9. How Positive Emotions Make You Stronger

How Positive Emotions Make You Stronger

Welcome to the blog companion to Episode 9 of the Redefining Happiness Podcast. We often think of happiness as a fleeting mood or a lucky feeling. But what if it’s actually a resource, something that strengthens you mentally, physically, and emotionally? In this post of Redefining Happiness Blog, we explore how positive emotions don't just make life more enjoyable, they actually make you more resilient, creative, and connected.

Let’s dive into how it all works, and why nurturing positive emotions is a life skill worth building.

Welcome Back to Redefining Happiness

Today, we’re talking about why positive and negative emotions feel so different, and what those differences actually mean for your life.

Most of us already know that emotions like fear or anger show up to help us react quickly when we’re in danger. But positive emotions play a different role entirely. Not only do they make us feel good, but they’re also making us healthier and stronger.

The Role of Positive Emotions

Researcher Dr. Barbara L. Fredrickson explored this idea through her paper, The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions. In it, she shares how emotions like joy, interest, and contentment don’t just brighten our mood, they expand our thinking, build our inner resources, and even help undo the effects of stress on the body.

In this post, we’ll look at what that means for your happiness, your resilience, and your everyday life. Because once you understand what positive emotions really do, you’ll start to see happiness not just as a feeling or a luxury, but as a tool for your health and personal growth.

What Negative Emotions Do

Negative emotions like fear, anger, and disgust are easy to recognize because they come with clear, immediate actions, what psychologists call “specific action tendencies.” Fear makes you want to run. Anger makes you want to fight. Disgust makes you pull away. These reactions are hardwired into us to help us survive, and they trigger real physical changes, like increased heart rate and blood flow to your muscles, so you’re ready to act fast.

The problem is that your brain doesn’t always know the difference between life-threatening danger and a stressful email, a late bill, or a conversation you’re dreading. So, your body reacts much the same way, even when you’re not actually in danger.

What Positive Emotions Do

Positive emotions don’t operate that way. They don’t show up in life-threatening situations. So the need to narrow your thought–action range to a single action, like run or fight, isn’t needed. What they do instead is broaden your perspective. Widening the range of the thoughts and actions that come to mind, they help you think more openly, creatively, and flexibly. They make you consider more possibilities, explore more options, and take in more of the world around you.

A Closer Look at Specific Emotions

Joy makes us want to play, try new things, and be creative, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally too.

Interest sparks curiosity. It makes us want to explore, learn, and grow.

Contentment makes us want to pause, savor what we have, and see ourselves and our world with fresh eyes.

Love is a mix of all these emotions shared in safe, close relationships. It encourages us to keep playing, exploring, and appreciating time with the people we care about.

Each of these emotions pushes us to step outside our usual routines and see things differently. For instance, the savoring prompted by contentment helps us better understand ourselves and see the world in new ways.

Building Lasting Resources

In this way, positive emotions help us grow and build what Fredrickson calls “enduring personal resources,” like knowledge and deeper thinking, as well as lasting social bonds and attachments that turn into social support. Even after the emotion fades, the benefits remain. So, every time we experience a positive emotion, we’re building a stronger, more creative, connected, and resilient version of ourselves.

Positive emotions also expand the way we think and act. Research shows that when we feel emotions like joy or contentment, we become more creative, open, and flexible in our thinking. We notice the bigger picture, consider more options, and come up with more ideas for what we might do next. In contrast, negative emotions tend to narrow our focus, making us more reactive and less open-minded.

The Undo Effect

Not only do positive emotions expand our minds and help us grow, they can also undo the physical effects of negative emotions. This is what researchers call the Undo Effect.

Negative emotions prepare your body for action. Your heart races. Your blood pressure rises. Your muscles get ready to move. But positive emotions can reverse those changes. They help return your body to a calm and balanced state. You move out of fight-or-flight mode and back into a place where you can think clearly and respond intentionally.

Study Example: Positive Emotions After Stress

A study conducted by Fredrickson and her team tested this by first putting participants in a stressful situation. They were given only one minute to prepare a speech called “Why you are a good friend,” and were told that it would be recorded and evaluated by their peers. Not surprisingly, this raised their stress levels and triggered stress responses like increased heart rate and blood pressure.

After the speech, the participants were randomly assigned to watch one of four short films: one triggered joy, another contentment, a neutral film, or a sad one.

Now, when these films were shown to people that were in a relaxed state, they didn’t cause much change in their bodies. But when shown after the stressful speech, things shifted. The participants who watched the joy or contentment films recovered from the stress much faster than those who watched the neutral or sad ones. And those in the sadness group had the slowest recovery of all.

This tells us that even mild positive emotions can help undo the effects of stress, both mentally and physically.

Why It Matters

According to the Broaden-and-Build Theory, positive emotions help you step back, gain perspective, and reduce the emotional weight of negative experiences. That makes it easier to bounce back and respond with clarity instead of reactivity.

This is why emotional well-being isn’t something to work on when you have spare time. It deserves to be part of your foundation. It supports your health, your work, your relationships, and your sense of meaning.

What We’ve Learned

To sum up what we’ve learned so far:

• Negative emotions are there to protect you. They’re fast, focused, and tied to physical responses.
• Positive emotions are slower and broader. They help you grow, expand your thinking, and build beneficial personal resources that last beyond the emotion.
• When you're stuck in a negative state, positive emotions can help pull you out. They can reset your body, shift your mindset, and open you up to better choices.

So, when you feel yourself reacting to a negative emotion, try shifting toward something positive. Not to ignore the problem, but to be in a position to manage it better with an open mind and broader choices. Try calling a friend, sing out loud to a great song, pet your dog, or as my niece suggested, go watch some funny cat videos. 

To help you take action on this let’s look at this week’s Happiness challenge.

This Week’s Happiness Challenge: Build Your Positivity Reset Kit

This week, I invite you to create your own Positivity Reset Kit, a go-to collection of things that help lift your mood and ease stress, so that they’re already available for you the next time you’re having a tough day.

Here are a few ideas to get started:

• A playlist of songs that always make you feel better, bonus if they’re fun to sing along to
• A folder of funny cat videos (or whatever makes you laugh)
• Photos from good times that remind you of what you love and value most, or just make you happy
• A list of people you feel safe reaching out to
• Quotes or messages that help you feel grounded or inspired

Then, when you’re feeling anxious, stressed, or down, pull something from your reset kit and see how it shifts your state.

To help you build and test this, I’ve created a FREE Positivity Reset Kit inside the Podcast Resources Hub with templates, worksheets, and journal prompts that together build an effective tool to help you reset your mood and calm your mind.

This kit is only available in the hub, so head to karencastillo.org and click on Podcast, or find the link in the episode description to get started.

Final Thoughts

This is about having tools at your fingertips to help shift your mood, not by ignoring what’s hard, but by helping you reset to a calmer state to manage your problems in a more open, creative, and productive mindset.

Increasing positive emotions is healthy, strengthening, and worth making a central part of your life. Research shows that people who regularly experience positive emotions not only feel better day to day, but also enjoy stronger relationships, improved work performance, better physical health, and even longer lifespans.

So when you take time to create happiness, you’re not escaping life, you’re strengthening your ability to live it well.

Next week, we’ll continue our discussion on the Broaden and Build theory and learn how positive emotions and finding positive meaning during hard times helps us build psychological and physical well-being.

Until then, keep choosing happiness, one moment at a time.

-Karen 

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