The nonstick pan

Positive psychology is all about encouraging what’s right with people instead of addressing what’s wrong with them. You study people who flourish and try to figure out what lets them do this while their peers are merely existing or, worse, languishing. It turns out that the curve of the population is pretty symmetrical, but not necessarily ideal: about 15% lie on either end of the spectrum, flourishing or languishing, and 70% lie in the middle (citation in my backpack, might update later if not lazy).

Basically, you want more people to be like Teflon pans… let the bad stuff slide off while the good stuff cooks together into a beautiful omelet and then you eat it. Just kidding about eating it – that part doesn’t fit into the metaphor.

Positive psychologists try to change people’s lives in small but significant ways through what they call interventions. Here’s an example.

Martin Seligman (famous for his experiment with “learned helplessness”, where he electrocuted puppies…) came up with the oh-so-cleverly-named Three Good Things intervention. It’s exactly as it sounds. Every night, you write down three good things that happened to you that day and then reflect on what you did to cause them or invite them to happen. They’re supposed to be little things because not everyone wins the lottery or gets married every day. You might write down that someone held the door open for you, or that you got all green lights on your way to work, or that you texted a friend and had a nice conversation, or that you pronounced “Allerød” semi-correctly, or that your fuzzy socks were finally out of the laundry and you could wear them again. Anything.

In an interview, Seligman noted that he only ever prescribes this intervention to his clients for a single week. After that, he said, most clients feel so much better that they decide to keep doing it on their own, and continue to reap the benefits.

This whole thing sounds a little fluffy, I know. Truth be told, most of positive psychology sounds pretty fluffy. But then it works, and you can’t really complain about fixes that are this simple and this effective, so eventually you stop calling it fluffy.