Dacher Keltner On our first episode of The Science of Happiness back in 2018, people reflected on three good things that happened to them each day.
Voices Sunny days. No stress. Music, usually. I only had enough money to pay for 16 minutes of my parking meter and I didn’t get a ticket.
Dacher Keltner The Three Good Things practice gives us a small break in the day to focus on gratitude. Kind of like a lunch break or a coffee break, but instead a Happiness Break.
I’m Dacher Keltner. Welcome to Happiness Break, a new series by The Science of Happiness, produced by UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and PRX.
On each episode, we’ll guide you through exercises to help you cultivate kindness, forgiveness, joy, resilience, and all the other emotions and ways of being that help us craft happier lives. We also look at the research behind why these practices are effective, all in about five minutes or so. A little break in your day.
It’ll air on alternating weeks from The Science of Happiness, so we’ll return with another Science of Happiness episode next week.
Now let’s turn to Three Good Things. And remember, we’re going to try it together right here, right now.
What I love about this practice is it can help you appreciate the good in the day-to-day. You know, so often we take the positive stuff in our lives for granted. We just let it pass us by without really enjoying it. By paying closer attention to it, we can get out of the habit of ruminating on the negative.
You know, this practice has been lab-tested dozens of times since it was created by psychologist Martin Seligman a couple of decades ago. And studies, for example, by Seligman and Steen find that doing this practice gives you a boost in happiness. Six months later, Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues have found that doing this practice leads you to feel more connected to the people around you.
There’s other work showing that it boosts optimism and that it really helps people like nurses and really high-stress jobs feel less burnout. It’s one of our most successful practices in this landscape of happiness practices.
You can follow along wherever you are, but if you’re able to grab a pen and paper to jot down your thoughts, that would help. Okay. Are you ready? Let’s get started.
First. Take a deep breath. And as you exhale, try to let go of whatever’s on your mind right now. Take a few more big breaths just like that. For this exercise, you typically list any good things that happen to you that day and write about why they happened. But for our Happiness Break, I’m going to give you some prompts.
Start by noticing how you feel right now in this moment. How do you feel? Try not to judge it. Just tune in and notice.
Let your breath settle back into its natural rhythm and think back to this morning. Where did you wake up? What’s the first thing you did? Maybe you stretched a little, had a cup of coffee. What did you eat or drink? Start to retrace all the steps of your day.
And as you keep moving forward in time, retracing what you did and where you went. Think about the things you saw throughout your day. If you just woke up, think about yesterday.
What was the most beautiful or amazing or interesting thing you saw all day? What are you grateful for seeing today? That’s your first good thing.
If you have a pen and paper, write it down. Describe it in as much detail as possible, or just say it out loud or even inside your head. I’ll give you a moment and feel free to press pause at any point if you need more time.
Whatever you’re remembering, take these moments to really appreciate it in as much detail as you can and try to remember how that thing made you feel at the time, and then notice how you feel now reflecting back on it.
Next, for whatever you wrote down, think about what caused that good thing. What had to happen for that thing to come to be. For example, when I see my wonderful daughters, I think how lucky I am to have met my wife Molly, over 40 years ago.
Now for your next good thing, look back through your day again. But this time, think about all the sounds you heard. Did anything you heard today soothe you? surprise you? make you laugh or smile? Did you get to listen to one of your favorite songs or did anybody say anything to you that made you feel really good?
Pick one sound you heard today that you’re grateful for and that’s good thing number two.
Start to picture what was happening at the time you heard it in as much detail as possible and write about it if you can. How did it make you feel? And once again, think about how that thing came to be. Why did you hear that sound? What caused you to hear it? And that’s part two.
Now for good thing number three.
Think back through your day. What’s the best thing that you experienced today or one of them?
When you’ve got it, try to remember in as much detail as possible and write it out if you can. What were you seeing? What were you hearing? Was anyone else there? And how did you feel?
What do you think caused that good thing to happen? Run through it in your mind or on paper. Why did that thing come to be?
That’s it. You just did the Three Good Things practice. How are you feeling now?
You know, we’re all working so hard right now and there’s so much stress. And I hope our Happiness Break and doing Three Good Things just gave you a moment of reflection to think about what is good in life and what we’re grateful for, and that it brought you a bit of contentment and some ease.
I’m Dacher Keltner. Thanks for joining our Happiness Break. We’ll be back next week with another episode of The Science of Happiness.
If you want more tips on how to do the Three Good Things practice, or want to learn more about the research behind it, check out our show notes wherever you’re listening to this podcast.
You can also find this and other happiness practices at www.ggia.berkeley.edu.
What were some good things that happened to you today? What did you think about? Share with us by emailing HappinessPod [a]t Berkeley.edu or use the hashtag #HappinessPod. Happiness Break is a production of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and PRX.
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