Positivity: Top-Notch Research Reveals the 3 to 1 Ratio That Will Change Your Life

by Barbara L. Fredrickson

Positivity opens us. The first core truth about positive emotions is that they open our hearts and our minds, making us more receptive and more creative.

Seem farfetched? Let me tell you about patas monkeys. Like humans and many other mammals, when these monkeys are young, they play chase. Yet their game of chase has a twist. They run headlong into a flexible sapling or bush to catapult themselves in an unexpected direction. If you close your eyes and picture this stunt, you’ll see that it would defy getting “caught.” It turns out that adults of this species never pull this stunt themselves. Never, that is, unless they need to escape a predator. In play, patas monkeys develop a particular physical skill that might one day save their lives.8 Likewise, we’ve all heard the phrase “the family that plays together, stays together.” The wisdom in this phrase is that social play builds ties between people that are lasting and consequential. This wisdom holds outside the human family circle as well. A fascinating example comes from a certain breed of ground squirrels. Like some other mammals, when one squirrel sees a predator in the distance, it will sound an alarm call that alerts other squirrels to run for cover. It’s a risky move. In crying out, the danger-spotting squirrel draws attention to itself, which may well attract the predator. Scientists used to think that animals would risk their lives like this only for kin with whom they shared common genes. New evidence suggests, however, that squirrels also sound alarm calls for former playmates, not ge netically related.9 These squirrels developed a social resource while playing— ...

The prescription that I suggest you try out is more reasonable: aim for a positivity ratio of at least 3 to 1. This means that for every heart-wrenching negative emotional experience you endure, you experience at least three heartfelt positive emotional experiences that uplift you. This is the ratio that I’ve found to be the tipping point, predicting whether people languish or flourish.

Consider Jen’s story. She’s a thirty-eight-year-old mother of three in California, and her youngest child has autism. She recently volunteered for a study on how mothers cope with the stresses of caring for a chronically ill child, and how it affects their health. She indicated to the research team that although she found raising her youngest child to be taxing, she also found the good in her new role. In working through her difficulties, she discovered strengths she didn’t know she had, and deepened her religious faith. In other words, Jen was higher than most in what scientists call benefit finding— she found the good that emerged from her struggles. You might suspect that this would set Jen apart and make her among the healthiest of the moms tested. It didn’t. Even though Jen was quick to articulate positivity, she didn’t truly feel it. When she was asked during the course of a few normal days how happy, excited, or content she was feeling right then, she most often admitted “not at all.” It turned out that Jen was lower than most on her level of heartfelt positive emotions. What the research team discovered was that only the moms who both found benefit in their stressful experiences and reported experiencing positive emotions in their day-to-day experiences showed healthy fluctuations in the “stress” hormone cortisol. But Jen’s positivity was not heartfelt, so her own cortisol levels were high all day long, which is not particularly healthy17

I’ve introduced you to ten forms of positivity: joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love. Now I want you to get to know each one personally. Discover what you and this feeling share in common. Of course, each is already familiar to you to some degree, and terms for describing them are already deeply embedded in our language. I suspect, though, you may be less aware of their full scope and beauty. You may not have previously considered the aspects of each state as scientists have investigated them. And you might not have appreciated all the moments in your life when each has entered your heart. I focus on these ten positive emotions for two reasons. First, they are targets of a growing amount of scientific research, including my own. Second, over the years I’ve examined the daily emotional experiences of hundreds of people— ranging from college students to working men and women in midlife and beyond. From this I’ve learned that these ten forms of positivity color people’s day-to-day lives the most. Other forms certainly exist.2 Yet my research shows that these ten are the most common. With one important exception, I describe them in the order of their relative frequency, starting with the ones people feel most often, and moving on toward those felt more rarely. The exception is love, which appears to be the most frequently experienced form of positivity. I describe it last (and you’ll soon see why).

There is particular power in the questions you ask yourself. Simply asking yourself What’s going right for me right now? can unlock so much. If you’re open and sincere as you seek meaningful, positive answers to this simple question, you prepare the soil for positivity to take root. Dewitt Jones, a photographer for National Geographic, stunningly illustrates the power of asking such questions in a video called Celebrate What’s Right With the World.21 In it, Jones tells how positivity infuses the ethic of National Geographic, and discusses how it has changed his life. Through the lens of his camera, he shows us how seemingly ordinary people and places— even disappointing ones— can radiate tremendous beauty if only we persist in asking ourselves What’s right here? What can I celebrate? and are patient enough in letting our answers surface. The effect of this video has been powerful when I’ve shown it in class. One of my students told me she was always skeptical of nature photos in magazines. She assumed they were edited and wondered why she never saw pretty images when she looked at nature herself. Jones’s teachings helped her realize that she never saw beauty because she didn’t believe it was there. With her eyes newly opened by his compelling account, she paid more attention as she walked through campus. She told me later, “Sure enough, all of the beauty seemed to pop out when I [had] thought it didn’t exist. The plants showed off their healthy green color, with rain dropl...

Imagine yourself as a flower in springtime, your petals drawn in tightly around your face. If you can see out at all, it’s only a speck of light. You can’t appreciate much of what goes on around you. Yet once you feel the warmth of the sun, things change. You begin to soften. Your petals loosen and begin to stretch outward, exposing your face, and removing your delicate blinders. You see more and more. Your world quite literally expands. Possibilities unfold. Some flowers bloom just once. Other flowers, like day lilies, close up every evening and bloom again every time they see the sun. Sunlight is essential to the growth of all green plants. Plants know this. They turn toward the light, stretching themselves open to take in as much as they can. Scientists call this the heliotropic effect. A similar heliotropic effect has been described in people.1 Positiv-ity is essential to the growth of all humans. We know this instinctively. We turn toward positivity, stretching our minds open to take in as much as we can. I call this the broaden effect.

Would you say it’s a triangle? Or would you say it’s a group of squares? Clearly it’s both. There’s no right or wrong answer. To infer the scope of people’s attention, we ask them to pick out a similar arrangement of shapes. Do they see this arrangement as more similar to a triangle made up of smaller triangles, or to a square made up of smaller squares. In conducting experiments with images like these, I’ve discovered that whether people see the big picture— the triangle in this case— depends on their current emotional state.4 When we inject people with positivity, their outlook expands. They see the big picture. When we inject them with neutrality or negativity, their peripheral vision shrinks. There is no big picture, no dots to connect.

Scientists at Cornell University examined the ways physicians make medical diagnoses by having them think aloud while they solved the case of a patient with liver disease.14 Astonishingly, this research team found that when they gave physicians a small gift— simply a bag of candy— those physicians were better at integrating case information and less likely to become fixated on their initial ideas, coming to premature closure in their diagnosis. Whether you’re the physician or the patient, I think you’d agree that better clinical reasoning is a good thing. Perhaps alongside the list of physical complaints we bring to our doctor’s office, we should also bring small gifts or kindnesses.

Your emotions are thought to be another key signal. Negativity prompts cell decay. Positivity prompts cell growth.5 At a very basic biological level, then, positivity is life-giving.

Back in chapter 2, I introduced the 3-to-1 positivity ratio as my prescription for how you can lead a flourishing life, full of expansive possibilities and lifelong growth. If 3-to-1, 4-to-1, and 5-to-1 ratios each describe the good life, why have any negativity at all? Why not shoot for 100 to 1? Here we all might protest that a life without suf fering is hardly possible, hardly human. Could any person, marriage, or team ever achieve a state of pure positivity? I don’t think so. But even so, perhaps being negativity-free is an ideal worthy of our strivings. Could there be a level of flourishing beyond what’s currently imaginable?

Consider a sailboat. Rising from a sailboat is an enormous mast that allows the sail to catch the wind. Below the waterline is the keel, which can weigh tons. You can take the mast going up as positivity, and the keel down below as negativity. If you’ve ever sailed, you know that you can’t get anywhere without the keel. If you tried, at best you’d slide aimlessly across the water, or at worst you’d capsize. Although it’s the sail hanging on the mast of positivity that catches the wind and gives you fuel, it’s the keel of negativity that keeps the boat on course and manageable. And just as the keel matters most when you’re going upwind, appropriate negativity matters most in hard times.

back and circle the ten items that reflect positivity. These are the ones that begin with the words amused, awe, grateful, hopeful, inspired, interested, joyful, love, proud, and serene. Go back and underline the ten items that reflect negativity. These begin with the words angry, ashamed, contemptuous, disgust, embarrassed, guilty, hate, sad, scared, and stressed. Count the number of circled positivity items that you endorsed as 2 or higher. Count the number of underlined negativity items that you endorsed as 1 or

Although changing your entrenched emotional habits is possible, it’s no easy feat. Think of it as moving a river: easier than moving a mountain, yet not something done on a whim, or without concerted effort over extended time. It requires nothing less than building a new foun dation, a new riverbed, along which your desired emotions can flow. Indeed, the best new research suggests that forging lasting changes in your positivity ratio requires as much intention, effort, and lifestyle change as losing weight or lowering cholesterol levels.12 This is why a simple platitude like “Don’t worry, be happy” rings hollow. It’s just a wish. It tells you nothing about how to move the riverbed.

If you took the Positivity Self Test, you now have an approximation of where you stand today. To get a more stable measure, take the test every evening for the next two weeks as you live your life as usual. Once you become familiar with the measure— and if you use the resources on www.PositivityRatio.com— it will take you less than a minute or two each day to weigh in, and just a few mouse clicks to compute your ratio. You now also know how you can dig deeper to extract a more intensive and accurate portrayal of your ratio using the Day Reconstruction Method.

If the spectrum of life possibilities ranges from −10 to +10, psychology had, until then, made extraordinary advances in the ability to move people from, say, −8 to zero. But we knew little about how to raise people above zero, to +6 or +10. Seligman invited psy chol o gists to imagine the contributions they could make if they shifted their focus beyond alleviating human suffering to include cultivating hu man flourishing.

Tool 1. Be Open The goal here is to experiment with mindful awareness while carrying out your day. Make your motto “be open.” Temporarily rid your mind of expectations and judgments. All too often these cloud your ability to be open. Instead, give yourself permission and time to experience the richness of the present moment. No matter what you encounter, no matter what happens, experiment with both awareness and ac ceptance.

Tool 2. Create High-Quality Connections

Tool 3. Cultivate Kindness

This exercise draws from research done by Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness. Give yourself the goal of performing five new acts of kindness on a single day. Aim for actions that really make a difference and come at some cost to you, such as donating blood, helping your neighbor with her yard work, or figuring out a better way that your ailing father might manage his chronic pain. Be both creative and thoughtful. Assess what those around you might need most. Although some of the kind acts you choose may take some advance planning, make a point to carry them all out on a single day. At the end of the day, take stock. Notice the good feelings that come with increasing your kindness: the positive connection to the person you helped, the fitting sense of pride you get from making a contribution. For lasting impact, make your kindness day a recurring ritual. Be creative each week. Find new ways to make a positive difference in the lives of others. Try it for a few months and see the difference it makes.

Tool 4. Develop Distractions Distractions are important tools for breaking the grip of rumination and curbing needless negativity. The goal is simple— to get your mind off your troubles. The most effective distractions demand your full attention. You get lost in the activity, fully absorbed by it, so that when you emerge you’ve cleansed yourself of the blues and are ready to approach your problems with a clear mind. I suggest you make two lists. Label one healthy distractions and the other unhealthy distractions. Ask yourself, “What can I do to get my mind off my troubles?” Then brainstorm. Identify things you already do, as well as new activities you’d like to try on for size. Be sure to come up with things you can do in good and bad weather, whether you’re at work, at home, or on the road. In good weather perhaps you’d work in the yard, go for a bike ride, or play soccer with the neighborhood kids. In bad weather maybe you’d go to the gym, learn a new knitting technique, or play chess with your son. At work, maybe you’d dive into research, clean your desk, or catch up on past e-mails. On the road you might read a novel, take on a Sudoku puzzle, or run through some yoga poses i...

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Fact 2. Positivity Broadens Minds The second fact is that positivity opens your mind and expands your range of vision. Although this broadened mindscape is temporary, it creates much-needed mental space. You escape the tightness of negativity and gain elbow room for greater flexibility and seeing the big picture. You feel a growing sense of oneness. This fundamental yet unheralded fact about positivity is the first core truth in my broaden-and-build theory.

Brantley, M. and Hanauer, T. (2008). The Gift of Loving-Kindness: 100 Mindful Practices for Compassion, Generosity, and Forgiveness. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger.