The Simplest of Delights (Introduction)

The other day I was listening to an episode of a podcast called “The Awesome Project." It’s a series produced by a Canadian Positive Psychologist named Louisa Jewell which explores various topics related to human flourishing. Flourishing is what positive psychologists call it when a person is experiencing “positive mental health and overall life well-being.”[1] When we are living our best and enjoying positive well-being as a result, we are flourishing.

The whole series has been fascinating to me, but this particular episode was exploring the impact of positive emotions—things like love, gratitude, pride, or excitement—on our overall well-being. It cited studies that suggested having daily experiences of positive emotion improves our resilience, helps us recover physically from the effects of stress, and guards us against depression.

The podcast referred to the work of Barbara Frederickson, who found that “the difference between people who flourish and those who don’t, lies in their ability to generate everyday pleasant moments at a ratio of [up to] 5 positive experiences for every 1 negative emotion.” That 5:1 ratio—she called it the Frederickson’s Positivity Ratio—especially gave me pause. The brain, you might say, is like Velcro for our negative experiences and Teflon for our positive, and in order to build the resources we need to come through negative experiences with resiliency, we need intentionally to work into our routines experiences that generate these positive emotions on a consistent basis.

Psychologist Michelle McQuade uses the term “positivity hygiene” to describe all this. Just like you work regular showers and brushing your teeth into your daily schedule, because you know how important these simple acts of self-care and personal grooming are, in the same way you should work regular activities into your routine that generate positive emotional affect. These activities do not need to be intense or elaborate (this is another finding in the research). Petting the family dog could do it; listening to some favorite music could; a 15-minute walk in the woods. The key is knowing what puts you in that happy place, even if its just momentary, and becoming intentional about building those things into your day.

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for a few weeks now: the positivity ratio, and positivity hygiene, and human flourishing. It occurred to me as I listened to the podcast that I’m not really all that clear on what experiences generate positive emotion for me. At least, not in the way the podcast was talking about it, I’m not. I know in broad terms what brings me joy and what steals my joy. I have a good idea of what my idea of a “perfect day” would be. But if I were going to try to be intentional about building such moments into my day, like the way I take a shower every morning, I’m not sure what exactly I’d include on the list.

Have I been walking around, the “positive psychology” equivalent of an unwashed slob?

Like I say, it gave me pause.

It also gave me an idea for a new series here at terra incognito. Over the next few months, I’m planning to take some time to explore the simple pleasures of life, examining some of the every-day experiences, objects, encounters, or activities that serve as unrecognized sources of positive emotion for me.

This is not just for the sake of cleaning up my act, so to speak, when it comes to my personal positivity ratio (though hopefully it will help me do that). It is, more importantly, to help me remember that the Lord’s Creation is, actually, crammed full of things to take delight in, if only we took the time to savor it. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: judging from the way he wired to be able to take such pleasure in even the simplest of things, you’d have to think the Lord was a hedonist at heart. And perhaps he is. It’s just that we’re so often like fishes, swimming in the sun-warmed water of his grace and goodness and never even realizing we’re wet.

Who knows what we might discover if we took some time to ask the Lord to help us see just exactly how wet we really are?