Learning to bring us happiness, knowing what to do to feel good, is tremendously valuable knowledge, but it is seldom taught in a structured and purposeful way.
Generally, people learn to manage our emotions and moods unintentionally, from the way we observe that their first caregivers, usually our parents, handled theirs. Thus, we learned to explode in anger at problems, to collapse with sadness at the losses that life inevitably entails, or to react calmly to the circumstances that are presented to us trying to learn from our experiences by putting "in bad weather, good face."
The quality of our life, the degree of satisfaction and well-being that we experience daily has to do, not with the fact of having or not having problems, sorrows or adversities, but with our ability to manage our internal experience. By internal experience I mean the way we live, how we interpret the events that occur day by day in our lives. Already in the first century of our era, Epictetus, a Greek philosopher, preached that "it is not the things themselves that worry us, but the interpretation we make of them."
Thus, bearing in mind that a very important aspect of the emotions we experience have to do with the interpretations we make of what happens to us on a daily basis, knowing how to build more positive interpretations, training ourselves to look at things looking for their light, not their darkness, is key.
We now know, based on the results of many investigations in Positive Psychology, that people who usually elaborate more positive interpretations of their life experiences construct them in a very different way from those who make them in a more negative and pessimistic way.
Pessimists often interpret adverse life events as more lasting, affecting all areas of their lives, and attribute their occurrence to themselves.
People with a more negative view often look at things in terms of black or white. There are no half measures. They tend to amplify the impact of whatever happens to them by magnifying it, and as a consequence they often feel powerless to deal with it. However, these styles of interpretation of experiences are nothing more than explanatory patterns that have been acquired at some point and, having practiced them countless times, have become automatic. They constitute what Martin Seligman, one of the creators of Positive Psychology, calls "negative explanatory guidelines." They are learned patterns and therefore can also be unlearned.
As of today, we can teach people to become more optimistic and to live with more hope. Language and thought management techniques have already been developed that lead people to create a more positive outlook on life. We know that optimism is something that is learned and therefore can be taught. Like any habit, changing our explanatory guidelines will require not only knowing what to change and how to change it, but constant practice until the new explanatory style has been internalized and automated.
Well-being is not something that just happens to us. It is something that can be sought. Today Psychology has advanced and we already have the tools and procedures to make us responsible for feeling good and experiencing a better quality of life.
