1: What if you could feel better anytime, anyplace, no matter what?
And not only that, but you could also live ten years longer.
Sounds good, right?
How do you do this? The answer is found in an unexpected place, Jane McGonigal writes in her book SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully.
Chances are, if you are a gamer, you know about power-ups.
“They’re the bonus items that give you more strength, more power, or extra life,” Jane notes.
Examples include “the power pellets in Pac-Man that allow you to gobble ghosts, or the care packages in Call of Duty that restore your soldier’s health, or the super seeds in Angry Birds that supersize the birds in your slingshot,” Jane explains.
Turns out power-ups are useful in real life, too.
That’s the premise of Jane’s book: You can live a better, happier life if you apply the principles and lessons from game design.
Power-ups, for instance, are “one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of someone who is living gamefully,” she notes.
“Just as you would use a power-up in a video game to get through a particularly difficult level, or to accomplish a seemingly impossible task,” Jane observes, “you can use real-world power-ups to give you a boost during difficult times.”
So, what exactly is a power-up in everyday life?
It is “any positive action you can take, easily, that creates a quick moment of pleasure, strength, courage, or connection for you,” she writes.
Here are some of Jane’s favorite power-ups:
- Watch videos of baby animals on YouTube.
- Look out a window for thirty seconds.
- Hold my husband’s hand for six seconds.
- Eat ten walnuts, because they’re good for my brain.
- Try to make my dog smile.
- Send a text message to my mom.
- Listen to a song from one of my favorite Bollywood movies.
- Do ten push-ups even if I’m exhausted—in fact, especially if I’m exhausted, because I like how strong it makes me feel. I think to myself: Screw you, exhaustion! Look at what I can do! I call them screw-you push-ups, and they feel awesome.
2: There’s more. Power-ups are more than just a momentary good feeling.
They “also change your biology in extraordinarily important and long-term ways helping you become far less vulnerable to stress,” Jane shares.
“That’s because in order to rebound from stress and tackle major life obstacles successfully, you need what scientists call high vagal tone.
“And power-ups are the best way to get it,” she explains.
Vagal tone measures the health of your vagus nerve, which goes from your brain to your intestines.
“The vagus nerve touches your heart, lungs, voicebox, ears, and stomach, helping to regulate virtually every important function in your mind and body,” Jane notes, “from your emotions to your heart rate to your breathing rate to your muscle movement to your digestion. . .
“Nearly twenty-five years of research,” Jane states, “has consistently shown that the tone, or strength, of the vagus nerve is the single best measure of how effectively a person’s heart, lungs, and brain respond to stress.”
So, what’s the key takeaway from all this research?
“The stronger the vagal tone,” she writes, “the better you are able to control your emotions and thoughts, and the less likely you are to suffer a variety of ailments, from diabetes and irritable bowel syndrome to social anxiety, loneliness, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Dr. Stephen Porges, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, discovered that vagal tone is a physiological marker of stress vulnerability.
Based on decades of research, he believes that increasing vagal tone is the best all-around intervention for mental and physical health.
“That’s because,” he explains, “what determines your mental and physical health is not the presence or absence of a stressful life event or even how you react to such an event; it’s your neurophysiologic state, or mind-body strength, before a stressful life event occurs.”
“Depending on how much strength you’ve built up,” Jane writes, “you will either be more resilient and therefore better able to experience growth, or more vulnerable and therefore likely to experience negative impacts.”
Vagal tone can be measured in the lab. But there’s an easier, more straightforward way to do so.
Simply track your daily ratio of positive to negative emotions.
“The higher the ratio between positive and negative emotions you feel daily,” Jane notes, “the stronger your vagal tone.
“For decades,” she writes, “researchers have known that experiencing more positive emotions in everyday life is correlated to better physical health. Longitudinal studies of hundreds of thousands of people have documented that experiencing feelings like curiosity, hope, laughter, and wonder seems to make people more resilient to illness and injury.”
In fact, research shows that people who experience positive emotions more regularly are not only happier but also live 10 more years.
Studies conducted by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson at the University of North Carolina and her colleagues show that interventions designed to increase positive emotions, i.e., the power-ups described above, “directly improved the health of the vagus nerve, which in turn improved the RSA numbers that represent the body’s resilience to stress.”
This leads to a self-reinforcing system, an “upward spiral dynamic” between positive emotions and physical resilience: “Improving your vagal tone makes it easier for you to have positive emotional reactions to everyday life events, and with every positive emotion you feel, your vagus nerve gets stronger.”
Which is why measuring the number of positive emotions you feel is such a valid and effective alternative measure of vagal tone.
3: But the science doesn’t stop there.
Barbara’s research shows that trying to directly reduce the number of negative emotions you feel provides virtually no benefit.
“People with high vagal tone,” Jane writes, “experience just as many negative emotions daily as people with low vagal tone—in fact, some research suggests they may feel even more.”
What really matters is the number of positive emotions you can generate to balance and offset negative ones.
“This is good news,” Jane explains, “because it’s much easier to find little ways to feel happy and connected than it is to block or prevent negative emotions entirely. The research also shows that when it comes to positive emotion, frequency is more important than intensity.”
That’s why even small actions that generate positive emotions can make a significant difference.
“You don’t have to make major improvements in your life or experience huge bursts of powerful, all-consuming positive emotion to increase your resilience,” she shares.
“Instead, the most effective strategy is to collect as many microbursts of positive emotion as you can throughout the day.”
Jane shares her experience recovering from a debilitating concussion: “Power-ups gave me control, even on the darkest days, to do something, anything, to help me get stronger. When I look back at that difficult time, I credit using power-ups as the most important and effective step I took to break free of the cycle of anxiety and depression.”
More tomorrow.
___________________________
Reflection: How often am I intentionally creating small moments of positive emotion throughout my day?
Action: Here are Jane’s instructions to calculate your positive emotion ratio.
What to do: Take a look at the following list of emotional experiences. As you go through your day, pay attention to the emotions you are feeling and put a check mark each time you feel the emotion.
If you felt it really strongly, or for a very long time, and not just for a fleeting moment, feel free to put two, three, four, or even five check marks by it.
For example, if you finished a big project this morning and felt extremely proud about it, you might decide that just one check mark by “pride” isn’t enough to represent how you feel—maybe it’s worth two or three.
Or if you spent most of the morning really angry about a serious injustice you personally experienced, it might be worth five check marks by anger. If the feeling was mild or fleeting, one check mark is fine.
POSITIVE EMOTIONS
- Amusement, laughter
- Pride, accomplishment
- Love for someone else
- Interest, curiosity
- Hope, optimism
- Inspiration, motivation
- Peacefulness, serenity
- Awe, wonder
- Gratitude, thankfulness
- Excitement, energy
- Connection, being part of something bigger than myself
- Joy, bliss
- Pleasure, contentment, satisfaction
- Surprise (positive)
- Looking forward to something
- Savoring a pleasant memory
Scoring: Count up all the check marks by a positive emotion (PE). This is your PE total. Then count up all the check marks by a negative emotion (NE). This is your NE total. Now divide your PE by your NE.
This is your positive emotion ratio. For example, if you have six check marks by positive emotions and four check marks by negative emotions, your ratio would be 6/4 or 1.5.
What did you think of this post?
