A Shortcut to a Happier Life

This post is by Nihara of Doing Too Much.

For a while, my daughter was coming home from preschool completely distraught and dejected. “Nobody wanted to play with me,” she would report day after day. Her sad little words crushed me. I imagined my lonely baby girl, sitting in a corner with no one to keep her company as she painted on canvas or built towers out of wooden blocks.

When I reached out to my daughter’s teacher to share my worries, she assured me that my little girl was playing “beautifully” with many of the children in the class. Her teacher even began emailing me a daily report, telling me exactly who my daughter played with each day. I finally realized that there was nothing particularly bad about my daughter’s days at school. The problem was one of perception, not reality.

My little girl was spending all of her time focusing on the minor slights that are part and parcel of preschool life, and not enough time cherishing the happy parts of her day. We humans all suffer from exactly this same tendency, says positive psychologist Martin E.P. Seligman. In his new book, Flourish, he writes that “[w]e think too much about what goes wrong and not enough about what goes right in our lives.” Analyzing negative events can sometimes be helpful for personal development, Seligman acknowledges. But he argues that “people tend to spend more time thinking about what is bad in life than is helpful.”

Changing your mindset with the what-went-well exercise

We can’t press a button and magically create a happier life. But we can feel happier by changing the way we look at our lives. Instead of focusing on the negative aspects of our days, Seligman explains that we can teach ourselves to “get better at thinking about and savoring what went well.”

He recommends the ridiculously simple “what-went-well” exercise. All you have to do is reflect daily on three things that actually went well that day and why they went well. You don’t need to find three big or important things (like a promotion or a marriage proposal). Just think about three positive events, however small or simple (like making it to work ten minutes earlier than usual, or having your favorite sandwich for lunch). Seligman claims that if you stick with it, you’ll probably be “less depressed, happier, and addicted to this exercise six months from now.”

So what does all of this have to do with the story of my sad little preschooler? Well, after unsuccessfully trying a few different tactics for cheering her up, I decided to test-drive the “what-went-well” exercise on my four-year-old. We called it the “three good things about your day” game.

Before she left to school in the morning, I told my daughter that she needed to find three good things about her day at school, like getting a good color at the play dough table or hearing a nice song at circle time. Even if she was having a really bad day, she still had to report three good things about her day (in addition to sharing her troubles).

The very first time we tried the “three good things about your day” game, my daughter returned home from preschool positively exuberant. She excitedly listed three good things that had happened to her before I even had the chance to ask. The “good things” were all very simple (like the fact that she and her best buddy painted on side-by-side art easels), but they made her beam from ear to ear. What was amazing was that she didn’t stop at just three good things. She had five happy things to report that day.

We continued the game until preschool ended last week. The same child who was coming home from school dejected and distraught was suddenly delighted and eager to share the good news of her day. Nothing about school had changed. The only thing that was different was her mindset.

The moral of the story is that you too have the power to have a happier life, just by focusing on the positive instead of dwelling on the negative.

What three things went well in your day today?

Nihara is (slowly) figuring out how to make the most of her time and her life—and you can too. Read Nihara’s thoughts on how to live a better, saner life at Doing Too Much.