Promoting resilience and wellbeing

  Are any of these statements familiar to you? “I used to love ...... but I just don’t have time anymore” “I really enjoyed…... but then we had children” “I used to spend hours doing ……. I can’t remember why I stopped” These statements are very familiar to me but interestingly not very familiar for my children.   Our children are innately good at finding what psychologists call ‘FLOW’.   This elusive state of engagement where our sense of time fades away and we are totally absorbed in whatever we are doing.   Susan Perry, a sociologist defines flow as “the word most often used to describe the state of mind that occurs when we are so deeply engaged in some activity that time seems to stop”, to embody this state we need to feel challenged enough but not so challenged that we experience frustration and ultimately want to stop.   It is essentially the sweet spot between too easy and too difficult.    With children you can observe this phenome...

  Now it will be no surprise to anyone that experiencing positive emotions lead to a happier life with greater wellbeing.   But this is only half the story. Barbara Fredrickson, an eminent researcher in this field, has discovered something amazing.   Essentially when we experience positive emotions our brains literally start working in a different gear.    We can take in more information, we become more sociable and our capacity to learn increases.   This is why some days learning is so much easier than others and why our little and big people are so much more receptive to new ideas or information when they are in a positive emotional state.  Barbara calls this the broaden and build theory, positive emotions broaden our thinking ability and we can use this ability to build new skills.  So how do we support more positive emotion in our households? One simple way is gratitude - paying attention to the things we are grateful for. For more than a...

  The other day someone described themselves army crawling through their life - they were without question surviving – they went to work every day, they got their children on the school bus, they filed their taxes and they managed to keep their household up and running.   This is a familiar circumstance for many of us, we get so consumed with just getting through the day we almost forget to look up and take stock of how we are living out lives. In psychology we often talk about the mental health curve which was originally developed by Huppert in 2005 and beautifully illustrated here by Emma Hepburn.      This curve helps us to appreciate that our mental health exists on a continuum, sometimes we are ahead and sometimes we are just trying to stay afloat. For a very long time the field of psychology was primarily interested in the in the left-hand side of this curve, researching, classifying and treating those who were struggling with significant mental ...