Ep. 106: What Is Positive Psychology?
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Positive psychology refers to a type of therapy that focuses on optimizing mental wellbeing, rather than fixing any specific problems. If conventional psychology helps people living with mental illness to achieve normalcy, then positive psychology helps people at a normal baseline achieve an optimal state. “Absence of symptoms is not the presence of wellbeing,” says Dr. Tayyab Rashid (pictured above) of the University of Toronto (Scarborough), also a faculty associate with the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University. He’s in conversation with Medcan Clinical Director of Psychology, Dr. Jack Muskat.
LINKS:
If you’d like to talk about opportunities to support your own mental health, contact a member of Medcan’s mental wellbeing team: mentalwellbeing@medcan.com.
Read Dr. Tayyab Rashid’s bio and website.
Visit Dr Jack Muskat’s LinkedIn.
Positive Psychotherapy: The Clinician’s Manual co-authored by Dr. Rashid, as well as Dr. Martin Seligman of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
Check out the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University, where Dr. Rashid is a faculty associate.
Learned Optimism is the seminal positive psychology book by Dr. Rashid’s mentor, Dr. Martin Seligman. Buy it on Amazon or Chapters/Indigo.
Read a study by University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School: Prosocial Spending and Happiness.
INSIGHTS:
Positive psychology defined: Positive psychology is setting conditions that are right for individuals, communities and institutions to flourish. How can we systematically foster growth? “By positive I do not mean the rest of psychology is negative,” says Dr. Rashid. “Absolutely not… What positive psychology brought more into sharp focus [is] taking the major tenets of humanistic psychology and reminding us, how can we put those notions of self fulfilment [and] self actualization under the microscope of science? … And how can we systematically enhance that approach? … Absence of symptoms is not the presence of well being.” Finally, on the topic of terminology, Dr. Rashid observes, “if you would ask me to reinvent the term of positive psychology, I would probably call it balanced psychotherapy… Of course, that would be bland and boring.” [1:25]
The role of optimism in positive psychology: Mental health characteristics are malleable and one tenet of positive psychology is the idea that optimism is learnable. “If anyone who is listening is thinking, ‘My life is so hard, so cruel, because I had this genetic accident, my mother was depressed [and] my father was alcoholic, and we had this flagrant history of family psychopathology—I am consigned to a life of misery.’” But change is possible. Dr. Rashid says that research has shown that you can develop your capacity to be hopeful, and to be optimistic. One great book on the subject, says Dr. Rashid, is Martin Seligman’s Learned Optimism (link above). The fact that optimism is learnable is important, Dr. Muskat says, because that quality, of looking at the bright side, is so important to the escape of catastrophic thought patterns. “Optimism is what's going to get [you] out of the rut,” Dr. Muskat says. [14:51]
A case study of positive psychology in action: Dr. Muskat challenges Dr. Rashid to chronicle a client’s journey, with a positive psychology intervention, that took them from “a dark zone” to positive fulfilment. That segues into a conversation about the way some patients feel that the therapeutic suggestions stop working over time. They arrive at a feeling of, “Doc, I wrote the gratitude journal for three weeks and [now, I’m] finding doing the same thing—It's not working.” He says, “every seed or plant needs different care at a different time of the season.” When therapies stop working after time, Dr. Rashid asks his clients to switch things up. “You have to keep on shifting because the joy is in the variety, the spice of these interventions.” [20:38]
Tangible actions that can help: Dr. Jack Muskat observes that people are experiencing difficulties when trying to find meaning in life. “What’s challenging people is, they don’t know what to believe,” he says. “Because they’re being inundated with a consumerist culture, they’re being inundated with values that don’t cohere.” So, Dr. Muskat asks, what are concrete things we can do? “Every day is an opportunity for a new start,” Dr. Rashid says. “Every day is a start. Every hour is a start… When you focus on start, your attention shifts from the outcome.” [26:26]
Try smiling: “Find ways to smile at small little things,” Dr. Rashid says. “When you smile, the other person smiles.” He says, “If I'm going to smile at you, you're going to smile at one other person, and that person is going to make the other person happy. So it's three degrees of happiness.” And: “Whenever you are stuck in something, find a way to smile, find a way to do something positive—because that’s your emotions’ reset button.” He acknowledges, “There are some times when you really need to dig deep… but generally all things [being] equal, generally smiling, mixed with playfulness, can brighten up your day.” To close, Dr. Rashid says, “If COVID has taught us [anything], it has taught us … how little control we have over our own life. But the control that we [do] have, why we don't exercise in positive paths?” [28:27]