Positivity

Chapter 1
Waking Up to Positivity
One s own self is well hidden from one s own self:
Of all mines of treasure, one s own is the last to be dug up.
Friedrich Nietzsche

TAKE 1
The morning sun streams through your bedroom window and wakes you from a fitful night s sleep. After a long string of gray and rainy days, you appreciate seeing blue sky. But soon enough you realize the alarm didn t go off. You re disappointed because you ve been meaning to wake up extra early so you can have time to yourself before the kids wake up and the morning race begins. With what little time there is, you decide to skip your planned exercise routine, spend some more time in bed, and write in your journal. You write,

I can t believe I let myself down again by forgetting to set my alarm. How am I ever going to take charge of my days (and my
life!) if I can t make this simple change? Without exercise, I m going to feel like a slug today. Ugh. I d better focus on why I write in this journal in the first place: to think about my larger goals and connect them to what I do each day. Is this really working? Is it worth my time when I could be sleeping? What I really should be doing with this extra time is checking for fires on e- mail or reviewing my ridiculously long to- do list. Isn t our water bill past due? Where is it anyway?

At this point you close your journal, get out of bed, go to your computer, and open your e- mail. Sure enough, you find that your co- worker, Sharon, needs input from you before she can submit her proposal, and she needs it by this afternoon. You ll be stuck spending at least part of your morning preparing forms for her. Feeling angry at her imposition, you open the next e-mail to see that the project you spearheaded received preliminary approval and you ve got forty- eight hours to make a final set of revisions. Fortyeight hours! you say out loud. Am I supposed to drop everything to make these revisions? How am I going to fit this in? The nanosecond of

BARBARA L. FREDRICKSON, PH.D., is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and principal investigator of the Positive Emotion and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a leading scholar within social psychology, affective science, and positive psychology.

"Written by one of the most influential contributors to this new perspective in science, Positivity provides a wonderful synthesis of what positive psychology has accomplished in the first decade of its existence. It is full of deep insights about human behavior as well as useful suggestions for how to apply them in everyday life."
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Ph.D., author of Flow

"Positively wonderful! Offers surefire methods for transforming our lives from so-so to joyous." - Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence 

"Positivity is literally the feel-good book of the year, providing a scientifically sound prescription for joy, health, and creativity. Read one to two chapters daily as needed or until grumpiness subsides."
Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology, Harvard University, and author of Stumbling on Happiness

"Barbara Fredrickson is the genius of the positive psychology movement." - Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., author of Authentic Happiness