Forget the negative and accentuate the positive

Three things have stuck in my mind in the past week, that have got me thinking about contentment, happiness, pessimism and optimism. These were Einstein, Positive Psychology and 'The Tipping Point. Bear with me it will make sense. I hope.

The first was this quote from Einstein I saw in a window of an advertising agency, now so often cited that its become ubiquitous :

“Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that is counted counts”

The second an article on positive psychology and the science of happiness (The Weekend Press, Mainland supplement C2 28/08/2010 John McCrone). When considering the question of happiness psychologists have, until recently, exclusively focused on the negative: what makes us unhappy, how do things go wrong and how can it be fixed? What about the positive? what is it that allows people to feel happy or better? What is it that dictates whether we view the world as a glass half empty or a glass half full? Positive psychology is the “scientific study of optimal human functioning that aims to discover and promote the factors that allow individuals and communities to thrive”. This includes resilience, well-being and happiness.

Happiness is 50% innate (you are either a pessimist or an optimist and there is nothing that can be done about that, its like a natural set point), 40% is attributed to how you deal with life and the events that are thrown at you and only 10% is attributable to life itself, the actual good and bad events. The idea is that 40% of happiness that is under our control can, therefore, be manipulated to a positive rather than a negative outcome.

Alison Olgier-Price of Canterbury University researches just that and has developed a 6 step programme that teaches people the power of positive thinking and techniques to give individuals mental strategies to cope with life and to develop and instil a positive optimistic outlook. The steps include:
1.Do more of what you enjoy however simple
2.Practise gratitude and recognise the good things: At the end of each day list three nice things that have happened however small and trivial
3.Understand your strengths and use them: forget about your deficiencies, find new ways of using what you are good at.
4.Learned optimism: For any event what are the possible outcomes? the best, the worst and the most likely? And what actually happens? Find a private belief to use to explain life's minor aggravations (e.g 'my loved one has had an accident and is bleeding to death in hospital' so if someone cuts you up on the road it is no longer
5.Goal setting and framing goals optimistically by shifting focus from what stands to be lost to what can be gained.
6.What defines your personal happiness rather than those meanings of happiness that we have been pushed into by our lives.

New Economics is clearly founded on principles of positive psychology. This is demonstrated in calls for a change how wealth is defined and measured by governments away from purely economic measures to measures have broader meanings of well being, happiness and a broader understanding of what is measured (e.g. NEFs Happy Planet Index). Which brings us back to Einstein's quote. We lose what we don't, or can't, count. So, if we want to become more happy as a society we need to understand what this means and we need to be able to measure it.

Now the third seemingly disparate thing. I am reading The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell) and on p83-84 he writes about Emotional Contagion. Emotions are contagious. Sad people make us sad, negative messages make us depressed and pessimistic outlooks make us pessimistic. And emotion can be transmitted by all media and through individuals, organisations and institutions. So if emotion is contagious? Can positivism/happiness be transmitted through a society like a contagion? Can society be made more content by infecting them with happiness through the news? Or government? Negative pessimism appears to be the dominant state of affairs, when was the last time the news was dominated by stories of good things? Or political parties competed with what makes them better for society rather than how rubbish the opposition was? Or the earth was going to be saved (saved from what remains to be clarified) by human action?

The mainstream perception of alternative low impact lifestyles is mostly a negative one. Dirty, impoverished, joyless and hard work. Not helped by the pessimistic doomladen perspective of advocates of sustainability themselves. Perhaps there is a need to rid themselves of the Cassandra complex that has infected it and take a few steps towards positivity. Can more sustainable lifestyles and low consumption patterns be made more palatable by selling happiness and joy? And if so, the argument goes these individuals will become more content and find value in ways outside of consumption as a means of defining self.

This is founded on the premise that happy people with a redefined perception of success (as defined by new measures of well-being) will consume less. But is this actually the case? Take energy use for example, are happy people lower energy consumers than unhappy ones? The answer to that I would love to know.

As a society if we begin to accentuate the positive and create a virtual epidemic of happy optimism who knows where it may lead us. It can't be any worse than the festering negativity we currently have.