Positive places enhance our lives – they are spaces where we thrive now and flourish in the future. Positive places improve our experiences by: 1. Communicating. Human beings are social animals, and in positive places we can mingle with other people, when we choose. In positive spaces we not only communicate verbally with others, but also send personally desirable nonverbal messages about ourselves as people. Members of a culture can “read” the nonverbal communication of culture-mates, and we feel that nonverbal information is more honest than spoken statements. Place-based nonverbal communication is why we get so worked up about furniture selections – a lot of furniture is equally comfortable, but the style of the particular furniture we select from among those equally comfortable options speaks eloquently about who we are as a person. Why do you think we love video tours of celebrities’ homes? We want to know who they really are.
2. Comforting. A place comforts us in many ways – colors and scents can sooth, sounds can calm, and opportunities to control the space can reduce stress, for example – but people often don’t consider how a space can help them restock their psychological batteries. When we work mentally, we tire our brain and reduce the mental energy at our disposal – just as we can wear down the charge in batteries. Our mental batteries are rechargeable, happily. When we look out a window at nature or into a fish tank or at a fire (or watch nature, fish or fire videos), we are transported from our physical location into a different place mentally, a place where interesting things happen that we can understand effortlessly. While we’re in that place, energy flows back into our cognitive centers. A place that helps us restock our mental batteries is comforting.
3. Challenging. One of our fundamental human needs is to grow and develop in ways that interest us. Different people have different self-enhancement plans, so the ways that places can challenge us to change need to vary – a studio to practice the cello is different from a woodworking shop or a hideaway to write a great novel, but all three can help a person achieve their own personal goals.
4. Complying. A positive space supplies us with the tools we need to do whatever activities we’ve planned there – it’s hard to cook a roast in a bathtub. If we’re doing thoughtful work, we need to be able to focus without distractions, which many people designing home and workplace offices forget.
5. Continuing. A positive place has the ability to evolve as our place-based needs change – too many built ins can turn out to be way too much.
Use the 5 C’s for positive places (communicate, comfort, challenge, comply, and continue) when you’re in different spaces – home, school, office, . . . – to determine if you’re a place that will enhance your life – or not. Watch for additional blog posts here to learn how you can turn negative places into positive ones.
(From L-R) Doug Hensch, co-founder; Martin Seligman, Exclusive Consultant; Andrew Rosenthal, co-founder
Co-founders Andrew and Doug are going to be there talking about how to use the tools on happier.com! Learn how to use Active Constructive Responding to improve your relationships and Three Good Things to bring gratitude into your life and sleep better every night! If you are a happiness enthusiast anywhere near New York City, we would love to see you there! It’s an excellent opportunity to connect with more people who want to learn about the science of happiness.
The event is being hosted by Emiliya Zhivotovskaya, MAPP, a member of the happier.com Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory.
Dr. Acacia Parks is an instructor in positive psychology, a researcher and a member of the Positive Psychology Practitioner Directory. Dr. Parks has taught a variety of classes on how to use positive psychology interventions, and she often gets questions from students and clients about what will work best for them.
Question: I’m unhappy. My Authentic Happiness Index results show I’m on the lower-end of the range, and I don’t feel cheery or upbeat. What should I focus on with happier.com?
Answer: You’ll likely benefit the most from exercises that focus on positive emotions. From my experience teaching and the research data, we get an idea of what works for what type of person.
The Three Good Things exercise, for example, will help you to focus on the positive aspects of your day, which research tells us often fall through the cracks of memory. It sometimes takes a week or two to see the benefits, but people who use Three Good Things on a regular basis report sustained decreases in depressive symptoms and increases in positive emotion.
Two exercises on HDC reliably produce large and immediate increases in positive emotion: Have a Good Day, which helps you plan a day full of pleasant activities, and the Gratitude Letter, in which you write a letter expressing in detail your gratitude for someone else’s contribution to your life.
We know from research by Barbara Fredrickson and colleagues that positive emotion leads to creativity and flexible thinking – as someone who experiences low levels of positive emotion, these exercises can give you the boost that you need.
What if there was a pill that you could take every day to effectively prevent diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and certain forms of cancer? And what if the same pill would effectively reduce nearly every risk associated with all cause mortality? Would you take it? Would you urge your families and friends to take it?
These are questions Dr. Robert Sallis posed as I listened to him describe the new “Exercise is Medicine” initiative by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) and the American Medical Association (AMA). Amid fiery debate over escalating costs and declining accessibility to healthcare, this groundbreaking partnership intends to push exercise and physical activity into the forefront of the public healthcare management discourse and introduces them as an integral aspect of disease treatment and prevention.
What if this pill was also a powerful tool in warding off dementia, anxiety, and depression? What if it improved self-esteem, cognitive functioning, and boosted your mood?
Exercise is a low-cost, accessible, and self-directed activity, and the truth is, most of us know that exercise is both medicine and therapy. So why aren’t we doing more of it? We all hear the Surgeon General’s warnings about smoking, sedentary lifestyles, and the dangers of eating fast food, yet we still sit in front of our televisions watching incessant advertisements for the latest antidepressants, channel surfing with our greasy French-fried fingers, then wake up to a breakfast of Camel lights and coffee.
We need more than just information – we need motivation! Until an Exercise is Therapy initiative is developed, follow some of the simple tips in this blog series to get you on the path toward adopting a healthier and HAPPIER lifestyle, which begins like anything else: Just one step at a time.
Scientists have identified important links between personality (how a person behaves and thinks) and the design of places in which people are most comfortable. If you’re house hunting, you can use info about the relationship between personality and place design to streamline your search.
Read on to fine-tune the list of design parameters you share with your realtor – or keep what you learn about your place-based needs in mind as you pour through ads on your own.
Are you extraverted or introverted? Extraverts get a lot of energy from the world around themselves, while introverts focus more on their internal worlds than extraverts. Both introverts and extraverts can have many friends or few friends or be socially adept or socially awkward – the difference between extraversion and introversion really boils down to how a person gets charged up or chooses to focus.
There are place-related implications of being an extravert or an introvert that you should share with your realtor:
1. If you are an extravert, you prefer a more open floor plan in your home, if you’re an introvert, you favor a layout with more clearly defined rooms, particularly if some of those rooms can be closed off with doors.
2. Extraverts prefer to use couches for seating in living rooms and family rooms, while introverts prefer single person chairs. So, whether you are an extravert or an introvert influences your preferred furniture, and that furniture influences appropriate room shapes and sizes.
3. Introverts are much better at processing sensory information than extraverts, so they are more likely to get overwhelmed by it than extraverts. Extraverts enjoy being in spaces that are more sensorally stimulating – make an extravert happy with brightly painted walls, intense lighting, mirrored walls, textured rugs – you get the idea. Homes that extraverts have “energized” are not likely to be homes where introverts can be happy – without some remodeling.
Another aspect of personality that has a big influence on how you respond to the world around you is whether you feel more in control of your own destiny, or whether you feel that fate or external forces have more influence on the course of your life than your own actions.
4. If you feel more in control of your own destiny, you like more rectilinear sorts of spaces and objects, while if you feel that external forces control your life, you prefer more curved objects and spaces. People in the second group prefer rounded archways and curving grand staircases, while people in the first group would like those arches and staircases squared off.
5. If you feel more in control of your own destiny, you are apt to “take charge” of a space and modify it to meet your own needs, while people who feel more controlled by external forces are more likely to accept their environment as it is. If you’re the “take control of a space” type, things work out better if a place can be used in several ways (because your needs may change), while people in the other group don’t require the same flexibility – their dining room will stay a dining room, no matter what sort of hobbies they adopt and a built in china cabinet will continue to usefully serve the same function as long as they live in the house.
Some people are more territorial than others – you probably know if you’re territorial, but if you’re confused: In a public space such as a movie theater, do you tend to sit at the end of a row of chairs, even if there are other available chairs toward the middle of the row? If you do, and there aren’t extenuating circumstances – you’re not over 6 feet tall or you don’t have a broken leg – you are probably pretty territorial.
6. If you are territorial, or the people who will share the house with you are, make sure there are spaces in the house that can be claimed as individual territories. Nothing defines an individual territory as well as a door that closes, but in a pinch a window seat (particularly if it can be closed off with curtains), or a section of a room with a lower ceiling than the rest of the room, for example, can be pressed into service as territories.
Environmental sensitivity also varies from person to person.
7. If you are the person who hears the mouse scampering in the next room or who knows when the neighbors change the wattage of the bulbs in their backyard lights, you are probably environmentally sensitive. You would prefer a home that is a little more isolated than people who are not so environmentally sensitive. When you are doing something that requires concentration sensory shielding is particularly important – so it is very important that your home office be acoustically and visually separate from the main living areas of your home.
Have you ever bungee jumped? Do extreme sports intrigue you? Would you ever consider skydiving? If you answered “yes” to these questions you are what is know in the psych biz as “high in stimulus seeking.”
8. If you are a high stimulus seeker, you prefer spaces that are complex or unpredictable – you want to get a thrill out of opening your own front door.
Is it important to you to make a unique statement with your home? If you owned a VW Bug, would you want to find a really unusual flower – or something else – to put in the bud vase that comes standard with each Bug? If you reply positively to these questions, then you have a high need for uniqueness.
9. People with a high need for uniqueness need a home that is different from the conventional home, somehow, and it is best if that difference is visible from the curb.
People can also differ in the strength of the link that they feel to the natural world.
10. If you have an affinity for the natural world, make sure that the houses you visit with your realtor are surrounded by nature, and that you have a view of nature from the places in the home where you are most likely to be harried (for example, your home office).
Knowing a little bit about how personality and place experiences are related can make your next search for a place to live more efficient – and increase the odds that the new house you select will become a home.
For additional information about designing with science, contact Sally Augustin, PhD.
