The Path to Healthier Thought Patterns
March 2024 Issue
Dr. Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology at Yale University
A Harvard trained psychologist, Dr. Laurie Santos is a Yale professor whose research focuses on the science of happiness. She is a renowned expert in the field. Her undergraduate course, Psychology and the Good Life, became the most popular course at Yale in over 300 years, and her podcast, The Happiness Lab, has garnered more than 100 million downloads since its launch. Recently, she was voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds.
In February 2024, Dr. Santos visited the Harvard Business School to guest lecture in Dr. Arthur Brooks’ popular course, Leadership & Happiness. The March 2024 Issue of ‘Seeking the Good’ is an adaptation of her HBS lecture.
“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts” suggested Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher. Intuition guided this idea in ancient Rome, but more recent scholars have also provided support for this hypothesis. In Victor Frankl’s timeless Man’s Search for Meaning—a book he wrote after surviving three years in Nazi concentration camps, in which he witnessed the murders of his family members and fellow Jews—he wrote the following: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” In other words, Frankl believed that even in the direst circumstances, we have the capacity to control our thought patterns.
In modern times, most of us are fortunately free from the tyranny Frankl endured. But the fact that we live in better times does not make his insights any less true. With the advent of modern social science, researchers have put Aurelius’ hypothesis under empirical scrutiny. And research shows that the idea holds water: we do have much more control over our thought patterns than we think, and when we use techniques designed to instill agency, we can indeed become happier.
Adverse thought patterns are deeply disruptive to one’s well-being. During everyday life, it is no secret that rumination can take its toll. A common sentiment among those who suffer from depression, for example, is that No one likes me or that People avoid me because I’m a mess; those with generalized anxiety often think I should have acted differently in routine social situations; super-strivers (such as Harvard MBA students) fear failure, and when they inevitably fail, they tend to think All my hard work has been worthless. When viewed impartially, it’s obvious that these sentiments are overly harsh and not based in reality.
Research has shown that the prevalence of negative thought patterns like these have contributed to recent declines in well-being. Across the last two decades, all age groups report two to four percent more “not good mental health days” in any given month. The prevalence of anxiety and depression has ballooned. And loneliness—especially among Gen Z and Millennials—has reached alarming heights. As such, a practical first step to solving these trends is to teach people that their negative thought patterns are not their destiny; in fact, with focus and effort, we can change how we think over time. But what are some specific ways we can control our thought patterns to boost happiness?
Gratitude, experienced and expressed
One way to fight negative thought patterns is via gratitude—the simple act of noticing life’s blessings. For example, if you have been (or are) a parent of teenagers, you might have felt as though you were a bad parent at the time—partially because raising teenagers can be a thankless job (when was the last time your teenager thanked you?). When parents have insufficient “experienced” gratitude, they can spiral into negative thought patterns.
The same can be said for professional life. In one 2010 study, Adam Grant and colleagues investigated the effect of experienced gratitude on fundraisers at a university, a job that could certainly be described as thankless. The fundraisers, low-level staffers, spent much of their days calling university alumni, which meant abrupt hang-ups, sour conversations, and many rejections. In the experiment, half of the fundraisers received a personal note of gratitude from their superior. Amazingly, the fundraisers who experienced gratitude—compared to the fundraisers who didn’t—increased their number of calls by 50 percent. Knowing that someone was grateful for their contributions gave the fundraisers a significant boost in their productivity, a measure that is tied to one’s job satisfaction.
Of course, it is not always within one’s power to receive more gratitude from others. In this case, we must shift our attention to “expressed” gratitude—whether for ourselves or others. For example, counting one’s blessings has been shown to reliably boost positive affect and outlook for the future, and in the best circumstances, can reduce feelings of depression. Expressing gratitude for others has also been shown to boost well-being. Scholars writing in Affective Science demonstrated that people who wrote thank-you notes to friends showed improved well-being compared to participants who did not write thank-you notes. As such, if you’re not experiencing much gratitude in your life, use your agency to express it.
Fight your inner critic
We are all guilty of negative self-talk, a phenomenon that comes in many forms. Think of the last time you failed or said something embarrassing in your personal or professional life; now, think about how you ruminated on that moment afterward. Perhaps you were overly critical of yourself (I’m such an idiot), or you catastrophized (I’ll never be successful again). Maybe you were filled with disproportionate shame, guilt, or fear, or you began “should-ing” on yourself (I should have done X, Y, or Z differently).
It is useful to feel a bit of regret when we behave imprudently—that is, hurting someone or acting recklessly; this type of negative self-talk can help us avoid future harmful actions. But unchecked negative self-talk that turns into endless rumination can be a real problem for our well-being and motivation.
Why, then, do we beat ourselves up so badly for ordinary failures or embarrassments? Generally, we use negative self-talk for motivation because we mistakenly believe it is effective. You might think of this as the “drill instructor” theory of motivation: if you yell profanities at yourself, surely you’ll improve, right? Not really, as it turns out: research shows that negative self-talk has deleterious effects on our well-being, long-term motivation, and goal attainment.
But research also shows that there is a much more effective strategy for internal motivation: self-compassion. Self-compassion is a form of self-talk that involves treating oneself with understanding and kindness in difficult times and recognizing that it is normal to suffer. It is also the subject of the psychologist’s Kristen Neff’s 2011 book. To Neff, self-compassion comprises three parts. The first is mindfulness, which means paying attention to what you’re feeling emotionally—even if those feelings are negative. The second aspect of self-compassion is common humanity, a recognition that suffering and failure is a normative part of the human experience. Finally, self-compassion involves self-kindness, the practice of being warm and understanding to ourselves when we suffer, fail, or feel inadequate.
Neff and her colleagues have shown that the practice of self-compassion is correlated with higher overall well-being, lower levels of depression and anxiety, and a lower fear of failure. Yet self-compassion has other benefits beyond just making us happier. In one 2012 study in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, students who performed badly on a GRE test were asked to take the test again. Before the second GRE, they were sorted into two groups: a self-compassion group, who were prompted to be self-kind, and a control group, who received no such instructions. Interestingly, students in the self-compassion condition studied, on average, 1.5 times longer than the control group—which indicates that self-compassion leads to more resilient performance.
Self-compassion can also improve one’s intimate relationships. In a 2013 paper, Neff and colleagues measured the self-compassion of over 100 couples—based upon the couples’ propensity for mindfulness, common humanity, and self-kindness. In the end, the scholars found that higher self-compassion correlated to happier and healthier relationships. Care for one’s spouse, connectedness with one another, and reliance after conflict all proved to be higher if a couple jointly practiced self-compassion.
But how can we generate more self-compassion? One strategy is to label and fight your inner critic. If, for example, you tend to be overly critical of yourself, be mindful—that is, notice what emotions you’re feeling—and accept how you feel without judgment. If you tend to catastrophize, remind yourself that the most negative scenario is almost certainly not your destiny. And if you feel disproportionate shame, guilt, or fear, remember your common humanity: everyone suffers and everyone fails. It’s a good thing that your suffering isn’t unique.
These strategies will move you toward self-compassion, which is a crucial step in controlling your thought patterns for a happier mood, better outlook, and closer relationships.
Get some perspective
A central cause of negative thought patterns is rumination, a state of mind which focuses on, and replays, negative situations. When excessive, rumination almost always results in emotional distress. But if you ruminate—and if you’re human, you probably do—it is a mistake to believe that you’re defective. Rumination is an evolutionary response to help us think about and solve problems. Yet when we ruminate excessively, problems don’t get solved; they become overwhelming.
Like our tendency for negative self-talk, we over-ruminate because we mistakenly believe it is an effective thing to do. For example, one study asked students to solve a hypothetical problem: their friend, in the hypothetical, was avoiding them, and the students had to write a detailed solution to (1) discover why their friend was avoiding them and (2) stop the avoidance. The students were assigned to two conditions: a ruminative group, in which they were asked to think about solutions in a self-focused way, and a distracted group, in which they were asked to think about random things—not necessarily a solution to the problem. When the students eventually presented their written plan for a solution, the distracted group scored higher on “problem solving effectiveness,” demonstrating that ruminative thought patterns aren’t an ideal solution to complex relationship issues.
Researchers have now begun exploring other strategies to help us get the perspective to break our cycles of rumination. One strategy proposed by experimental psychologist Ethan Kross is what’s known as “distanced self-talk,” a technique of talking to oneself in the second or third person (rather than the first person) to increase psychological distance. This technique of talking yourself using your own name and the second-person pronoun “you” might feel odd at first, but Kross and colleagues have put it to the test. In one 2014 experiment, subjects who had to give a scary public speech were placed in one of two conditions: they were either asked to talk to themselves in the first person (“I need to rehearse this talk”) or in the second and third person (“Laurie, you’ve got to put some work in for this speech”). Kross and colleagues found that subjects who encouraged themselves in the non-first person had a better affect balance leading up to the speech, better performance during the speech, and less shame after the speech.
Another effective way to get perspective on a tough situation is to imagine how your distant future self might think about your present-day circumstances. In one 2015 study, subjects were asked to think about a particularly stressful situation. Half of the subjects were encouraged to think about how their near-future self—one week into the future—would be impacted by the stressor. The other half were encouraged to think about how they’d reflect on the situation ten years into the distant future. Researchers found that the ten-year-off group saw significantly lower negative affect and felt less permanence from the stressor than the group who imagined how they’d feel a week later.
A final strategy for regulating our negative rumination one that has been replicated time and again by social scientists: write it out. Scholars writing in Emotion, for example, brought together subjects who had recently experienced a distressing event in their lives. Half of the participants wrote about the distressing event for 15 minutes for three consecutive days; the other half wrote about a random prompt for the same time period. When surveyed about their emotions about the distressing event at the end of the experiment, the group who wrote about their distress scored much lower on emotional reactivity—a hallmark of self-distance.
In these ways, research points toward three ways to get perspective: employ distanced self-talk, imagine your distant future self, and write it out.
Use your imagination
In recent years, the term “manifesting” has gained steam in popular culture. This idea, as you may know, suggests that you can make your goals or dreams come true by sheer belief that you can achieve them. Manifesting is an undoubtedly attractive idea, but does it really work? One 1991 study tested this by surveying women who were trying to lose weight. Did women who imagined positive fantasies of their future weight loss do better in terms of their fitness? The answer was no—it turned out that women who had positive fantasies about weight loss actually lost less weight than women who did not fantasize. The scholars concluded that the fantasizers, in imagining their success, partially believed that they had already succeeded in their goals; and since they had already imagined success, they did not think they needed to put more effort into actually losing weight.
One useful alternative to manifesting is “mental contrasting”—that is, thinking about the positive outcomes of reaching a goal contrasted with negative obstacles that stand in the way of that goal. Researchers writing in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine taught middle-aged women the mental contrasting technique, and months later, measured the women’s activity levels. The women who regularly visualized their biggest obstacles regarding physical activity were, up to ten weeks later, about twice as active as women who did not use mental contrasting.
But research has shown that mental contrasting is even more effective when you add in an “implementation intention,” a motivational strategy in the form of an “if-then plan” that can lead to better goal attainment. One 2008 paper put this to the test on athletes, a group that often struggles with negative thought patterns. The experiment instructed athletes to repeat an if-then phrase when they felt unsure about themselves (for example, “If I feel scared, I will calm myself and I will tell myself ‘I will win!’”). Athletes who used implementation intention performed significantly better than the control group.
When you find yourself in a bout of negative thought patterns, the above strategies point toward the power of our imagination. Resist your urge to manifest—which ignores obstacles—and instead imagine their inevitability, which will help you figure out how to overcome obstacles in stride. The research is clear that you’ll be better off if you do.
The way forward
As you can tell, modern research hints that Marcus Aurelius may have been right: the quality of our thoughts deeply matters for our happiness. We mustn’t get discouraged by our negative thoughts—because, of course, everyone has them—but we must remember that letting these thoughts become a pattern is the real danger. Thankfully, we now know about a host of strategies we can use to break the vicious cycle of rumination—strategies that can help us to become more productive, more self-compassionate, better at attaining goals, and best of all, happier.
The next time you feel yourself slipping into a negative thought pattern, recall the four strategies: (1) experience and express gratitude, (2) fight your inner critic, (3) get some perspective, and (4) use your imagination. Each will put you on the journey of controlling your thought patterns for the better.
Contributing editor: Bryce Fuemmeler