The 21-Day Happiness Challenge: Five Ways to Be More Positive
A couple of weeks ago, I asked this question: “Are you celebrating your success?”
The point is that many of us are always chasing success without pausing to actuallycelebrate the success we’ve achieved so far. Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, has studied and written about this extensively.
In one of the most popular TED Talks — “The Happy Secret to Better Work” — Shawn puts it like this:
“Every time your brain has a success, you just change the goal post of what success looks like. You got a good job, now you have to get a better job. You hit your sales target, we’re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we’ve done is we’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.”
If we can bring more positivity into this present moment, though, our brain experiences what Shawn calls a “happiness advantage,” based on the finding that “your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed.”
So how can you bring more positivity into this present moment? Training.
Shawn developed what he calls the “21-Day Challenge,” in which you pick one of five researched habits and try it out for 21 days in a row to create a positive habit. Doing so actually rewires — or trains — your brain to be more positive.
Here are the five habits to choose from:
- Three Gratitudes: Pause to take note of three new things each day that you are grateful for. Doing so will help your brain start to retrain its pattern of scanning the world, looking not just for the negative inputs but for the positive ones.
- Journaling: Similar to the gratitude practice, but in this case, detail — in writing — one positive experience each day. This will help you find meaning in the activities of the day, rather than just noticing the task itself.
- Exercise: Exercising for 10 minutes a day not only brings physical benefits, but it also teaches your brain to believe your behavior matters, which then carries (positively) into other activities throughout the day.
- Meditation: Take just two minutes per day to simply breathe and focus on your breath going in and out. Doing so will train your mind to focus, reduce stress, and help you be more present in this moment.
- Random Acts of Kindness: This can be something simple, and Shawn suggests writing one positive email to praise or thank someone each day. Not only does it benefit the recipient, but it also increases your feeling of social support.
As Shawn wrote on his Harvard Business Review blog, “Gratitude, focusing on positive experiences, exercise, meditating, and random acts of kindness are all ways to change the pattern through which your brain views work.”
Are you up for the challenge? Which habit will you practice?
Or have you already taken the challenge? What did you experience?
Shawn Achor is New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage and Before Happiness. His TED talk is one of the most popular, with over 11 million views. He has lectured or researched at over a third of the Fortune 100 and in 50 countries, as well as for the NFL, Pentagon and White House. Shawn is leading a series of courses on “21 Days To Inspire Positive Change” with the Oprah Winfrey Network.
09:08The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
09:34And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
10:03But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present,then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we've found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosiswhen positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed.
10:36Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of.Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
11:02We've found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful forfor 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first.
11:31Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it.Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness.We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network.
11:58And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
The Only Way to Get Important Things Done
MAY 24, 2011
“How can I get 7-8 hours of sleep when I’m with my kids from the moment I arrive home, and I need some time for myself before bed?”
“How can I find time to exercise when I have to get up early in the morning and I’m exhausted by the time I get home in the evening?”
“How can I possibly keep up when I get 200 emails a day?”
“When is there time to think reflectively and strategically?”
These are the sorts of plaintive questions I’m asked over and over again when I give talks these days, whether they’re at companies, conferences, schools, hospitals or government agencies.
Most everyone I meet feels pulled in more directions than ever, expected to work longer hours, and asked to get more done, often with fewer resources. But in these same audiences, there are also, invariably, a handful of people who are getting things done, including the important stuff, and somehow still managing to have a life.
What have they figured out that the rest of their colleagues have not?
The answer, surprisingly, is not that they have more will or discipline than you do. The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.
It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.
“Acts of choice,” the brilliant researcher Roy Baumeister and his colleagues have concluded, “draw on the same limited resource used for self-control.” That’s especially so in a world filled more than ever with potential temptations, distractions and sources of immediate gratification.
At the Energy Project, we help our clients develop something we call rituals — highly specific behaviors, done at precise times, so they eventually become automatic and no longer require conscious will or discipline.
The proper role for your pre-frontal cortex is to decide what behavior you want to change, design the ritual you’ll undertake, and then get out of the way. “It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing,” the philosopher A.N. Whitehead explained back in 1911. “The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
Indeed many great performers aren’t even consciously aware that’s what they’ve done. They’ve built their rituals intuitively.
Over the past decade, I’ve built a series of rituals into my everyday life, in order to assure that I get to the things that are most important to me — and that I don’t get derailed by the endlessly alluring trivia of everyday life.
Here are the five rituals that have made the biggest difference to me:
- Abiding by a specific bedtime to ensure that I get 8 hours of sleep. Nothing is more critical to the way I feel every day. If I’m flying somewhere and know I’ll arrive too late to get my 8 hours, I make it a priority to make up the hours I need on the plane.
- Work out as soon as I wake up. I’ve long since learned it has a huge impact all day long on how I feel, even if I don’t initially feel like doing it.
- Launching my work day by focusing first on whatever I’ve decided the night before is the most important activity I can do that day. Then taking a break after 90 minutes to refuel. Today — which happens to be a Sunday — this blog was my priority. My break was playing tennis for an hour. During the week it might be just to breathe for five minutes, or get something to eat.
- Immediately writing down on a list any idea or task that occurs to me over the course of the day. Once it’s on paper, it means I don’t walk around feeling preoccupied by it — or risk forgetting it.
- Asking myself the following question any time I feel triggered by someone or something,: “What’s the story I’m telling myself here and how could I tell a more hopeful and empowering story about this same set of facts?”
Obviously, I’m human and fallible, so I don’t succeed at every one of these, every day. But when I do miss one, I pay the price, and I feel even more pulled to it the next day.
A ritual, consciously created, is an expression of fierce intentionality. Nothing less will do, if you’re truly determined to take control of your life.
The good news is that once you’ve got a ritual in place, it truly takes on a life of its own.
Tony Schwartz is the president and CEO of The Energy Project and the author of Be Excellent at Anything. Become a fan of The Energy Project on Facebookand connect with Tony at Twitter.com/TonySchwartz andTwitter.com/Energy_Project.
http://www.shawnellis.com/1085/21-day-happiness-challenge/
https://hbr.org/2011/05/the-only-way-to-get-important.html