How to cultivate a positive mindset

Olivia Remes is a mental health and well-being researcher at the University of Cambridge, author of This Is How You Grow After Trauma and a life coach. Her research has covered everything from assessing the prevalence of poor mental health in high-risk settings, such as the construction industry, to what helps women in disadvantaged circumstances reduce their risk of anxiety. Here, she recommends three evidence-based strategies for cultivating a healthier mindset: one that will boost your happiness, increase self-control and motivation, and help you reach your goals.

1. Do small things daily that exercise self-control

My team’s research at the University of Cambridge, as well as seminars and discussions with hundreds of people over the years, has consistently shown that a key component of well-being is self-control. Having self-control has been linked to feelings of calmness and ease, and greater feelings of life satisfaction. But what is self-control? Anytime you put in effort to think, behave or act in a certain way, you are using self-control. Not quitting when you find something difficult, or not stopping on a run when you feel the urge – they’re exercises in self-control. And self-control is like a muscle: the more you exercise it or use it, the stronger it gets.

There’s plenty of research to back up this idea. In one study, for example, researchers asked 69 people to do self-control tasks at the beginning of an experiment, such as squeezing a hand grip and not thinking of a polar bear for 5 minutes (once you’ve been asked not to think of a polar bear, it’s very hard to think of anything else – try it!). Similarly, squeezing a hand grip soon becomes tiring and your hands want to relax, but if you keep squeezing despite fatigue, then you are using self-control to do so.

After these initial tasks, the participants were divided into four groups and asked to spend two weeks performing exercises that required self-control. The first group was asked to maintain optimal posture as often as possible, the second group was asked to try to change their moods, while others had to keep detailed notes of their diet. The final group didn’t have to do anything. After the two-week period was over, everyone was asked to repeat the self-control tasks from the beginning of the experiment.

The participants who had done the daily self-control exercises for two weeks were better able to withstand the tiresome tasks from the beginning of the experiment compared to those in the control group. In other words, those who had engaged in a consistent activity for even a short period of time ended up having a greater capacity for self-control.

This suggests that whenever you do something repeatedly – even if it is difficult in the beginning – the consistent effort you put in can increase your overall self-control, and this greater inner strength can spill over to other, unrelated areas of your life.

2. Resist daydreaming

Try not to daydream. Research shows we can spend more than a third of our day thinking about things that are unrelated to the task at hand. There are some benefits to daydreaming, but Harvard researchers have shown that mind wandering is also a key cause of unhappiness. To arrive at this result, they used smartphones to monitor the thoughts and happiness levels of 2250 adults, and found that people’s minds wandered during almost any activity that they were involved in. Mind wandering also made participants feel less happy. Even when participants’ minds drifted to pleasant topics, they didn’t necessarily report feeling happier than remaining engaged with their current activity. However, when participants thought about something neutral or unpleasant, they felt substantially unhappier. So it turns out that thinking about something else instead of the task at hand can stand in the way of happiness.

Daydreaming can lead to rumination and make you start zooming in on the goals you still haven’t achieved. It can also have a negative impact on your reading comprehension, and this can get in the way of you remaining focused. Knowing the downsides of mind wandering can help us, because knowledge is power: when you become aware of an issue, you can take steps to address it. Therefore, the next time you catch your mind wandering, redirect it back to whatever you need to do. This will not only be better for getting your to-do list done, but could also improve your happiness.

3. Write your life script

When you’re thinking about resolutions this year, a key question is to ask yourself: if you were to write the script for your life, what would you want your life story to say? What kind of habits would you like to have, what would you like to achieve in your career? What would your relationships look like?

Next, rate yourself, on a scale of 1 to 10, in these and other areas of your life that are most important to you. A score of 10 means that you’re highly satisfied with where you’re at now in that area of life, and 1 means that you’re feeling very dissatisfied. If you’ve got a low score in one of these areas, think about the one step you could take to go up by just 1 point. This is key. It’s not about making big changes, which can often be insurmountable, stressful and intimidating. It’s about making small, sustainable changes. Be specific about those changes. For example, it’s better to say, “I’m going to exercise for 20 minutes in the morning” or “I’d like to get this specific promotion at work”, instead of having a vague goal, such as “I’d like to exercise more” or “I want to be more successful”.

The key to successfully improving aspects of your life script is that you take that small step. We think we need to wait until we feel more motivated to achieve our goals or do certain tasks, but actually, according to some research, we as humans are bad at predicting our own future emotions. We might think that we will feel more motivated or energised to take action later, and so we put off taking that first step today, but then when “later” comes around, we realise that we might still be feeling unmotivated to do the activity. Rather than waiting for motivation to come and assuming motivation leads to action, it tends to be the other way round. Motivation follows action.

Therefore, start small. Create and tackle smaller goals first, and this will make it easier to achieve the big ones in your life.

As told to Helen Thomson