Positive Psychology Archive

Gratitude has the power to boost well-being, improve sleep, lessen depression, and help heart health. Now new data from the long-term Nurses' Health Study shows that it may extend lives. How can you jump start a gratitude practice in your life?

What could you do today to feel happier? Three strategies drawn from positive psychology, a field that aims to improve moods and lives, may help.

We all know that motivation is key to accomplishing our goals, but even if you have a much-desired goal in mind, it's too easy for motivation to dissipate. Before setting a goal, it's critical to identify why it is important to you, to create a detailed plan that outlines how you will achieve it, and to make a to-do list so you can track your progress.

Researchers have increasingly found links between poor mental health and higher heart disease risk. Stress, childhood trauma, and other issues may affect behavior and trigger physical changes that elevate heart risk. Taking steps to support mental health can potentially improve heart health as well.

Negative traits such as anger and insecurity have been linked to heart-related problems. Taking steps to temper these tendencies may help.

Remember the Type A personality? First coined back in the 1950s, the term refers to people who are aggressive, ambitious, competitive, and time-conscious. But the notion that Type As were more likely to have heart attacks than their more laid-back counterparts turned out to be untrue, as numerous studies in the 1980s and 1990s revealed.

But in the early 2000s, another personality type — Type D for distressed — began getting more attention. Type D people are anxious, irritable, and angry; they also tend to feel ill at ease in social situations and are uncomfortable opening up to others. According to a 2018 review in Current Cardiology Reports, having a Type D personality is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The lead author, psychologist Johan Denollet, first described Type D and created a test for it (see "Type D personality test").

Take a moment to think about how you treat yourself when you make a mistake or fail to reach a goal. If you tend to beat yourself up when things go wrong, you, like most people, can use a little more self-compassion in your life.

Forgiving and nurturing yourself seem to have benefits in their own right. Strong self-compassion can even set the stage for better health, relationships, and general well-being. So far, research has revealed a number of benefits of self-compassion. Lower levels of anxiety and depression have been observed in people with higher self-compassion. Self-compassionate people recognize when they are suffering and are kind to themselves at these times, thereby lowering their own levels of related anxiety and depression.

While looking at the sunny side of life offers a lot of light moments, there may be a better path to well-being.

Optimism feels good. The expectation that positive things will happen is associated with happiness and better health, including fewer heart attacks and a lower risk for premature death. Pessimism, on the other hand, feels bad; it makes you depressed or anxious and keeps the fight-or-flight system activated, triggering chronic inflammation (which is linked to many diseases).

You might think the best way to improve your well-being is to cultivate an optimistic outlook. Think again. "Better than cultivating an artificial optimism is to see the situation and the world realistically," says Ronald Siegel, an assistant professor of psychology, part-time, at Harvard Medical School and medical editor of the Harvard Special Health Report Positive Psychology.