Noticing Positive Things Decreases Stress

lifestle family

Leadership Tip of the week #1

adapted from Harvard Business Review

Over the course of a typical workday, negative and positive things inevitably happen — and many people focus mainly, or exclusively, on the negative ones.

But research has found that even small positive experiences are a valuable resource for reducing stress.

When people spend time thinking about what went well that day, their mental and physical stress levels decrease by small but significant amounts, and they have an easier time detaching from work.

Thinking positively doesn’t come naturally for most people:

We’re attuned to paying attention to negative things, which makes it hard to notice positive ones.

So instead of ruminating on negative events, make time to relive, enjoy, and share the positive events of your day.

Doing so creates bonds with other people and reduces evening stress, improving your sleep — and the better alertness and mood that result can lead to more positive things happening tomorrow.

Adapted from “The Powerful Effect of Noticing Good Things at Work,” by Joyce E. Bono and Theresa M. Glomb

Author: Andrew Mann

Managing Partner at NorthBailey. Having had senior marketing & insight roles at Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Coop and M&S, I'm now using my experience & network to solve strategic marketing problems for NorthBailey clients

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: