156. How Do I Know If I'm Thriving? (special community talk share + short practice)
===
Welcome to Joy Lab!: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach
Aimee: All right. So, welcome to our community talk. We are so grateful you have joined us. We are talking about thriving today and how do we know if we're thriving, which is actually, it was a community question as well. So keep submitting to the mailbag. To get us on the same page, let's, maybe get an understanding of what thriving is, at least how it's defined in psychology.
So I kind of like these formal definitions. At times they help, you know, sort of make sense of these bigger concepts. So that's what we'll do for a moment here. Um, [00:01:00] all that to say though, there is very little consistency around this concept. Um, this, Definition of thriving, and actually so often the words flourishing and also wellbeing are usually used kind of interchangeably when folks are talking about thriving and flourishing and then optimal wellbeing or wellbeing.
With all that said, though, I do want to highlight Dr. Martin Seligman's, um, what he calls his wellbeing theory, which is also a definition of flourishing. So you can see how that happens right there. Um, but I think it's really helpful, also known as thriving, right? So here we go to, this is what he says, uh, "to flourish is to find fulfillment in our lives, accomplishing meaningful and worthwhile tasks and connecting with others at a deeper level, in essence, living the good life."
So there are five blocks or building blocks that enable flourishing as [00:02:00] Seligman lays out, and he uses the acronym PERMA to identify these. So P is positive emotion, E, engagement, R, relationships, M, meaning, and A, accomplishment. So those are the building blocks of flourishing. And we'll dig into these, I think, in a podcast episode or several episodes, because I think this is really helpful.
Uh, and the key thing that Seligman notes about these building blocks is that they are learnable, they're skills, they're strategies to increase each of these. And what do you know, we really work to enhance all of these building blocks in our Joy Lab program. And other resources within our natural mental health community.
So I want to note as well why I think there is so much uncertainty around this idea of thriving or flourishing. And I think these are helpful to note because they can break some of these kind of unconscious barriers that we might have with this [00:03:00] idea that we can all thrive. So the first reason I want to note is that the application of psychology has been in more recent times, I guess you'd say, has been limited to a very tiny but important aspect of our mental health, which is getting rid of negative symptoms.
Uh, and I'll quote, I'll integrate some quotes here from Seligman because I think he adds some insight to some of these blocks that might show up. So here's something Seligman notes to highlight this. He said, "it used to be that whenever I introduced myself to people and told them I was a psychologist, they would shrink away from me because quite rightly, the impression the American public has of psychologists is you want to know what's wrong with me."
Henry, I'm sure as a psychiatrist you get that kind of flavor of response from people?!
Henry: So that's what it, what it is.
Aimee: So there is that energy, but there's also certainly the [00:04:00] practice, that focus of what is wrong, um, in psychology.
It is the traditional medical model. I'm sick, make my sickness go away. And when the sickness is gone, when the symptoms alleviate, then that is success in the model. So it's sort of like zero is the goal in this system. And, so then we're not really encouraged or trained to think beyond zero based on that kind of medical model.
And so on that note, I think that this idea of thriving can be hard to wrap our heads around because we have then a very linear approach to mental health. So again, the common goal is essentially zero. And then when it comes to mental health, if you have no symptoms, you must be on the right side. So you're, you're doing fine. If you have symptoms that's negative, you must be on the bad side. It's very black and white. But that, it's just not true, right? We are a multitude of qualities and strengths and struggles. And amidst it all, we can still thrive. We can still flourish in these unique ways that get dismissed, I [00:05:00] think, when everything gets interpreted so rigidly.
So I want to bring another Seligman quote here to highlight this. He says, "I think you can be depressed and flourish. I think you can have cancer and flourish. I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believe that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity."
I love that quote because I am also in the lower end of positive and we talk about that a lot on the podcast. Um, so this quote suggests to me one more reason again, why I think thriving can sort of sound unattainable for some of us, right? If you're not an optimist, you weren't born with those traits.
Again, it doesn't matter. Some of us may be born with a tendency toward more positive affectivity, you optimists. Some may be not. Doesn't matter. So this is just one of those factors, again, that Seligman notes in PERMA, which is [00:06:00] positive mood. It's just one of those building blocks that maybe you optimists might have a lead on, but these are skills that can be developed. So wherever your starting point is or, you know, wherever that temperament might sit, there is this space for skills and practice. And that's what we work on here at Natural Mental Health and Joy Lab. I want to give one more quote from Seligman to highlight why the practice of these factors of flourishing and thriving are actually the point.
So the practice is the point. So I think of flourishing and thriving as a practice, not really a state, the learning, the making sense of these factors uniquely for us.
Here's what he wrote: "Suppose you could be hooked up to a hypothetical experience machine that, for the rest of your life, would stimulate your brain and give you any positive feelings you desire. Most people, to whom I offer this imaginary choice, refuse the machine. It is not just positive feelings we want.
We want to be [00:07:00] entitled to our positive feelings. I love that. So, when I think of thriving, when I think of flourishing, I really think of the work, the practice that we do here, um, that many folks have, Seligman has, has taught and shared that many folks, um, engage in just instinctually, um, the practice of our elements the uncovering of our innate resilience, of our innate flourishing. So Henry, I know you have a lot of good stuff to share here, uh, and a little practice for us at the end, but maybe you can continue on with more about thriving. Yeah.
Henry: So, you know, that last quote that you read by Seligman, what I thought he was going to end with is not the part about we want to be entitled to our positive feelings. I think that's what it was. I thought he was going to say we want to also have [00:08:00] some of our, quote, negative feelings. Which I think is a legitimate part of thriving. And he said as much in one of the earlier quotes, you know, you can be depressed and still thrive. You can certainly be sad and still thrive or fearful once in a while and still thrive. You know, it's just the idea that we want to be our whole selves, which includes both sides of that. Also, it occurred to me with when you read his first quote, I think the definition he gave was basically to have meaningful work and to have, you know, deeper relations, connections with people. I don't do this very often, but it made me think of Sigmund Freud,
Aimee: Oh,
Henry: Who
Aimee: leap. Do tell...
Henry: um, because his, the one thing that [00:09:00] I kind of remember positively that Freud said was his, his keys to whatever he called a happy or successful life were to love and to work. And I think it's the same thing Seligman is saying, you know, to, to love or love well, as we talk about, and then to have some sense of meaning and purpose and, and so forth, which might come through work, it might come through other things.
But so, you know, you had alluded to this too, Aimee, that in mental health care and treatment as usual here, at best we get, we work to get people back to their baseline. You know, so I think you said point zero, wherever they were and they kind of, you kind of go down or up from that. We want to help people get back to that baseline, which is important and super helpful.
But I think [00:10:00] that Seligman's work and others in the Positive psychology movement are pointing out something that people in the spiritual traditions have always known is that to really, really live well, you need more than that. You need more than an absence of symptoms. And I think it's a very legitimate part of mental health work to help people get beyond their baseline. Because whatever their baseline was, point zero, they were still susceptible, you know, to whatever it was that happened, depression, anxiety, something else, you know, it still happened. And so getting beyond that, so that it's not that you feel good every single moment, you feel happier, on top of the world, but it's that you, you just have so much more in reserve if you're starting from a kind of a higher, stronger place than you were before. [00:11:00] And, and so that's really the purpose of Joy Lab, I think, in essence, is to work toward helping people get to a better level than they started out with. Because if you're there, there's so much less opportunity for something like depression or anxiety to get in and kind of take you down. So I think it's just great that this question came up because I, I, it occurred to me when, when the question did arise, how do I know if I'm thriving? It occurred to me that you could just think about what we're doing in Joy Lab and, and think, oh, this is just one more way in which I might not quite be.
live up to what I want to live up to. You know, it's one more opportunity to fall short if I'm not really thriving in my life. And I, I think it's just really good that we're talking about this because I believe that, [00:12:00] first of all, it's a work in progress. You know, none of us get there and stay there all of the time.
And I think too, that it's, uh, Something that looks different from what most people would imagine it to be. The way we talk about it, we think about it. It's not what you might see in a commercial or on Instagram or Facebook or when you're seeing people, you know, living their best life, leaping in the air, you know, whatever it might be.
Those are good things. I'm not, dismissing that at all, but that's not what real joy or real thriving means to me, at least. So I thought it might be helpful to explore what does it feel like then? How do I know if I am there or not? And I want to bring people back really quickly to the conversation we've had before in Joy Lab about the prefrontal [00:13:00] cortex, so the left and right prefrontal cortex, which has quite a bit to do with this conversation, I think.
This is really, oversimplifying it and maybe even distorting it a little bit, but I think it's, it's good for illustrating this. And very simply put, when your left prefrontal cortex is more active, you're in a state of being willing to approach like kind of opened up and you feel safe and secure and you can approach another person or approach a task or some something going on in your life.
You have this sense of openness, and maybe even a sense of expansion, expansiveness. And when your right prefrontal cortex is more active, then you're in a state that might lead you more to avoidance, you know, to kind of hunkering down or maybe pushing things away. And there's a overall sense inside of [00:14:00] constriction.
So sort of approach, avoidance, expansion, constriction. And what I, one thing I think it's really important to say about this is that we have both of these things for a reason. They're both built into our brain, into our being, because sometimes constricting or avoiding is the best strategy and sometimes approaching or expanding is the best strategy.
Thing is that when we've undergone a really difficult time in our lives for whatever reason, trauma, anxiety disorder, depression, whatever it is, it puts us into that state of avoidance or contraction and kind of shutting down and we just don't want to stay there. We don't want to live there.
So, to me, thriving might mean that we still have these periods where we feel [00:15:00] off or we feel smaller, constricted in some way. But they don't last as long, they're not as powerful, maybe they don't come back as often or as easily. And we're also able to be aware and live in this state of this greater openness and, you know, able to reach out and expand in our lives.
So it's not that we never have that. We're not living in a certain positive state all of the time, but we're maybe there more of the time. And, you know, something that we often really emphasize here is this idea of 51 percent, just a little more than half. So if you, maybe your baseline is, is being in both of those states 50 percent of the time, that's actually probably really good compared to most folks.
But even if you're there, if you can move it up a little bit, 51%, 55 percent of the time you're in that [00:16:00] more open, positive state, that's great. That's going to make you less at risk for future problems with your mental health. It's also going to make life simply more fulfilling and enjoyable. So let's do a little practice around this, just a few minutes.
And largely what, what I hope you get from this practice is just a sense of these this experience of kind of tuning in, being aware of your body and where, where this feeling resides and being able to kind of use that as a tool, like a, just an instant, way of checking in with yourself and finding out where am I right now?
Am I in a state of greater openness or a state of greater constriction? And I like this because it's so simple and because it's so easy to notice if you have a little bit [00:17:00] of training and know how to tune into yourself. This is, uh, kind of learning to, to be able to feel what is going on in your body in the kind of the viscera, the heart and the gut, of your body, somewhere between the throat and the groin. It's just tuning into the sensation. It's important to note that you don't have to do anything to try to force yourself into this positive open state. All you need to do really is notice.
And simply the act of noticing often, not always, but often allows us to open up just a little bit more. So let's start. So whenever you're ready, you can just let yourself settle in to this moment. Doing your best to, to be [00:18:00] present with your body and allowing your mind just to calm, just to kind of settle. If you've been busy or stressed or have lots of thoughts rolling around, that's okay, but invite them to quiet down a bit. A good way to do this is just to let your body sink into this chair, this cushion, this floor, this ground, wherever you're, however you're holding your body up, just letting it settle and sink in. And then turning your attention to your breath for a few cycles as a way to further enter into your body and the [00:19:00] sensations of the moment and to invite your mind to quiet down even a little bit more. So simply aware of your breathing. What's it feel like when you're breathing in, expanding? And what's it feel like when you're breathing out, letting go? Just as an experience of noticing, and awareness, see if you can just check in with your yourself right now, somewhere in the chest or the belly region, [00:20:00] just asking yourself, how am I feeling at this moment? What am I feeling? And if you'd like, you can just think of it as either how open am I or how constricted or closed am I?
No judgment, either one is fine, but just simply noticing. Right now, do I feel more [00:21:00] open or more closed? When you feel open, there tends to be a sense of expansion, sometimes a feeling of warmth. And often a sense of flow, kind of like a freedom of movement. This can happen no matter what emotion you're having right now. No matter whether that emotion is considered positive or negative, you can still have that sense of flow and movement and openness to it. [00:22:00] And just as another experiment and a practice in awareness, invite a memory, uh, hopefully a recent memory of some time when either you felt really expansive and had this sense of thriving or openness, or you witnessed it in someone else or maybe a story or something you watched that had this, this sense of really being open and present and expansive in some way.
See if you can come up with a memory and let yourself really dive into that memory, really experience it. [00:23:00] Just for a moment. And then tune in again, just check in with yourself. What's it feeling like inside right now? Does it feel any different? Does simply bringing this to mind change anything about your current moment to moment experience? It doesn't have to. There's no right or wrong. Just notice with interest what happened. [00:24:00] And before we bring this to a close, maybe you can just, just know that this is something you can do at any time, almost in a second, in a moment. You could practice it enough that you could do it no matter whether you're doing something else or really feeling something strong at that moment in time, you can just check in. Very quickly.
Am I open? Am I closed? Expanded? Constricted? And the more that we notice, especially the more we notice ourselves being in this more expansive state, this feeling of approach or openness, the more likely it is [00:25:00] to keep happening. It's a way of feeding this positive spiral. So you can bring yourself back, back to your body, back to your surroundings. Let your eyes open. And as always, it's great to be with you. We look forward to more of this and just hope you, hope you have a better sense of what it means to thrive and maybe even find yourself moving or drawn a little bit further in that direction.
