What’s Positive about Positive Psychology? Part One: Background, Gratitude, and Hedonic Adaptation

From one of my readers (JB): “Congratulations on your positive psychology course! I want your top 10 suggestions for being positive.”

Accepting the challenge with alacrity, I made a list of happiness techniques, or “interventions,” as they are sometimes called, I have discovered through my study of positive psychology. I compiled a list of 19. I started to just publish the list, but, then, thought, no, it would be better to flesh out a few details about each one for the uninitiated. Even those techniques that seem self-explanatory have their nuances.

As I set out to cover them all, this article was getting very long. I’m a firm believer that a blog should not take more than 5-10 minutes to read; if it takes longer than that, people I know will be too busy and will ignore it. Or, they will do what I do: print it out, and set it in a stack of unread, but tantalizing, articles. I may get to them from time to time, or they may sit around lonely and ignored for years until I finally throw my hands up and send the poor little things off for recycling.

Rather than publishing another e-book, which would take me several months to complete, I am going to give it to you in installments. I’ll start with a little history, and, then, move on to what may be the most important concept in positive psychology: gratitude. That will lead me to another important concept in positive psychology: hedonic adaptation. Because gratitude is such an important topic, I will start it here and continue to cover it in future articles, along with what is known as the “set point theory” of happiness. I will then move on to concepts like optimism, resilience, flow, and grit, among others.

If you want a book summarizing positive psychology, I recommend The How of Happiness: A New approach to Getting the Life You Want, by Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, professor at University of California, Riverside. I will be borrowing heavily, but not exclusively, from this source.

What is positive psychology, and where did it come from?

Positive psychology is not just about “being positive.” Dr. Lyubomirsky defines positive psychology as the psychology of “what makes life worth living.” [1]

Buddha, Socrates, Aristotle, and the Stoics left us a template for positive psychology.

Buddha, who preceded Socrates by about a hundred years, deserves consideration as the first “positive psychologist.” He was the great master of introspection, obsessed with eliminating psychic suffering.

For those unfamiliar with the spiritual journey of Prince Siddhartha, later known as the “Buddha” (or awakened one), I commend it to you. Like the stories of most great sages, it has been embellished by legend at the expense of historical fact. After clearing all of the fluff and miracle stories, however, the story of the Buddha is the story of a man who introspected down to bedrock.[2] Not many people do that. Spoiler alert![3]

Socrates was unique in the history of western thought because he was the first philosopher in the western world to apply what were then (400 BCE) the new cognitive tools (reason, discourse, and dialectic) to human behavior. He combined them with his version of “beginner’s mind” (“the only thing I know is that I know nothing” – a starting point for logical inquiry, later adopted by Descartes).

I am fascinated by Socrates because he presents at least two interesting stories: (1) Socrates the man, and (2) the Socratic method, still used by therapists, coaches, and law school professors.

I could go on and on about the origins of positive psychology, but I doubt that anyone other than myself would find it interesting, so I am going to fast-forward to the 1990’s.

Dr. Marty Seligman had the unique perspective that psychology focused too much on “mental illness” and not enough on “mental wellness.” When his colleagues elected him president to the American Psychological Association in 1996, he used the bully pulpit to nudge psychology in new directions, emphasizing the sources of happiness and well-being. He also emphasized empirical studies of psychological techniques, as opposed to the intuitive approach used by so many of his predecessors.[4] 

That is our point of departure. If you are interested in this topic, however, I encourage you to study the Stoics. I will save the specifics for another day, but their influence continues to ripple through modern psychology, as does Aristotle.[5]

Seligman continued to evolve and develop theories on the use of “signature strengths,” “well-being,” and “flourishing,” as well as others.  Along the way, he attracted a host of devotees and collaborators who developed theories like “flow,” “grit,” and “resilience.”  

Gratitude

The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who has learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life: give thanks for everything.   

Nobel Peace Prize winner, Albert Schweitzer

Of all of the techniques for increasing happiness and well-being, gratitude is the Godfather. Studies on gratitude indicate that it is a tried-and-true method for boosting happiness. Dr. Lyubomirsky refers to it as a “metastrategy” for achieving happiness.[6]

In The How of Happiness, Dr. Lyubomirsky lists 8 ways that gratitude boosts happiness[7]:

1)            Grateful thinking promotes the savoring of positive life experiences.

2)            Expressing gratitude bolsters self-worth and self-esteem.

3)            Gratitude helps people cope with stress and trauma.

4)            The expression of gratitude encourages moral behavior.

5)            Gratitude helps build social bonds, strengthening existing relationships and nurturing new ones.

6)            Expressing gratitude tends to inhibit invidious comparisons with others.

7)            The practice of gratitude is incompatible with negative emotions and may actually diminish or deter such feelings as anger, bitterness, and greed.

8)            Gratitude helps us thwart hedonic adaptation.

What is hedonic adaptation, and why would we want to thwart it? 

Hedonic adaptation[8] is an important concept in positive psychology. “Hedonic” is usually defined as relating to pleasure. In this context, “hedonic adaptation” means that pleasures lose their luster over time, sometimes very quickly. You buy a new car. It’s a real treat for a week or maybe a month. Then the “new car smell” fades, and it’s just another way to get from here to there.

Researchers have studied lottery winners. The results indicate that winning the lottery is great until the lucky winner realizes that he has cousins he never knew he had, and they need a loan; managing a large sum of money can be a headache; and, trusting financial advisors sounds like a good idea until you live through a market crash because some idiot starts a war on the other side of the world, or the SEC fails to regulate sub-prime mortgages.[9]

Hedonic adaptation is especially treacherous when it comes to marriage. Let’s face it. As we adapt to each other, the shine starts to wear thin. Passionate love turns into “companionate love.” We experience “felicific stagnation.” Marital bliss typically lasts about two years.[10]

Hedonic adaptation isn’t all bad news. First, the word “hedonic,” in this context, is a misnomer. The adaptation process works on negative experiences the same way it works on pleasurable ones. Spinal cord injury victims and burn patients learn to live happy, fulfilled lives, despite their circumstances. People find the silver lining in cancer.[11]

Second, as implied above, there are techniques to thwart the adaptation process.[12] Gratitude is one.  If after reading this, you are concerned about your marriage (or significant-other relationship), Dr. Lyubomirsky has answers for you. She has written another book titled, The Myths of Happiness, aimed at teaching us how to stretch the passion and delay the decay. 

How do you keep a gratitude journal?

How often should you journal about your gratitude? I do not believe that the gurus and academicians have given us a clear answer to that.

Studies by Lyubomirsky showed that people who keep a gratitude journal once a week reported better results than those who did so three times a week.[13]

Studies by Robert Emmons (see below) showed that people who kept gratitude journals daily led to greater increases in gratitude than those who did so weekly.[14]

My own practice is to keep a spiral notebook on my kitchen table and note all of the good things that happen each day. Approximately, once a week, I will fire up my laptop and make a list of the things, people, and experiences for which I feel grateful. What I have learned is that focusing on gratitude leads to the development of what I call “gratitude consciousness.” As Albert Schweitzer said, you learn to be grateful for everything.

I suggest that you experiment with gratitude journals, and see what works best for you.

All of my new coaching clients fill out a questionnaire, and one of the questions is for them to assess their mood. If it is not near the top of the chart, and often it isn’t, which is why they have contacted me, I recommend a gratitude journal. So far, they have all been grateful for this advice.

The most comprehensive review of studies validating the benefits of gratitude is Thanks! How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier by Robert Emmons, professor of psychology at the University of California - Davis. I will review this book in a subsequent article and discuss the “set point theory” of happiness.

I would be grateful for any questions or feedback! Please contact me at tom@coachingwithwisdom.com.

TN

[1] The How of Happiness, at 2.

[2] We usually attribute “know thyself” to Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi.  According to The Instruction of Ptah-Hotep, reputed to be “the oldest book in the world,” the saying, “Man, Know Thyself” comes from ancient Kemetic wisdom teaching of “the Mysteries,” which ancient African scribes passed on for centuries, dating back to approximately 2000 years before Socrates. It is truly ancient wisdom. No one exemplifies it better than Buddha.

[3] What did he find there? Nothing! Ha! Literally. This is why the concepts of “nothingness” and “no self” maintain a prominent place in Buddhism.

[4] Seligman has published a full account of his journey in The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism.

[5] Aaron Beck, the psychologist who formulated cognitive therapy, openly expressed his gratitude to the Stoics. Beck worked with Seligman at one point, and it is easy to see the influence of cognitive therapy on positive psychology. It is also easy to find the influence of Aristotle.

[6] The How of Happiness, at 89.

[7] Id., at 92, et seq.

[8] Hedonic adaptation is also sometimes referred to as the “hedonic treadmill” because, like a treadmill, you keep running but don’t really move forward.

[9] According to Dr. Elizabeth Scott, author of Hedonic Adaptation: Why You are not Happier (verywellmind, July 16, 2020), the happiness boost that most people get from winning the lottery lasts about a year. After that they either revert back to where they were before or, in some cases, they are less happy than before.

[10] The Myths of Happiness, at 19.

[11] One way some psychologists distinguish adaptation to good events and bad events is to refer to adapting to good events as “hedonic adaptation” and attributing our ability to adapt to bad events as a product of our “psychological immune system.” Just as our bodies have an immune system to fight off illnesses, our minds have a set of skills that help us buffer and cope with the impact of negative events.

[12] This is important if you are adapting to something pleasurable. If you are adapting to negative circumstances, you do not want to thwart adaptation, you want to accelerate it.

[13] The How of Happiness, at 92.

[14] Thanks! at 32.