Strengthening Happiness Muscles
Since 2010, I have worked with people experiencing trauma, loss, and moral distress. I have witnessed what data shows: reducing distress and experiencing goodness are two separate endeavors.
Someone can cut their PTSD symptoms dramatically and still experience anhedonia (diminished positive affect). Someone can learn to manage panic attacks and still be waiting for life to begin. Conversely, someone can carry significant psychological distress and still have a connected, meaningful, joy-filled life.
We can strengthen our capacity to experience the good.
Bad Is Stronger than Good, Unless We Practice
Negativity bias kept our species alive. Survival favored the ancestor who mistook a shadow for a predator over the one who mistook a predator for a shadow. Social psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues (2001) summarized decades of research in five words: “Bad is stronger than good.”
For example, a compliment evaporates by lunch while a criticism replays all week. Positive experiences can shape us, but we need to notice, savor, and learn from them.
A Treatment Built Around Reward
Most psychotherapy for depression and anxiety targets negative emotion. Positive affect treatment, developed by Michelle Craske, Alicia Meuret, and colleagues, targets the reward system directly.
In a 2026 randomized clinical trial of 98 adults with severely low positive affect and depression or anxiety, 15 sessions of this treatment produced greater reductions in anxiety and depression than a treatment focused on reducing negative affect. The advantage held at one-month follow-up (Meuret and colleagues, 2026). Positive affect treatment breaks down the process of cultivating pleasant emotions into three steps:
- Plan for and anticipate positive emotions like joy, gratitude, awe, and pride. When we plan pleasurable activities and anticipate the reward, we get a dopamine rush and strengthen our ability to respond spontaneously and creatively instead of reacting in threat response patterns (Fredrickson, 2001).
- Enjoy and savor these experiences. It’s not enough to have these experiences. To change, we can actively engage them, notice what we like about them, and recall vivid aspects of the experience.
- Learn. Once we experience support, we can notice what was significant and replicate this experience. This includes allowing ourselves to feel pride for our growing happiness muscles.
Repetition matters. The more often we experience safety, joy, connection, pride, and awe, the more available those states become, and the more readily we spot opportunities for them in our environment. We can train the brain to pay attention, savor, and learn, and it becomes easier to do so. We don’t need to practice four hours a day. It’s better to practice in small, sustainable ways throughout the day.
Awe May Be Especially Important
Awe is a positive emotion that may be especially important to cultivate. Drs. Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt (2003) describe awe as our response to vastness that exceeds our current mental frameworks and asks us to accommodate something new. Awe works on two levels. It feels good, and it reorganizes how we understand ourselves and our place in the world.
In a 2025 randomized controlled trial, 68 adults living with long COVID completed four courses on awe. They then practiced finding brief moments of awe in everyday life, a few times a day; they reported a 17 percent decrease in depressive symptoms, a 12 percent decrease in stress, and a 16 percent increase in well-being— compared with a waitlisted group (Monroy and colleagues, 2025). In one of my favorite awe studies, Dr. Surm and colleagues (2020) showed that individuals who attempted to experience awe during nature walks had significantly improved well-being, compared with those who walked in nature without such attempts.
Addressing Barriers to Happiness
In my work with veterans and first responders, savoring often feels foreign at first. Mission focus trained them to scan for what could go wrong. In psychotherapy, we work together to redirect disciplined vigilance towards what is going right (for instance, can you discipline yourself to notice good drivers?)
We often need to address barriers to experiencing happiness. Notice any protests your mind has: Don’t feel happy because if you do ______. For instance, many individuals I have worked with feel guilty over experiencing positive emotions and think they “don’t deserve to be happy.” If it didn’t have to be about deserving, can you see how experiencing some positivity might help you show up more fully for those you love and want to serve?
Others I have worked with who have survived hard things feel uneasy when joy arrives, fearing a traumatic crash. It is true that everything we love changes, and we can’t hold on to the emotional highs. We have a choice: Do we want a life with only lows? Or do we want a full life, with highs and lows?
An Invitation to Practice
I challenge you to:
- Plan and anticipate: Find one small opportunity for growth or service today, and let yourself look forward to it.
- Savor: When something good happens, pause for 20 seconds and replay it, recalling all the juicy details.
- Learn: Before sleep, recall one moment in your day you want to remember. Ask yourself, “What did I do that helped this happen?”
Access moments of A.W.E. (Monroy and colleagues, 2025) in your life through these steps:
- Attention: Give full, undivided attention to things you appreciate, value, or find meaning. (Falling leaves? A genuine smile?)
- Wait: Slow down and pause.
- Exhale and expand: Amplify whatever sensations you are experiencing.
Hold onto the good you experience through the exercise Dr. Rick Hanson (2013) developed called “H.E.A.L.”:
- Have a positive experience by noticing one that is already there, or creating one.
- Enrich it. Sustain and intensify it, letting it grow.
- Absorb it. Sense it sinking in and becoming part of us.
- Link it. Hold the positive experience alongside older painful material, keeping the positive in the foreground.
Whatever you try, notice what shifts. Can you start to build happiness muscles?
Your distress and your flourishing each deserve attention. You can learn to carry grief with acceptance and compassion, and feel the sun on your face, all in the same afternoon.
What would it look like to give the good in your life the same attention you give threats?
Where might awe already be waiting for you?
