Imagine your happiness away
Difficulty Level:
Medium
Frequency:
Whenever you feel stressed, or overworked
Duration:
5-15 minutes
How to do it
Step 1. Try to think of a thing or event that made you happy. It could be a music show you saw last month, a nice dinner with friends, or maybe a bigger event such as the time you graduated or when you started your first job.
Step 2. Once you have a positive event in mind, think of ways that this happy thing or event might have never happened, or might have never been part of your life. For instance, going to a dinner party with friends wouldn’t be possible if you did not have enough money, time, or even these people who you can call your friends.
Step 3. Next, describe in what way it is surprising that this thing or event IS part of your life. Going further with the dinner party example, you might normally not be the kind of person that likes to spend a lot of time on expensive food, or you may be somebody who is very busy and normally does not have the time to go to dinner parties, etc.
Step 4. Consider yourself grateful that, despite the way it could’ve been, you had the opportunity to experience the positive event.
Why you should try it?
Engaging in counterfactual thinking about how good things might not have happened increases positive feelings (2).
Engaging in counterfactual thinking lets you reappreciate positive events that have become familiar with, or have become attenuated to (3,5).
The research
- “Counterfactual thinking” describes imagining how things could have turned out differently if only some past event changed.
In a study on the effect of counterfactual reasoning on the appreciation of romantic relationships, researchers found that participants who wrote about how they might never have met their romantic partner were more satisfied with their relationship than those who wrote about how they did meet their partner (4). - College students who wrote about the ways in which a positive event might never have happened, reported more positive experiences than those who wrote about how the positive event became part of their life (4).
How it works
Counterfactual thinking elicits positive emotions in two ways:
- Thinking about positive events in your past lets you re-experience some of the feelings you experienced during the event (2). The “problem”, however, is that the more you think about a situation, the less positive emotion you will re-experience, as you are getting more and more familiar with the event and slowly desensitized to the feelings that are involved with it (3).
Counterfactual reasoning helps because thinking about ways in which an event might not have occurred can make that event seem more surprising. This surprise causes an experience that, at least temporarily, can undo the “familiarization” that you have with the event (4,5). In other words, by looking at the absence of the positive event, you will gain more positive emotions about the experience than if you simply recalled the experience. - The second way that counterfactual thinking improves your mood is through the effect of downward social comparison. The way downward social comparison works is that by comparing oneself to others who are worse off, under certain conditions, can make us feel better (1).
By engaging in counterfactual thinking, we will be comparing our actual self to a hypothetical version of ourselves who is worse off, allowing us to be more appreciative of what we have, allowing us to feel better.
The evidence
- Buunk, A. P., & Gibbons, F. X. (2007).
Social comparison: The end of a theory and the emergence of a field.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 102(1), 3-21. - Emmons RA, McCullough ME (2003).
Counting blessings versus burdens: Experimental studies of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84:377–389 - Kahneman D, Miller DT (1986).
Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives.
Psychological Review, 93:136–153. - Koo, M., Algoe, S. B., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2008).
It’s a wonderful life: mentally subtracting positive events improves people’s affective states, contrary to their affective forecasts.
Journal of personality and social psychology, 95(5), 1217. - Roese N, Olson J (1997).
Counterfactual thinking: The intersection of affect and function. In: Zanna MP, editor.
Advances in experimental social psychology. Vol. 29. San Diego, CA: Academic Press, pp. 1–59.