Positive Psychology Column for 10-26-03 By Tom Muha, Ph.D. THE FOUNDATION FOR ACHIEVING HAPPINESS You can determine how happy you are by the choices that you make at three different levels: –> The first round of choices you make in contributing to your happiness has to do with how you think about your past, present and future.  –> Your second set of choices involves how you employ your character strengths in the major arenas of life: work, love, play, body, mind and spirit.  –> Your third group of choices consists of those that give your life meaning and purpose, which takes you to the highest level of happiness. Over the next few weeks I’m going to help you understand each of these major components of the new science of success and satisfaction.  Today we’ll begin by focusing on how you can choose thoughts that will establish a foundation for your happiness. Your emotions (positive or negative) are consequence of how you talk to yourself about the events of your life, whether they’re in the past, present or future.  When you remember times from your past and experience hurt, anger, guilt, sadness, betrayal, disappointment or any other negative emotion, you are handicapping your ability to achieve happiness.  Those negative feelings are a black hole sucking up precious energy you could be using to create positive emotions in the here and now. There are several reasons this is so.  The type of thinking that accompanies a negative view of past events necessarily involves considering yourself a victim, and imagining that you were entitled to have had something better occur back then.  To sustain negative emotions about what’s happened, someone has to be blamed.  That someone could be you (which leads to having depressed feelings) or another person (which  fuels ongoing anger). Having lead yourself to believe that you have no control over what’s happened to you in the past, you’ll likely to carry that same way of thinking into the present.  When you tell yourself that other people can control the quality of your life, you render yourself powerless to be able to create the life of your own choosing. People who think pessimistically further trap themselves in unhappiness by interpreting problems as being permanent and negatively affecting all aspects of their lives.  Good things, pessimists tell themselves, are fleeting and will have little effect on their overall well-being.  Why get your hopes up, the pessimist asks, only to have them dashed by the cruel reality of life?  So the pessimist (who, by the way, labels himself as a “realist”) has a hard time imagining positive outcomes, and therefore finds it difficult to muster the energy to even try to make anything good come to pass. Pessimistic thinking rapidly leads to feelings of despair.  Since negative emotions are centered in a primitive part of your brain, your reactions are restricted to a repertoire of fight, flight or freeze. Creating positive emotions entails the use of optimistic thinking rather than allowing pessimism to prevail.  To be an optimist you need to tell yourself that the good parts of your life are permanent and will spread joy into all aspects of your existence.  When thinking about problems, reassure yourself that obstacles are temporary and insignificant in the scheme of things.  Tell yourself that you will ultimately find a way to realize the positive outcomes you envision. Rather than reacting to negatives, you can teach yourself to shift your brain to high power by becoming proactive.  Success starts by learning how to think of solutions that you can use to remedy the problems of your past, present and future. There are several more tools you can use to redirect your thinking: Appreciation is making the choice to selectively focus on the positive parts of life.  This magnifies the good thoughts in your mind, thereby displacing the bad.  Focusing on a persons good qualities, for example, works wonderfully to keep loving feelings flourishing. Gratitude is another effective tool.  Rather than remembering all the bad things that have happened and might recur, you teach yourself to think about all of the good times and the positive possibilities for the future. Forgiving frees you of the negative emotions associated with painful encounters.  Holding onto bad feelings only hurts you, not the perpetrator.  Reframing is another useful choice for thinking about problems because it looks at them as valuable lessons rather than mistakes.  If you’ve learned something from all of the tough times, then you’ll think of yourself as stronger and more capable of making good choices in the present.   Tom Muha is a psychologist in Annapolis. He welcomes your comments and questions. To contact him call (443) 454-7274 or email him at tom@achievinghappiness.com.