Episode 122: How To Be Happier Via Positive Psychology Dr. John

Dr. John Schinnerer: Hey everybody, this is Dr. John back with another episode of the Evolved Caveman and we're up to, I don't know, like 120 something episodes. I kind of lose track, but, uh, a lot of episodes. Gotta say, never thought I'd get this far. I. But I think it's really important to share these tools with a broader audience, partly in an attempt to help people get less angry, partly in an attempt to get people happier, partly to get people more engaged with their life, um, and partly to get people to make sense of what's going on in their mind.

Because, uh, we've all got a little crazy going on in the voices in our heads, and that's me included, perhaps me most of all.

But today I wanted to talk a little bit about positive psychology. Because to me, this is some of the greatest research that I can share with you, and I'll try and mix in some stories to make it less boring and more appealing.

But positive psychology basically is the scientific study of what goes right in our life, what makes life worth living, which is really interesting because psychology for the last 100 years about has focused on how we're broken. What's wrong with us? How are you crazy? And how do we fix that? You know, depression, anxiety, bipolar, narcissism, borderline psychotic, sociopathy.

How are we? Crazy. So it's focused on really the negative, the bad, which is really important, like we need that, but it's only part of the equation. It's only half the equation. It's, you know, it's as if psychology focused on how to take us from negative five to zero, from fricking miserable to simply surviving.

And Freud actually thought that, he thought that if I can get a patient to just surviving, if I've gotten rid of their neuroses, I'm done. I win. That's a great job. And I've been there before. I've done that work and it's. Mildly satisfying. It is an improvement, but we totally missed out. On how do we go from zero to plus five?

And, and that's partly why I was drawn to sports psychology because I think sports psychology is often about how do you get your mind to work for you instead of against you? And in, in this context, it's under athletic competition, but it could be really in anything business, life, relationship. How do you get happy?

How do you get to optimal performance? How do you find meaning in your work?

So this positive psychology has been, to me it was like manna from heaven because I think it's only half the solution to look at how do we get past or depression or anxiety or a DHD or neurosis. And the other half is what tools can we learn?

To get happier, to get more positive, to get more realistically optimistic, to find more awe in our life. More curiosity, more passion, more hope, more laughter, which is a huge one. More elevation, which I'll talk a little bit about. More awe, relaxation, contentment, all that stuff, because what is happiness, if not little moments of positive emotions stitched together?

And you know, one of the things that's interesting is happiness as a term is largely useless because it's so vague and so broad. It doesn't really tell us anything, and we sure as heck can't measure it in research. So. Basically positive psychology calls for as much a focus on strengths as weaknesses, as much an interest in building a meaningful life, as in fixing the worst in your life.

And it starts with different assumptions about human nature. The assumptions are something like the idea that goodness and strength and resilience, those ideas. They're as worthy of research as disease and disorder and distress. And so there's old questions combined with new scientific rigor, such as what is the good life?

Going back to Aristotle, which is funny because I majored in philosophy back in undergrad and I thought that prepared me to do absolutely nothing in life. Come to find out, we have now gone full circle. And with positive psychology. I circle all the way back to what Plato and Aristotle were talking about 3000 years ago.

What is the good life? What is your good life? What does a good life look like for you? What does it feel like for you? Because I think we spend so much time running in place, rushing from one to-do list to another, trying to get from work, to get home, to take care of the kids, to get a decent night's sleep.

We don't even stop to consider. Take this meta view of our own life and ask, is this really what I wanna be doing? Is this meaningful? How could I make this meaningful? Where is there room for positive emotion? Could I carve more time or more habits in my life to cultivate more positive emotions? Uh, other questions that we look at is virtues own reward.

Is acting in a virtuous way rewarding? What does it mean to be happy? I. Can happiness be pursued directly? And we've come up with some answers to these questions. So back to this idea of happiness. So again, mistake to equate positive psychology with happiness. Happiness is quite overused and is of little worth as a word to us.

Although when I'm talking to clients, initially I do use happiness, but then I quickly try and break it down to. Smaller categories such as courage, kindness, curiosity, resilience, moral courage, teamwork, authenticity, and positive. Psychology also looks at things like positive relationships, which is huge, positive emotions, healthy relationships, education, and positive organizations.

So here's a little bit of what we found out about the overused term Happiness. Happiness is not the goal. It's not a goal, it's a process. Happiness is about learning to enjoy the journey. And I explain this to a lot of clients and some get it and some don't, but you know, I, I think we've been fed that bullshit story for so long and from such a young age of it, it goes something like this.

Do well in school, get good grades, get into the best college. You can get good grades in college. Find someone you love. Get married, get a job. Maybe not all in that order, but get a job. Excel at the job, climb the corporate ladder. Make money, make more money, get raised, make more money. Have kids, parent, and you know, eventually we retire at 65 and then you'll be happy.

That's the story that we're told or that we come to believe, I think. And what we find out is that that's not true, is that happiness is partly about enjoying that journey and learning how to set up circumstances in your life that cultivate more frequent positive emotions. Happier individuals are successful across multiple life domains, including your marriage or romantic relationship, friendships, income, your work performance, your health, and things like meaningful work.

And and even more surprising, and this one kind of blew me away, and you may have heard this before, but this was a huge meta-analysis. And a meta-analysis is a study of other studies. So there, the results from it are robust because there's a lot of data that's taken into it. And in the social sciences it's really rare to find directionality in results.

So it's rare to find that A causes B. Normally what you hear is A, is related to b. They're correlated. But what we've found with this meta-analysis is that positive emotions engender success more so than success brings happiness. So I, I think the story that we're told growing up is become successful and then you'll be happy.

Get the money, get the, the sea do, and the house on the beach, and then you'll be happy. And, and to an extent that's true. We need enough income to meet our basic needs, but we're often shooting for way more than basic needs, and I can't tell you how many wealthy clients, I mean really wealthy clients that I've talked to that just aren't happy.

Instead, what we found is that happier, more optimistic people. Enjoy more success. So why might that be the case? Well, for one reason, if you think about who you'd like to spend time with, you probably, if you're like most people like to spend time with happier, more optimistic, more upbeat people, I. Most of us have friends that are depressive and pessimistic and suffer all the time, but those people are kind of an energy drain and they're not very enjoyable and uplifting to be around.

So most of us tend to like to be around happier, optimistic people, and that means happier, optimistic people have more friendships, more relationships. And those more relationships means that they have more information passing through them, and more information means more chances for success. So in other words, if you're looking for a job and you know more people and more people wanna help you out because you have good energy, you're gonna find more job leads.

If you don't need those job leads, you can pass 'em to other people and increase your value even more. But you know, the, the more depressive people, the more pessimistic people, the more bitter people don't have the same kind of access to the information, so they have less chances of success, less probability of success.

Now Martin Seligman, who's kind of considered the father of positive psychology, put out five categories of focus within positive psychology, and the acronym is called perma, P-E-R-M-A, perma, where the P stands for positive emotions, which is one of my favorites. The E stands for engagement, which is like flow.

Mike Cheek sent me high or being in the zone, and that's that state where, you know, if you've played sports before, you might have touched it, where you, you know, are playing soccer and you become the game, you become the ball, you stop thinking it, the voice in your head temporarily goes away and time passes rather quickly.

And most elite athletes spend a lifetime trying to get back to that in a variety of ways. But that's engagement. So we've got positive emotions, we've got engagement. The R is for relationships, and there's a bunch of positive psych tools that can be learned to improve the quality of your relationships.

Things like capitalizing or gratitude and appreciation. There's, there's tons. The M is for meaning, so having some sort of overarching purpose in your life, something bigger than yourself. And we know for men that the number one indicator for a happy man is meaningful work. That's the number one indicator.

So if you have work that you consider not meaningful. You need to work on that. And, and that's, it's actually pretty easy because there was a study done on janitors, um, in a hospital setting, and they broke 'em up into two groups, one that found their work as not meaningful, just a paycheck. The other group of janitors saw their work as meaningful and that they helped patients get better sooner by maintaining a sterile atmosphere.

They helped the doctors and the nurses, and so they were serving others. And the janitors that saw their work as meaningful got a number of positive health benefits as a result of that. Now, that's just a shift in how you think about your work. And I, and I think meaning often has to do with how am I serving others?

What about what I am doing is serving other people? And I was talking with someone recently about, um, you know, being a waiter at a restaurant. He was kind of saying, you know, it's not meaningful at all. It's just kinda a shit job. And I was like, okay, yeah, I'm not gonna argue that point with you. However, there's also great meaning in it in that you are helping people get the sustenance, the fuel they need to do things that are important to them.

And you know, you can roll your eyes at that if you want, but this is merely a shift in how you think about your work. And so to actively look for the meaning in your work has some real benefits. And finally, the A is for accomplishments or positive actions. We need to take action. You know, you can have all the rest and not do anything, and it doesn't matter.

So today I want to go a little bit into positive emotions, the P in perma, because that's kind of my area of passion. And basically emotion is what moves us, emote the, the Latin. Of it means to move. So it's the driving force that moves you to act or not act. And emotions move through you as well. Emotions are meant to be temporary.

They direct and command things to which you are supposed to pay. Attention and emotions are contagious, so you can spread negative emotions, which I'm sure you'll, you're familiar with if you have an anxious friend, but you can also spread positive emotions. So emotional management, just briefly is the skill of turning down the duration, the intensity, and the frequency of negative emotions and turning up the duration, intensity, and frequency of your positive emotions.

And it allows you to have more of a choice in what emotions you feel and how long you feel them. And some. Very brilliant. People like Philippe Golden at Stanford think that emotional management is the key to happiness, and I agree with him. Now there's research that's been converging over some time that shows that what we're shooting for is a three to one ratio of positive to negative emotions for a thriving, meaningful, happy life.

Barbara Frederickson has shown this in her book positivity. Dr. Kelner at Cal has shown that we need a three to one ratio of good to bad. I think he calls it Jen. Um, and that's largely based on our interpretation and perspective. Um. John Gottman has shown that we need a five to one ratio of positive interactions, negative interactions in our relationship.

There was a study that showed that we need a four or five to one ratio of positive to negative in high functioning executive teams. And it makes sense if you consider that. You know, one of the great values that employees bring to work is novel ideas, new ways of doing things, innovation, creativity, and that those very things will be shut down.

I would argue most by things like anger. If you don't feel safe, you're not going to be comfortable enough to bring up potentially stupid or brilliant ideas in a brainstorming session. So what we're looking for is small daily steps of improvement in the right direction. Now, why should you care? Why do you want more positivity?

It seems self-evident on the face of it to me, but. Positive emotions open us up to new experiences, new learning. They broaden our awareness to a wider range of thoughts and actions. They can help us create more accurate mental maps of the world because we can take in new information. They help us build ties between other people and ourselves that are lasting in significant.

They, they fill us with enduring resources internally that we can use to support loved ones later. I mean, think of it as having two buckets of emotion. One is negative, one is positive. Both go from a one to a 10. And normally what we do is we focus on, man, I just want to get rid of this anger that I'm carrying around or this depression or this anxiety, and.

Yes, you do want to empty out that bucket of negative emotions, but often that's the only place that we put our focus. And I've seen so many people that go around with a partially full bucket of negative emotion and an empty bucket of positive emotion. And I can tell you that is far from being happy and, and these two buckets are separate and unrelated.

And why is that important? Because if you just focus on the bucket of negative emotions, and let's say you're successful enough and you empty that sucker out, and that's at a one or a zero, well, if your bucket of positive emotions is also at a one that's not happiness, that's just surviving.

To get to someplace or something that looks like happiness. We gotta focus on filling up the bucket of positive emotions. It's incredibly essential and, and those positive emotions. They also help us to become our best by opening up our hearts and our minds to new skills, new ideas, new relationships, new ways of being, new ways of interacting with people.

They connect us to others. They also act as a hidden reset button for the physiological impact of negative emotion. So for example, when we get angry, heart rate goes up, cortisol gets dumped into the bloodstream, muscle tension increases. You might get some tightness in your chest, maybe your throat constricts a little bit, and then as soon as you can tap into something like calm or relaxation or appreciation or gratitude.

Those physiological effects go away because you relax. And then two other things which are kind of major. So positive emotions lead us to live longer, seven to 10 years longer, which is funny to me because I'm sure the depressed people are out there like, screw that, who wants to live longer anyway. And then positive emotions also, as I said, lead to greater success in life.

Now here's the the point that I wanted to make with this because this is a huge point. This is a B, f, D point, big fricking deal. I need you to be aware of how tiny positive emotions are. I need you to be aware that they are quiet, fleeting. Fragile positive emotions whisper to us. They do not scream at us like the negative emotions do.

When you're pissed, you know you're pissed. You wish you didn't know how pissed you were. When you're sad, you know you're sad. When you're really anxious or panicking, you know damn well what you're feeling. However, do you know when you're feeling elevation? Do you even know what the hell elevation is?

Do you know when you're curious?

Do you know when you're relaxed? And I ask that honestly because a lot of the men that I talk to confuse being tired with being relaxed. So I, I think in this society we go, go, go, go, go. Especially the women out there, which I don't really specialize in, but, um, I, I think we just go, go, go, go, go. And then when we stop and we're not doing, we're just like, oh my God, I'm so tired.

I need to take a nap. So be aware that positive emotions, they're subtle. You need to. Dial in your attention so you can begin to pick them up more quickly. You need to put more circumstances in your daily life to feel positive emotions more frequently. Because I, I think one of the mistakes I see people make is we, we think that happiness should come from big things.

And it does, like for instance, um, let's say you graduate from college, all right? You feel some pride, you feel some achievement, accomplishment. You know, you feel happy. Um, that's great. You buy a new car, same thing. You feel, you feel happy, you feel confident for a bit. The problem is those things don't happen very often.

I'm not content waiting four years for some happiness.

And, and so we need to find, and we need to tune into the really tiny, quiet moments of positive emotions. So to begin with, we need to figure out what are the positive emotions. And I, I mentioned some of 'em, but you know, gratitude, awe, awe is a great one. 'cause it opens us up. Relaxation, contentment, joy, love.

Curiosity, appreciation, courage, pride, self-compassion. Compassion for others. Hope, laughter, peaceful peacefulness. Inspiration. Elevation. Oh, and elevation is when you watch someone else do an act of moral or physical courage and it makes you feel almost like an awe feeling where that your shoulders pull back slightly, head goes up a little bit, chest expands, and.

You feel kind of this rush of inspiration. You wanna do new things, you feel connected to others.

So here's, here's the study that I wanted to share with you. So there was a study done by Alice Isen, uh, I believe at UCLA, but I'm not sure. And this was back in the seventies and eighties. So it's been a while, but brilliantly what she came up with was, I wanna see what effects.

Does it have on people when I give them a really small gift or when they find something unexpectedly positive? And here's how small this gets. One of the studies looked at putting a quarter in the change slot of a payphone. Now, some of you listening to this may not know what a payphone is, but in the old days, you would have to go to a booth and.

Put in change to dial a number. And then sometimes change would spit out, often would get spit out before like you drop it in and it would just go right through. 'cause the phone was broken. It was really annoying. So anyway, she, one of the things was put a quarter in the coin, the change slot, and people would discover the quarter and they get a little dose of happiness.

The other one was, we're gonna give. X-Ray technicians three Hershey's kisses wrapped up in tissue paper with a bow. Now, I think you'll agree that those are pretty minor occurrences. Tiny, right? So check this out. That little shot of happiness that you get from finding a quarter or getting three Hershey's kisses made people in those studies.

More charitable, friendlier, physically healthier, more open-minded, more creative, better at problem solving, smarter and more productive, and less prone to error. The X-ray technicians actually diagnosed x-rays more accurately. To me that is absolutely mind blowing. And so I really want to drive this point home because I need you to understand that our emotional state is influenced in little, little ways, and our emotional state impacts everything.

Everything and our emotional state. Can be picked up by most other people regardless if you're trying to hide it or not. And, and I really think that we only have these moments in which we live and you know, so happiness is in part a matter of stringing together these moments or seconds of positive emotions and positive thoughts, all of which you consciously cultivate.

And you know, in the beginning. They're very short. Maybe they last 1, 2, 3 seconds. However, what I would suggest to you is I want you to practice savoring, recognizing and savoring your positive emotions as you go throughout the day. Look for circumstances to cultivate positive emotions, and it can be as easy as when you step outside, be grateful for the air that you're breathing.

'cause right now we've got smoke all over California. That which we used to take for granted. Breathing clean air is no longer a granted, and that smoke is also pouring across the country, but you can step outside if the air is clean. Be grateful for that if you can walk on your own. Be grateful for that.

Look at nature and let it fill you with awe. And it doesn't take any more time. It's a matter of awareness, and then it's a matter of savoring it. And by savoring, I mean stick with it a little bit longer, be aware of it. And so instead of it passing after two or three seconds, now it sits with you for eight to 10 seconds.

And you know, my, my belief is that happiness may look like. Here's a moment of love, followed by a moment of gratitude, and then a moment of hope and peace and joy and pride and laughter, and then inspiration, and then curiosity. And the more you get in touch with these, the more and more of your time you're spending in what I would argue as a happy state of being.

And, and realize that, you know, we're dealing with the emotional side of the mind or that the emotions in the body and brain, and they don't always make rational sense. So one of the things you don't want to do is overanalyze positive emotions. Why am I feeling happy right now? What's going on here?

Because when you overthink it, they disappear often. And, and so I, I really wanna encourage you to get a little bit more into the metaphorical, the symbolic, uh, the woo woo, like kind of the new age way of looking at some of these things. And, and let me give you a story to illustrate what I mean. I remember I came home from work one day and my daughter was about four, and I, I was kind of tired and stressed and spent after seeing, you know, eight or 10 clients.

And my daughter at four picked this up, which is kind of wild. And she. She says, dad, come here. And I, I kneeled down next to her and she put her hands almost cupping next to her heart, like in a ball next to her heart. And then she took the ball of her hands and kind of moved it towards me in my chest, and then opened them up as if she was taking energy from her heart and giving it to my heart.

The funny thing was, you know, my, my background's been more science and research and uc. Berkeley drilled that into me, and the older I've got, the older I've gotten, the more that I can incorporate these other lenses, these other ways of seeing reality, because at that moment, I felt exactly what she was trying to give me.

She was giving me love from her heart. I felt it and it bumped my mood up a couple points now. Interesting. 'cause there's two ways I could have gone there at least. Right? I could have been like, that's stupid kid stuff. 'cause actually she had been taught that by her preschool teacher. But what I did was, wow, thanks honey.

That really helps. And I felt it. But I think, you know, so many of us men have been disconnected from our emotions for so long. That we don't feel that stuff. And if we're disconnected from two thirds of our emotional spectrum because of how we were brought up in the man box culture, how the hell are we ever gonna know if we're happy?

If the one emotion that we're really familiar with is some degree of anger, irritation, frustration, annoyance, rage, disgust, contempt. Maybe we've got lust and stress in there as well. Do you see any room in there for positive emotions? Do you see any room for awareness of positive emotions? 'cause I sure don't, and my experience when I was fully in the man box was I wasn't happy.

So there's a bunch of different ways I can go from here. Um, I mean, there's so many tools. But you know, one of the things to pay attention to is really the development of metacognition.

And that's a fancy psychological phrase, which I'll break down 'cause I don't really like fancy psychological phrases 'cause it just screws up everyone's understanding of things.

But metacognition basically is thinking about thinking or awareness about thinking. And you can also think about your feelings too. Know, it's, uh, one of the first things I'll do with clients is give them a framework to overlay on their own mind, to ask themselves, where is my mind trying to take me right now?

And do I wanna be there? And so the framework is basically, you know, you're familiar with past, present, future. This just added positive and negative to that. So you've got positive, past positive present, positive future. And then on the other, on the bottom row, you've got negative, past negative, present, negative future.

And just asking yourself, stopping and asking the question, where am I right now? Or what do I feel right now is one of the most powerful ways to build metacognition, and we really need to develop that because the first step in all this is awareness. And you've gotta be able to take a step back from your own thought stream to reflect on it, to challenge it, to ask, is this completely full of shit or is this telling me the truth?

Because I would argue that way more than half of what goes on in our head is an absolute lie because of that negativity bias, right? We just overfocus on negative stuff, negative thoughts, negative emotions, negative self definitions. I'm fat, I'm lazy, nobody likes me. All that stuff and we get, we get fused with it.

We become one with a thought stream and we think we are, I am my thought stream. And that is not true. You are far more than your thoughts. You are far more than your thought stream. And I know that because at any moment you can take a step back and ask who is doing the thinking?

Okay, well, John's doing the thinking. Well, if John's doing the thinking, then is he the thinking?

No, and I can think about my own thoughts. I can think about my own emotions. I, I can also feel about my thoughts and I can feel about my own emotions, so I can, you know, I think oftentimes you ask a, a man, you know, how do you feel about that? Like, well, I think I'm happy. Or I think I'm sad, or I think I'm a little bit angry, that's not feeling, that's thinking.

So don't make that mistake. And then you could feel about thinking. So you could be sad that you have suicidal thoughts or you could feel guilty about that when I would say that's totally normal. What's not normal is acting on the suicidal thoughts. Um, you could have feelings about feelings, which is often how we get into these.

Negative thought, feeling spirals where you, so feeling about feelings, like I can, let's say I get angry at my daughter, then I can feel guilty about getting angry. Then I can feel depressed about getting angry. Oh man, I always do that. Like I always lose my temper and, and all that just piles on and makes it worse to get out of that emotion or mood.

So metacognition. Is a big deal. Um, I think, you know, the other part of this is metaphor becomes a big deal in terms of dealing with emotion. Again, not dealing with the rational, not dealing with thought necessarily. We're dealing with the emotional mind. So you gotta step outta that literal, linear way of thinking.

To deal with it best. And you know, this didn't make much sense to me until, well, it made sense to me because I knew like visualization had worked well in sports psychology since the 1950s and it started in slalom skiing. And you can still see Olympic skiers even now, they'll be rehearsing their run at the top of the mountain before they go down.

So you can see 'em, you know, kind of. Moving their head to the left and right, moving their arms and hips, but they're not actually doing any, any skiing, but we know that practicing mental rehearsal can shave seconds or tenths of seconds off of your time, which can be the difference between first, second, and third.

Then Richie Davidson did some work at University of Wisconsin where he measured people's brain activity. Under two states. One was looking at the real life object, like a red Corvette. The other one was, close your eyes and imagine the red Corvette. And then he did this under a bunch, like, you know, imagine your best friend's face.

Now look at your best friend's face. And what he found was 88% of the same areas in the brain activate under both conditions. So there's an 88% overlap between what you see as reality and what you imagine. Visualization and consider that our brain is simply an organ trapped in a dark pitch black skull, and it has no access to the outside world, other than through our senses.

So it has no direct contact with the outside world. So in a very real sense, we are living in a vast simulation and our senses in our brain are actively trying to recreate reality. At a billion bits per second or millisecond rate. But it was the, it was a great research based bridge for me to begin to talk about the importance of imagery or visualization or imagination.

So when you think about emotion, what I want you to do is, you know, consider, how do you think about yourself with regards to emotion? Do you think of yourself as a bucket? A container. 'cause that's what I used to do when I was a kid. The problem is that bucket of negative emotions would fill up and then it would take like just one more drop and I would, you know, go volcanic and lose my temper.

Well, that's not a very effective metaphor. So I was like, okay, I'll make it bigger. I'll make it a kitty swimming pool. Okay, well same dynamic applies, right? It just takes a little bit longer to fill it up. And then I remember years ago when I was starting my practice, I was talking with a really, a guy that was amazing at visualization and we were kicking around ideas and we came up with the idea of a strainer or a colander, you know, where you pour the hot water in and it holds onto the pasta, which is the good stuff.

And it lets the bad stuff go through the hot water, dirty, hot water. That's much more effective because that's really what you're trying to do with emotion, is just get the message and let it pass through you. You don't need to hold onto it. And then I took it a step further just because in my job I am often dealing with a lot of negative emotion that comes at me pretty quickly.

And so I now imagine myself as a net with big gaping holes stretched across a river. And that river's coming at me fast. And I would say because of the negativity bias, that 70 80% of that water, which I think of as emotion, is negative and uncomfortable. And that stuff just goes through me on a split second basis.

And anything that's good in that water, it just kind of magically sticks to the net compliments, kind words, a smile, an award, and all that sticks to me and it stays with me. So how you think about these emotions makes a difference.

So, just in closing, I'm not gonna go into all these, but some of the things that we need for happiness, greater happiness, we need heartfelt, positive emotions frequently throughout the day because we don't wanna wait four years to get a big chunk of positive emotions.

We need to get them daily. Routinely. You need to learn to savor your senses. Partly because it brings you back to the present moment, partly because that's where a lot of pleasure is, smells, sights, sounds, taste. We wanna learn to live in the present moment more frequently, which is why that framework that I gave you a past, present future is so important because the more you can tap into that and ask yourself, where am I?

Where's my mind trying to take me? The more you can bring yourself back to the present moment. And tied into that, I would argue, is the skill of mindfulness. Again, most importantly, to train your attention, to come back frequently to the positive or the, uh, present moment. And then we need to find ways to reframe our past challenges, to look at difficult times as challenges that we overcome, that we overcame, and that we learned something from.

And then last, finally focusing on and striving towards significant goals, future goals. So that's just a, uh, a little snippet of positive psychology. Hopefully you've enjoyed that because we sure as heck need more of that out there. We need more happiness. We need more curiosity or gratitude, more awe, more elevation, more mudita, more inspiration, peacefulness, laughter, joy, hope, compassion, all of that.

We need it in this day and age more than ever. So that's it for this episode of The Evolved Caveman. If you've liked this, if it was meaningful to you, if it was helpful to you, please be sure to leave a rating. Please be sure to like and share with other people. We need to get the message out there more broadly to help more people.

Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you next time. Bye-bye.