How to flex your happy muscles

Even the most optimistic person will have struggled to stay positive in 2020. According to Dr Emma Hepburn, a clinical psychologist and author of A Toolkit for Modern Life: 53 Ways to Look After Your Mind, which is a guide to cultivating positive habits, much of our optimism comes from what psychologists call our ‘explanatory’ style – how we explain to ourselves why we experience certain events. ‘The more we think this way, the more the brain creates new links that make these thoughts more likely to happen in the future,’ explains Dr Hepburn. So when we focus our mind on positive things, we’re helping the brain create new connections, which then makes optimistic thinking more likely to be our default.’ A good place to start in building our optimism is to notice our tendency towards negative thoughts, says Dr Hepburn. ‘Shifting our thinking to focus on what could go right gives us a more balanced picture, can make us less anxious about what might happen and can also help us notice when things go right, too.’ The most effective and widely studied way of doing this is the Best Possible Self method, a positive psychology technique that involves spending 15 minutes a week writing down in a notebook how your life would look and feel if everything went as well as it possibly could.