lives, so it makes sense to focus on those difficulties. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is particularly good at this, helping people to understand what the problem is, what’s keeping it going, and how to tackle it.
We all do this naturally in our day-to-day lives as well. If something’s gone wrong, or we’re in a threatening situation, it makes sense to focus on this so we can try to do something about it. In fact our brains do this automatically, as a way of helping to keep us safe. You don’t want to be focussing on how lovely the sunshine is if you’re being chased by a bear!
The problem with this approach is that it can sometimes lead us to overlook the positive experiences we have – and while it’s easy to see why we might need to pay attention to negative emotions, research shows us that positive emotions (such as happiness, excitement, and contentment) are just as important.
Positive emotions help us to think more creatively and problem-solve more effectively. They can make us feel more secure and closer to other people. They even help us to recover from the physical effects of emotions like anxiety. In fact, research suggests that positive emotions play an important role in resilience, and that people who can continue to experience positive emotions during difficult times are more likely to be able to ‘bounce back’.
In other words, it’s important to pay attention to our positive emotions – especially if we’re struggling, and especially after what has been a very difficult year for a lot of us.
So we’d like to invite you to have a think about how you can make more use of your positive emotions. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Make a deal with yourself to notice your positive emotions (however small or fleeting) and allow yourself to experience them fully
- Keep a record of your positive emotions – use a notebook, your phone, your diary, or whatever works for you
- Dedicate some time each week to identifying the things that have made you feel good that week and re-playing these situations in your mind
- Use your phone to take pictures of things that bring up positive emotions for you, and look back through these later on
Lantern Psychotherapy 