To be happier when we’re dealing with something tough, the common advice goes, we can consciously look for the bright side of life’s challenges. For example, we might reframe the thought, Why was I unlucky enough to have my bike stolen? as I’m lucky to get some insurance money to buy the newer bike I’ve been wanting. And when we do this, we will likely feel better about the incident.
But this popularized advice risks leaving the impression that we should be able to turn every negative into a positive. In reality, it can feel forced or even futile to tell ourselves upbeat stories about life’s biggest hardships. In a recent paper published in the journal Emotion, Wake Forest University psychologist Christian Waugh and his colleagues suggest a more authentic way to alleviate difficult emotions in such situations.
At the heart of this approach is something we sometimes forget about big stressors—they tend to come in complex packages. Take, for example, the COVID-19 pandemic that was Waugh and his colleagues’ focus: The threat of illness was frightening, yet many of us also enjoyed more free time and built deeper interpersonal connections.
When reflecting on the pandemic, research participants—mostly college students—were asked to break this prolonged stressor into four to six distinct components. Without being asked to find positive aspects, about 60% of participants did so, mentioning things like more time with family.
Waugh and his colleagues then gave the participants a choice: They could try to alleviate their pandemic-related distress by reframing a negative component more positively or by spending more time focusing on a positive component. The participants wrote short essays. One participant reframed the negative experience of lacking spending money with: “This means I will not be as focused on objects and can focus on my thoughts and friends more.”
However, most people chose to focus on a positive component, and those who did reported more positive feelings afterward.
“Because these stresses are complex, they’re heterogeneous,” Waugh says. “Even if they’re super negative, positive things can still happen. Another way to feel better is not to change the meaning of anything, but to zero in on the positive element and focus on that.”
This distinction might seem subtle, but it means we don’t have to feel pressured to feel grateful or optimistic about a difficult experience in its entirety; we’re just invited to pay attention to some of the smaller good things that happen alongside it, things we might have noticed already.
Waugh and his colleagues ran several experiments, and even when faced with a more bite-sized challenge—specifically, preparing an oral presentation that would be critiqued—participants were able to identify positive elements.
There’s something of a catch, though. Participants who listed more positive aspects were more likely to choose to elaborate on one of those rather than reframe a negative aspect, and those who engaged in this process reported less stress at the end of the experiment. But participants who scored high in personality traits like optimism and resilience were more likely to identify more positive components of stressors in the first place. In other words, the approach seems to offer more help to those who need it less. It may just come more naturally to people who cope well with difficulty.
Still, Waugh suggests a practical way that people—even glass-half-empty types—can make real-world use of his findings. He recommends that we identify distinct elements of a stressor in our lives, to avoid ruminating on a single element, and then list the elements in two columns, marked “good” and “bad.”
“Just keep going until there’s at least one thing in the ‘good’ column and then focus on that,” he says. “My studies suggest that would work.”
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