I’m someone who is very future focused. It’s hard for me to celebrate wins! I’m often thinking about what the next step is, what I have to get done by the end of the day, what the kids need this week, and generally thinking about what I need to prepare to stay on top of everything.

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If you are someone who thinks about their life as busy, or someone who is trying to juggle a million balls in the air, then it can be really hard to focus on the here-and-now. Sometimes I tick things off my todo list or I finally do that big thing that’s been in the calendar, but the next second is thinking about what’s coming up next and I don’t stop to appreciate what has just happened – it’s a never ending cycle like that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that never arrives.

When you combine that with my tendency to stay out of the spotlight, and my reluctance to toot my own horn, what I end up with is a situation where I just never celebrate achievements. I don’t like to promote myself, and I know a lot of people are like this, and so it can feel a little bit uncomfortable to really give yourself a pat on the back. But in this post I want to remind you that you absolutely deserve to do this, and I want to explain some of the science of why you should.

You Never Get to the Finish Line

The problem of always moving forward without stopping to celebrate your wins is that your experience of life can feel very busy or very overwhelming, and it can also feel quite defeating when you just never seem to get to the destination – the end of the tasks or the end of the chores or the end of your financial goals, or the end of your fitness journey, it never comes! We want to get to these achievements or milestones, but things don’t just stop after that, because there is always the next step in life, and so it’s up to you to actively decide to pause and just acknowledge what you’ve done.

Maybe you did something really difficult or brave or something that needed a lot of commitment, and you’ll really want to soak those feelings in and experience them before moving on. Or maybe you did something really simple but rewarding, in the midst of a difficult day or a difficult period in your life, and that deserves recognition as well, it doesn’t have to be a big win.

Your Brain’s Negativity Bias

We can often get to the end of the day or the end of the week, and always be thinking about the next thing, but sometimes we ARE thinking about the recent past but focusing on something bad that happened, rather than celebrating our wins. Our recent wins really go to the bottom of the list of what is occupying our minds!

What’s happening here is that our brain has a negativity bias where we focus on the negative things that have happened or we guess are going to happen. Our brains do this because our brain’s number one job is to keep us alive. We have evolved to have a heightened reaction to negative things because our brain needs to very very quickly respond to threat; we don’t need to focus on positive things as intensely because our immediate survival doesn’t depend on that as much. But in the modern world, our lives aren’t actually under threat as much as our emotional brain thinks we might be, so we need to use our rational brain to talk to ourselves and redirect our focus on things that make us feel good, and calm our nervous system. This is where celebrating our wins comes in.

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Celebrate Your Wins With Three Lenses

We want to balance out this natural negativity bias. We want to feel good day to day! You might want to feel more calm, more accomplished, more centered, and happier, and celebrating your wins is going to help with this.

The scientific research has found a number of factors that predict wellbeing, and combat that negativity bias (there is a review by Donaldson and colleagues in 2015 and I’ll put the reference below). There are three factors that I want to focus on here. These are gratitude, mindfulness, and optimism.

I want you to think about these three as past, present, and future. We can have gratitude for things that happened in the past or things we acquired in the past and may or may not still have; we can be mindful of the present moment, and we can be optimistic about the future.

The Past: Gratitude

Gratitude has been shown in many studies to be a major factor in improving happiness, and it has also been shown to make unpleasant events feel less intrusive in your mind (again the references I’ll put in the shownotes). Gratitude has been described as a sense of appreciation, thankfulness, and a sense of wonder, so when you are practicing gratitude try and think of something that you have or has happened recently that covers these elements. You can express gratitude for some element of your life and really think of it as a win that you are so happy to have experienced.

The Present: Mindfulness

If we then think about the present moment, research shows that mindfulness improves our focus for present-moment experiences, and has been found to improve our focus on the positives and so combats the negativity bias. Try staying present to the experiences you’re having right now, small sensory experiences, sounds, touch, sight, for example, really process what people are saying and notice what people are doing, right now, in this moment. Doing this lessens the focus on the past and the future, and you’ll get a sense that things really are alright right now.

I have a post on meditation here, and in it I talk a little bit about mindfulness and controlling your attentional focus so you can go and check that one out if you are interested in that. By being mindful of the present, you can notice what’s good, what you love, what you’re happy about, and be glad for the wins that you have achieved up until now.

The Future: Optimism

The third element to focus on, which is future oriented, is optimism. There is a research article from Bunjak and colleagues in 2022 that explains that when we feel optimistic about the future, we are more likely to be engaged in tasks, have greater wellbeing, and ultimately achieve our goals. So you can see that there is a bit of an upward spiral happening here: you choose to think about the future in an optimistic way, we engage in our tasks because we have hope that they will help us achieve our goals, we have greater wellbeing in the process, less negativity bias, and then even more optimism for the future because we are focusing on positive activities, and so the cycle goes on.

We can celebrate those achievements, as we go on this journey of engaging in pleasant tasks and then having more optimism for future pleasant experiences, and that’s how we improve our wellbeing.

Let’s Put it Into Practice

So how do we implement this in our everyday lives? I think it’s about the small moments. It’s about retraining your brain to be mindful of the present, focus on the little positive things that are happening, practice gratitude for things that have already happened or are happening, and look optimistically to the future. You can do these tasks inside your own mind for a few seconds multiple times throughout the day. Even if you’re someone who thinks of themselves as really busy, or who doesn’t like to draw attention to their own achievements, it’s still important to do this even just with yourself. Maybe you’re standing in the elevator at work. Or maybe you’ve just woken up or are just about to go to bed. Maybe it’s something you practice every time you do the dishes (and we know that’s every day!).

Celebrate Your Wins Workbook

It’s even more powerful if you can write it down and look at it for the week – I have a Celebrate Your Wins Workbook in the online store, which will help you with this (get the pdf in greenery or bright abstract). It has a short summary of the research I’ve talked about in this post, and then there is a one-page worksheet where you can fill in your wins and your gratitude for each day of the week. Looking back on the list like this is a powerful reminder of the positive things in your life. You don’t have to download the workbook you can simply write out or journal on what I’ve talked about in this post, but the workbook is there to make the process really easy for you.

So, make sure that you are patting yourself on the back for all of those achievements, big and small. Be grateful for the past, be mindful of the present, and stay optimistic for the future. It’ll help you feel content and positive and overall improve your wellbeing.

It’s time for my favourite quote, it’s by Mary Oliver, “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time!

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If you’re ready to take back control of those busy overwhelming days, then you’re ready to join TIMEWISE. As a former neuropsychologist, I have created the Intentional Life Framework where I teach you how to manage your time and work with your brain to craft the life of your dreams.

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References:

Bunjak, A., Hafenbrack, A. C., Černe, M., & Arendt, J. F. (2022). Better to be optimistic, mindful, or both? The interaction between optimism, mindfulness, and task engagement. Journal of occupational and organizational psychology, 95(3), 595-623.

Donaldson, S. I., Dollwet, M., & Rao, M. A. (2015). Happiness, excellence, and optimal human functioning revisited: Examining the peer-reviewed literature linked to positive psychology. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 10(3), 185-195.

Kiken, L. G., & Shook, N. J. (2011). Looking up: Mindfulness increases positive judgments and reduces negativity bias. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(4), 425-431.

Toepfer, S. M., & Walker, K. (2009). Letters of gratitude: Improving well-being through expressive writing. Journal of Writing Research, 1(3), 181-198.

Watkins, P. C., Cruz, L., Holben, H., & Kolts, R. L. (2008). Taking care of business? Grateful processing of unpleasant memories. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 3(2), 87-99.