Episode 236: Broaden and Build
Welcome to Live Free Creative podcast. You are listening to episode number 236 Broaden and Build. I’m so excited. This is one of my favorite ideas that I learned the very first weekend of class in graduate school and I felt some of the truth of it intuitively. I’m so excited to share the data and the research with you around this idea of thriving.
Before I get there, I know you’re on pins and needles now, knowing you’re going to learn some positive psychology concepts. Before I get there, I want to start with a quick life lately.
Segment: Life Lately
My Final Weekend of Class
If you listen to happy class, then you know that I just finished my last weekend of school of class, so I guess technically it’s not my last weekend of school because I’m all the way finished until the end of July.
It was my last weekend of class, synchronous class time where I spent, three days in a row of 10 hours a day in class with all my classmates, which has been a big part of my life for the last year.
It was fun to finish up that last weekend with some of my favorite classmates, my small group in Phoenix, Arizona. You can hear more about that transformative weekend that we had in Happy Class Week 28, which is available now.
Finals and Capstone
I feel like school has been my life lately for a long time, and it was fun to feel like one, one little piece of it has shut down. While I still have finals, and that’s my big life lately right now. I will be working on final papers and projects for the next two and a half weeks. And that even sounds bizarre to say that in two and a half weeks I will go up to Pennsylvania to graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. I will walk across the stage, have my name read just like I did 15 years ago when I graduated with my bachelor’s degree in nursing.
Graduation Dress
Let’s talk about some serious things: I found a dress about two months ago when I was just browsing in a local boutique that I love, and I found this dress and I thought it was so cool and cute and I really liked it and it was a great price. So, I bought it. It’s darling, and then I was like, this is going to be my graduation dress. I’ve worn it a few times for other things. I wore it to a wedding, and I wore it to a fun Valentine’s Day tea that I did with Plum. I love a great dress that I can rewear on lots of occasions.
I’m also keeping it as that is going to be my graduation dress probably. But there’s also a few different events happening. We have a garden party at Martin Seligman’s house. We have the actual graduation walking across the stage. We have the second day graduation with the full university where Idina Menzel is the graduation speaker. She’s our commencement keynote, so that will be fun. Hopefully she’ll sing for us.
I’m feeling like I need more than one dress, so I have a few different dresses in my current closet, but after being with my girlfriend classmates, this last week, I thought maybe I’ll go browse a couple of my favorite consignments in town and see if there is another fun graduation dress that pops out at me that I could also go on to wear to other things.
I probably made a mistake of wearing the dress I had deemed for graduation for a couple other events already, because. It doesn’t feel like a graduation dress anymore. I love re-wearing things. I love buying things secondhand. I love the sustainability of that. I think it’s wonderful to have a wardrobe that you can pick and choose from and shop my own closet. And it also might feel fun to go look for a dress. So, we’ll see. I feel like I need three. And I have a lot of dresses, so I’ll just, I’m excited to see how that shakes out.
Planting My Garden
Another life lately that’s been fun is that it is time to plant my garden. I got started a couple weekends ago for this year when I had my birthday in February. My sisters and I have a birthday gift card exchange where we all go in on a big gift card for each one of us. One of my sisters texted me and said, where would you like your gift card to this year?
I spent some time thinking about it and said, I really would like it to a local nursery. It’s called Sneeds. If you live in Richmond and you’re not familiar with Sneeds Nursery, I love it so much. They gave me a gift card to Sneeds, and it was finally time to go spend it. I bought a few lavender bushes to put along my fence line. I bought some camelias. I planted gardenias in my front last year, and they didn’t survive the winter. I think it was a harsh winter, but also, I don’t really know.
One of the nursery people said that gardenias tend to be a little finicky. So, I bought camelias, which I know do well here in Richmond because I see them all over the place. I’m excited to watch those grow.
I also started putting actual vegetables in my raised beds. I normally like to sow seeds, but I just didn’t have the capacity. I was, had too many things in the air this January, February, when I normally would’ve started like sewing winter seeds. So, I’m buying seedlings and I already put in some indeterminate tomatoes to climb over my beautiful iron arch. I planted some marigolds and some lettuce, butter, lettuce, and kale.
I need to go back now this week probably because the pepper is an eggplant. I love planting shishito peppers. The plants don’t get too big, and they are so productive. They just, they, you can get like hundreds of little shishito peppers from one plant.
A shishito pepper is tastes like a mix between a jalapeno and a bell pepper, so it has a little more bite than a traditional bell pepper, but not as spicy as a jalapeno. And they’re small, jalapeno sized, so they’re great for roasting or putting on salads or stuffing and stuff mixing them together with other things.
I love the shishitos. I’m excited to put those in and grab all the other plants that I want in my vegetable and flower garden. I’ve checked on my rose bushes. I bought some tomato cages for my rose bushes. I have visions of having a little rose garden and I have six beautiful rose bushes.
They’re very small at this point, which is why I felt I needed the tomato cages because my dogs run wild in the backyard. And if they get, especially because we have two of them, and they’re very energetic, if they get in a race mode, they’ll just blaze through the garden. So, I think the cages will help with that.
My blackberries are already starting to leaf out and have a couple little about, bunches of little clusters of fruit on the ends. I think it’s going to be a bumper garden year, and I’m thrilled about that.
Summer Haircut
I also just got my summer haircut. I’ve had the same general haircut for about ten years since maybe in eight years. When Plum was born, I had very long hair and I dyed at platinum. I did that look, that kind of white, gray, platinum long hair looks for about a year and it was so much maintenance, and it also really destroyed my hair. So, I cut it chin length and bangs, mostly the bangs because my hair was so broken that it just made sense. A lot of it was bang-length. I have this bob with a fringe that I’ve had since 2014, and it gets a little bit longer. I noticed my author photo in the back of my book, my hair is about shoulder length.
Generally, it’s mostly around chin length, but for the summer I just got it cut up to my ears. It’s just a little French bob with my eyebrow length, fringe, and my hair is about my ears, and I like the length anywhere between my ears and mid neck. When it starts to hit my shoulders and flip, that’s my indication that it’s time to cut. I’m excited about my new haircut.
Eyeglass Prescription
Finally, I’ve got what feels like big news. It is not big news, but Dave thought it was hilarious. I took my son to the eye doctor. He at school has done a couple vision tests that have come back iffy, where they’re like, ah, it was a little off. So, I took him to the eye doctor to see if he needed a prescription for glasses. Dave has worn glasses for a very long time. I never have.
I’ve always prided myself on my good vision. I made an appointment for myself along with son, just because I don’t know, the last time I had an eye appointment I figured it’s something that maybe people do even who have good vision, and when we left the Ophthalmologist, I had a prescription for glasses and my son did not.
My very first prescription, baby girl’s first eyeglasses. I haven’t bought the glasses yet. It is for far away distance. The ophthalmologist said my distance is just a little bit like starting to get a little squishy and that I may feel more comfortable driving and at night especially, and if I go somewhere like to a game or to the theater, or something that I need to see, or it would be helpful to see further away.
I am excited to get, baby’s first pair of glasses at 40-years-old. The other thing that she said was interesting was that because it’s my distance that’s starting to go, I probably won’t need readers for a long time. She said most people, like 95% of people need readers at some point as they get older, but people like me whose distance vision like fades or over corrects means that my closeup vision will stay good for longer, which means that I’ll need these distance glasses, but I won’t need readers for a while.
So, there’s an update on getting older and glasses and finals and my garden and my haircut and all things going on in my life lately that feel even the tiniest bit noteworthy.
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For your ease I’m going to share these products I mentioned along with a couple other of my favorites that I add to my cart at iHerb in the show notes.
Thank you so much for your support of the companies that make this show possible. I love partnering with brands that align with my values and where I really want to recommend these things and say, hey, check it out. So, I appreciate your supporting the brands that support this show. Let’s dive into talking about Broaden and build.
Broaden and Build Theory
It’s so interesting now having been part of this graduate program for the last almost year. Broaden and Build is foundational to positive psychology. Broaden and Build is a theory of positive emotion that was first introduced in 1998 by Barbara Frederickson. Barbara is a researcher and a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and this work has been one of the most highly cited theories, articles, foundations of positive psychology ever.
Survive or Thrive?
Now, let me back up for a minute. Most of you have probably heard of the idea of our survival brain, right? This the idea that we have a lizard rain inside of us that reacts when we’re in fear. It’s like our fight or flight response.
It’s the innate sense of protection that we need to escape a tiger attacking. Now in our modern world, we don’t have tigers attacking us very often, hopefully. However, your brain does the same type of thing.
In response to fear, we hear about the fight or flight response, and this our neurological response to fear that closes our blood vessels, narrows our vision, raises our heart rate shuts down our digestive system and enables us this fight or flight survival response is responsible for what a lot of people would say are survival. It’s responsible for our ability to escape things that are difficult. I’ve heard about this my whole life.
In fact, there were a few brain myths that were debunked in a neuroscience class that I’m in right now about this idea. Specifically, about the idea that our brain has like our lizard braid inside, and then the next layer is like a little bit more advanced, and then the final layer is a little more advanced.
I don’t know if you’ve heard of that, the, it’s called the Triune Brain, and there’s a great book called Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain that debunks some of the ways we’ve been talking about the brain, even, in fact, I’m going to maybe make some people angry with this one, but the book also debunks the idea of being right brained or left brained.
It talks about how for creativity and for more black and white thinking, we use our whole brain. We use our whole brain most of the time. And so even though you can find on like an MRI specific area that light up a little bit more or where you know if one part of your brain gets damaged, certain specific things on your body, will be affected, the idea that our, that someone is fully thinking with their right brain or their left brain, or that inclines them toward these specific abilities was debunked.
Survival Response is Evolutionary
What I want to talk about today though is this survival response. I’ve heard for my whole life and a lot in adulthood and a lot in parenting even, that our brains are wired for this type of survival that is brought on us by fear, by negative emotion, by anxiety, by worry. Our ability to survive depends on this response that is a positive response to negative stimuli.
It’s our reaction, and that’s great. It is. It’s wonderful that we have that, that we can flee, that we can fight, that our body will naturally go through those processes.
But what I learned in my first weekend of class, That I had never known before is that our brains have a similar and opposite response for thriving. This is the broaden and build theory. This is something that I had never heard of before. Barbara f Fredrickson set out to answer the question, what is the evolutionary purpose of positive emotion?
What is the Evolutionary Purpose of Positive Emotion? Thriving.
We know the evolutionary purpose of negative emotion, like worry, anxiety, and fear. That’s that survival response when we are faced with a tiger attacking.
When we’re faced with a tiger approaching, our brains recognize, and our body recognizes its need to shut down and focus and get away. But how do our positive emotions have a natural evolutionary purpose? What is the point of feeling happy? What is the point of feeling hope?
Maybe these seem like dumb questions. If you’re thinking like of course everyone likes to feel happy, but specifically evolutionarily, physiologically, what is the benefit of positive emotion? Have you ever considered that? I had never thought of what the equal and opposite response to positive emotion is.
We know what happens with fight or flight. What happens in the face of positive emotion, broaden, and build something that is so awesome to me that just blows my mind, is that it is almost truly. An equal and opposite response.
The Four Steps of Broaden and Build
The broadening build theory includes four steps.
- The first is that we have an experience of a positive emotion.
There are a lot of different emotions, positive and negative. Some people may say, especially like in a world of life coaching, maybe you’ve heard there’s no positive and negative. They’re all just emotion and they’re all neutral. From a scientific standpoint. They do categorize them as positive and negative based on what type of action response they invite in our physiology.
In 2013, Barbara Frederickson outlined what she calls the 10 most important positive emotions, and I’m going to name them for you. These are what Barbara Frederickson would say are the most important: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.
So those are cool. You can think of those, and more positive emotions as the first step of the broaden and build theory that we are faced with a positive emotion. So, we experience a positive emotion.
- The next step is the broadening of thoughts and behaviors.
In direct contrast to a negative emotion response where we start to shut down and focus, when we experience a positive emotion, we have a broadening of thoughts and behaviors.
We become more open to ideas and more curious. We explore a few different ways of thinking. Our actual sight, like our line of sight, our peripheral vision opens so physiologically we can see more than before.
- Step three is that we’re able to build personal resources through trying different things.
This is where people start to become innovative, positive emotions are what led to innovation. What have led to, the. Furthering in promotion of wellbeing of humanity through arts and sciences and discovery and curiosity. If we had just been in survival in response to negative emotion, we would still be fighting tigers. It has been positive emotion that has broadened our thoughts and behaviors, build personal resources.
- We transform the self by increasing health and wellbeing.
Our brains and bodies are not just designed to respond to fear, worry, and negative emotion. We are also genetically predisposed to benefit from positive emotion, which has led throughout history to innovation, transformation, change, improvement, progress, and flourishing.
Sponsor: Songfinch
I want to take a minute to share with you another one of today’s episode sponsors. This episode is supported by Songfinch, which I was thrilled about because Dave has a birthday coming up this week, and I knew that it would be the perfect gift.
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The trail name I was given was Morning River. I gave Dave the trail name Swaying Oak.
After I gave him his trail name. We were trying to keep it together and be serious even though we were both laughing. And he said, what do I do now? And I said now you write a haiku. I was totally joking, but Dave closed his eyes and opened them a few seconds later and said this:
what more can I say
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The ad spot is over, but I’m just going to take a second to gush a little bit more about how incredible this process was with the creation of a custom song. It feels like the most special. Gift music has this ability to invite emotion that maybe isn’t easily accessed through other means, and when you add that to.
A relationship to a specific memory or experience. I want to have a song written for every one of my relationships, for my mom, for my dad, for my sisters, for my friends. I think that it’s just a cool use of these beautiful, independent artists, creativity, such positive emotions, such joy, and as I’ve been talking about,
Broaden and Build Capitalizes on Positive Emotion
Positive emotion is so powerful and evolutionarily historically just as important to our development as our ability to survive. I think that’s the main point I want to drive home with the theory of Broaden and Build. We hear so much about our survival instinct.
We hear about the way that we operate in fight or flight. Our nervous systems go into overdrive when we need to get away or when we need to access power that we otherwise might not access to. Run, flee, fight, or whatever the case may be in response to negative events, circumstances, and emotions. That’s all great and true and real.
Equally as important to our lives and our development and our relationships is our ability to thrive. We have survival instinct and we have thriving instinct in response to positive emotion. Our body knows how to widen our sights, engage in imagination, build creativity, enhance, and deepen relationships.
We seek for solutions to problems that we didn’t have access to before. So just like I hear stories sometimes about how in danger a mother could like cruise through a burning building to rescue her child or lift a car to save someone. That powerful survival instinct is equally proportioned by our powerful, thriving instinct that when we feel awe, inspiration, kindness, that we can access solutions.
We can imagine futures. We can build relationships and resources in our lives in ways that otherwise we aren’t able to. Isn’t this good news?
Isn’t it amazing news that we have a survival instinct and that we also have a thriving instinct? That it’s natural and evolutionarily important for our minds and bodies to have a broadening upward spiral resource gathering reaction to positive emotion.
The Purpose of Positive Emotion
A key element of the broaden and build theory is that positive emotions are important for more than just emotion.
I think sometimes we get caught up thinking that happiness, joy, excitement, awe, or contentment, that those things are complacent emotions, that they don’t lead to anything except for just a feeling. What Barbara Frederickson’s research shows us is that positive emotions are critical to our development.
The more positive emotions we experience, the wider the range of thought action behaviors we have. We are more flexible, we’re more creative, we are more innovative. Broadened behaviors help us build rich work-related knowledge and skills, abilities, and resources. It’s not just fluff and in fact, sometimes when we notice ourselves going into or moving with a survival instinct, but we aren’t being chased by a tiger.
Flip the Funnel
Where we notice that we are narrowing our vision, we’re feeling clenched up and tightened up and acting out of a fear response. We can remember that instead of the downward negative spiral or the narrowing of a funnel that happens with a survival instinct because we, especially if you are not actually in physical danger if you don’t need to drop everything and run.
By taking a deep breath and knowing, remembering this Broaden and Build theory, you can flip that funnel upside down. So instead of narrowing everything, it starts to open everything, and you can look for the positive.
This is not erasing or the toxic positivity of not acknowledging the circumstance that may be difficult. Instead, it is utilizing your thriving instinct in a solution-focused way. You can draw upon your resources, your support group, your intellectual and cognitive and emotional resources you can consciously open to possibility. Open yourself to imagining solutions that you don’t see, obviously placed in front of you.
Prioritize Positivity
Understanding the Broaden and Build theory, where positive emotions are translated into real life creative action can give you tools for optimism and resilience, for kindness and relationship building that you didn’t know were possible.
This theory shows us through research, evidence-based projects, and peer reviewed papers that amusement, hope, play, cheerfulness, awe, inspiration, surprise, and enthusiasm, lead to progress, lead to innovation, lead to resilience and accomplishment in a way that negative emotions cannot do.
Surviving AND Thriving
Life is going to give us both. We need our survival instinct. We also need this thriving instinct. It’s real and present, and somehow, we just don’t talk about it.
I think I had instinctually understood the importance of positivity in general in my life, but it wasn’t until I read Barbara Frederickson’s work and had her come lecture my class and was able to ask questions and hear from her directly around the real-life implications and applications of positive emotion building and broadening our lives that this really came home for me.
When I asked Barbara Frederickson about the application of the Broaden and Build theory, what she said to me was, to prioritize positive emotion.
Something that we know is that positive emotion builds resilience, builds creativity, builds relationships in a way that negative emotion doesn’t. And so simply by acknowledging that, by understanding that if we prioritize positive emotions in our life, prioritize positivity, prioritize kindness, prioritize moments of awe and inspiration, that we will put ourselves on a pathway for broadening and building.
Stay open, stay kind, make place in your life for joy, make place in your life for thriving. I hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode. The reference to some of Barbara’s articles will be in the show notes, and I can’t wait to chat with you again next week.
Reference
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What Good Are Positive Emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 300–319. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.300
