You’re listening to episode number 263 of Practically Happy. Today I’m asking you the question, what is your positivity ratio? Another way to think about today’s topic is going to be as a positive emotion meal plan.

I happen to love a meal plan. I love nutrition. My specialty as a nurse was as a diabetes educator. I spent years and years helping patients with diabetes establish healthy eating patterns that would be beneficial.

Good for their health and well-being in addition to activity level and medication management. I loved the food piece though because it feels so accessible. It feels like a thing that we’re doing all the time. We’re eating every single day.

The Healthy Plate Method of Meal Planning

And when I was working, I really loved using a visual to divide up the plate called the Happy Plate Method. It was developed by Harvard Health. And it basically divides your plate like a standard dinner plate. into sections and then gives you advice on how to organize the different macronutrients of your meal according to the divisions on your plate.

If you’re imagining a plate in your mind and you divide it in half, so there’s just a line straight down the center. According to the healthy plate method, and this is for a low carbohydrate diet for people with diabetes, half of your plate would be green leafy vegetables or other types of low carbohydrate vegetables.

That goes on half the plate, and then you divide up the other half of the plate into half. Then you have two quarters. One quarter is carbohydrate, including fruit, including grains and corn and peas, like high carbohydrate vegetables, including bread or rolls.

And then the other quarter, the other half of the half is your protein. That would be eggs and all the meats. Beans even would go in that category. Legumes kind of span between carbohydrate and protein, but for the sake of the healthy plate method, they usually count in the protein section and then the dairy. And fats are off the plate. Obviously, you eat all these things.

Sometimes you have mixed things, and all your vegetables and your carbs and your meats all go together. I can think of lasagna as a good example of everything being mixed. So, it’s not as neat and tidy as thinking of it as this divided up plate where things are touching. It’s a great visual though, because it helps a patient who hasn’t been thinking a lot in these macronutrient terms.

to consider what they’re eating, the quantities of the things that they’re eating and then especially with people who are using insulin for diabetes management, they’re, doing a lot of calculations based on what they’re eating, and their blood sugar levels at any given moment to dose their medication.

The Healthy Plate Method helps establish healthy ratios.

So, the healthy plate method is great. It’s what I think about when I think about really clear framework for ratios on a meal plan. In my course Seven Days, Seven Dinners— which is just a meal planning course– I use the healthy plate method to help people just think about rounding out their meal if they just have protein source in a carbohydrate, for example, to add more vegetables in there.

Personally, I’ve recently been on a journey to increase my protein intake as a woman in my early forties. I’m just 40, but I’m, going to turn 41 in a few months and I’m on this pathway towards middle age.

And I have read and heard a lot of great things about how important a high-protein diet is to maintain your skeletal muscles. I’ll talk more about that in a future episode, probably, but for now, it’s just been nice to think about protein as an anchor point in my own diet, and I think about my ratios a little differently.

I’m not as concerned about my carbohydrate intake and even my fruits and vegetable intake. I like to eat produce at every meal, but I really am focusing on getting enough protein to support the weight training that I do, and just to keep my muscles healthy and strong as I’m getting older.

We might think about food and meals in terms of ratios. But what about emotions?

I think about meals and meal planning in terms of ratios pretty frequently because of my background. I don’t know if you do. Maybe you think about meals in a whole different way. Maybe you’ve never even considered the idea of what different components of macronutrients go into a meal. That is something that can be helpful as you’re thinking about overall health and nutrition and what types of things do you want to eat and how do the different types of nutrients affect your body?

Protein is an essential building block for your skeletal muscle system. Carbohydrates are our primary source of energy. Fats are good for our nervous system. Everything has a place in our diet, but what quantities and what ratios is most healthy and most effective for the type of life that we want to live?

What is your positivity ratio?

That’s something that we can put some thought into. That’s where the idea of your positivity ratio and your positivity meal plan comes into play.

Segment: Life Lately

I wanted to tell you a little bit about life lately. It’s been a few weeks since I did a life lately segment and I’ve had some fun. The two biggest things happening right now in my life are that I have been to New York City twice in the last couple weeks and had a great time both times.

Christmas Girls’ Trip to NYC

The first time was a weekend getaway with my daughter, Plum, and my niece, Sailor, and my sister, Emmy. We had been thinking about it for a couple years and finally just said, let’s put it on the books. We spent three days in Manhattan with the girls.

Now Plum and Sailor are both only girls in their family. My sister Emmy and I both have two boys and one girl, and so we’ve called them sister cousins since they were little. They’re the same age, and they are delighted by each other.

We live far apart. My sister and my niece live in Utah, and we live out here in Virginia. It was fun to get them together for a girl’s weekend. We chose the activities that we did in the city based on 10-year-old girls. So, we went and saw the Rockets Christmas Spectacular. We went to this new balloon experiencethat’s on the pier It’s just temporarily in New York City and it’s well worth a visit If you are considering a trip to New York or you live nearby, we loved the balloon experience.

We also went to the Museum of Modern Art, which was fantastic. We went to the Big Apple Circus, which again was there temporarily. I had never been to the circus before. This is a European circus that was brought over for just a I don’t know if it’s a few weeks or a couple months, and it was fun.

It was really like what you think of when you think of the circus minus the animals, there were, there was a little, there were lots of clowns that were trying to not be scary, but I think there’s an odd like Americans are a little bit nervous about clowns. I know that they show up in a lot more European entertainment show than here probably because of some of the horror related aspects to clowns in American culture, but the clowns were funny.

And then there were great dancers. There were acrobats. There were, there was a little guy who like rode a bicycle in a net thing that like rose in the air. It was just awe inspiring and fun and felt kind of old school. We had a great time.

We also, of course, got to see the Christmas tree at the Rockefeller Center. We went and spent, a few hours in F. A. O. Schwartz and let the girls have the real like authentic toy store experience. We went to Central Park on just wandered around the city and had a fantastic time.

Speaking Event in New Jersey

I went home and then a day later I went back to New York City. I just landed and then went over the bridge into the Ridgewood, New Jersey, where I was able to see a good friend and spend an afternoon speaking to a women’s group in Ridgewood.

There were probably between 75 and 85 women in attendance at this monthly mom’s group, and it was so fun to share about the power of Positive psychology and I will, I developed a little worksheet for them that I’m excited to share with you in a couple weeks.

I’m going to do an episode of the same topic that I shared with them and just an introduction to each of the key components of the PERMA model of positive psychology and then some good questions, reflection questions to think about applying it to your life and some of that will Go over a little bit today with the positivity ratios.

That was fun and reminded me how much I love speaking and facilitating. If you. If you are part of a group that has speakers, come in, whether it’s speaking to the adults at a PTA board, or like an education program, or in a corporate environment, if you have speakers come to annual events for an association or a group that you’re a part of, please send me an email at miranda@livefreecreative.co.

I have loved speaking both keynotes and doing workshop facilitation for the last seven to 10 years. And I really love it. So, I would love some more opportunities to do that. If that’s something you’re ever looking for, make sure you reach out.

Plum’s 10^th Birthday Room Redo

The other fun life lately is that it is almost my daughter’s birthday. This episode goes live on Thursday, December 14th. My daughter turns 10 on the 15th. Having her birthday so close to Christmas has been fun and a little bit of a challenge because I’m trying to keep them separate, but also enjoy both. I feel like I’m buying a lot of gifts for my daughter in December.

That’s not a bad thing, but one of the things that we decided to do, as more of an experience gift for her rather than, gift to unwrap, was to design and decorate her bedroom. We’ve lived in our current house for about two years and a full year of that I wasn’t doing any home projects because of being in school now that I’ve picked it back up.

It’s been fun to reengage with some of my previous visions for the house and last month I wallpapered and painted and put-up new trim and hardware in plums bathroom. She has a bedroom that has an attached bathroom. Which doubles as our guest room when people come visit. It’s nice. You can just come sleep on the floor in our room.

And we have a beautiful end suite available for guests. I did her bathroom, and it was so fun. It turned out beautifully. And then for her birthday, we said we would redo her bedroom. She knew about it and so she was able to help me pick out paint and give me some ideas of things that she was excited about.

And then Dave took Plum to a hotel for two nights so that I could HGTV style whirlwind through repairing the walls, painting, putting up trim, painting the trim, putting up curtains, redoing her be.

I actually ended up reupholstering her bed frame hanging princess style curtains with lights above her bed, adding new bedding, shelves and art on the walls, putting up a new mirror rolling out a new rug, and when she came home, I had put a sign and some bows on her door, and so she opened her door to a big reveal of a brand new 10 year old tween girl room and it is so cute.

Positivity Ratios begin with understanding Positive Emotions

We can begin learning about a positive emotion ratio by talking about positive emotions in general. Are you aware of what positive emotions are. You probably know how they feel, but positive emotions are a mental state brought about by feelings of happiness, joy, love, contentment, amusement. They are an essential aspect of our human experiences.

They influence our overall well-being and quality of life. Not only are they pleasant, but they also serve vital developmental functions and Functions in our psychological and physiological well-being not only do they help us feel good, but they keep us healthier They also play a role in shaping the way that we think about our lives in our perceptions our thoughts and our social interactions.

Have you ever had the experience of thinking about a story from your life or a relationship or something when you’re feeling bad. You’re sad. You’re mad. You’re upset you’re frustrated and you’re thinking about something, and you frame it out in one way.

And then maybe you sleep, or you eat, or you go on a walk with a friend, or someone gives you something that makes you feel good, or you can serve in some way that you feel competent and confident, and then you think about that same experience, and suddenly it looks really different. The whole story is different, because our emotional state plays a role in framing our human experience.

The benefits of Positive Emotions

Emotions matter for a lot of reasons. They help us cope with stress, adversity, and challenges. Positive emotions serve as a buffer against negative emotions, but even if we have a lot of negative emotions happening in our lives, we can, at the same time, increase our positive emotions and feel better overall.

Because of that increase. I have an episode called Emotional Twist Cone. I’ll link that in the show notes. This episode talks about the sometimes-confusing feeling of having both negative and positive emotion existing at the same time in our lives, we can be really overwhelmed or sad and have these moments of joy or happiness or delight infused within that sort of baseline negative emotion, that’s possible.

And it’s sometimes confusing. I think we’re often taught we’re either all the way one or all the way the other. And the truth is we can experience a lot of different things, a lot of different emotions at.

Positive emotions are also helpful because they literally broaden our perspective. If you think about tunnel vision, like only seeing a certain, like right in front of you, focusing on something, that happens often when we’re in a fight or flight response, when we’re extremely stressed out, we don’t see anything. everything. We just have seen what’s right in front of us and see the problem ahead usually.

Research shows that when you are experiencing positive emotion, your line-of-sight increases, your peripheral vision widens, literally broadens your perspective. That’s something that I found so fascinating and incredible. And you can imagine when your literal perspective is broadened, figuratively, your perspectives are broadened as well.

You’re more open to Creativity to innovation to solutions that you hadn’t thought of before positive emotions and actually practicing positivity through optimism exercises help you to find the solutions that when you’re stressed out and overwhelmed, you actually need so practicing positivity and being able to get yourself into a positive emotion can actually help you solve the problems that you’re feeling that are causing some of the stress.

Negative emotions are also useful.

Now, I don’t want to downplay the importance of negative emotions as well. Negative emotions are protective, and they help us signal when things are not right in our lives. Sadness can be connective, and the grief that we experience in community when terrible things are happening in our families, or in our lives, or in the world, those things link us together through the human experience.

And positive emotions play a huge role in our well-being. If we’re going back to some benefits, positive emotions can lower your stress hormones. They lower your cortisol, they reduce your inflammation, increase your cardiovascular health, improve your immune function. Cultivating positive emotions with intention can contribute to a healthier lifestyle, better sleep, and increased longevity. You live longer. when you have more positive emotions in your life.

 And of course, we like to be around people who help us feel that way. And so positive emotions play a role in building and maintaining relationships. They facilitate communication, empathy, and bonding. And we’re more likely to be the type of people want to be around when we are experiencing positive emotions ourselves.

We’re more likely to be kind, or to be cooperative, to be open to understanding others and feel empathy. Are you seeing the picture of how positive emotions are extremely helpful and beneficial in our overall well-being? Now, how often have you thought about the quantities of positive emotions? that you’re experiencing daily, per se.

Can you explore your personal positivity ratio?

This is where this ratio comes in. We think about maybe, “
Oh, I’ve had a lot of carbohydrate today, maybe I need to boost my protein!” or “I haven’t eaten a vegetable all day, I need to get a vegetable in.”

But have you ever thought, I’ve had a negative day… Whether from self-generated negativity or from negativity that has arisen because of unforeseen or unexpected circumstances, I need to get some positivity in.

I need to boost my positivity because I’m not having a great day.

Oftentimes, When I’m feeling negative, my instinct is to stay there, to sit in negativity, and in that space it’s easy to ruminate on all the things that are going wrong. It’s counterintuitive and important to remember that we can influence our own positive emotion, we can generate it through some specific actions.

I’m going to tell you something that I think is important. And so, I’m going to say it twice just so that it can sink in:

You can increase your overall well-being, your overall life satisfaction without decreasing your negative emotions at all by increasing your positive emotions.

Okay, I’m going to just stick with me. I’m going to say it one more time. I think this is important to understand. A lot of times when we are feeling in negative emotion, when we’re feeling badly, when we are depressed or overwhelmed, we think that the solution is to decrease what’s going wrong.

And that can help, that can be a solution, but let me say this again. You can increase your overall well-being and satisfaction with your life without decreasing your negative emotions at all by increasing your positive emotions. This is where that ratio comes into play. If you increase the amount of positive emotion that you experience in your life without decreasing the negative at all.

When you increase your positive emotions, you increase your well-being.

You are increasing the ratio if you went from two negative emotions to two positive emotions and you boost your positive emotions, maybe then you’re still at two negative emotions, but you now have three or four or five positive emotions and that ratio increase. Adjusting up your positive emotion without doing anything about the negative will help you feel better.

Life is not meant to be 50/50. A good life is more like 75/25.

It’s important to note that life is not meant to be 100 percent positive all the time. And I follow a bunch of life coaches that I really, I really appreciate.

There’s a popular saying in life coaching that life is 50 50. That it’s 50 percent positive and 50 percent negative. Now, I just want to clarify that in the research, it shows that a one-to-one positive to negative equals depression, or a poor overall life satisfaction.

If you really are 50/50, one to one positive and negative, you’re not going to feel great, okay?

So, it’s popular, and I know it’s easy to say that, but the research shows that if you’re one to one, you’re going to want to dial up the positive because positive emotions need to be higher than negative emotions in order for you to feel better.

I’m going to tell you about a couple ratios that have emerged in positive psychology research over the years, and there’s not an exact pinpoint. Of course, all these things are subjective, so the way you feel emotion differs from, you think about it. the person next to you or your neighbor or anyone in your family.

And so, there’s not like an exact science to this, but I think just like the healthy plate method, having a little bit of a visual can be helpful when you’re thinking about how much positive and negative emotion you’re experiencing in your everyday life. I gave you the research that one-to-one equals depression.

Negative emotions have high energy and we are naturally biased toward them.

So, if you have one positive interaction or emotion for every negative emotion that you have, you’re not going to feel great. This usually is because negative emotions have a much higher energy than some of our positive emotions. So negative emotions burn brighter in our memory. And we also have a negativity bias.

You’ve probably heard that before where if we’re thinking over our life, we are often more aware of the negative that happens than the positive.

Negativity Bias in Action

In fact, in my experience, I’m going to just share from Amazon reviews. This is just a random experience, but having written a book a few years ago, I have over 200 five-star reviews and I have a couple.

Three-star reviews. Just a couple. The ratio there is like one to a hundred. And I could tell you, almost word for word, what those negative reviews say. Even though I have had a hundred really glowing positive reviews. And the negative reviews aren’t even terrible. They’re just, a little bit more critical or a little bit more honest or the book wasn’t for everyone.

That’s fine. That’s a great example, personal example, of the way negative, negativity bias works in our lives. That we are often much more likely to remember the thing we did wrong or the thing that made us feel bad rather than the dozens of things that help us feel good. So, you can already see just right off the bat that a one to one is not going to work for feeling good.

6:1 positive to negative emotion looks like flourishing.

Some of the research shows that a six to one six positive emotions to one negative emotion leads to a state of flourishing. So not only feeling good, but feeling excellent and like you’re confident, you’re on top of things, you’re accomplishing your goals, you’re progressing, doing well. That’s someone who’s intentionally focused on positive emotion and outcomes in their lives, for sure.

5:1 positive to negative interactions in marriage is a healthy relationship.

Gottman from the Gottman Institute groundbreaking research on marriage and relationships and the Gottman Institute research shows that in a marriage. You need 5 positive interactions to 1 negative interaction for that marriage to be healthy. There’s a 5 to 1 ratio of positive to negative marital or relational interactions to have a super healthy marriage.

And even though there isn’t a clear cut, this is it, 100% perfect ratio for general well-being, it looks like there’s a trend around three to one of a positive ratio for your well-being.

3:1 positive to negative emotions looks like well-being.

About three positive emotions for every negative emotion seems to be a place where a person, an individual, is feeling great about their life. You’re feeling a general overall sense of well-being and life satisfaction. If you’re thinking about a healthy plate, that’s going to be a quarter of the plate negative emotion and three quarters of your plate positive emotion.

So, when you’re thinking about your positivity ratio or your positivity meal plan, if you’ve had a plate full of negative emotion, you know what you need to do? Eat three plates full of positive emotion to counteract that and help you feel better overall. Now, I also want to clarify that it’s not just more is better all the way up to 100.

You CAN have too much positive emotion. It’s called mania.

Too much positive emotion, especially high energy positive emotion, can lead people into what’s considered a mania or a manic state. So around 11 to 1 is what the research says of when people are no longer experiencing positive results from having high positive emotion, but it starts to curve that you down to where it’s negatively impacting their lives.

Life satisfaction is better predicted by frequency rather than intensity of positive emotion.

The research shows that life satisfaction is better predicted by frequency rather than intensity of positive emotion as well. So having more frequent gentle or mid-level energy positive emotions will be better for you overall than having one smash-it out-of the-park high energy best-thing-that’s-ever-happened and then feeling no more like subsequent smaller positive emotions, so frequency rather than intensity is also good.

And this is, this feels really hopeful for me as an individual as well as a parent, because sometimes I’m striving for these big, magical, memorable moments, and what actually makes a bigger difference is small, consistent, Moments of positive emotion and connection that goes for me as a mom trying to generate positive emotions in my home with my family as also as an individual, another piece of research that I love.

I’m just going to quote from an article called updated thinking on positivity ratios by Barbara Fredrickson.

She says that “The pattern of results shows that human flourishing is nourished by small yet consequential individual differences in positive emotional experiences in response to pleasant everyday events.”

To generate these positive emotions in your life, it’s just small, every day, pleasant events and allowing yourself to notice them and feel them and savor them that makes all the difference.

We’re looking for a positivity ratio between about 3 and 6 positive, pleasant emotions to 1 negative emotion to find that optimal state of Mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

Let’s take a quick break for today’s sponsor, and then I’m going to share 10 ways you can boost positive emotion.

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Ten Ways to Boost Your Positive Emotions

I’m going to move into now 10 ways to boost your positive emotions as you’ve been listening to the show. Maybe you’ve been thinking, Okay, I get it. I want to have more positive emotion in my life. I haven’t even ever thought about, trying to balance out and increase my positive emotion to overcome or balance out the ratio for my negative emotion.

But what do I do? How do I increase positive emotion?

Sometimes we think that positive emotion happens when good things happen to us, and that is true. The sort of serendipitous, wonderful, delightful things that happen that help us feel lucky those things can bring positive emotion for sure.

We also can generate positive emotions intentionally by prioritizing them. I’m going to just share 10 ways to boost positive emotion. I also want to invite you to get a notebook out or a piece of paper or dictate into your phone what are some ways that you generate positive emotion in your own life.

These are ideas that have some evidence behind them, they’ve been researched, but there are so many ways to feel positive emotions or individual things that you might really enjoy that other people might not enjoy. If you have your own list of positivity generators, you have your own little list somewhere of things that you can do that you know make a difference in your life to boost your positive emotion, you’ll be set the next time that you’re thinking, gosh, the day hasn’t been great.

I need to boost some positive to find that balance. Take some time to write down a little positive emotion list for yourself.

Now, these ones may also help, so I’m going to share 10 right now.

1.Write down something you’re grateful for.

The first one is to write down things that you’re grateful for. Unlocking our brain’s ability to focus on what we have, what is existing in our lives or relationships or items or experiences that we appreciate is a surefire way to boost some positive emotion.

It’s an antidote to a lot of negative emotion as well. It’s hard to be feeling grateful while you’re feeling stressed out or negative. And I know that I said you can feel those things simultaneously. You absolutely can. And gratitude is an important emotion. So, if you can write down something that you’re grateful for, even do this regularly through a gratitude journal, that is something that has shown to really increase people’s wellbeing and positive emotions.

2. Savor

Number two is to savor something. Savor a positive experience. Whether that’s generating an experience itself, maybe you’re going to have a meal that you really and you’re going to allow yourself to be present in the moment and think about the reasons that you like it and really exist within it rather than just Experiencing it alone.

Savoring adds more positive emotion to an experience rather than what we would get from the experience itself because we’re reflecting on it with intention and that is amplifying the experience itself. When we were on our Novios trip, I did a savoring activity with the couples. I got this great Costa Rican, single source chocolate and passed them out to the group and invited them to have a chocolate savoring moment together.

Where they just, one square of chocolate. in your mouth, and you let it melt, and you think about it, and you’re present for it, and you’re aware of your surroundings, and you’re then talking about it, how it tasted, what you liked, how it felt. It was like a five-minute activity, and the next day the couples came back with all these cool experiences that they had shared through that savoring exercise.

Savor something. It can be a piece of chocolate. It can be a Diet Coke with lime. It can be a walk. It can be watching a bird. Have a positive experience and think about and reflect on it as it’s happening.

3. Take a moment to breathe deeply

Number three is trying some deep breathing. Ten deep breaths can bring you into a state of calm, invite some peace or relaxation that you hadn’t been feeling before.

I mentioned earlier in the episode that negative emotions can be high energy. And we have some positive emotions that are high energy as well. Enthusiasm, excitement, surprise, some of those are high energy positive emotions, but there are also a whole lot of low energy positive emotions that we can bring about by simply breathing emotions like calm, contentment, appreciation.

Those are things that sometimes don’t feel big and shiny. They’re subtle. Low energy positive emotions that can also greatly contribute to our well-being.

4. List a personal strength and how you used it today

Number four is to list one of your personal strengths and how you used it well today. If you haven’t yet taken the VIA Institute Free Strengths Finding Survey, that’s one of my favorite resources.

It’s at viacharacter.org and you set up a profile for free, you answer some questions, and it will come back and give you. What some of your signature strengths are your list of strengths. Being aware of your strengths is first, great to have even this website tell you what you’re good at by the answers that you give.

And then to be able to use them regularly in your life can be powerful for generating positive emotion.

5. Color on a coloring page

Number five is a simple fun one that should be accessible to most people. Color. One of my papers in graduate school was all about how the research shows that coloring for as little as 20 minutes can reduce stress and increase well-being in adults.

Humans. So those adult coloring books that, have gone through a trend, I don’t know if they’re trending so much now as they were a couple years ago, having a coloring book and some crayons on hand, it doesn’t have to be an a special adult coloring book to if you’re a young mom, you’ve got toddlers or kids around, I feel like it’s not that hard to find a piece of paper and a pencil or a coloring book and some crayons or markers or colored pencils.

Coloring for about 20 minutes can invite some of the calm and ease that you would get from deep breathing, but also boost creativity. It helps you feel competent and confident. So, color.

6. Get in the flow

Number six is do an activity that causes flow. That experience of being in the zone when you’re like, time disappears because you’re just doing something that you really, you have a good match of the skill and the challenge.

I felt like this all weekend as I was redecorating plums room. I love painting walls. It’s weird, but I get very much in the flow when I’m cutting in the edges and then using the roller and getting great coverage and just seeing the immediate difference from one color to another. I love painting rooms and it’s lucky because I do it a lot in my, the houses that I’ve redesigned.

That’s one of my flow activities. What is one of yours and find some space in your life to do that to boost your positive emotion.

7. Call a friend or family member

Number seven is calling a friend or family member to connect. Calling is better than texting. Texting is better than nothing. But there’s something about the voice, listening to someone’s voice, that makes a huge difference.

It increases your ability to connect. Give someone a call. Use the Marco Polo app. I love the Marco Polo app. I use it personally and I also use it with all my coaching clients. That facetime of being able to chat with someone and tell them what’s going on, even if it’s not concurrent.

A lot of my family lives a couple hours different time zone from me, so it’s easy for me to leave a message when I get up or, as I’m going to bed and then they can catch up on their own time. Call or send a message to connect to someone that you love. It can increase your positive emotion.

8. Do a random act of kindness

Number eight is to do a random act of kindness. There’s like hundreds of these. There are internet posts that have so many different ideas, but something as simple as dropping off a treat at someone’s house or paying for the car behind you in the drive thru line.

Around this time of year, I love to leave big tips. Randomly go get lunch with a friend and leave a tip that’s bigger than the cost of the meal if you can financially boost someone with a surprising tip. It can be fun.

9. Play your favorite music and sing/dance along

Number nine is to play your favorite music and sing or dance along.

Some people are moved by music more than others, but most people that I know have a favorite song or they have a go to album when they want to boost their mood. Use that. Use that to your advantage. If you’ve had a down day, turn on your favorite music and sing along in the car or play it on your headphones or dance around the kitchen or turn it on while you’re getting some of your tasks done. That can increase your positive emotion.

10. Get into nature

Number 10 is to get into nature. Spending time immersing ourselves in nature, whether it’s going on a walk around our block and just seeing the nature of like our neighbor’s yards, or it’s getting into nature in the mountains or on the beach or in the desert on a hike or on a bike ride, even on a drive.

Sometimes it’s nice to just take yourself on a drive and observe, for us right now, there’s still leaves turning, it could be beautiful. Maybe you live somewhere where it’s snowy and on a sunny day you can go on a drive and just see the, the snow-covered fields or mountains. Spending time in nature is a great way to increase your positive emotion.

So, there’s 10 and there are many more. I would love to, again, invite you to spend some time today or this week coming up with a list of activities that are surefire. positive emotion boosts for you as an individual, and then keep it somewhere where you can access it.

As you’re thinking about how your day’s going, you’re conscious of, gosh, a lot of kind of hard things have happened, or I’ve been feeling stressed out, or the kids, this or that, or my relationship, or my work, or whatever’s going wrong, can go wrong. And you can still feel better overall by increasing your positive emotions.

Explore them, discover them, and prioritize them, you’ll feel better emotionally, physically, mentally, relationally, and your overall sense of well-being will increase as you increase your positive emotions.

Feel better. Do more things that bring you joy. That’s not groundbreaking, but I think the ratio piece of the science behind How increasing our positive emotions can benefit our lives even without decreasing our negative emotions is powerful.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this episode thinking about your positive emotion ratio. And I hope that you enjoy even just making a list of things that bring you joy. That making a list can be a positive emotion boost in and of itself.

Want to work with me? Sign up for a free coaching call!

I want to mention again that if you’re interested in working with me as a coach, a well-being coach, a practically happy coach, a lot of my clients have creative projects as well, I am so excited to work with some new coaching clients in the upcoming year.

My coaching packages are all available on my website and I also am offering. Free exploratory calls right now. I’ll link the page in the show notes where you can see the packages, see all the details, and sign up for an exploratory call. If you’re interested. My goal as a coach is to be an encourager, add support, help you clarify your own values and decisions so that you feel better making some tiny adjustments to set you up for success.

Whether you’re needing support with your creative project or career, or just with your personal life, as a woman, a wife, a mom, I am here for you and I would love to help you clarify your values and your goals, identify your strengths, and then be a sounding board as we work out the best way to move forward with the type of life that you want to lead right now in this next Season that you’re experiencing new coaching will start in the new year in January, so now is the right time to be thinking about it and to sign up for an exploratory call.

If you would like to work with me, have a really great week, everyone I’ll chat with you again next time, and in the meantime, I hope that today’s episode helps you feel a little bit more practically happy.