EP 151: The Broaden-and-Build Theory | Barbara Fredrickson

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi, welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Leith Mall. And today I'm having a conversation with Barbara Fredridsen. She's one of the leading authorities on the psychology of positive emotions and well known for her Broaden and Build theory. So this is really a world class psychologist and theorists and practitioner who really helps us understand the power of positive emotions and having, not that we're going to avoid negative emotions, but having a good balance between negative and positive emotions in our life in order to really support, well, being, thriving and happiness. So give it a listen. Barbara Fragmentson, an amazing teacher.

Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is April Seifert and I am your host for this incredible interview. I'm so excited today to be speaking with Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. Dr. Fredrickson, I'm so excited that you're here to speak with us today.

Oh, glad to be here. Such a good overall focus for us all right now in terms of resilience. So I appreciate the invitation.

You know, it really is we, for a lot of reasons, you know, I think we're going to hit some really interesting things today during our conversation, from just the impact and the importance of positive emotion in resilience to maybe some misconceptions that might be out there that are keeping people from truly making the progress they want to make. So I feel like we should just dive right in because you've got such an incredible depth and background in the field of positive psychology and affect science. And I mentioned it in your intro, you're best known for your Broaden and Build theory of positive emotions. Can you give us sort of the overview of that theory, the main points that we want to make sure that we have as a foundation for our chat?

Right, right. When I first started studying emotions, almost every everything was focused only on the negative emotions. It's like you would read the science and you'd think humans never felt good because it was all about the bad stuff. And one big intellectual puzzle was, well, why do we feel good? It's not.

From an evolutionary perspective. It's not just about.

Reproduction. That had been a previous view is that negative emotions are about survival, positive emotions are about reproduction. And I thought that's not the case. Not every positive emotion is in that context of mate seeking and mate retaining. And so I was Curious. How do positive emotions contribute to survival even though they're not coming up at times that are threats to our life and limb? And so what I pulled together from my own research findings and that of others is that in the moment that we experience positive emotions, they fundamentally change the way our brains take in information. We have an expanded view. We know this from brain imaging studies and behavioral studies. Our peripheral vision expands when we're feeling a mild, uplifting positive state. We also carry ourselves in ways where our chin is more up. And so we see more of the world rather than looking down and seeing very little. There's all kinds of ways, both cognitively and.

Physically, in terms of kinematics, that we expand with positive emotions. And so we take in more information and connect the dots and bigger picture, we're more creative. We can come up with, you know, good solutions to problems. Those are temporary effects of positive emotions. That's the broadened part of the theory. It describes that fleeting openness that goes with the fleeting good feeling. The reason that that matters is having more moments of that in your day makes you connect with people better. You build friendships, makes you learn new things. And you now have a cognitive map of your neighborhood or your town because you've explored some. So it changes us in ways that are enduring, endurable, and can be thought of as resources for dealing with tough times. So the sort of puzzle is, how do people just, you know, without thinking about it, become better versions of themselves? Is the way we do it without thinking about it is finding joy, finding gratitude, finding positive emotions. It's nature's way of making sure we grow.

And learn things. We can learn things purposefully, sure. But, you know, nature's not going to just assume you're going to intend to become more resourceful. It's just going to design things so that over time we become more resourceful if we experience enough positive emotions.

That's so good.

Yeah. So there's two parts to the broaden and build theory. It's sort of the broaden is what it does, and the build is what the broaden is for.

So that's such a great summary. And it points to almost this repetitive nature that we have. I'll point to us as psychologists, because we definitely do this. We focus on the negative. What's wrong with us as human beings, which we need to fix to the detriment of ignoring the positive, thriving, resilience side of things. We've done that over and over in the field. But also as individual people, when we encounter a challenging time, we tend to focus or move more in the direction of almost this self deprecating way of interacting with the world. Like, come on, April. Like, oh my gosh, I can't believe you. I can't. You know, we sort of move in that direction. It's reminding me a lot of some of the self compassion work and research where our tendency as human beings is to maybe move in that negative direction. But what we find with your theory and with others that sort of point in the similar direction is that these positive states, these positive emotions are incredibly important. Not just because we feel good and something fleeting like that, although that's important, but because there are real outcomes and real learning and growth that can come from us taking that maybe less.

That approach that we're less, we have less of a tendency to take. So I think that's a really great reminder that there are important outcomes here that can happen as a result of doing this over and over and cultivating this in your life.

Right, right. Making it habitual is the key. It needs to be part of a, a daily diet. But you know, what you're describing in terms of that negativity bias, it's, sure it's in our field, but it's just hardwired into human nature totally to the negative. And then our culture just feeds it to us. Just give it, you know, if people are going to attend more to the negative, we'll just keep throwing negative at them because that is the best way to get advertising in front of our eyes or whatever it is, or to grab attention.

The hard part about that is that.

Our psychology, our wiring, our brains are designed around the environment of our ancestors. And.

Yeah, there were dangers, but.

For our ancestors and also for ourselves, when we're at our healthiest, good events in our day and benign experiences that are actually good, they're not empty.

Are way more frequent than bad things. It's just that the bad things scream at us and the good things just whisper.

And the reason the bad things need to scream at us is because they tend to be rare. Now, right now, they don't feel rare. They feel like it's a constant stream of bad stuff.

But that's not what our brains were designed for. They were designed to deal with. Good is the most common. And sometimes there's a bad thing. So you got to be really alert to that because that bad thing could kill you. And so you have to draw, you know, you have to give your attention to that. But the wisdom comes in knowing like, oh, that thing that's not dangerous for Me right now, I can turn my attention to something else. It's hard when we can't be kind of aware enough to disengage from after having the alarm go off.

You just pointed to something that is so important that I want to make sure that people take home. Because sometimes when we talk about the research around positive emotions and things like that, people sort of like roll their eyes and we'll get to this in a minute about where we've gotten in society with toxic positivity. People probably heard about that and social media and places like that. But um, people kind of roll their eyes and think like, okay, you just want me to pretend like everything is good and everything's not good. But what you pointed out was so perfect that negative experiences are actually less common, yet we focus on them so much more. So as a baseline, just doing nothing, just being a human being with a mind, you're operating in a biased fashion. You're paying more attention to the things that happen less often and, and less attention to the things that are happening more often. So when we cultivate this notion of focusing a bit more on our positive emotions or developing that habit that you mentioned, what we're doing is unbiasing our thinking a little bit more. We're balancing it more from its typical biased way of moving through the world. I didn't want people to miss that because sometimes people think like, oh, you're just asking me to pretend the world is all perfect. And that's not at all what you're saying, right?

It's actually notice what the world is.

There's two asymmetries between the positive and the negative. The one is the negativity bias that it negative events and experiences just command your attention. The other is, you know, I mentioned it a little bit. Positive events are more frequent. That's a separate asymmetry. One is about intensity and the other or the demand for attention, and the other is about the frequency. So when we talk about needing more positive emotions in our day to be healthy, nobody's talking about, you know, kicking up your heels like a leprechaun on the top of a sunset hill. That's the picture we always get of joy, you know, that there's just some really extreme, you know, able bodied joy that, you know, only certain people can reach. And we're talking about just like, oh, take a break and look at the bird, you know, or just very small, mild and fleeting things. That's what drives well being and health. It's not the intensity, it's just the Finding and recognizing and appreciating the, the, the everydayness and the mild versions, that's what's most important.

That's so good. You know, in psychology there's a lot of schools of thought. Definitely cognitive behavioral therapy talks about it and others, other related theories. But we look at the interconnectedness or even cyclical nature of things like emotions, thoughts and behaviors. They almost feed off of one another. Can you talk a little bit about that cycle or that, that interconnectedness of thoughts, emotions and behaviors and how positive emotions can play into that?

Yeah, yeah. No, there's really important and classic work that comes out of the cognitive behavioral approach on downward spirals. So think of it as you're feeling depressed and down. You become more pessimistic. You think that good things aren't going to happen and then that makes you more depressed and down. It's like you're, you have the feeling, you now interpret the world negatively and it makes you more, you know, there's also kind of shame spirals. Like I'm awful. I now see this is evidence that I'm awful and it makes me feel even more awful about myself. So those spirals, downward spirals are very real. The thing that cognitive behavioral therapy originally missed is that Seligman was adamant of saying this is not positive thinking, it's non negative thinking. And that missed the opportunity of seeing that positive emotions can be the escape hatch from these downward spirals and they actually fuel through similar dynamics between feeling and thought and behavior. Upward spirals. But I want to just emphasize that it's not the mirror opposite. It's not like there's just down.

And up because there's other things that differ about them.

Positive emotions broaden our awareness. That helps us see more interconnectedness with other people. Interconnectedness, like seeing yourself as part of the bigger picture. And so, and negative emotions narrow our attention and get us to focus just on like, I've got to survive, it's just about me. And so the downward spiral is, is insular. It's, it insulates you from other people. So it's not only down and narrow, it's alone. You're, you're, you're, you're down, you're, you've got tunnel vision and you think your problems are unique to you.

And so what happens on the upward spiral with, because broadening and narrowing are so fundamentally different. The, the.

The upward spiral is like, hey, this is good. And my kind of good is just like you're kind of good. And maybe we could enjoy this Together. And so there's more openness.

And socialness to that upward spiral and more ways to see yourself as part of something larger. That's how you get from positive emotions to bigger sense of meaning and self transcendence or just even just seeing yourself as not the most important thing in the universe. Whereas when you're feeling negative in that downward spiral, it's like, you know, I'm the only one who's ever had to deal with this.

Yeah.

A really nice escape hatch into the upward spiral can be to just remind, you know, if you hear yourself saying, you know, I alone suffer in this way. There's a. I can't remember the particular.

Label on this Buddhist technique, but it's like, you know, may I and everybody else who's having an argument with their spouse right now, may we all feel better or find our way out, you know, so you see yourself as part of the legions of millions of people who happen to be having a relationship conflict at this moment. You know, everybody's suffering a little bit. May we all find our way out. So it's kind of wishing yourself well, but everybody else who's got a similar problem, you know, and seeing, I mean, that's a key insight or practice within self compassion, seeing your problems as human.

Problems, that common humanity. Yeah, that's so good. You know, you're really highlighting things that are very protective. Right. Social connectedness is very protective. Our ability to balance our thinking, broaden our attention and almost intentionally control where that attention goes. There's such a protective nature to positive emotions. And I want to make sure that we make this link very intentional here about the link between positive emotions and that protective nature and how they relate to what we're here for, for the summit, resilience and coping. So can you talk a little bit about that link?

Right. So there's all kinds of ways that positive emotions through this broadened awareness help put us on trajectories of growth. We become better versions of ourselves. One is more socially connected. And we know that we need to not only have people that we can support lean on in hard times, but just as a basic baseline level, if we don't feel like we're around friendly people, we're vigilant and on guard. And that leads to a whole physiology that's not good for us. Long term chronic inflammation and all the diseases of inflammation in part could stem from people just feeling like it's not safe here.

So there's a constant vigilance. So creating community where you feel safe and that people are friendly and that you can count on people, whether it's in your workplace or your, your neighborhood. That's, that's. Those are super important things. They don't just happen automatically.

It takes investment. But that's not investment, like saying, I want to build community here. Let's be a community. You build it by having good experiences together. You know what I mean? You don't, you can't earn somebody's trust by saying, you have to trust me. Right. They learn to trust you by experience. So these things are built indirectly through experience. And so one way that we build up those resources is, and resilience is through just living our lives and experiencing plenty of positive emotions. Resilience comes through that because resilience means you have enough resources to deal with everyday ups and downs. Having very few resources makes us brittle, makes us less likely to be able to bounce back after hard times. So, you know, one definition of resilience is having, you know, being resourceful, being able to generate resources for yourself. Yeah. Either through connection or through your own practices. So, I mean, resilience is certainly an important.

Topic, and scientifically it's been studied in so many different ways. I like to define it as flexible use of personal and social resources.

That's so good. And you know that you mentioned something before that is key here. You talked about, you know, when we don't have some of those protective factors. So, for example, we don't have, maybe not even physically around us, but we don't have that feeling of that true deep support network around us. We can start to feel like the world isn't safe, which triggers a set of, you know, physiological responses. The danger here is that we don't necessarily experientially feel any of those little drops in the bucket of those physiological responses until they've all added up to a very large problem that manifests in some type of illness or some type of catastrophic event, heart attacks and other things like that we don't realize until then. So what you're talking about is the importance of. I'm going to go back to the word you used before cultivating this habit over time, knowing that you know what you're doing is staving off some of that, even though you might not be feeling it right in the moment as it's happening, those small contributions to this feeling that the world isn't safe. So what you're doing is avoiding adding any of those small drops to that bucket and keeping yourself in a position where you can approach the world much more flexibly. Effectively. And I mean, dare I say with a lot more joy than, you know, if you feel like you don't have those factors around you. So I think that's really important for people to realize is that the downside of this can be happening, even though you might not even experience it necessarily when it's happening.

Right. And, you know, if we're wise and we don't think, oh, all I have to do is feel good, so I'm going to take a lot of drugs and drink a lot of alcohol and just ride roller coasters all day. I mean, if we kind of keep our wits about us as we.

Strive for, you know, authentic, contextually appropriate, healthy, positive emotions, then we can use that feeling of feeling good and relaxed and safe, of knowing we're on the right track for health. I mean, sometimes I have people ask me, oh, is there, you know, which biofeedback thing can I get on my watch that'll tell me that, you know, I'm in the right track? Like, nature has its own biofeedback. It's called emotions. If we develop our mindfulness of our emotions, that's what you need to pay attention to more than what your watch tells you your heart rate variability is or whatever. So that's exactly why the feeling part of emotions is there, is to serve as our guide. Like, more of this, less of that.

Yeah, there's a really scary rabbit hole that I'm going to dip my toe in and then hopefully avoid going completely down. But what you're mentioning there around, like, devices. And we have a device that tells us whether we are tired that day. Am I tired today? I don't know. Let me check my device. We have devices that tell us whether, you know, we're in a calm state. I better check this. And it's funny because all of these things serve to take our focus and push it externally on a device versus internally on the experience we're having, the emotion we're having, how our body feels. How does the rhythm of my body feel right now? Do I feel rested? You know, we just. We focus completely on these external things, and that's a whole rabbit hole. We could go down for probably an hour in itself.

Yeah. And it's. It's remarkable how little we trust ourselves. Yeah, we'd rather, you know, offload that. That. I don't know, that judgment, you know, so. Yeah, I'm with you on that. You know, my kids always, you know, laughing about how they have an app to tell them whether it's daylight.

Yeah, right.

I Totally agree. I love it. Something we touched on earlier. I want to make sure we actually have an intentional conversation about this because you hear about it a lot in social media. Other places is this relatively new term that we've come up with as a society called toxic positivity. So, hey, and I feel like this is one of those places where this term and this notion has come up in some of the, like, self help, personal development space that isn't as grounded in research and evidence. You hear about toxic positivity, we hear about how we're just supposed to only focus on the positive, just ignore the negative things, just have a more positive thought. How is that different from what you're talking about? And how do we truly get the benefit of what you're talking about versus just sort of paying lip service to it in this, like, fake, sort of contrived way.

Right, right. You know, this is. I kind of put it under the heading of a little knowledge about positive psychology can be a dangerous thing.

Yeah.

When people hear the word positivity, then they think this is about forcing yourself to think positively. And so, you know, one thing that you know feels like nails on a chalkboard for me. I study emot is people saying, oh, you study positive thinking. I'm like, no, I don't. I study positive emotions. These are very different things. Positive thinking might be a springboard for positive emotion, or it just might be something you're forcing through your brain in a very insincere way. So whether positive thinking has benefit or not is probabilistic as to whether it actually produces a positive emotion that infuses mind and body.

Emotions are by definition a mind and body experience.

They alter our thinking, our perception, but they also alter our physiology. The way we carry ourselves, the way we move through the world.

The reason that we have.

The need, it's a really important need for the word toxic positivity is to be able to see the difference between, you know, it's not always just like, I'm going to pretend I'm feeling good for other people's benefits. That's sort of like the early work by.

Sociologist Arlie Hochschild on.

Emotional labor. Like flight attendants have to.

Yeah, yep.

Reject a certain emotion so that other people aren't afraid of flying. You know, at the beginning, people were afraid of flying. So if the flight attendants acted happy, it would be easier. You know, so that gets overdone and it is a cause of burnout and. And such. So having to present one emotion when you feel another is one form of dissembled or. Or. Or.

Inauthentic positive emotions. Another one is what you might just call wishful thinking. Like, yeah, I really want to be a positive, happy person, so I'm going to force myself to always fake it till you make it. Yeah. And. Or never allow myself to go down that path of thinking about a problem. Or if anybody raises something negative, I change the topic, you know, or something. Some kind of like, no negativity here mantra, which is, you know, it's just completely unrealistic. And it's why.

Why we need this word to be able to distinguish between this.

Kind of unskilled use of positive.

Yeah.

Thinking or positive emotions.

And being able to separate that out from the authentic, contextually appropriate, mild positive emotion that is fuel for growth and wellness. Now, the problem is if people think positivity as a whole is toxic and we have to throw it all out. That, I think is like, well, have a good life if you want to do that. That sounds awful, right? So it's like, you know, it's to your own peril that you throw it all out. You do need to be able to discern the. The genuine from the. From the fake.

Yeah.

And we've always needed to do that because there's deception in the world. I mean, you know, you walk into. There's all kinds of. Of ways of. Of using positive emotions in your work if you're in sales. Right. And some of it is really genuine. It's like, hey, I have to be here selling this stuff. I want to enjoy my day, so I'm going to connect with the people that I'm working with. You can tell when it's a genuine, like, I just want to strike up a conversation. Otherwise, this. This job is just painfully boring versus somebody who's like, wow, that color looks so good on you. You know, doing it. And you're like, okay, please stop. You know, just. I just want to look at some things here. And, you know, sometimes it's a. It could be a mix of both, but we have for decades used positive emotions as a sales technique.

Yeah.

And so we don't trust other people's smiles in certain contexts because we think there that that smile is manipulative. That smile is to get me to open my wallet. That smile is to try to change my opinion of this. You know, so we. We had long ago, well before the term toxic positivity. We've become skeptical of other people's smiles in. Especially in the context of outside of relationships and in the marketplace and things. So which Is sad. You know, it's. It's like I feel like you there, you know, there's movement sometimes to take back the night. Like, let's be able to enjoy nighttime as a safety place. I feel like we should take back the smile. Yeah, as, as something about, you know, genuine friendly connection and not. Yeah, all these other meanings layered on top of it. But.

The other. The lesson from the science, though, is I've, you know, I've spent a good portion of my career trying to see what do positive emotions do if you are able to generate them. How do they change the way the brain works? How do they change the way the body works? How does it change the way people connect? Seeing them in their kind of natural habitat and seeing the benefits that they have. That's one whole area of positive psychology that is kind of the basic science. Taking that and saying, here's an intervention that will help you. You can't just jump from one to the other. You need to figure out the science around the interventions.

So it's basically knowing that positive emotions do good things, tell you nothing about how should I best cultivate one when there's none around me seemingly, you know, or if I'm depressed or so on. So we have to realize that those are different questions. And so we need an equally good science testing. Well, what if people try to bring it into their lives this way? Learning to value positive emotions is one thing and then learning how to best cultivate them is another. But one of the things I think is.

Actually more at our fingertips than we.

Make use of is that many of us know what to do to make ourselves feel good. We have hobbies, we have favorite relatives and friends to call. We have favorite places in nature or, you know, like, oh, if I take time to dance, I'll know I'll enjoy that. But we just don't give ourselves time to do those things. We're so busy. Achieve, achieve, achieve, achieve. Or, or, you know, watch this, watch this, watch this. And just, you know.

It'S, it's. We're not. We tend not to prioritize the things that would bring us the most positive emotions emotion in a day. It's because we as a culture undervalue our, our feeling states.

And we think it's irrelevant what we feel as long as we do something.

Or as long as we achieve something, or as long as someone thinks this about me, it doesn't matter what I actually feel, you know, so we tend to prioritize all these things over inner experience and that.

What I hope people get out of the science that I like to share is that.

We'Ve lost sight of. We need to also prioritize how we feel. Not to the point where we think we always have to feel good, but that sometimes we should feel good and that's okay. And that's an investment in our resilience and well being and you know, and if you have to tell yourself, well, I'll be a better parent if I take care of myself in this way, I'll be a better teacher, I'll be a better boss, I'll be a better teammate, you know, if you need to not. I mean, people think of it as selfish is the problem. Self absorbed and so kind of being able to convince yourself. Actually it's better for everybody else if I can get some insight around this.

Yeah, there's an interesting scale. Scott Barry Kaufman, I think he actually created the scale. It's a pathological altruism scale. And it gets at exactly what you're talking about where we are altruistic to other people to the point. To our own detriment, to the point that we aren't taking care of ourselves anymore. And then there's a flip scale.

He calls it healthy selfishness and it's, it's really great. Anyway, just wanted to throw out there in case anybody wants to do some googling after we're done.

Earlier you talked about cultivating trust in our relationships and we started talking about the importance of other people in this experience of positive emotions.

I'd love it if you could talk a little bit about positive emotions that we experience just on our own. Maybe when we're engaging in a hobby that is a solo activity versus those that we experience with other people in conjunction with other people.

Yeah, I think this is something that our western approach to psychology is really missed a lot of is that we think of emotions as belonging to a person. It's like my happiness, your anger. And.

The most impactful positive emotions we're finding in the research we've been doing in the last decade or so is showing us are those that we collaboratively experience with others to the point where you can't really say this is your positive emotion that this person is catching. It's really actually belongs to the, to the two or three or the group that's experiencing it. I tend to talk about it in terms of two people because it's just easier linguistically. But this can be experienced in groups.

The jargon phrase I use for is positivity resonance because the positivity is resonating between people and it actually reverberates and grows a little bit and becomes a little longer and a little larger because we're feeling it together and we know that if we smile and we see someone else smile, it makes us smile bigger and a little longer and you know, so we can kind of feel that reverberation of resonance sometimes.

Sometimes we call it chemistry, sometimes we call it we really clicked. And that.

Is a way of connecting that.

Really comes forth when people are present together physically, you know, real time sensory connection. You can get proxies of it this way with a video call a little bit when we pay really close attention. But it's, it's hard, you know, it's a little bit of the information that we need in our brains to be able to catch someone's motions comes through, but not at like full volume. Like being in person.

I think we all experienced that these last few years. I think that resonates with people. Like it hasn't been the same, right?

No, it's. I like to think that, you know, whenever I have a full day on Zoom, I end up being completely exhausted. And I feel like it's in part because normally a day could be just as long, just as many meetings, but if they're in person, you're getting some fuel from that engagement that you. That's, it's, that's what's missing. We're not getting refueled through our connection, we're just using fuel.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? In that sense. So yeah, it's like when we think what is it that, why isn't this as good? You know, it's, it's. That's, this is exactly what's missing is the amplification of these co experienced positive emotions.

And we, what we found is that above and beyond the positive emotions that you feel individually, it's these collaboratively experienced positive states that are most related to physical health, to pro sociality or being a better community member. And in the early months of COVID we found that that predicted the degree to which people honored social distance and wore masks, even if we control for political ideology, that people were more concerned with others and to the extent that they had experienced more positive uplift together with others. So we become better people, better community members, healthier, happier, more resilient. When we have more of this in our day. And.

You know, and it's more about quality than quantity. So it's not like you have to have.

The whole day full of connection, all connection, all, all day. You know, I'm A. I'm a very extreme introvert. And I had a day like that yesterday, which is like one of my feud days back in 2022, because of Omicron, I kind of hid out at home. So I was back on campus, had meetings all day. Every meeting was fun and wonderful, but at the end of the day, I'm like, oh, God, yeah, speak. I don't want, you know, I can't have a conversation anymore.

No more eye contact. I can't do it.

But. So it doesn't have to be nonstop. But we find that if you have at least a handful of moments of quality connection within a day, that predicts resilience, mental health, physical health. We just had a paper come out to show that in long term marriages where there's more shared positivity that has even biological signature synchrony, part of it, and nonverbal synchrony as part of it, those individuals are living longer. You know, we've tracked them over 30 years and we find that this is a better predictor than marital satisfaction.

Wow.

Because part of marital satisfaction, I think, is what people want to feel in their marriage, whereas what we're capturing is what they actually do feel. So there's not a not. This wasn't based on self report. And it's, it's not, you know, it's like, it's like the, the genuine, authentic, contextually appropriate positive emotions. The things that, if you're able to cultivate that with your partner, it's good for both of you.

Yeah, we can totally see that. You know, I feel like we have this opportunity to almost send people on their way today with some practical ideas. You know, we're here for this summit to help build our individual, collective, global resilience. And I'm curious if you have thoughts about practices we can implement, habits that we can develop that can get us started so that, you know, we can begin to cultivate some of these outcomes that we've talked about throughout our conversation.

Yeah. I think the most important starting point is to realize that it's worthwhile that. That it's worthwhile taking time to plan your day in a way that includes some opportunities for.

Feeling replenished by nature, or taking time for an activity you consider to be spiritual or, or rejuvenating, like meditation, and especially taking time to connect with people. We find, especially that when people connect with strangers and acquaintances or co workers, that the quality of those connections really is impactful. And, you know, people know how to connect and know how to do all these things. It's just that we just.

De. Emphasize them, think they're not important, think they're trivial. And so the very first part is to realize, no, this is essential. This is like eating my fruits and vegetables. You know, this is, you know, just part of my basic diet has to include these things. And once we kind of develop an allegiance to caring about our health in this way, our mental health.

Then it's much easier to, to unleash these activities. You know, these just approaches. The main thing is that there's no one activity that's going to work for everybody. It's so personalized.

Can I just call out the gratitude journal right now? Like, it might work for you, but it might not. And if it doesn't, actually you're like into that contrived positive thing that we talked about before, not knocking them. But. But does it actually work for you individually?

Yeah. So. But if you, if you realize, oh, the magic isn't in the activity, it's exactly the emotion.

Yes.

That if you train your eye to look at the emotions and mindfulness practice can help with this, then you can notice when, oh, I've been doing this thing because people said it would work, but it doesn't make me feel good or it feels kind of empty, then give it up and do something else, you know?

You know, it's, you need to find what makes your own heart, you know, come alive and your own face kind of warm into a smile. And so it really is a matter of learning yourself and where those sources of replenishment will come from. And then, and then just know that that's super important. Don't, don't let that go in your day. And if the pandemic taught us anything and all the mental health tsunami that came after that is we need self care. We need to learn self care so much better and practice so much better than we have because we can't be of value to others like we want to be if we can't get out of bed in the morning, if we can't keep our own motivation going. So it's part of what we need to do to make an impact in the world is take care of ourselves.

So good. Barbara, where can people learn more about you, about the peplab, about all of the amazing work you're doing?

Yeah, my lab website has access to all of, all of our scientific papers, and that is positiveemotions1word.org or the peplab at University of North Carolina. That'll get you there too. And then I have websites that go along with both of my books. I'll give you the one for the second book Love 2.0 which talks about the collaboratively experience positive emotions because it has positive more resources that is positivity resonance one word.com so positivityresonance.com the the book Love 2.0 it's not about romance. It's about these, you know, everyday co experience positive emotions. And the research that we've done in the 10 years since that book first came out is just continue to reinforce the points in there almost to the point where I was like I should write a new version of it but publishers don't like that thing. Yeah, yeah.

Like come on, let's move on to the next thing. This is so great. This was such a needed insightful conversation particularly after the last couple of years that we've had. But I mean almost as a way of looking forward about what we're going to do with our lives, with our practices, with our self care moving forward from this point. So just want to say thank you for the work you're doing and for taking time out to be with us and be part of the summit because it's just so impactful to get really good information out to people that we know will actually make an impact in their life. So thank you so much.

Yeah, and I appreciate that you're pulling this together because it's one thing to do the work, but then if it never gets out to the broader audiences like you're bringing it, you know, boy, we need that. So thank you.

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