What is Positive Psychology?

Positive Psychology is the scientific study of human flourishing and the practical application of what helps individuals thrive. My aim is to support you in discovering and using your unique strengths to create lasting meaning, fulfillment, and resilience. Together, we'll build a personal toolkit to help you navigate challenges and define success on your own terms.

Understanding positive emotions means looking at how we feel about the past, enjoy the present, and stay hopeful about the future. Exploring positive personal traits is about recognizing qualities like love, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-awareness, self-control, and wisdom.

Sometimes, what people commonly see as "wisdom" turns out to be true — but other times, it doesn’t hold up when we take a closer look. Research in positive psychology often reveals insights that challenge traditional thinking, helping us see well-being in new and sometimes unexpected ways.

To name a few:

• Wealth is only weakly related to happiness, both within and between nations, especially when income is above the poverty threshold (Diener & Diener, 1996).
• Activities that make people happy in small doses – like shopping, good food, and making money – do not lead to long-term flourishing, indicating these have rapidly diminishing returns (Myers, 2000; Ryan & Deci, 2000).
• Experiencing "flow" is so satisfying that people often do it just for the joy of the activity itself, not for any external reward. The activity becomes its own reward. Flow happens when your skills match a challenging task, you're working toward a clear goal, and you get immediate feedback on how you're doing.
• People who regularly express gratitude have better physical health, optimism, progress toward their goals, well-being, and help others more (Emmons & Crumpler, 2000).
• Trying to maximize happiness can lead to unhappiness (Schwartz et al., 2002).
• Optimism can protect people against mental and physical illnesses (Taylor et al., 2000).
• Optimistic or happy people perform better at work, school, and sports, are less depressed, have fewer physical health problems, and have better relationships with others. Furthermore, optimism can be measured and learned (Seligman, 1991; Lyubomirsky, King & Diener, 2005).
• People who report having more positive emotions in adulthood live longer and healthier lives (Danner, Snowdon & Friesen, 2001).
• Doctors who feel a positive emotion tend to make more accurate diagnoses (Isen, 1993).
• Healthy human development can take place even in conditions of great adversity due to a common and quite ordinary process of resilience (Masten, 2001).
• Expressive writing comes with some powerful benefits. Research shows that people who write about tough or traumatic experiences tend to be physically healthier than those who don’t. Interestingly, even writing about the positive side of a difficult experience can lead to the same health boosts (King & Miner, 2000). And it doesn't stop there—writing about your life goals or imagining your best possible future can have similar health effects. The bonus? It’s a lot less emotionally draining than revisiting trauma and can actually boost your overall well-being (King, 2001)."