Barbara Fredrickson, a professor of psychology and modern leader in the study of positivity, found that previous positive activities prepare us to better manage future stressful situations effectively. Negative events take up more of our brain space. Fredrickson found you need at least three positive experiences to counteract one negative incident. You need these positive experiences to serve as a buffer; otherwise, negative emotions will keep you from problem-solving and long-term thinking. If we haven’t built a solid bank of positive events and actions, we are more likely to be overcome by negative ones.
I didn’t realize just how much building my positivity bank account had improved my ability to cope until my apartment flooded earlier this year. I came home to find my entire living room drenched, my filming equipment ruined, and some priceless heirlooms demolished. In this moment of chaos, I found myself surprisingly calm. I realized that getting stressed-out or angry over it wasn’t going to fix it. It also wasn’t going to give me any of the answers I needed. So even though I definitely felt stressed-out (stress is somewhat inevitable in these types of situations), I kept that sensation to a minimum. I instead found myself investing all that extra nervous energy into finding solutions. When I spoke to my building manager, I remember his response. “Usually people get very angry and that just makes resolving the situation even more challenging.” Pause. Not only does useless negativity wear us out, it keeps us from moving forward.
How to Build a Positivity Bank Account
Keep track of positive things that happen in your life in a journal or spreadsheet. When stressful things happen you’ll have a premade list of positive things in your life to draw on to help you through.
Positive Thinking Helps You Recognize Opportunities
In one of my favorite episodes of the popular documentary series The Experiments, Darren Brown does a series of experiments to better understand what makes people lucky. In one of these tests of kismet, Brown creates several “lucky” situations for a supposedly unlucky individual, Wayne. First, Brown sends a fake scratch-off prize card to Wayne in the mail. If Wayne would just give that lucky card a scratchety-scratch, he’d find that he’s won a brand spankin’ new TV. What does Wayne do? He throws the scratch card in the garbage. Next a fake interviewer is placed on the street offering a cash prize to anyone who could answer “today’s special question.” Brown designed this question specifically for Wayne. It would have been a piece of delicious, free money-cake for him to answer. However, Wayne pushes off the interviewer claiming he’s “too busy” and quickly moves on. In the final test, fifty dollars is left smack dab in the middle of Wayne’s path home from work. Wayne manages to walk home but completely ignore the money—even though it was directly in his line of sight.
I found this whole series of events fascinating, and a harsh reminder of one truth: “You create your own destiny.” Through our actions and choices, we start to perpetuate the reality we think we deserve. In Wayne’s case, he assumed unpredictable situations can only have a negative result. Therefore he avoided anything that wouldn’t be a guaranteed success. Wayne no longer looked for opportunities, because he had convinced himself they didn’t exist. When you take on negative attitudes, you restrict your access to life’s advantages on a day-to-day basis by refusing to acknowledge your potential skills, engage with the community, and/or take risks. Simply put, you can’t expect to fly, if you’re afraid to leave the ground.
In another experiment, the impact of positive emotions on the brain were tested. Subjects were divided into five groups and shown different clips of people that were each chosen to trigger a specific emotion. After viewing the clips, they were asked to imagine themselves in a similar situation and write down how they would react. Those who were exposed to clips showing positive emotions wrote down significantly higher number of actions they could take. Now this area of research is fairly new, but it goes to show that if we recognize and experience more happy things each day, we’ll also recognize and acknowledge additional opportunities. You’ll reach a little bit harder for the stars, because they simply won’t feel so far away. I look at it this way: your ability to achieve a goal is directly related to how much you believe that goal is attainable.
When I was a teenage rebel, I focused on the negative. I didn’t believe I was able or capable of becoming anything more than what I was. My own fear held me back from recognizing not only opportunities, but also my own talents. I believed I was worthless, and as a result that’s what I became. It’s amazing how in a few short years I was able to completely turn my life around, create lasting meaningful relationships, and find myself on a journey to the best me I could be. It wasn’t because I was destined to be a special story to be told in a Chicken Soup for the Soul storybook, it was because I worked hard to create a more positive lifestyle. In the following chapters, we’ll address how you too can build positive habits to help you live your happiest, healthiest, and most fruitful life.
Identity: Realizing You’re Different and Becoming Self-Aware
“Remember always that you not only have the right to be an individual, you have an obligation to be one.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt
At age six, I remember sneaking into the kitchen and stealing some cookies to snack on before dinner. My father had told me several times that under no circumstance was I to have any of those sweet, chocolate morsel-filled biscuits before dinner. What he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him, right? As I found my way to the staircase, there were only a few carpet-covered wood stairs separating me from sweet success and even sweeter celebration. I had pulled off my heist. Victory was to be mine.
As I rounded the end of the banister, mere footsteps from my room, I found myself face-to-face with my father. I had pulled my shirt up, securing it there with my teeth, to form a MacGyver like sling for my stolen desserts. As I looked at him, my mouth gaped open, sending my shirt and the forbidden treats it contained tumbling down to the white carpet below. Having kept the cookies close to my chest, their little chocolate chips had melted. As they rolled across the tufted ground, they left streaks of brown goo behind them.
“Anna!” my father screamed, and this was followed with a few choice words not appropriate for this book or most public settings. I should mention that my father had spent hours on end caring for this carpet, steam-cleaning it and making sure it was pristine. I had been caught not only stealing forbidden treats, but had also destroyed my father’s domestic pride and joy. His brow was furrowed and his face was red. I was done for.
I burst into a fit of tears, an effort to distract my father from the disaster zone I had created. Despite my best efforts, it did not work. Not at all. I was sent to my room to calm down and sentenced to a spanking with the mixing spoon. This was the ultimate form of punishment in my household, right up there with when my mother would angrily take her shoe off, wave it in the air and threaten us when we fought too much during road trips.
In my room, I panicked. How was I to escape this torture? After thinking about it for a long time, I grabbed two story books from the shelf and went down to accept my punishment. I would take this torture head on.
“Dad, I am ready now.” I said to my father looking him square in the eye. Mixing spoon in hand, he turned to give me a quick thwap. The spoon made a hard cracking noise, as if it has hit something solid. My dad burst out laughing.
“Anna, what the hell do you have in your pants?” I reached down the back of my pants to pull out my two storybooks. I had