Prioritizing positive emotional experiences

This post is a reflection for a course I am taking at Renison University College at the University of Waterloo. The course is titled Positive Psychology and is taught by Professor Denise Marigold, currently the Chair of Social Development Studies.

The topic of the reflection is from the course, though the response is my own.

This week, I have chosen five emotions I want to try to experience this week. Each day I will be making effort to experience at least one of the emotions from the list. The five emotions I have chosen are:

1. Awe
2. Amusement
3. Serenity
4. Gratitude
5. Excitement

This list was chosen from a larger list, and I tried to pick the ones that I could kinda see how I might be able to do it, to not make things too hard on myself. They are loosely listed in order of how hard I think they will be to elicit from easiest to hardest.

Day 1

So my plan for today was to go out and find something awe inspiring, and I realize now that I forgot to do that. Hopefully I remember to do it tomorrow. It was and still is on my TODO list, I am going to set a reminder on my phone.

Instead I am going to go for gratitude and think about some things I have to be grateful for today. Even though I never went out I appreciate how nice and sunny it was today. I had a really engaging conversation with my professor's husband who is also a professor who researches meaning. We discussed his theories of meaning, and some difficulties in understanding the concept. I also had fun today chatting with my mom on Facebook.

Day 2

So today I made a bit more progress in that I planned out a bit how I might practice serenity, I bought some bath bombs and I am thinking I might have a spa day (it was going to be today but I pushed it to tomorrow).

Day 3

So, I went ahead with the spa day idea. I drew up a bath, put on some spa music, got my colored light, put on a face mask and put some cucumbers on my eyes. It was fairly relaxing for a bit, but it definitely could've been better. I spent a lot of time thinking about things I had to do.

Day 4

I decided to revisit awe today. I started my morning by listening to the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky, with canons of course:

Unfortunately, that wasn't terribly effective, so I decided to take my camera out and explore the city and take some pictures.

At first I was listening to a podcast and that wasn't the awe vibe so I switched to music and got in the flow more and started to experience awe as I looked at some amazing buildings.

Day 5

Today I was very busy with my capstone design project that I basically just grinded work the whole day.

Day 6

In order to add some amusement to my day, I ordered a Rubik's cube and decided to start learning how to solve it. It has been pretty fun. I don't have the algorithms memorized yet but I have the general sequence down.

Day 7

I practices a lot of gratitude today when I went outside and realized how warm it was compared to the past few months. I discussed with my roommate all the great things that have gone well for us over the last year, and all the exciting ways things are going to get better in the next few months (summer, end of school, vaccine, etc.).

Reflection

Overall, this exercise was incredibly difficult for me. I consider myself a very hard working and studious person, and my baseline is prioritizing getting things done as quickly as possible

Surprisingly, the difficulties weren't exactly what I thought they would be. I anticipated the hardest part being finding the time to do the task each day. I would say that was dwarfed by the challenges of 1. remembering to try (I should have set an alarm or something), and 2. coming up with reasonable ways of experiencing the emotions. There are a lot of obvious solutions to the first problem, but I will have to spend more time thinking of solutions to the second problem.

I am torn on whether this is a good way to arrange your day. I think I enjoyed some of the things I did, especially that extra-long walk I went on taking pictures. That said I found it stressful trying to think of things to do and forgetting to do things some days. I think if I had come up with more ways to elicit the emotional experiences, I could have gotten more benefits. I may try this again in the future.