Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Look at Your Life Appreciatively
Researchers in the field of positive psychology have discovered that positive emotions give us benefits beyond just feeling good. When you are feeling positive emotions, it’s easier to see the big picture, rather than getting lost in detail. You will also find it easier to be creative than when feeling stressed, angry, sad, or even ‘neutral’. Positive emotions help you to make sense of complex information quickly, and make you less likely to jump to conclusions. A positive mindset has physical benefits, too – it helps your heart rate and blood pressure to return to normal more quickly after stressful events.
Focusing on what is going well in your life, what you are proud of, and what you have achieved, will tend to make you feel better, since your emotions are largely a response to your internal representations of the world. Conversely, focusing on problems, even with the intention of fixing them, can make you feel anxious or irritated, and therefore less resourceful, particularly if you imagine experiencing difficulties in cinematic detail. Instead, appreciating the best of what you have already will improve your emotional state, and hence your ability to achieve your goals.
Because positive emotions have these benefits, it is useful to focus on appreciating what is positive in your life as a foundation for making the changes you want. However, it is not always easy or even appropriate to try to stimulate positive emotions through humour, or through telling ourselves to ‘look on the bright side’. Fortunately there is an alternative. Psychologists tell us that the easiest positive emotions to evoke, even in the hardest circumstances, are gratitude and compassion. You can use this:
- Appreciate even simple things with gratitude.
- When bad things happen, rather than complaining or feeling sorry for yourself, ask yourself “What do I need to learn from this?” You may not always get an answer, but if you have contributed to the situation in some way without realising it, sometimes you will get an answer that increases your self-awareness or helps you to avoid making a similar mistake in the future.
- Find positive meaning through helping other people.
How to Make the Most of Good Memories
Your emotional response to a mental image is determined at least as much by how you think about is as by what you are thinking about.
To really understand this principle, try this experiment:
➔ Think of a happy memory. As you see the memory in your mind’s eye, notice how intense your positive emotional response is. Now notice what happens to the intensity of your emotional response after each of the following steps:
➔ Is the picture life-size, or smaller? If it is smaller, bring it up to life-size.
➔ Is it in colour, or black and white? If it’s black and white (or grey), make it colourful.
➔ Is it bright or dim? Try making it a little brighter.
➔ Is it moving or still? If it’s still, put some movement into it.
➔ Are you seeing it as you saw it at the time, or is your point of view outside the picture so you are looking at yourself? If you are outside the picture, step into it and see it through your own eyes.
Most people will find that the positive emotional response is stronger when the image large, moving, bright and colourful, and particularly when you are involved in it, rather than watching yourself from the outside. Having said that, everyone is different, so if some of the changes got a different response – for example, if the picture felt better still rather than moving – that’s fine. Use whatever works for you.
How does this work? The qualities of a visual image (as opposed to its content) are like codes that tell the brain how much attention to pay to something. For example, we take more notice of things that are moving than things that are still. The more involving and realistic a pleasant mental image is, then usually the stronger your positive emotional response will be.
The above exercise is an example of an NLP intervention known as ‘submodalities’. If you want to find out more, there is a lot more information about submodalities and how to use them in my book Practical NLP 4: Submodalities and Anchoring.
© 2026, Andy Smith. All rights reserved.