Happiness is: Remembering the Good Times
Many years ago, when I worked as a therapist on an inpatient psych unit, I ran a Positive Psychology group for some of our patients.
It was a group I’d run many times before and this particular topic involved remembering and savoring positive moments of your life and using them as a way to anchor into a feeling of joy in the present.
It’s a skill that doesn’t always come naturally to people, but it can be incredibly powerful and effective once you get the hang of it.
The interesting thing about this group is that depending on the participants, it turned out one of two ways:
Either they’d be able to connect to a good memory and appreciate it for what it was
OR they would become lost in and overwhelmed by the fact that it “wasn’t happening now”
Even more interesting is that no matter how well I knew the patients, it was impossible to predict how they’d respond on any given day and I always had to be prepared for it to go poorly.
But even in those moments where the reaction wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be, I still knew it was an important concept to introduce them to: The idea that recalling positive memories is a skill you can learn that will support mood regulation (Joormann, Siemer, and Gotlib, 2007).
You see, the way we cultivate feelings of happiness isn’t just dependent on what is currently going on in our lives.
Happiness can also be sourced from the joys and blessings of the past as well as the things we hope for in the future.
People who struggle with depression and anxiety spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what has gone wrong or what could go wrong, rather than training their brains to remember times went things went well.
I remember in the depths of my own struggle with depression, one of my favorite ways to boost my mood was to write down a “Positive Memory List.” This was well before I knew this was an actual psychological intervention, but I just naturally knew that thinking about the good times felt better than dwelling in my own sadness and negativity.
Here’s the thing: I know that difficult things happen in life. I know that unfair, cruel, and downright tragic things happen.
But we get to choose how much of our mindset we will devote to how sh*tty the present moment feels or whether we will do ourselves a favor and even for a minute remember a time when things were better.
This simple act of remembering better times helps us get in touch with different parts of our brain. It gets us out of a negativity bias where the worse things get the more we just see what’s wrong. And it helps us access a sense of hope that not only makes us feel better in the moment, but can also give us access to possibilities we hadn’t considered.
It doesn’t mean we ignore, gloss over, or minimize what’s happening in the moment, it just means that as an act of self-care and preservation we decide not to let the dark times completely swallow us.
So in between the hard moments, in between the tears or the frustration or the worry and doubt, give yourself the gift of remembering a time when things weren’t as bad.
Remember an incredible vacation you once took, your first kiss with your spouse, a memorable hike you took in the woods one summer, or the joy of curling up by the fire with a cup of cocoa and a good movie on a snowy night’s eve.
You get to decide the quality of your inner world, so do yourself a favor and strengthen your some of your happiness skills, starting with remembering the good times.