How Positive Psychology Reduces your Anxiety

Human brains are wired to focus on the negative. Wouldn't it be great if we could change our brains to have more happiness? Hi, I'm Chester Elton and with me is my dear friend and co-author, Adrian Gostick. Well, thanks Chess. Our guest today says that in just two minutes a day we can begin to rewire our minds to focus on the positive. So we're going to put them to the test and see how this works. As always we hope the time you spend with us will help reduce the stigma of anxiety at work and in your personal life. And with us is our new friend Mark S. Fussell, the founder behind the nonprofit Take 2 Minutes, which is designed to enhance mental wellness through positive psychology and technology. With more than 25 years of experience in IT, Mark has created a suite of tools that leverage daily positive messages, gratitude journaling, of which we're a big fan of, meditations, breathing exercises, a grounding exercise, a gratitude challenge, sleep audio, dream journaling, and more, as if that weren't enough, right? Right. All to foster happiness and well-being. Mark, we're delighted to have you on the podcast. Thank you for finding the time. Oh, thank you very much for having me on. I very much appreciate it. Glad to be here. Well, we're excited. So tell us a little bit, first off, about Take 2 Minutes and why you would have created this kind of platform. Yeah, that's a good intro. So, Take 2 Minutes started back in 2016, I think, as an application to send my older son positive messages every day. He was struggling a bit in high school with, I don't want to necessarily label it, but he wasn't fully happy. He was struggling a bit with happiness in high school. And so, I just started sending him positive messages. That grew into family members wanting to receive them and other acquaintances. And then one day I woke up and I had like 300 people getting the messages and I didn't know who they all were and I realized there was probably a need for some of this or more of this. And so I reached into my network of contacts and realized I had a acquaintance at Duke University who was a doctor of psychology. And the gentleman spent countless hours on the phone with me teaching me all about his studies in resilience and positivity, activities around positive psychology. And I decided to make that into an application. This was probably in 2018, I started developing the actual application. Today, I'll add to that, my goal and the reason why I like being on these podcasts is, you know, obviously I wanna promote Take Two Minutes, but it's more important to me to promote the activities and ideas that people can do to help get themselves into a better place. If you don't use Take 2 Minutes, I'm actually okay with that, because there's many apps out there. Find an app that actually can help you through these activities that I recognize can't help people. Excellent. You know, I love that you went to the professors and, you know, the people with all the data and whatnot. So talk a little bit about positive psychology and why that's so important to our well-being. Right, positive psychology, in my interpretation, and I'm sure you can get other interpretations by different people, but it's just the act of recognizing ways to get yourself into a more positive mindset. It is kind of what you touched on, you know, rewiring your brain for positivity. I do always stress that that doesn't mean that anyone, myself included, is positive 24-7, right? There are problems in life. Life is not rainbows and butterflies you know I was reflecting this morning upon this podcast and My last few days have not been at the peak of positivity It's just one of those things where you know for some reason I've had headaches. Maybe it's the weather I don't know things have got me more in a Less than positive state as of late and but the beauty of positive psychology in my mind is if you practice it it doesn't mean you're going to be 100% happy every day It's more you recognize when you are struggling and that's okay. Those struggles should happen There's over 300 emotions that are recognized You should experience some of those emotions your own your only emotion should not be happiness But with positive psychology when I'm ready or when I feel like I'm ready to rebound, I know how to take the proper steps to do so. I like that. And that is a great part of positive psychology. It gives us that resilience, which is, you know, some people are challenging that word, but it's still a good concept that, you know, resilient people, like you said, do bounce back. But okay, so, but, you know, some people are gonna say, look, Mark, I go to therapy every week. I'm 60 minutes in there. I'm doing this. I'm doing meditation for 15 minutes a day. Now you're telling me, I remember when eight-minute abs came out, and all of a sudden, you can have a six-pack abs in eight minutes or whatever it was. Really, two minutes? That's my push. How can short bursts like that really influence us for the better when there's a lot of work to be done as messy humans. There is. I think the two minutes, you know, comes from some, many of our activities, such as gratitude journaling, or the three good things activity, really only take you a few minutes. And, you know, we've coined the term two minutes, but only take a few minutes each day to do. And, you know, gratitude journaling is huge. I think on the onset, Adrian, you might've said that you guys like gratitude journaling. Gratitude journaling can really help someone get into a more positive mindset. And to sit down in the morning and take two minutes, to coin that phrase, to think of something you're grateful for is not a lot of time spent and that can help you recognize positivity. And I'll go back to a couple focus groups I put together where I had complete strangers who were somewhat struggling in life, people I didn't know, use Take Two Minutes and I'll even take a step further back to say as I developed Take 2 Minutes in like 2019, so Take 2 Minutes became live in 2019. From 2019 all the way through 2023, in my opinion, Take 2 Minutes was in a beta state. I was learning from users. I was learning what did work, what didn't work, how to improve what did and didn't work. And so all this sums up to gratitude journaling is great as it is. Not everyone is able to do it. If people are struggling, if they're in a negative mindset, if they have depression and you ask them to take two minutes every morning to write down something they're grateful for, they're not going to be able to. I've seen so many people fill their hands and they're like, I have nothing. There's nothing I'm grateful for. And that's their answer. And they move on. Whereas in reality, we all have things to be grateful for. And so for that reason is why I created, and I think Chester, you mentioned it on the intro, the Gratitude Challenge. The Gratitude Challenge is an activity that works instead of gratitude journaling for someone to become familiar with how to start a gratitude practice. The idea behind a Gratitude Challenge is my system will send you a prompt every day at the time you choose, and that prompt will give you something for which you should be grateful for, and it asks you to write a statement of why you are grateful for it. And going back to my studies of my use cases with complete strangers, what I found is people who couldn't recognize any gratitude at all to a state now where in my daily life, just 12 days later, I walk outside and I see things I'm grateful for. So they were able to make that shift in a short amount of time. So that, and going back to answer your question, they were just in a gratitude challenge. That took them about two minutes every time they got the prompt, and that was once a day. And in that two minutes a day, they were able to start recognizing gratitude. And in turn now, they have a gratitude practice they started where they can sit down in the morning and write a gratitude statement. So it was a huge shift for these individuals. Yeah, so you really crushed my next question, which was, why is gratitude so important? I think you've pretty much answered that. Is there one of those practices in particular that you find is particularly effective for most of the people you deal with? Yeah, so I've had three focus groups I've done with Take Two Minutes, and all three focus groups started with a certain number of people who I did not know at all, just people who wanted to use Take Two Minutes. They start with a meditation – I'm sorry – they start with an MDES questionnaire. A lot of words, but basically it's a questionnaire that asks you 20 questions. And through those 20 questions, the system is able to recognize your, how much positivity and how much negativity you have. It gives you a ratio, like a three over one or a two over one or a one over one. So, with that, we have a baseline of everybody's negativity and positivity. Once they have, once we have their baseline, they start a gratitude practice in the morning. So gratitude practice can be gratitude journaling, if you know how to gratitude journal, or it's a gratitude challenge. So they do that for 15 days. At the 15 day mark, I would then ask them to start a three good things exercise. So we can talk about three good things a little bit more in one moment here. But so for the days one through 15, they did gratitude. At day 15, they started three good things. Three good things is an evening exercise. So, we're kind of going against the two minutes a day because technically you're spending two minutes in the morning and two minutes in the evening, right? But the two minutes in the evening for the Three Good Things, in addition to the gratitude journaling in the morning, they did it for 15 days as well. So, to recap, 15 days of gratitude journaling. At the 15th day, you started with Three Good Things. You continued your gratitude journaling in the morning. So, morning gratitude journaling, evening three good things. And at the end of 30 days, they paused for five days and then took another NDES questionnaire. In my focus groups, I have found that 95% to all participants have a 200% increase in positivity after just those 35 days using just those two activities. Wow, you know, it's interesting. My wife and I have that three things practice at the end of the day. We ask each other, what are your three? And it's just a lovely way to end the day. I love that. That's way more than two minutes, Mark. Yeah, see, we've blown this thing wide open, Jess. We've uncovered... Yes, the truth is... The truth is it's going to take you up to four minutes a day to come up with a happier life. Now, who's gonna do that? Yeah, who's gonna do that? It's four minutes. Right, yeah. How do people learn more about your work, Mark? Where do you send them? Well, obviously, take2minutes.org is the website. On the take2minutes.org website, there's tons of data, articles I've written, articles from the user groups, studies about the user groups. But also on that site, you can schedule a meeting with me. I'm on LinkedIn, Mark Esposito on LinkedIn. So people are always able to get in touch with me via the website or via LinkedIn or mark at take two minutes.org. So, so everything that you know, you're telling us is built on positive psychology, which we're, you know, big fans of. So but you're meeting somebody in the elevator, and they're saying, like, Mark, I'm not going to log on, I'm not gonna do this. I mean, give me some advice for that person that says, here's how to incorporate some more positive psychology into your daily life. What would you tell them? That's a very good question. I don't think I've ever been asked that before. So I think each individual has to find the journey that's the best for them. And this goes back to my initial onset saying, take two minutes is not the right tool for everyone. I wish it was, but I think we all know there is no one tool that's right for everyone. That's why we have choices in life. So some people need therapy. I think therapy is very important. Take 2 Minutes is in no way trying to substitute therapy. What Take 2 Minutes tries to do is work with people who are in therapy to give them activities outside of their sessions. What I'm getting at is I don't think there's one solution we can recommend to everyone. I think my – I say this about meditations, too. For meditations or for trying to find positivity in your daily life, it's a bit of a journey. You've got to find the path that works best for you. If that path, if you try to take two minutes and it doesn't work, that's okay. Don't give up. Try something else. Find out the source or the means or the activities that work for you to help you get into that better mindset. As you may know, you may not know, there's probably 7,000 apps out there that are all around gratitude journaling, positivity, meditations. You know, this is a very saturated area. Try a different app if Take 2 Minutes doesn't work for you. I do, you know, going back to what we talked about initially, I think gratitude is huge. I think if people can start recognizing gratitude, that helps them a lot. That's in my mind, the easiest thing you can do to get into a more positive mindset is gratitude. And if you can't think of gratitude statements, try the gratitude challenge. But ultimately it comes down to, if you do start a gratitude practice, it's not about making profound statements day one, it's about recognizing anything in your life that you are grateful for. It could be birds chirping. It could be the sunshine on a warm day. It could be something small like that, but write it down, make a note to do that day in and day out. Those activities, like exercise, will rewire your brain. When I say like exercise, I'm saying that exercise, if I go to the gym today, I'm not going to be huge and buff and in shape, right? One day is not going to do it. The same thing for gratitude journaling or getting to a positive mindset. One day is not going to do it. It's an activity you need to repeat to make it part of your daily life. Yeah, knowing Adrian Gostik is on my list almost every day in my garage. Nice. Yeah, I mean, I'm often curious as to how often that's reciprocated from Adrian, but I really, I don't want to know. No, no, no, I know you too, Jess, yeah. Yeah, I know you. Adrian once said, of all the people I know, you're one of them. That is awesome. So we, you know, obviously the name of the podcast is Anxiety at Work, and you've talked a lot about gratitude. So what's really interesting is this idea of the two minutes to that positive psychology, how does that help people manage their anxiety, and particularly at work. Yeah, so that's a I was thinking about that prior to this podcast. Work is an interesting environment because the work environment is again different for each individual. It's hard to for me to put myself in someone else's shoes in their work environment. Work even for me, for anyone, work can be stressful. Work adds stress to our life. Work adds complications. This goes back to my initial statement, you know life's not rainbows and butterflies every day It works not rainbows and butterflies every day. You can have some good days. You can have some challenging days Anxiety as you probably are both aware is concerns of the future, right? So if you are in if you're having anxiety or having a panic attack Whether you consciously know it or not, you are worried about something in the future and it could be your subconscious working on it as well. But there is a future concern that is causing you to have that anxiety, that's causing you to have that tighter chest, the difficulty in breathing. You are worried about something. The best thing you can do to try to calm down for that, and this is difficult, this is not an easy task, but it's to bring yourself into the present, right? So think about what's happening right now. Get your mind off of worrying about the future. And I say that's challenging because it can be your subconscious somehow working on that worries as well. But what you need to do is really focus on what's around you right now. And that's where I think on the onset as well, Chester, you mentioned the grounding exercise. Our grounding exercise I have built into our app is one that you can do on your own. You can use the app, but it's the 4-3-2-1 exercise where you're supposed to stop, look around you, find four things you can see. And I always explain this as the seeing part is the easy one, right? You can look around and quickly see, you know, I see a light, I see a camera, I see a clock, and that's almost superficial. You can find four things you see pretty easy. But then as you get down to the number three, you know, find three things or note three things you feel. That's when it takes a little bit more thought process. And this is where it becomes beautiful because that thought process is what's bringing you into the present. So you need to really stop and say, what do I feel? So right now for me on this podcast, where I'm standing, I can feel my elbows against my desk. My elbows are resting on my desk. I can feel the heels of my feet, let's say digging into the floor, you know, stabilizing me. I can feel my AirPods in my ear. Those are the three things I can feel right now. But that's a little bit more in-depth You got to actually think what am I feeling right now? And then it's used to number to name two things you can hear That's one that in my mind is even more challenging because if you're in a quiet office if you're in your house, you might not hear a whole lot of stuff but that's where you really need to stop and take a few moments to listen and just Quit all of the thoughts and say do I hear birds chirping? Do I hear a train in the distance? Do I hear rain outside? Whatever it may be, write those two things down. And then what's one thing I smell right now? Again, another difficult one. Maybe you don't smell a whole lot, but stop and really take a moment. What I'm getting at is those moments you're taking, instead of saying, I don't feel anything, I don't smell anything. No, you do. Stop and really take some time to find it. And that process of taking that time is what really helps you get back into the current moment and helps alleviate some of that anxiety. Yeah, that's great advice, too. We've, yeah, we've even done the 5-4-3-2-1 and it's great advice, like you say, to bring somebody to the present, whether they're nervous about going into a meeting or making a presentation or whatever it is that's giving them anxiety. That's been great. Okay, so one thing we want to ask, Mark, as we wrap up here is we always ask people their self-care tactics. Now you can't talk about take two minutes as one of your daily routines, but talk us some through other things that you do to that you've found personally to help you thrive as a busy professional. Yeah, no, I thank you for that question. I really do find time every morning for myself and I find that to be for me very important. And when I say time for myself, I get up earlier than the family does, and I do that purposely so I have some me time. My me time every morning is time sitting in a chair in my kitchen area. Usually my dogs are around me. It's quiet. I have a cup of coffee or more frequently a cup of tea, and that's my start of my morning. It's some quiet time. I read a couple articles or I read things that are interesting to me I want to catch up on to learn. I think for me, learning is always something that's key to me. But anyway, my point is that those, that morning, the start of my morning, which is a half hour, I spend almost doing nothing besides reading and sipping my tea with my dogs. After that, I always make it a point to do some sort of activity. That activity can be yoga. It could be walking a dog. It could be a, you know, a short sprint training exercise. And ironically, I don't do those for long. I mean, I'm talking 15, 20 minutes, but that 30 minutes of that onset followed by 15, 20 minutes of some kind of activity, let's say an hour of my morning, is what in my mind gets me centered for the day. It makes me feel good about myself for the day. Makes me feel like I'm ready to tackle the day because I spent some time for me. Now to counter that, I've heard many people say, well, that's time I'm taking away from doing something else. And that's a good argument, but the thing is, is if you, let's say, the one I hear a lot is, if I take me time, I'm taking time away from my family. That's one I hear quite often. And that statement in itself is true, but I would argue that where if you're not in a good mental spot, if you're not centered, if you're not ready to take on the day, the time you're spending with your family is not as quality as it could be if you make sure you are in a good mindset to spend that time properly. Excellent. So we're in the home stretch here. Give us two things you want people to remember from our conversation today. I think the biggest thing I want people to always remember is there are ways to help yourself. There are, and if it's not helping yourself, there are ways to get help. Don't, I, it really, I get bothered when I hear people that are really, really struggling with things and they don't know where to get help. There are many therapists, there's apps out there to get help with therapy. Find a way to get help instead of taking measures into your own hand. I think that's really important. We got to get people to find more ways to find help. I think positive psychology is great if you are able to self-help. If you're not able to self-help, go out and find help. And there's a lot of options out there. I think that's the biggest takeaway I can give to people is find a way to get some assistance. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks, Mark. That is great advice. And like you say, I think you've introduced a great tool that can help a lot of people. Like you say, it's not maybe the only tool, but it's an important one in the quiver. So thank you, yeah, for all you've done to help people with their anxiety at work and for all you're doing out in the goods you're bringing into the world. Mark, thanks for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I very much appreciate it. Hey, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, Magic Mind. If you haven't heard about it yet, you should. It's a wonderful little boost in the morning. It's a little kind of like the five-hour energy only it's really good for you. That's the difference. Quality ingredients, they go above and beyond the standard. And if you put in Gossigan Elton 20, when you go to magicmind.com slash gossiganelton, you get a 20% discount. They are so confident that you're gonna love this product, that they will give you 100% refund. It's 100% guarantee. You don't even have to send in the bottles. It's a great place, a great thing to take with you on the go, put it in your backpack, put it in your car. I use it Monday mornings to get my week off to a great start. I've been using it for a long time. I love it. If you try it, I know you'll love it too. So thank you, Magic Mind, for being our sponsor, and I hope you'll take advantage of that 20% discount. Well, Jess, another interesting guest, another good tool out there for people to try out, this Take 2 Minutes. So tell me a little bit about what you took away, lots to take away in there, positive psychology, Mark gave us a lot of tools. What were some of the big takeaways for you? You know, it keeps coming back to me again and again, this idea of having a regular practice, a cadence, you know, that you develop a habit of taking those two minutes. You know, it's like a lot of things. If you can just get into that rotation, if you can just get into that cadence, over time it builds up. I like this analogy of, look, you go work out one time, you don't come back with a six-pack. You've got to invest over time. Even if it starts with just two minutes, and then as we got into it, he said, well, there's two minutes here and two minutes there, and pretty soon you've got four minutes. You're building that resiliency. I particularly liked his focus, as you might guess, with the work you and I do. It was really focused on gratitude, a lot of it. You know, writing down things and having your three at the end of the day and so on. But there's only like a journal that people could buy right now, just, you know, something to give you a gratitude habit? Habit, I think for like maybe 90 days. Yeah, so we're alluding to the gratitude habit by Gostin and Milton, right? So yeah, big takeaway, get in the habit of doing things. The other thing is, you talked about sharing it with other people as well, which I think is really important. You publicize it, right? That's a great point too, is yeah, if we have goals and we just keep them to ourselves, they're really secrets. And they're not really goals. So yeah, tell people, look, I want to do this, I want to do that. I love that. One of the things that Mark told us just as he was leaving after we were wrapping up there was that this great idea of negativity screams at us, positivity whispers. And it is such a powerful thought is that everything in our lives right now, we're right around the US election, boy there's negativity in every avenue, your newsfeed, they know that you'll click bait on negative stories. Positivity is harder to find, but it is more powerful. And this is where Mark was talking about, we have to rewire the circuits in our brains to create positive feelings and that's where positive psychology gets into find the meaning in your life you know be grateful for the good that's all about positive psychology and if we fight that negative screaming and listen for the whispers we're gonna have a happier life my last takeaway from mark was his morning ritual i thought that was really lovely you know get up before the family find thirty or sixty minutes uh... just to really do what brings you joy, whether it's reading or walking the dog or whatever it might be that just really gets your day started in a good way. I find with myself, if I've had a late night or whatever and I sleep past that, all of a sudden I feel like I'm playing catch up all day and I thought that was a really good reminder Start your day with just some me time. Yeah. Yeah positive me time find out what works for you What a great what a great conversation with Mark today We want to thank our producer Brent Klein our booking agent Christine Lawrence who helps find amazing guests and to all of you listening in. If you like the podcast, please share it, let others know about it, and we'd also love you to visit thecultureworks.com where you can get some free resources to help you and your team culture thrive. Yeah, follow us on LinkedIn. We've got a wonderful gratitude journal. We publish twice a month. It's all free. We've got hundreds of thousands of people, literally, that subscribe. It's been really fun. And we love to speak to audiences all around the world, whether it's virtual or it's in person or just over the phone. I'm kidding. On topics of culture, teamwork, and resilience, give us a call. We'd love to speak to you at your event. And of course the Anxiety at Work book is available in Audible, lit video, you know, bookstores everywhere. It's easy to find. There's a lot of great information there as well. We hope you'll take advantage of that. Other than that, Adrian, did I miss anything? You can send me work. I see you captured it all, grabbed the book, anxiety of work, and yeah, let us know what we can do to help you. And until next time, we wish you the best of mental health. ♪♪