Three Good Things
Have you ever noticed how much our thoughts shape our experience of the world? Until we notice this for ourselves, much of our emotional experience can feel like it simply happens to us. By commenting on everything that happens, our mental narrative can turn a perfectly neutral day into a good one or a bad one, evoking feelings and physical sensations (like adrenaline, or tension from fear or anger) that match those thoughts.
This might seem scary at first, but it can be quite freeing. Before recognizing how much our mind shapes what we feel, we can only go along with our thoughts, feeling trapped in our mental patterns. We may sense that we are not really trapped, yet we don’t know, in our own felt experience, that there is another option. Once we see how our thoughts color our experience, we may find we have more options than we thought. By exploring our way of thinking and gently questioning negative thoughts, our experience of the world can shift.
Here’s a classic example. You are walking down the road and suddenly you see something in front of you. “It’s a snake!”, yells your mind, and you freeze in terror. After a moment, however, you realize that something doesn’t add up. You take a better look and grab a stick to poke it… and realize that it was only a coiled rope! You were never in any danger, you only believed distorted thoughts about your perceptions. This is one way our mind can operate. When it believes we need to protect ourselves, it can distort the world around us.
The Three Good Things exercise
To help you get acquainted with the way your mind works and learn to start tweaking its patterns, we have included an exercise from psychologist Martin Seligman, who also calls it the “Three Blessings.” By selecting Three Good Things about your day and writing them down, you may start to see how much our thoughts and points of view shape our perception of the world, and how a more positive narrative can change how a day feels. By looking at our thoughts we can recognize our negative biases and practice reconnecting with our innate sense of well-being.
How to do the Three Good Things exercise
The worksheet suggests doing this each night before you go to sleep:
- Think of three good things that happened today. They can be small, such as enjoying your breakfast, or big.
- Write them down.
- Reflect on why each one happened. The worksheet calls working out the “why” the most important part of the exercise, and you get to choose reasons that make sense to you.
