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“A perfect day doesn't exist” Murphy called it. Tell me about a perfect day that you’ve had recently. A day that you woke up without worrying that you’d miss the bus to get to work; a day that you didn’t need to struggle when thinking about what to get for lunch; a day you didn’t need to dread going into one meeting after the next. Rack your brains, think long and hard as you may, but this day doesn’t exist. It may never. It is ordinary to have ordinary days, but it does not mean that the extraordinary cannot exist among the mediocre or the chaotic ones. Just like Murphy’s Law states, everything that can go wrong will go wrong, and life is as such, made up of the good and the bad. In Baek Sehee’s trending therapy memoir, I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokpokki, she writes: Light and darkness are part of the same thing. Happiness and unhappiness alternate throughout life, as in a dance. So long as I keep going and don’t give up, surely I will keep having moments of tears and laughter. When negativity hits us like a train-wreck, our initial reaction may not always be the most forthcoming. It is natural to feel the urge to retaliate, it is the body’s natural fight or flight response and defense mechanism to protect oneself from hurt. Beliefs like ‘the future are not going to be better, ‘the world is a harsh place, and ‘no one cares about me’ result in bursts of negative emotions. Instead of responding negatively, what if we looked at things from a different lens, from a more constructive perspective?   UNDERSTANDING NEGATIVE EMOTIONS & BELIEFS You finally reach the office, drenched in sweat from running after missing a bus. All you want is to sit down and sip on an iced coffee, but your supervisor comes in at that moment and calls you in for a meeting. He rejects your proposed idea and you feel disappointed at yourself and wonder if you are not good enough for the job.  You are in the downward spiral of your negative thoughts:  “I am going to be a failure, I am not worthy of this job.  But instead of letting the morning ruin the rest of your day, there is a way to turn things around.   Get to know the ABC Model This model is used in cognitive behavioral therapy to help us gain awareness of our negative thoughts and feelings and then reshape them in a more positive way. Created by psychologist and researcher Dr. Albert Ellis, the letters refer to the different parts of the model that are linked in order. We usually think that the Activating Event (A) will trigger our Consequent Emotions & Actions (C). However; it is actually the underlying Belief (B) of the situation that causes our response. It is Negative Beliefs that make you feel and behave poorly. 

  REFRAMING OUR NEGATIVE, LIMITING BELIEFS Here are two types of beliefs you might experience, and how you can better manage them.   WHY BELIEFS When we encounter a difficult task or an unpleasant situation, very often, we would find a source of blame and ask why this happened. In the case above, when feeling dejected that your ideas were not exemplified, you may push the blame to your supervisor and accuse him of favoriting other colleagues. We tend to search for reasons to attribute the cause of the problems and sometimes, this may result in unhealthy associations.  A WHY Belief is how we explain things to ourselves when an event happens. The explanations we give make us feel and act in a certain way. It is actually normal to feel sad or to think that “You are not good enough” whenever you face defeat.  However; if you keep thinking to yourself that “YOU are ALWAYS not good enough, in EVERYTHING that YOU do?”  Then here’s how to reframe your Why Beliefs!  Give it a try to make it less permanent and less pervasive in your negative beliefs. You do NOT ALWAYS get rejected in every idea right?   WHAT-NEXT BELIEFS “A WHAT-NEXT Belief is when we predict what will happen next after an event has happened.” Firstly, let’s think of the best case scenario. With that picture in our minds, spend 5 minutes thinking about what can be the likely case scenario–the middle ground between the worst case scenario and the best case scenario.  Discuss with your friends or reflect by yourself on the positive and negative feelings that can result from the likely case scenario. So what if your idea gets rejected today, does not mean tomorrow you cannot fix and improve on it right?  This allows us to shift our What-Next Belief from Worst Case Scenario to Likely Case Scenario.  These are one of the practices to help you overcome your What-Next beliefs, change your mindset and be better every day. There are more tools that can equip you with skills to help you improve your daily well-being.    OUR NEGATIVE BELIEFS ARE NOT PERMANENT We can start to distance ourselves from the problem and see things in the bigger picture. It is okay to ask why, but understanding that the problem is just a cog in a larger system would help an individual grow and thus develop a healthy growth mindset.   *****   SUGGESTED TOOLS and PROGRAMME TO IMPROVE YOUR WELL-BEING Let’s Unpack This card game / Well-being Journal / Well-being Circle Programme Take charge of your day better. When you take time to reflect on how your day went, you are now equipped with the skills to tackle your own emotions, but do it at your own pace. Being aware that you can reframe your negative beliefs into positive ones when you ask yourself why and question your beliefs, you know that what comes next is not that terrible after all.

On Friday, 27 Nov, US President Trump tweeted angrily, “Twitter is sending out totally false ‘Trends’ that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative ‘stuff’.”He did not refer to what trends but #DiaperDon was trending with many memes showing Trump seated behind a tiny desk, wearing voluminous pants (suspected to be hiding an adult diaper).

Donald Trump at his comically small desk

The scene was part of a Thanksgiving speech followed by a press conference where he berated a reporter, “You’re just a lightweight!” Trump continued to rage, “Don’t talk to me that way. I’m the president of the United States. Don’t ever talk to the president that way!” What followed was many memes trolling him as a baby throwing tantrums with #DiaperDon. That caused him to rage out at Twitter, accusing the Tech company of making false trends. “For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!!” Trump raged on with his tweets. He was referring to a 1996 US law that protects websites from content posted by users.

TRUMP’S NATURAL DEFENSE AGAINST DEPRESSION

Would Trump ever get depressed? In our views, hardly! When a demeaning post was trending, he said it was made up. When he lost the election, he said it was rigged. According to The Fact Checker by The Washington Post, Trump has made 23,035 false or misleading claims in 1,331 days. From an average of 5 claims a day during his first 100 days to an average of over 23 claims a day towards his last 100 days of presidency, Trump has a way of explaining things to himself and the world – that made him quite resistant to depression. If you look through his claims, you can find a general trend. If it’s good news, it’s because of him. If it’s bad news, it’s because of someone else. A model explaining depression suggests explanatory style plays a big part.

NOT ME, NOT ALWAYS, NOT EVERYTHING

Explanatory style can be categorized into three dimensions:

1. Personal: Me or Not Me
2. Permanent: Always or Not Always
3. Pervasive: Everything or Not Everything

For example, you received a bad feedback from your boss. And you think to yourself, “I’m never good enough.” So this thought can be deciphered as: Me (because it’s “I”) Always (because of the absolute word “never”) Everything (because “never good enough” affects everything else besides the task that you didn’t well) When bad things happened (as they naturally would), and when we persistently explained them as Me, Always, and Everything, it would be a big cause for depression. What Trump did was quite the opposite. When bad things happened, he blamed it on others (Not Me). When good things happened, he took the credit all for himself (Me). Trump’s explanation of why things happened anchored heavily on the Personal (Me or Not Me) dimension. But this strategy has great drawbacks.

THE CONS OF BEING TRUMP

One could easily push one’s responsibility away – shirking off one’s accountability. Sometimes we need to realistically take responsibility for the bad things that happened. What may work better is to consider the other two dimensions: Permanent (Always or Not Always) and Pervasive (Everything or Not Everything). If bad things happened, sometimes we need to take responsibility by attributing it to ourselves (i.e. “Me”). But what is important is to see the benefits of explaining it as “Not Always” and “Not Everything” because it signifies room for improvement, much like having a Growth Mindset. For example, when you next received a bad feedback from your boss, instead of thinking, “I’m never good enough,” consider how empowering if you would to think, “I can learn a new skill from this feedback.” Thanks #DiaperDon for this inspiration.

It is not uncommon to see viral videos of people in Singapore engaged in petty fights on social media nowadays. It is perhaps a symptom of a deeper issue we’re facing in Singapore – stress and pent up emotions, which manifests itself in ugly ways when they’re suppressed. It’s probably the reason why Fragment Room, a business that allows people to vent their frustrations physically on objects by smashing and destroying them, had more than a hundred customers within a week of their opening in 2017. But breaking things may not necessarily be the only way to manage our negative emotions. There are ways and techniques to channel these emotions in ways that isn’t detrimental to our well-being. There are three common ways we usually deal with negative emotions – Suppression, Distraction and Reappraisal.  

SUPPRESSION

One way to regulate our emotions is to inhibit the expression of our inner feelings. This is known as suppression. The common expression of ‘smiling on the outside but crying inside’ is a good example of how one might use this strategy. It should come as no surprise that suppressing negative emotions is correlated to decreased self-esteem and greater anxiety. Indeed, suppression is not the best emotion regulation strategy. Instead of helping us overcome those negative emotions, it will cause us to feel even more negative with all these emotions pent up within us. How then can we regulate negative emotions? There are two other strategies that we propose using. First, a temporary measure would be to distract ourselves.  

DISTRACTION

Distraction refers to keeping our mind occupied with thoughts other than those negative ones. A lot of times this strategy is used as a temporary break to consolidate thoughts before moving forward, but it can also be used as an escape route to avoid confronting a situation. Distraction itself is not a bad regulation strategy, but how we use it is key. There are 3 strategies for distraction to be effective.

1. STOP

Give yourself a break from the situation. This is an important step to make sure that you do not get overwhelmed with the situation.

2. SCHEDULE

Set aside a time for yourself to think about the situation. Other than the allotted time, do not ruminate and worry about the situation.

3. SCRIBE

Write down your worries and concerns. You’ll be surprised to find that writing your worries down helps to alleviate your worries in your mind. These 3 strategies used together can help you to take a pause and move forward better, instead of just running from the problem. The best solution that we recommend would be to reappraise the situation by looking at it differently.  

REAPPRAISAL

The last commonly used emotion regulation strategy is reappraisal. If we give a different meaning to an event, a different emotion and action follow. According to the ABC model popularised by Martin Seligman, our beliefs (B) interpret an activating event (A), resulting in consequent emotions and actions (C). Hence, A -> B -> C. Most of the time we only see the cause (the activating event) and the effect (our consequent emotions), and we fail to see the important link, which is our beliefs. Reappraising an event is changing our beliefs to bring about a different meaning to the event. This ultimately influences our emotions and actions taken. Below is a simple some ways to reappraise an event:

1. EVIDENCE

What proof do we have that our thinking is right?

2. ALTERNATIVES

What is another way of thinking?

 3. IMPLICATIONS

What does your thinking imply?

 4. USEFULNESS

Is it useful to think this way? Reappraisal is also known as disputing. Check out our blog on Resilience for more about this.  

FIX, NOT BREAK

 Positive psychologist Martin Seligman once said that “life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better”.  Everyone would have met with setbacks and troubles in their lives, but what set asides the optimist from the pessimist is their mindset and consequently the way they handle their emotions. Instead of relying on breaking and smashing things to release our pent-up emotions, we can instead choose to handle our emotions at an earlier stage. While distraction is only a temporary measure, when used in the right way it can help us better recollect our thoughts and regulate our emotions. This can prevent us from getting too overwhelmed by any situation and helps us to calmly think through our next step. Reappraisal is however the best strategy to handling negative thoughts and emotions. Many times, we do not know the innate reason for our negative feelings. By identifying the beliefs that cause us to feel negatively and choosing to relook at the problems we face using a different mindset and attitude, our  emotions will also change to be more positive. Then we might just be able to look at our troubles with a smile instead of a frown.

Given that we are usually ranked amongst the top in any conceivable good indexes in the world, shouldn’t our happiness follow suit? We have amongst the world’s highest GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, and integrity in government and businesses. And according to the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), we also deliver one of the world’s best educations. Yet, Singapore is placed at 31st in terms of happiness by the World Happiness Report (WHR) 2020. The top spots are often secured by the Nordic countries. WHR ranks a country’s happiness based on citizens’ evaluation of their lives: If 0 being one’s worst possible life and 10 being one’s best possible life, where does one position oneself on a ladder from 0 to 10? Besides happiness, other well-being factors that may contribute to happiness are also being measured (such as those listed below):

• GDP per capita
• Healthy life expectancy
• Perception of integrity in society
• Freedom to make life’s choices
• Social support
• Generosity

WHR tries to explain our happiness using the above six factors. The table below shows Singapore’s 2020 rankings on happiness and the six well-being factors.       Out of 153 countries, Singapore ranked 31st in terms of happiness. However, we ranked top in terms of healthy life expectancy, and perception of integrity in society. In terms of GDP per capita, we came in 2nd. Our society is rich; we live longer and healthier lives; and we have an efficient system built upon the foundation of integrity. Yet, there are other factors that may be preventing us from reaching the top places in terms of happiness. These factors are much closer to heart. Our economic focus up to this point has made us rich and helped us build the best physical and medical infrastructures in the world. But for us to reach Maslow’s higher levels of human progress, it may be time to invest in individual and social capital. Our society has done a great job to meet our physiological and safety needs – two lower levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Once these needs are met, we strive for something more, such as to be part of a strong social network, to live out our potential, and finally to live for something bigger than ourselves. When we become a part of a strong social network, we build social capital. We can realise our potential through cultivating passion and purpose, and they are related to building individual capital. When we eventually live for something bigger than ourselves for the betterment of others, not only do we build individual capital, we increase social capital. This is known as altruism. Money, health care, and safety are important factors that contribute to our happiness. Once these needs are met, we need something closer to our hearts, such as passion, purpose, and altruism. Truly, then Singapore will become a place where no one is left behind. ———- If you would like to join us in cultivating passion, purpose, and altruism, please reach out to us via info@happinessinitiative.sg If you’d like to learn more science about happiness and well-being, do join our Telegram Channel for daily insights!