Wellbeing Blog - Getting to know your happiness
What does it mean to be aware of our mental wellbeing?
It’s often easy to remember a time when you felt sad, angry, or disappointed and the reasons why you felt that way. Difficult emotions like these are easy to spot because they stubbornly hold onto our attention.
When it comes to positive feelings, like happiness, hope, or pride, we sometimes need to think harder to remember them. This isn’t because there are fewer good times than bad times, but because our attention is biased towards negative events as a kind of survival instinct. So many good, exciting, fun things happen to us and unless we make an effort to cherish and remember them - we won’t.
Psychologists might call this our ‘mental filter’ and it behaves a bit like dark sunglasses: with our sunglasses on everything appears dull and gloomy, but when you take the sunglasses off the same things appear so much brighter. Our perspective changes, but the facts remain the same.
Being more mindful of positive emotions takes practice, but it’s not impossible.
How can we make the most of happy feelings?
Lucky for us, a psychologist called Rick Hanson has written a whole book aimed at helping us maximise positive feelings and boost our wellbeing.
He describes four simple steps that can be remembered using the acronym HEAL.
1 | Have a positive experience
Next time you are enjoying yourself, feel happy, or generally feel good, pay extra special attention to that moment.
If you have a really great memory then you can use this too.
2 | Enrich the moment
Spend at least 10 seconds reflecting on this positive experience.
How do you feel? Do you notice any sensations in your body? Are you smiling? Who are you with?
3 | Absorb the moment
Spend some time letting all of your thoughts and feelings really sink in to your memory by paying attention to them one at a time.
If you do this step, you will soon be a natural at recognising happiness without having to think too much.
This step also helps you create a bank filled with positive memories that will be useful later, for example if you are in a bad mood it can help you think about good memories.
4 | Link positive and negative feelings together (optional)
You might not feel ready to tackle negative emotions, and that’s okay! Just skip this step for now and focus on steps 1-3.
Once you have fully recognised and savoured the positive feelings in this moment, try to also notice if there are any negative emotions lurking in the background. Only visit these negative emotions briefly to acknowledge that they are there.
It’s normal to feel good and bad things together, emotions are complex! But by practising these skills, we learn to remain centred in a positive space.
HEAL is a mindfulness technique, and while there are lots of different ways to be mindful, HEAL is easy to remember. In the beginning, writing down your thoughts and feelings at each step can be really useful.
If you are struggling to find something positive to focus on, try making your own happy moment! Some ideas for this are taking a warm bath, walking in nature, reading a book or enjoying your favourite meal. Over time these things will become second nature and you will notice a boost in your wellbeing!