Positive or pleasant emotions aren't just frivolous. They can help resource us to deal with challenging times. I'm Vanessa King, head of psychology and workplaces at Action for Happiness and here to welcome you to Joyful June based on our key to happier living of emotions.
Notice what's good. Now, there's a lot of difficult stuff going on in the world right now and many of us are experiencing challenges. So it might seem that trying to cultivate pleasant emotions like joy and peace and calmness um might just feel feel frivolous or might even make us feel guilty.
Yet science shows that when we experience pleasant emotional moments, we become more open to others, more open to ideas and more flexible in our thinking. We're better at learning. We're better at complex problem solving.
And little by little that can build our psychological resources and our resilience and actually help us cope with those difficulties. So here are three tips this month to experiment with to cultivate pleasant or positive emotions um in your daily life. So the first tip is really tapping into our senses.
Now, this is especially good if we tend to get caught up in our heads or overwhelmed. And it's just resourcing those our sense of our sight, our hearing, our taste, our touch, etc. Our smell even and we can use those to actively seek out little boosts of positive emotions.
So, it might be um noticing the sound of laughter or um trickling water. Um, it could be noticing the smell of freshly baked cakes or bread as we walk past a bakery or a beautiful rose in the garden. There's lots of roses where I am at the moment.
It's rather lovely. Um, or it could be um touch, you know, feeling kind of that, you know, the soft fur of a pet maybe or cool cotton on our skin. um noticing sights, you know, beautiful sunset or the sparkles of um sunlight on a pool of water or even our favorite color.
So using our senses in this way, we can actually activate positive emotions without kind of getting too much into cognition. So activate your senses this month and see what positive emotions you can find. The second tip is what I'm calling um punctuating your day with packs pauses.
Now, PAX is Latin for peace and it's also a little acronym. Set a sort of notification on your phone, dare I say that, um, two or three times a day. And when the notification goes off, just simply pause.
P, pause, breathe in, and then just notice what's around you. And find something that you appreciate, you value, you find beautiful or amazing. And simply breathe in and breathe out with that.
And make sure the exhale, the X there impacts is slower than your inb breath. Just do that for a few breaths and you might find that that gives you a moment of peace and calm. So punctuate your day with a two or three pax pauses and see how that feels.
And the third tip this month is creating a kind of mood music playlist. Now most of us will experience different emotions over the course of a a day or even you know a period of time and of course not all of those are pleasant emotions. So maybe create a little playlist for some of those emotions you commonly feel.
So maybe if you have moments of sadness or frustration or anger and find a piece of music that kind of represents that for you and put that as the number one tune on on on the specific playlist. Then find a piece of music that um you find calming or peaceful. Add that to the mood music playlist.
And thirdly, find a piece of music that you find uplifting and energizing and joyful and add that. So you can create a little three-etune playlist to help you kind of process maybe an emotion that you're experiencing right now, maybe a less pleasant emotion, and then move through kind of calming, peaceful, trying to let that go and then replacing it with a more uplifting in um joyful tune. And there's if you want to tap into some sources of um uplifting tunes, we've got the joyful June playlist on Spotify under Action for Happiness that you can tap into.
There's lots of really fun fun tunes on there. So, as ever, that's it from me. The three tips um are using your senses um so tapping into sounds, smells, sights, um tastes, and touch you as sources of activating pleasant or positive emotions for yourself just in your everyday life.
The second tip is punctuating your days with little packs, pauses. P standing for pause, A um standing for taking your attention to something you appreciate value or find amazing um or beautiful. And thirdly, breathing in and then exhaling that slow um slow out breath that can downregulate our nervous system helping us feel calmer.
And the third tip is creating a mood music playlist. So tapping into a less pleasant emotion that we might be feeling uh then a piece of music that helps us feel calm and transition from that that um unpleasant emotional state. And thirdly um move into a more uplifting or joyful emotional state.
So, as ever, we love to hear how you're getting on with these tips and any of your ideas and thoughts on any of our social media platforms and indeed on our action for happiness app, which is free to download wherever you get your apps from. And it's a lovely in inspiring, uplifting community on there um that we'd love to see you be part of. So, thank you for watching or listening and look forward to seeing you here again next month.
Thank you.
