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Understanding How to Function at Your Best: Defining Positive Psychology

Here at iDoneThis, we often talk about how principles of positive psychology can be used to improve our well-being and happiness at work. We wanted to go back to basics and get an expert to explain what positive psychology is and how it can help you live your life better. So we spoke with Dr. Stephen Schueller about defining positive psychology and what progress and timing have to do with living a good life.

Dr. Stephen Schueller on positive psychologyDr. Schueller is a professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and member of the Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies, where he works on developing internet and mobile interventions in behavioral and mental health service delivery. (This is the first installment of our interview. Head here for the second, 5 Reasons You Don’t Do What Really Makes You Happy).

Here’s our interview with Dr.Schueller on positive psychology and how it can improve our lives.

Initially I think I misunderstood positive psychology as being all about positive thinking and positive emotions — and that’s really not what it’s about.

That’s definitely true. One of the things I really try to differentiate positive psychology from is this positive thinking movement, things like reading The Secret — where you think it, you’ll get it, or think positively and your life will be better. That’s not what positive psychology is about at all.

Lots of research shows that experiencing positive emotions is very beneficial, but that’s not really the point in positive psychology. Positive psychology is a movement focusing on trying to understand what optimal functioning means.

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Productivity and Happiness at Work: The Best of the Internet

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This dog’s ready to rumble! Now read the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

Breaking the Bad Meeting Habit

How ShopLocket uses I Done This to Maximize Progress

What a messy desks says about you

Do —> Measure —> Learn faster

The Grumpy Employee’s Guide to Being Happier at Work

 

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Making Others Happy: The Best of the Internet

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Burger Chair with PugPugs know best…including the best of what we shared on the interwebs this week:

5 Tips to Make the Most of Your Company Retreat.

Why would you move to downtown Vegas to run your business?

How do positive emotions increase longterm conversions?

A beautiful slideshow on building culture on a remote team.

Recognize how everyone around you does good things.

Relentless questioning improves self-awareness.

The art & science of teambuilding.

imageLike our blog? Sign up for our free newsletter if you’re interested in productivity, management, startups, and how to work better.

Master Your To-Do Lists

[T]ry picking a stubborn item from your own to-do list and redefining it until it becomes something that actually involves moving one of your limbs… Breaking each task down into its individual actions allows you to convert your work into things you can either physically do, or forget about, happy in the knowledge that it is in the system.

Tom Stafford, “The Psychology of the To-Do List”, BBC.com.

Discover four more helpful to-do list tips and how to master the art of to-do lists by understanding why they fail.

When Are You Most Happy? The Happiness Tracking App

Matt Killingsworth is interested in not just what makes people happy but when people are happy. Gathering data from a happiness-tracking app that he built, he found that people are less happy when their minds are wandering, no matter what they’re doing.

So rewire yourself to stay in the moment, and watch how you’re paying attention.

Are You Checking Your Attention’s Blind Spots?

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Ever get so caught up in a task that you don’t notice something in plain sight? There’s actually a term for that — inattentional blindness — a state of unseeing created by where you’re focusing your attention.

A famous example of inattentional blindness is the invisible gorilla study. Before participants watch a video of two teams of three people passing a basketball, they are told to carefully count the number of passes made by the team dressed in white (the other is dressed in black). Halfway through the video, a woman in a gorilla suit walks through to the middle of the screen, beats her chest, and then walks offscreen.

About half the viewers fail to see the gorilla at all, but without the instruction to count the passes, a person in a gorilla suit would’ve been pretty hard to miss.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

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Productivity Issues

Product Issues

Product Issues

“Piled Higher and Deeper” by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com

We spend an enormous amount of time trying to get the world to align with the vision we have for what will make us happy or successful. Whatever “it” is, figuring out how to deal with the noise in your head is probably faster and cheaper than changing the outside world. Not easier, though, merely important.

— Seth Godin makes his usual sense in his post It’s Not All in Your Head.

Sometimes the stuff in your head is exactly what Seth says — noise. Don’t psych yourself out with the should’ve-would’ve-could’ve. You’re already your better you to get out there and do.

The Power of Daydreaming

We always assume that you get more done when you’re consciously paying attention to a problem. That’s what it means, after all, to be ‘working on something.’ But this is often a mistake. If you’re trying to solve a complex problem, then you need to give yourself a real break, to let the mind incubate the problem all by itself. We shouldn’t be so afraid to actually take some time off.

Jonathan Schooler explains his forthcoming paper on the power of daydreaming in Jonah Lehrer’s blog post, “The Virtues of Daydreaming”. According to Schooler and Benjamin Baird’s research, questions need time to marinate and incubate in your brain in order for you to come up with better and more creative solutions.

Like doodling, daydreaming is put down as a waste of time, when in fact you’re getting stuff done. Your unconscious is still hard at work while you can let your mind wander and take a break without the guilt trip!

Creative daydreaming

Image: Hikingartist.com

Positivity Drives Productivity

Watch Shawn Achor’s entertaining, thought-provoking TEDxBloomington talk on the power of positive psychology. (Source: https://www.youtube.com/) The author of The Happiness Advantage and CEO of Good Think Inc., a research and consulting firm, points out that the common understanding that happiness as the last thing to happen after success achieved by working hard has the order all wrong. … Read more

The Psychology of To-Do Lists

The always wonderful Maria Popova at Brain Pickings delves into the psychology of to-do lists in her discussion of John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister’s book, Willpower:  Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. She points to the authors’ discussion of the Zeigarnik effect, which explains why our brains continue to nag us about what we leave unfinished. Originally thought to … Read more