Welcome to Part 2 of Happiness! If you haven’t already, please read part 1 as well, which you can find here. And in this post, I’m going to cover happiness and thinking skills, and seven powerful evidence-based tips to improve your happiness.

We all want to be happy, but we don’t always know how to get there. In part 1, I discussed how we define happiness, and can we alter it in a lasting way. In this post I’m going to dive deeper into happiness and specifically focus on happiness and cognition, that is, your thinking skills that can influence happiness, and how we can make changes in our everyday lives to improve our happiness using our cognition. Cognition is one of my favourite topics as a former neuropsychologist, and I’m excited to bring you the research in this area so that you can really make meaningful change. It’s not something that you often see spoken about in the personal development space, and yet understanding this topic is an such important component of living a meaningful life.

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Cognition

You might already realise that happiness is related to what you are thinking. The words that we hear and the words that we say to ourselves are so powerful that they alter our experience of our lives. In personal development, there is a lot of focus on mindset, on attitudes, on beliefs, but really all of this boils down to what we are saying to ourselves. What are the actual words that we are thinking in our own minds. A related idea which is just important is that we can also control our thoughts and our emotions, and the control skills that we have are vital in engaging in appropriate behaviour and generally being mentally well.

It’s these two related ideas that I’m going to talk about here.

I’m going to talk about your thoughts, and your control skills, and that can be a lot to take in for some people because it’s not something that is often spoken about, but I’ll do my best to break it down, but more importantly I’m going to cover at the end seven tips that come out of the research about what you can do with all this information in your everyday life so that you can can improve your happiness.

In the previous post I mainly focused my content on one particular research article, and I’m actually going to do a similar thing today. I’m going to take a little bit more from the Lyubomirsky article that I talked about last week, and then there is also a fantastic summary article from 2021 which is about the neuroscience of happiness and well-being, by Alexander and colleagues (see all references below). I’m going to take out some of those key ideas and translate them for you, and add in some other bits and pieces along the way.

Your Thoughts are Powerful

So the first idea that I want to cover is that the thoughts that we say to ourselves are incredibly important for our happiness. It makes sense, if we are engaging in a scathing commentary of our own behaviour, and believe things like being worthless, then that obviously is not going to allow us to experience a lot of positive emotion. But sometimes I find that people aren’t even noticing what they are saying to themselves, or they say things to themselves or to others that actually just go by unchecked.

Part of healthy mental wellbeing is taking the time to notice what your thoughts are. What are they saying? What thoughts have you got on repeat? Where do those thoughts come from? And are they true and helpful? These are really powerful questions to help you start examining what you are thinking and if you want to keep those thoughts.

I talked in part 1 about pessimistic beliefs that can be detrimental to you pursuing happiness, and that these have been shown to be false, and so they’re unhelpful. So there are some particular thoughts or beliefs that are more helpful and have been looked at in the literature as improving happiness, and I want to give these to you as some ideas that you can try on and see if you can start to say them to yourself and believe them.

New Beliefs

The first is that when you believe that endeavours towards feeling happier will actually work, then they are more likely to. I touched on this in part 1. Being optimistic, having hope, and believing that you can change your happiness is a vital first step.

Next, gratitude practices have been shown in a range of research to improve happiness. Choosing to focus on what you are grateful for improves your happiness, no question. Research shows that when you write about what you are grateful for, as compared with just writing about general occurrences of the day or about unpleasant things, then your happiness improves. The idea here is that you are focusing your thoughts on all the wonderful things in your life and this then changes mood.

The next idea is that self-reflection can also improve happiness. There was a fascinating study done in 2013 that asked participants to spend 10 minutes every week for 4 weeks writing about their best possible self, and then they spent another 5 minutes writing about a goal that might help them attain that best possible self, so that they were writing for just 15 minutes once per week. At the end of the four weeks, overall happiness was significantly improved compared to the start of the study. You can see that writing about this particular positive scenario is directly influencing thoughts, because you are generating these thoughts and then writing them out. The authors suggest that this type of activity might improve happiness by improving optimism and hope, which are important factors that I mentioned earlier.

Executive Functions: Cognitive Control

So beyond just the thoughts that you say to yourself, there are some other aspects of thinking that are related to happiness as well, and these are the cognitive control skills that I want to talk about.

This is a really important topic, because part of emotional intelligence is to control our emotional responses. So the implication is that we’re using our control skills to regulate our emotions and control their expression. Our control skills are otherwise known as our executive functions – you might have heard this term before, it’s what’s happening when we are using our prefrontal cortex to think clearly and carry out logical goal-directed behaviour.

As we grow and develop we learn to control our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions, and it’s these cognitive control or executive functions that are doing that. Our emotions are a huge part of our experience, and we need cognitive control so that we can regulate our own emotions, we can interact appropriately with other people’s emotions, and emotionally charged things in our environment.

So for example, we go through the day hearing upsetting things on the news, our partner might be grumpy, someone might say something really surprising about something, all the while you might be feeling excited about something else, and your brain comes in and has to manage all of that so that you are walking through the world in an effective way. And all of these emotional experiences have the potential to distract us from our regular daily activities – imagine if we had no cognitive control over our emotions, then we just wouldn’t be able to function effectively as adult humans.

In the scientific literature there is a focus on three executive functions that might help control and regulate emotions. Let’s go through them:

Inhibition

Inhibition is a really important function because it’s there to stop ourselves from doing something on autopilot, when it might not be appropriate. Think about if you saw something really delicious go past you at a restaurant that is heading for someone else’s table, and you think “oh I might like that,” you don’t get up and snatch it away and start eating it, you can inhibit that idea and control your actions.

So you can see why inhibition is really important – if we feel emotionally charged in some way, we don’t want to be acting on impulse and not thinking through our actions, we need to be able to reign it in, and make a decision about how we want to respond. You might have heard the phrase “respond instead of react,” and this is what inhibition allows us to do.

In terms of happiness, inhibition is important because we might have a longer term goal that is important to us and we think will make us happy, and yet there are distractions in the world all the time, and we need our inhibition to avoid those distractions and stay on track with our goals. The Alexander article explains that inhibition contributes to our happiness by helping us achieve long-term goals, and have healthy relationships because you are controlling how you respond in a social situation.

Working Memory

You have probably heard me talk about working memory before, I talk about it a lot, and this is the ability to hold information in mind. It’s whatever is in the forefront of your mind right now. Almost always, we talk about working memory in terms of verbal or word-based information, so what are you hearing or reading or thinking. But, there is an emotional version – so it’s the ability to hold an emotional representation in your mind. So, what are you feeling right now? What emotion is at the forefront of your mind right now?

The Alexander article explains that this skill is related to better emotional regulation, which is related to happiness, so in other words, if you can regulate or control your emotions by thinking about them and holding that emotional experience in mind, then you can feel better. And related to this, if you can hold happier information in your mind, then this helps you have happier experiences. For example, if you’re able to hold a happy event or idea in your mind and really hold onto that feeling, then you are focusing more on this and less on negative experiences and emotions, and this improves happiness.

Now there is a two-way relationship here, between working memory and happiness. Research has shown that if you experience something happy, like a picture or a happy story for example, your working memory skill is better. So, if you are in a happier mood (compared with a low mood or a neutral mood), then you are better able to hold information in your mind, which means that you can do things like make decisions more easily and remember what it is that you’re doing in the moment, and these types of things can help you feel less overwhelmed. So this is yet another reason to think about improving your happiness level, which I talked more about in the previous post.

Attentional Switching

The third and final executive function that I want to cover is called attentional switching, which just means switching or moving your attention from one thing to another. I talk about attention more broadly back in this post, so go there if you are interested in this topic.

When we need to pay attention to multiple things, we are switching our attention from one thing to another. But, this can sometimes be difficult or cause problems when we want to focus on only one thing – no one likes distractions. But sometimes it’s really important to switch your attention, like when something unexpected is happening, or when you are trying to think flexibly to solve a problem or to follow a conversation.

So, what has this skill got to do with happiness? In the Alexander article there is a summary of research that has shown that being in a positive mood actually helps you to switch more quickly and easily, which can actually be good or bad depending on the situation, like I explained just now. But also, there is research that shows that positive mood can improve your ability to solve problems and get those lightbulb moments where you really start to understand a problem. So you can see that there again is this two-way relationship between attentional switching and happiness, where they both influence each other.

Of course, switching is also an important function when we are trying to switch our focus from a negative emotion to a more positive one like happiness, and in this way it’s a bit like working memory, you want to be holding positive emotions in your mind and feeling those, and so we want to be able to switch away from a negative focus in your mind towards a positive one.

Let’s Summarise Executive Functions

Now, I know that all this so far has been very heavily based in cognition, this is a happiness and cognition post! But I know it can be a lot to take in so I’m going to do a little easy summary for you now, before I move onto more practical tips on how you can take all this information and actually use it in your life.

So stick with me, the seven tips are going to be really helpful.

Cognitive control is very important, it allows us to respond appropriately in the world by controlling our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions, and these control skills are called executive functions. And these executive functions work with emotions so that they can all influence our experiences appropriately. We know that happiness and executive functions work together in this two-way relationship so that there is this kind of positive upward spiral where happiness improves executive functions, and then enhanced executive functions further improve happiness. So it’s really good news all round.

I explained that for this to all work really well, we want to have good inhibition so that we’re not acting on impulse, and we want to hold positive emotions in our working memory so that we are holding onto those positive feelings, and we want to improve switching our attention from one thing to another so we can focus on positive emotions and switch away from negative ones.

So now what can we do about all this? Are there things we can do to enhance these skills or utilise them better?

Seven Tips About Happiness and Thinking

Based on the information that I have given you so far about the importance of your thoughts, and about how cognitive control is related to happiness, I have some tips that flow on from that. I want to take this time though to emphasise that this is general advice only, based on the science, and it’s only to help improve general well-being, this is not a treatment for any mental health disorder, so if you need tailored help please go and see a mental health professional. And this is the case for any advice given by me in my business. Let’s go over the tips now.

What Are You Saying to Yourself?

The first is to answer the questions that I talked about at the beginning when really looking at your thoughts. Take a paper and pen and look at the thoughts that you are thinking about a particular issue and how you are experiencing it. I asked the questions: What are the thoughts saying? What thoughts have you got on repeat? Where do those thoughts come from? And are they true and helpful?

So really explore this, and it’s best done on paper or in a digital format so you’re not just thinking around in circles and holding everything in your mind. Then, try some more positive or helpful beliefs, and this can involve just changing the thought a little, so that it’s a little more positive and helpful while still being believable for you. Can you identify those pessimistic or false beliefs? What exactly are they? And then can you challenge them. Are they really true?

Keep a Gratitude Journal

This might seem like bumper-sticker advice, but there really is a lot of science behind this. Write out the things in your life that you are grateful for, and there is so much to recognise even when things are rough, and it really will change your mood. You might like to write about why you’re grateful for those things, and you also might like to look back on previous gratitude notes you’ve made to really give yourself a mood boost.

Write About Your Best Possible Self

The third tip is to follow the exercise that I mentioned earlier about writing about your best possible self. In a moment I’m going to write out the exact prompt that they used in the study. The prompt was for academic life, and they asked participants to cover a different domain across the four weeks, and these were academia, career, social and health. And so I’m going to actually change the academic words from their prompt to career terms, but otherwise it’s the exact prompt that was used with the study participants. The participants were asked to write about this idea for 10 minutes, being as creative and imaginative and detailed as they wanted.

Here is the prompt:

“Take a moment to think about your best possible career life over the next few years. Imagine that everything has gone as well as it possibly could. Perhaps you have successfully landed your dream job, or got a promotion that you really wanted. Think of this as the realization of the best possible career life you could ever hope for yourself.’’

So you can write on that for 10 minutes, and then participants were asked to write for a further 5 minutes using this new prompt about goals:

“Write down a goal (or goals) you think you might want to attain that will help you achieve your best possible self that you just described. Sometimes long-term goals seem overwhelming or out of your reach. But every journey begins with just a single step. Think about taking baby steps towards your long-term goal (or goals). A baby step could be as simple as proactively seeking information you need or talking to someone who may be able to guide you. Defining the next baby step you need to take, to get a little closer towards your goal, is a great way to get going with the journey without worrying too much about the length of the road.”

So this is a really interesting exercise, I’d encourage you to give it a go, and you can do it for different life domains too like health and relationships etc.

A Little Pre-Work Mood Boost

The fourth tip is to engage in something that might enhance your mood before tackling work or a difficult task. You might like to listen to some upbeat music, write out your positive motivation for doing the task, or even hang some beautiful artwork in your space. You might find that these short activities make it easier to use your executive functions so you can focus well, solve problems, and get things done efficiently.

Manage Impulsivity

The next tip I have for you is to try and manage things so that impulsivity is less of an issue. Let me explain what I mean by this. You first need to know that everyone has strengths and weaknesses in different cognitive functions. I have fairly good inhibitory control, so I don’t act on impulse a lot, but on the other hand I’m probably a little slow to switch my attention to a new thing if something changes. That’s just my natural way of being.

If you are someone who is not so great at controlling impulses or not getting distracted, then the biggest thing you can do is set up your environment so that there is not much for your impulses to be directed towards. So, declutter your space, make your desk or room as clean as possible, remove distractions, turn off your phone, put it a different room, and cover up anything that can grab your attention. I would even encourage you to make this an extra step in your task, so add a preparation step before starting the actual task – you could call this “Step 0” and tick it off your task list as you go. You can see that supporting your inhibitory control like this allows you to stick to the plans you have made so that you can be happier.

Mindfulness Meditation

The sixth tip I have comes directly from the Alexander paper that I have been talking about in this post, and that is mindfulness meditation. Meditation pops up a lot as an incredibly powerful practice in personal development, emotional intelligence, and cognitive and emotional wellbeing. There is a lot of research in this area and Alexander and colleagues summarise some of that, and they explain that meditation increases positive emotion both during meditation and afterwards, and meditation is associated with increases in empathy, compassion, prosocial behaviour, altruism, and social connectedness.

We know that meditation actually changes the way the brain functions, in particular in the prefrontal cortex which is the area that supports our executive functions which I wrote about earlier. If you would like to try meditating but don’t know how, go back and read this post, I take you though it there. Now, it is thought that meditation increases happiness by improving things like emotional awareness, emotional regulation, and savouring, which is an idea that I want to cover in this final tip for improving your happiness.

Savouring

This concept of savouring is where you really focus on holding on to a positive feeling when it happens. I mentioned earlier that there is this idea of emotional working memory, where your brain holds emotions in the forefront of our mind, and if you want to be happier then you want to be holding happiness in your emotional working memory. This is really what you’re doing when you savour.

There is a very interesting paper from 2024 by Colombo and colleagues that showed that participants who were taught to savour a positive experience in the moment, recalled more details of that event a week later, and that memory was rated as more positive compared with people who didn’t savour. In the paper they define savouring as “the capacity to attend to, appreciate and enhance the positive experiences in one’s life.” So how do we savour the moment exactly?

In the Colombo paper they explain that you can do it in a few different ways. Savouring can involve choosing to have a positive experience and modifying that experience to make it even more pleasant for yourself, paying mindful attention to the positive details of the experience, and doing this by sharpening your senses, creating positive interpretations of what is happening (and this goes back to cognition and the thoughts that you say to yourself), and then expressing positive emotion in the moment, so saying something nice, or smiling for example. These are all things that you can try when you’re having a happy experience so that you can intensify that happiness.

What Changes Will You Make Today?

Phew! This post has been really rich. I know it’s been very brain-heavy, but these ideas of how thinking and emotion relate are really going to have a strong influence on your own wellbeing so that you can further enhance the quality of your life. If this has been a lot to take in, go back and read it again and take notes, it really will be worth the effort. If you liked this post, will you let me know? I know this is one that will really have an impact on the experience of your life, and come on over to Instagram or Substack and let me know what you thought.

I’m going to leave you with a quote from Mary Oliver, “Tell me what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” See you next time!

References used for the article

Alexander, R., Aragón, O. R., Bookwala, J., Cherbuin, N., Gatt, J. M., Kahrilas, I. J., … & Styliadis, C. (2021). The neuroscience of positive emotions and affect: Implications for cultivating happiness and wellbeing. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 121, 220-249.

Colombo, D., Pavani, J. B., Quoidbach, J., Baños, R. M., Folgado-Alufre, M., & Botella, C. (2024). Savouring the present to better recall the past. Journal of Happiness Studies, 25(1), 20.

Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: an experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of personality and social psychology, 84(2), 377.

Layous, K., Katherine Nelson, S., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2013). What is the optimal way to deliver a positive activity intervention? The case of writing about one’s best possible selves. Journal of Happiness Studies, 14, 635-654.

Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of general psychology, 9(2), 111-131.

Lyubomirsky, S., & Layous, K. (2013). How do simple positive activities increase well-being?. Current directions in psychological science, 22(1), 57-62.

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