MIND MOVES: Two recent experiences have wormed their way into my subconscious and have sustained me.
The first was driving through the west of Ireland under a clear blue sky and being treated to the spectre of wild hawthorn trees in full bloom. Lines of hawthorns with their snow-white fuzz marked out the boundaries of green fields.
These were the cherry blossoms of the west. Their beauty and freshness, and the warmth of that summer day, made it hard to be grumpy, even for me.
The other experience was reading Marty Seligman's book, Authentic Happiness, having left it sit on my bookshelf for years. His book summarises the research in "positive emotions": wellbeing, gratitude, contentment, optimism and hope, to name a few. In short, "that which makes life worth living".
Many see this change of focus in psychology as a welcome development.
It certainly represents a shift from our conventional preoccupation with negative feelings, pathology and despair. As a profession, we've tended to prefer our moods dark and brooding.
For Seligman, the discipline needed a wake-up call. Along with a growing army of researchers and clinicians, he has championed this among those who favour a more positive psychology.
Reading his work, surrounded as I was by hawthorns in full bloom, it was easy to feel good. I remembered that hawthorns in our Celtic tradition were believed to promote happiness in the troubled, the sad and the depressed, when worn or carried.
They were viewed as being conduits of positive earth energies, especially when they grew close together and produced abundant blossoms. Maybe those druids were on to something.
We want to be happy, to experience our lives as grounded and connected and having purpose. Not to ignore or minimise the difficulties we face, but to find in them invitations to deeper layers of meaning.
Seligman was not recommending quick-fix happiness, which is why his title emphasises authentic. He believed happiness came from dispositions within our personalities - not unlike the virtues of old - which each contribute to overall wellbeing.
The qualities he proposed as important included gratitude and forgiveness - enabling us to make peace with our past and not be imprisoned by it. Optimism and hope - the knack of learning to see good events as right and proper and bad events as temporary glitches or learning opportunities. And, of course, love - both the capacity to give love and the capacity to be loved.
Being a scientist, Seligman looked for evidence to support the value of positive emotions in our lives.
He found no shortage of evidence for the reasons we might feel bad, despite the long-term damage that it can do to our physical and mental health.
But you could at least see some value, in an evolutionary sense, in feeling bad. Fear warns us to pay attention to possible danger; sadness moves us to let go and grieve; anger energises us to engage with violation or injustice.
Negative emotions have been shown to narrow our thinking and action and get us to focus our attention on the basics of survival.
Positive emotions, on the other hand, create states of mind that enable us to develop high-level survival skills. Feeling good broadens the mind; it produces creative thinking, motivates us, leads us to engage with the world around us, to broaden our horizons and build support.
And the skills we develop from doing this become critical to dealing with difficulties that arise down the line.
For example, researchers tested the influence of critical thinking among practising physicians. They first induced positive emotions in a variety of ways and then asked them to think aloud while they solved a diagnostic problem regarding a patient with a liver disease.
Other physicians were involved later in the same diagnostic test, without the feel-good preparation. Results showed that physicians who felt good were faster to integrate case information, less likely to become stuck in their problem-solving or to make premature decisions regarding the diagnosis.
Two decades of similar research have consistently demonstrated that when people feel good, their thinking becomes more creative, integrative, flexible and open to information.
Seeing the good in ourselves and appreciating what we so easily can take for granted in our lives is a choice we can make - a daily practice well worth cultivating. Learning to value what is growing in us, even if it's not yet blossoming, may be exactly what carries us through difficult and challenging situations.
Authentic happiness is not a selfish agenda; it resounds in our relationships and benefits those around us. No one is left unmoved by someone who is happy and at home with themselves.
Gratitude, optimism and love are contagious and transforming emotions. Check them out. Think about what is good in your life right now and smile. You may ignite a revolution.
Tony Bates is a clinical psychologist.
