10 Top tips for keeping up morale

Many of us are having to manage more anxiety than normal, as well as drastic changes in our daily lives. There are two key principles which it is useful to bear in mind: Managing anxiety takes mental strength and energy, and, that the state of our morale affects the state of our immune system. (At this point I have to say this doesn’t mean that anyone who becomes ill wasn’t positive enough. Absolutely not. Rather just that we know that keeping our spirits up is important to supporting our immune system. It’s not a guarantee of perfect health!)

Bearing these two key things in mind, here are ten tips for managing anxiety and keeping your spirits up

1.      Count your blessings

The new science of positive psychology has proved the benefits of the old adage of, when you are feeling low, counting your blessings. The exercise they have designed is known as the ‘three good things’ exercise. At the end of each day, identify three good things that have happened during the day. It’s good practice to write them down. Doing this regularly helps train your brain to look for the positives amongst the gloom, to find the silver linings if you like. For instance today in the paper there was a report on the positive effect of the lockdown for wildlife.

2.      Reasons to be cheerful

In addition, you might like to think each day of a good outcome of the current crisis- a reason to be cheerful. I’ve been doing this and putting them out on twitter. Today mine is going to be: Lockdown means chance of being hit by a bus – zero!

3.      Gallows humour

Which brings me to my next tip, the use of humour, specifically ‘gallows’ humour. I worked as a social worker in child protection for many years. Gallows humour was crucial for getting us through the sadder and tougher times. It exists for a reason. To make the unbearable bearable, to restore functionality quickly when a collapse into despair isn’t helpful. Be aware it doesn’t travel; it is very specific to the moment. And some people appreciate it more than others. Laughing in the face of death is a well-known coping mechanism, it works for me in small doses. Laughter reduces threats to size.

4.      Humour generally

There is lots of evidence that laughing is good for us and for our immune system. Whatever rocks your funny bone. Remember, this all may be no laughing matter, but, also, we don’t have to be solemn to be serious. Laughing is a good coping mechanism

5.      Managing your news feed

We are being offered 24-hour, worldwide updates. Following all this is not likely to do you any good. You can’t influence things other than by taking the sensible precautions we’ve all been told about. So take positive control and  limit your daily diet. Personally I read the paper rather than watch the news. One benefit of this is that there is less ‘emotional contagion’ from the page than from a person, so less transmission of anxiety. I listen to classic FM rather than my usual preference of Radio Four. I leave the room when dear beloved is getting his evening fix of doom and gloom from the evening TV news.

6.      Have a worry half-hour

This is a time-honoured technique of ‘allowing’ yourself a specific allotted time to worry as much as you like. So if you need to, spend 15 to 30 minutes allowing yourself to name all your worries. Write them in a ‘dear diary’ if you have no one at home. Or arrange a mutual strictly focused and time limited phone call with another ‘worrywart’. And when your time is up, stop, close that box and move on with your day knowing you have another half hour of worry time allocated tomorrow. With any luck doing this will reduce the likelihood of doing your worrying in the small wee hours, which is the worst possible time to do it.

7.      Get into flow

Find things to do that ‘take you out of yourself’. When we are completely absorbed in things we are in a state of ‘flow’ and when we are in this state we are not focused on our feelings. It’s like getting a holiday from your worried self. For me writing, gardening, and complicated cooking (or these days ‘creating from what we have got to hand’) all offer me productive escape time. This is usually more effective than mindless TV watching (where half your brain is still ticking along thinking about it all). A good, complex film though, is a different matter.

8.      Eat well and exercise

You are no longer at the mercy of the snack bars, train trolleys, airline catering etc. as you skedaddle from one place to another. Make the most of it to eat healthily. Lots of fruit and vegetables are good for immune system. Exercise is very important to both mental and physical health. You know the rules about keeping your distance. Put your face mask on and get out there and yomp for an hour somewhere green.

9.      Phone a friend

Social contact is another thing that is very important to our wellbeing. I am fortunate that I am marooned with dear beloved. Even so, I am resolved to talk on the phone to at least one person who isn’t him every day. You might want to talk about the situation, that’s fine. However, I would suggest you also ask them about their plans for the day, what they are hoping to achieve during this period of lockdown. In other words, try to help them see a silver lining. Ideally you will both come away from the phone call feeling slightly better not even worse!

10.  Have longer-term projects on the go

‘Wise people’, someone once said ‘prepare for the worse while hoping for the best’. Once you’ve done what you can to prepare for the worse, then turn your energy to hoping for the best. Starting projects suggests an optimism about the future that becomes self-reinforcing. Uncertainty can act to paralyse us. By pro-actively starting a project we can break out of that paralysis. The hardest part is getting started, but one you do it will draw you forward. Apart from total house rearrangement, I’ve started a new tapestry kit. These take me years to complete. But every evening I can admire the couple of square inches I’ve completed and feel I’m making progress.

And finally, I try to remind myself that, while Coronavirus is a new and scary threat, we live with our mortality all the time and habitually take precautions to increase our chances of staving it off. I cross at the lights, I avoid eating bad food, I get my flu jab,  etc. None of these guarantee my continued survival but they are habits that help. Our new temporary habits of social distancing, hand washing are really just more of the same.

Oh and chocolate! A little bit of chocolate with morning coffee just gives my morale a quick boost!

Stay well,

Sarah

Love the money, hate the job? The effect of bulls**t jobs on happiness

Money for old rope - so why am I exhausted?

Many of us have noticed  a strange paradox but been unable to put a name to it. We believe that a job that doesn’t demand too much of us should mean we have plenty of energy left over for our real interests. Furthermore, we anticipate that if that job not only doesn’t demand much of us but also pays us very well, then we should experience happiness: we have beaten the system! We are being paid for doing practically nothing, what could be a better arrangement?

And yet, after an initial sense of triumph, it can slowly become apparent that the logic - lots of money for little work equals happiness and a fulfilled life  - doesn’t work out. Instead we feel, well, that something isn’t right. That despite the income we aren’t happy at work.

This leaves us caught in a trap: we feel we would be fools to leave such a great sinecure. And so we struggle on, wondering what is wrong with us that we can’t make the most of this; that after work we don’t spring into life as the artist, writer, dressmaker we know ourselves to be at heart; rather that we slump in front of the TV apparently exhausted after doing next to nothing all day. We grind through the endless days of non-work trying to look busy. We wonder why what should be great, and is the envy of friends slowing burning out in the caring professions, feels so awful, indeed, soul destroying. It seems there is a cost to taking the money without feeling we are really delivering value in return.

The Graeber hypothesis

David Graeber has put a name to this particular employment conundrum. He calls the jobs with these characteristics that produce these unexpected outcomes, ‘bull**t jobs’. A bullshit job is one that essentially has no meaning either to the job holder, nor, seemingly, to the wider world. It adds no perceptible value to life. As he says:

“Be honest: if your job didn't exist, would anybody miss it? Have you ever wondered why not? Up to 40% of us secretly believe our jobs probably aren't necessary. In other words: they are bulls**t jobs.”

This interesting book is highly recommended. It’s an easy with read with lots of quotes from those in bulls**t jobs. He goes on to offer an interesting analysis of the rise and proliferation of these jobs since the 1980s and the growing of the bulls**tisation of other, previously unaffected and otherwise meaningful jobs, such as teaching.

Thinking of ourselves as  rational economic actors the trap we find ourselves in makes no sense, and so we can’t resolve it.

Your job should seem necessary, if only to you

However, it makes perfect sense from a positive psychology perspective. From work in this field we know that meaningfulness is important to engagement and wellbeing at work. We also know that the boundaries between work and outside work are highly permeable and how we are in one sphere of life will affect how we are in other spheres of life. In other words the draining effect of a bulls**t job will adversely affect our ability to be energised at other times.

Pondering this, I related David’s theory to a model about the value of work from Christopher Michaelson, who suggests that the value can be arranged across two dimensions. He argues that work can offer a high intrinsic value i.e. feel  valuable in itself; it can have an instrumental value, such as being well paid. From these two values we can construct a landscape on which to place different jobs.

As you can see below I have had a go at locating where bulls**t jobs fit on this model e.g. high in instrumental value (well paid), low in intrinsic value (pointless).  It appears they are located directly opposite to many caring jobs e.g. looking after the sick or vulnerable.

I am hopeful this understanding might help people caught in the trap of highly paid yet soul-destroying jobs. It helps make sense of the situation and facilitates a discussion about the kind of job that might be, not just bearable but actually engaging, and whether the cost of switching might be worth it 

What do you think?

References

Graeber, D. (2018) Bullshit jobs: a theory. Allen Lane UK

Michaelson, C. (2013) The value(s) of work. In Froh, J. J., & Parks, A. C. (2013). Activities for teaching positive psychology: A guide for instructors. American Psychological Association.

Did you know: seeking happiness can make people unhappy?

While we recognise that in general happiness is a crucial ingredient of well-being and health, happiness is not valued to the same extent by everyone. For some people it is a ‘nice to have’ while for others it is the stuff of life, a state to which they constantly aspire. Goal pursuit theory suggests that if we value something and actively pursue it we should experience more of it. So if we value happiness and pursue it, so we should experience more of it.

However, there is a sting in the tail. The more highly we value something, the higher the standards are likely to be against which we evaluate our achievement of it. So, for instance, if I value academic excellence and strive hard to achieve it, I’m not going to be very satisfied with just a ‘pass’ grade – it hasn’t met my standards of a great mark.

Importantly, while my disappointment with my mark doesn’t change my mark, if my goal is to achieve happiness, my disappointment with the level of happiness I am experiencing DOES affect my level of happiness. To be disappointed is incompatible in the moment with feeling happy. Of course, expectations are context specific: most people don’t expect to feel happy at a funeral, but might well expect to feel happy at a party. 

If I’m at a party and DON’T, as I expected I would, feel happy, then I am likely to feel disappointed. And the feeling disappointed will lower my happiness. If I had not had any expectations of feeling happy then I wouldn’t feel disappointed by not feeling happy and, paradoxically, might actually feel happier than the disappointed person!

In other words, by valuing happiness very highly, and making it a goal and measure of value, we product the very circumstances that raise the likelihood of disappointment and adversely affect our chances of achieving happiness: The pursuit of happiness may cause decreased happiness.

Considering all this, Mauss, Tamir, Anderson and Savino (2011) concluded ‘that valuing happiness is not necessarily linked to greater happiness. In fact, under certain conditions the opposite is true. Under conditions of low (but not high) life stress, the more people valued happiness, the lower were their hedonic balance [ratio of positive to negative emotional states], psychological well-being, and life satisfaction, and the higher their depressive symptoms.’

In short, an overly focused pursuit of happiness is unlikely to lead to greater happiness. We need to recognize that we experience all sorts of emotions and while happiness can be encouraged by the way we live our lives it can’t be produced to order: it is not a guaranteed outcome of any activity. 

I wonder if the reported huge increase of reported depression in the world is in any way related to this strange paradox. Have we somehow, with our twenty-first century interest in and emphasis on happiness, raised expectations about how much happiness people should feel, maybe even to the extent that all non-happy feelings are experienced as strong failure and disappointment? My mother used to say to me ‘I don’t mind what you do (as a career she meant) as long as you are happy.’ For her happiness was the goal and measure of success. Even then I struggled to understand the advice as I didn’t understand how to ‘be happy’ I didn’t know what made me happy. Finding that out has been a life-long journey.

My father, conversely, pointed out to me long before it became a poster slogan, ‘happiness is a journey not a destination’, or to paraphrase John Lennon ‘Happiness happens while you are concentrating on something else,’ or finally my own thoughts: happiness is a happy by-product of the life lived and the choices made. 

This article is based on the research and article byMauss, Tamir, Anderson and Savino (2011) Can seeking happiness make people unhappy? Paradoxical effects of valuing happiness. Emotion, Vol 11, No. 4, 807-815

Does Happiness Contribute To Success? Reasons To Be Cheerful

While much research confirms that successful outcomes can foster happiness, it has tended to be seen as a one-way linear relationship: you have to be successful to be happy. But might it be more of a circular relationship? A virtuous circle where being happy makes it more likely you will succeed? In 2005 Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ed Diener and Laura King pulled together all the research they could find that addressed the question: does happiness contribute to success?

What does it mean to be happy?

Happy people are those who frequently experience positive emotions such as joy, interest and pride while they experience negative emotions such as sadness, anxiety and anger less frequently. It is this ratio of time spent in positive as opposed to negative moods that predicts those who define themselves as ‘happy people’. From other research we know that the ratio needs to be 3:1 or above to start to move us to describe ourselves as generally ‘happy’.

One suggestion is that happy people feel positive emotions more frequently because they are more sensitive to rewards in their environment. In other words, they find more reasons to be cheerful.

How might feeling happy help us succeed?

It seems that experiencing positive moods and emotions leads us to think, feel and act in ways that add to our resourcefulness and that helps us reach our goals. Positive emotions, it appears, are a signal to us that life is going well, that our goals are being met and our resources are adequate. Since all is going well, we feel we can spend time with friends, learn new skills, or relax and rebuild our energy reserves. We are also likely to seek out new goals, to plan a new project, or get started on booking that holiday for instance. We can compare this with when we are in a negative mood state, when our concern can become to protect our existing resources and to avoid being hurt or damaged in some way.

Lyubomirsky and colleagues reviewed 225 papers and found that feeling good is associated with things like, feeling confident and optimistic, feeling capable, sociability, seeing the best in others, activity and energy, helpfulness, immunity and physical wellbeing, effectively coping with challenge and stress and originality and flexibility. We can easily see how these would help with motivation and tenacity in achieving goals.

Some of their findings

1. Positive affect and job performance is bi-directional e.g. each affects the other
2. Happy people seem to be more successful at work, in their relationships and experience better health
3. Happy people set higher goals for themselves
4. Happy people are more willing to do things beyond the call of dut
5. Happy people are more successful across domains of marriage, friendship, income, work performance and health.

 So effectively yes, happiness does lead to success.

What does all this mean for us?

The key to happiness is frequent positive mood states that outweigh negative mood states by at least a 3:1 ratio. When we are happy good things are more likely to happen and we can generally cope with life better. To pro-actively manage our mood states is a good investment for us and our organizations.

Some questions to help you think how to use this information

How well do you know your mood boosters? How do you find reasons to be cheerful, and how do you help others to do that? How effectively do you build them into your daily, hourly-even life? How good are you at spotting when the ratio is slipping and finding a way to boost your mood?  How can you help others with this?

Lyubomirksy S, Diener E, and King L (2005) The Benefits of Positive Affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin Vol 131.No. 6. Pp 803-855

Other Resources

More on using Appreciative Inquiry and other positive psychology techniques at work can be found in Sarah’s book Positive Psychology at Work.

See more about Performance Management in the  Knowledge Warehouse.

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