This podcast episode delves into the intricate dynamics of positivity and its profound implications on our pursuit of happiness. Klaudia speaks with Dr. Vikki Barnes, a distinguished clinical and organizational psychologist, who introduces the concept of "free happiness," emphasizing that true joy is not contingent upon external circumstances, but rather can be cultivated from within.

Join in for practical insights on how to embrace authenticity in our emotional experiences, recognising the importance of addressing both positive and challenging feelings as essential components of a balanced and fulfilling life.

Hello, happiness seekers. Welcome to the Happiness Challenge podcast. I'm Klaudia Mitura, and I'm on a mission to explore the best happiness habits that science has to offer.

Like so many others, the pandemic cut me off from my family and work. So I decided to use my training as a psychologist to discover what science can tell us about the art of happiness.

What I found set me on a path to joy, and now I'm ready to share my journey with you.

Each month, I'm publishing three linked episodes where I'm speaking to a leading expert, putting their tips to the test and sharing my findings and feelings.

From mindfulness to exercise and random acts of kindness, I'll be shining a light on the simple happiness habits that can bring more joy to our lives. So join me as I embark on my challenge, and together we can become more successful, resilient and. And happy. Hello, happiness seekers.

Welcome to this month's Happiness Challenge, where I'll be exploring the concept of positivity. Helping me with this topic is Dr.

Vikki Barnes, Clinical and organizational psychologist, author of a fantastic book, Free the Art and Science of Positivity.

Vikki will help us to understand how to unlock happiness that doesn't depend on external factors, but instead arises within positive mindset available to all of us for free. Welcome, Vikki.

Thank you so much for having me.

Vikki, I'm very much intrigued by the title of your book, which is very specific in calling out that idea of free happiness. So let's start with a question of what does free happiness mean to you?

The book title is really, it's got two meanings. So free happiness came to me because I thought happiness isn't something that, you know, we hear often, happiness isn't something that you buy.

And that's true. You don't need money to buy happiness. Happiness is free. It's within our environments. We get it from nature. We get it from being around other people.

We can create it ourselves for absolutely no amount of money at all. So that was the first meaning of the title, but the second meaning was this is really a toolkit on how to free happiness within your life.

So setting it free. So there are two meanings to that title.

Oh, okay. I absolutely love that second meaning as well. This idea that, yes, we can absolutely unlock it.

And I guess it's very interesting taking consideration that sometimes when we look on social media, when we look around the consumer culture around us, the message is almost opposite. We supposed to be happy once we buy certain things, once we purchase certain experiences.

So from your perspective, how can we navigate the Pressures of social media and consumer culture, which often tell us that happiness comes from material and external things.

Well, that's a really interesting point and a really important one. And I actually wrote an article for a campaign called Population Matters some years ago, and it was around Christmas time.

And we know that in our culture, Christmas is big in terms of purchasing, buying things, spending money on all kinds of gifts and meals and outfits and all these kinds of things that we think make us and other people happy.

So I wrote this article about the amount of waste and the amount of money that's spent around Christmas time, the amount of things that we have that are replaced, that don't need to be replaced. Like mobile phones, for example, getting the next mobile phone, the next version one we don't really need to replace the one we have.

So I wrote this article and it was really in line with their campaign about how it's nice to be able to have the money to buy things.

And sometimes you can, of course, you can treat yourself and feel good if you've bought a new dress or a nice matcha latte from your favorite cafe or whatever it might be. That's my personal happy one. But in the end, it's not really making us truly happy.

So we have these little spikes of happy hormones when we do that, but it's not in the long term, in our whole lives making us happy. So we get happiness from much more purposeful and meaningful things over the long term.

And those are the kind of things that actually spending all this money on isn't doing.

So in terms of social media, I think that the direct link there is simply about the amount of adverts that we have, the notifications to do this, buy that, have this, get better, get bigger, have more, and also the fact that everybody else seems to have something that you don't, and their life is so enriched and so much better and so much happier because they have the new car or the bigger house or the better holiday or whatever it might be. And it really isn't. Show the research, you'll know this as well. The research really isn't showing us that's the case.

Happiness is not going up when we have more stuff.

So social media is really tricky to navigate because we need to be aware of what we're looking at, be aware of those algorithms and what some people call the echo chamber. So whatever you're looking at is looking at you and it's coming up more.

And just make sure that we are getting a sense of the real world as well as the social media world and what actually makes us feel happy rather than what we think and what other people tell us will make us feel happy.

Thank you so much, Vicky. And yes, we have so much pressure, don't we?

I mean, whatever device we open, whether it's tv, whether it's mobile phone, we are connected to this idea of social comparison and the fact that happiness, happiness is external and if we just fulfill certain conditions, we will get more happiness.

And it's just really refreshing to know that that's not the case and we can be working on those more, as you call them, more purposeful ways of gaining that happiness. And you have already mentioned the idea of what research is showing us around happiness.

And yes, as yourself, I'm very much passionate about the science and I often will refer to science to think, okay, is that actually true? Or this is a conventional wisdom that is somewhere outside on social media.

So from your perspective, what does science say about the benefits of positivity? And are there any studies that have changed how we understand happiness?

Yeah. So Martin Seligman was the founder of the positive psychology movement, right.

In psychological terms, this is a relatively new area of psychology, although it's been around for a few decades. And he, Martin and his colleagues set about to answer these questions, really and to make happiness and positivity a scientific study.

So they've done lots of global research in lots of different cultures, with lots of different people in lots of different ways, using lots of different measures to find out what it is that makes us happy and what is the science behind it. This fascinates me. Absolutely. I, I love it because essentially, so I'm a big brain geek. I love learning about the brain and neuropsychology.

And we have this brain that is doing certain things like a computer would do certain things. So we have some control over it. But also it's doing what it's just trained to do and what it's there to do. In evolutionary terms.

We've also got a lot of other things that are impacting us from the outside world. So we've got all this stuff to navigate. So the science is really there from brain imaging studies, from phys. Physiological studies.

And what it's showing us is that. So Martin Seligman and his colleagues, they created this perma model and that is the five.

It's been advanced since then, but the basic model was five main areas which if we satisfy all of those areas, we will live a happy life, a meaningful life, a pleasurable life and a purposeful life. And those five areas are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment.

And they are saying that if we have those five areas ticked off in our lives the majority of the time, then we will have a happy and a good life. And those five areas, the first letter of each of those. If people haven't worked this out by listening to this, they spell the word perma.

And that's why it's called the perma model.

Fantastic.

And as you said, like specific model, but also quite lots of research behind it from neuroscience to social psychology, showing that yes, those specific aspects do increase happiness long term. Which is exactly what we want to hear. Right? We want to hear that. Absolutely.

If we invest in certain aspects of our well being, it does work and it brings those specific benefits. I'm going to play a little bit of a devil's advocate here if that's okay, Vicky as Okay. So we can very much work on staying positive in life.

We can very much be looking at those five specific areas.

But we know that life is far away from perfect and we will be going through aspects in life that when things are not going to work out and rather than staying optimistic or positive, we do need to accept those more difficult feelings and challenging emotions. So according to you, can positivity be ever toxic? How can we strike a balance between that optimism and actually realism in life?

This is one of my favorite topics. So you're asking a devil's advocate question, but I really, really love that. So thank you.

So the first thing that comes to my mind is a fun way of thinking about it, really. And I don't know whether you ever saw the film Finding Nemo with the fish.

And so Nemo's dad, I tell this story a lot to relate to the question you're asking. Nemo's dad loses Nemo and he's obviously very stressed and upset about this. But his friend Dory, who is this is the blue and yellow fish.

Dory's constantly positive, constantly happy and she, her motto is just keep swimming. So she is just relentlessly positive. Whereas obviously Nemo's dad is really, really struggling.

Now in that kind of scenario, if that were a real life scenario with two human beings, of course you can't be positive in terms of you can't be happy and optimistic in that situation. You're stressed, you're anxious, you're worri worried, you're scared and you're probably feeling quite pessimistic. What's the worst case scenario?

Where's my son? What's gone wrong?

And loads of other instances in life where it is very normal and very adaptive, actually, and healthy to have what we call in inverted commas, a negative emotion. Now, there are a couple of problems there.

One is the term negative, and in my book, which you very kindly mentioned earlier, Free Happiness, they I have a whole chapter on celebrating the negatives, I call it. And I have negatives and inverted commas because I think all emotions need to be celebrated. All emotions have a purpose.

What we need to do is we need to give that emotion its time to tell us what it needs to tell us. So you are completely right. Life is not perfect. Acceptance was key. When you just said that word, I was nodding along.

And if we can do that for whatever emotion we have, then that's when we're winning and that's when we move through the negativity more quickly. Because if we don't allow the negative emotion in, it's there, it's going to eat away.

It's nibbling away at some part of our brain or maybe our bodies or whatever, and it comes out in some form. Maybe it's a health issue, maybe a mental health issue, who knows?

But if we allow that through and we accept it, then we move through to a more positive and optimistic place sooner. And that is essentially what we want. The second problem I see with that is going back to our friends Nemo's dad and Dory the fish.

Dory is not helping in that scenario. So she's being positive and lovely, but she's not helping. So there's an authenticity element to this as well. You know, I think that if you.

If it's not an authentically positive and optimistic situation, then it doesn't call for those kinds of emotions and behaviors. So we do have to be really aware of our own situations, but also other people and just match our emotional responses to what's actually happening.

I think that if we're more authentic, then we move through to positive emotions more quickly, even through the difficult times.

Thank you so much. Vicky and I just really empathize when you say about this idea that we do need to go through those challenging emotions.

And often if we avoid them, if we not face them, it's just keeping us in a certain maybe mindset, maybe situation in life and actually going and working with them and accepting them and celebrating. I love the fact that you're using the word celebrating. That's so powerful. And actually celebrating them is very much okay.

I can then work with them and then potentially move forward. So let's. I would like to dig deeper into that aspect.

So how can we therefore capitalize that idea and promote a culture of positivity without ignoring maybe struggles and challenges that are happening around us?

I think part of the problem is that we see happiness and positivity as something that can be toxic and it can be if we take them too far. But so a lot of my clients and people I work with, they will challenge me on this word happiness and say, I just don't like the word. I don't.

I don't feel comfortable having to work for happiness or strive for happiness. It doesn't feel like you should be making this effort for happiness. And I say, that's fine. Change the word.

Change the word to something that you want it to be. It can be contentment or calmness or joy or whatever you want it to be, because there is a bit of a.

It's heavily weighted, there's a weighting around the word happiness because we feel like we should be happy. And this goes back to your social media point earlier.

I think we feel like we should be happy because the rest of the world seems happy on social media, right? And the films and all the, the romance out there and everything that's happy ever after. And I mean, I love a bit of romance, don't get me wrong.

But I do think that there's realism about it. So I think, I think how do we promote this is conversations like we're having now, we need to talk about positivity in the most realistic way.

And I've had many people say to me, I'm not an optimist or a pessimist, I'm a realist. And I think people don't like to put themselves on one side or the other. And it's the same with happiness. I don't.

People are kind of a bit scared of being happy because what's going to happen if you're happy? There's only one way and that's down sadness, right? So it doesn't work like that.

If we can be happy more of the time, then our lives are better on the whole. It's not a case that, oh, if we're happy, then we're going to automatically be more sad because we've allowed ourselves to be happy.

But I think we've somehow started to believe that happiness is a bit of a thing to be scared of because just in case it all goes wrong, but I know I celebrate it. I think happiness is a great word. I love it. I know you do too. I think that if we, if we have the right conversations about it and promote It.

Well, then we can create that culture. Absolutely.

Thank you so much.

And it's so important to really stress that point I definitely had in my life and also through other experiences, this idea that, yes, if you'll be happy, oh my goodness, something bad will happen. So it's rather, if we are happy, we maybe should be happy quietly or actually let's stay at that kind of very neutral level.

So, yeah, really interesting. But as we already mentioned in this podcast, happiness is such an important aspect of our life and it has such a big impact of what we do in life.

It's very important that we build more of it.

So thinking about happiness from that practical perspective, not necessarily a fleeting moment or something very fluffy in life, but something very practical. So. So what practical habits or rituals you use to foster positivity and happiness?

Yeah, there are a few really nice ones that I always start with when people ask this question because it's a really good question and I love it when people ask because I think it's one of the best questions that people can be asking. What can I do? What's one really simple life hack that I can do to help my boost my happiness?

And I posted something on social media this week and it was just about creating a smiley face in my breakfast, right? It's a really silly thing. Really, really silly thing. Just porridge, oats, blueberries in the shape of a smiley face that made me smile.

It was a bit silly. It boosted a happy hormone. It really worked. You show somebody else they smile, took a picture, post online.

People are posting fun things about it and then they've got ideas. People are post sending me messages about their happy breakfast then.

So it creates this positivity link between all of us and it's a really silly but simple thing. But I think one of the most important things about it was at the beginning of my day. So it was starting the day with a bit of light heartedness.

And there's so much heavy heartedness in the world and I don't like to focus on that, but there really is.

If you want to get up and watch the news, you're kind of starting your day with this heavy heartedness because most of the news that's aired is bad and negative. So we need the light heartedness, we need the fun, we need the silliness and we need the happy hormone.

So one thing I would say is just start your day with something that will make you smile. It can be anything at all.

It might be dancing around the room to your favourite track, it might Be wearing your favourite, favourite outfit, anything happy, breakfast, whatever it might be.

If you can do the same when you go to bed then great, because you've actually started and ended your day really well and whatever happens in between, at least you've got those two moments that you were in control of and you've created those happy moments in every day. So that's one of my most treasured go tos I think, when people ask me how to be happy.

And then you've got all kinds of other things which I won't go into in great detail because of time, but things like gratitude diaries and writing down good things that have happened in your day and checking things off your to do list and all of that kind of thing that just makes you feel like you've something's worked well for you in every single day.

Thank you so much, Vicky. And I think the moment when we keep it so simple, it just becomes achievable.

You know, I can try to incorporate something happy in the beginning or end of the day. It doesn't sound like a big deal.

Whereas often I feel when we talk about well being or happiness that there is this expectation that oh my goodness, it's another like hard work.

I'm already having a really busy schedule and you're asking me to do something more, to do something else to add to my very never ending to do list to think about happiness. But actually as you said, it can be something very simple. Thank you so much. That makes me happy, which is great.

So on the happiness challenge, I always ask my wonderful guests about their own happiness. So Vicki, what makes you happy?

Oh wow. Well, the first thing that came to my mind was my camper van. I have a camper van and I absolutely love it and it does make me happy.

Every time I get into the seat of my campervan to drive somewhere, I feel instantly at ease. I know that there's an adventure ahead. I go on all kinds of trips and it's always really nice.

Normally in nature or for walks or hikes or just somewhere new to explore and it's always amazing. And I know that everything I need is there and there's not a lot of clutter and I feel like I'm getting away from it all.

In a true sense, I think the word is freedom. Happiness to me at the moment, at this point in my life is freedom. And that is my campervan.

Oh, I love that. And I can already imagine you in your campervan. I seriously need to see some great pictures. And plus the porridge picture.

I think that's what we need to see, as you said, to kind of boost our happiness. But that seems the word adventure. Love that. Where listeners can find out more about your book.

So the book is available to buy either through my website, which is if you search for Dr. Vicky Barnes and positive well being, it should come up.

That's the name of my organization and on there there's a link to Free Happiness or it is directly available through Amazon as well. So again you would just search for Free the Art and Science of positivity by Dr. Vicky Barnes and then you should be able to find it.

Brilliant. Thank you so much. And it is definitely one of the books that really should be on everyone's bookshelves. So thank you so much for sharing.

Thank you Vicky again for joining the podcast and thank you everyone for listening.

I see you at the next episode where I'll be test driving some of the methods shared by Vicki today and also I'll be sharing my thoughts and feelings about them. So keep in touch. Please subscribe to my newsletter the happiness challenge via LinkedIn and most importantly, as always, I dare you to be happy.

Thank you so much.