Positive Psychology for Individuals with MS

What is Positive Psychology?

Positive psychology is an area of psychology that focuses on helping people to experience greater life satisfaction.
Positive psychology focuses on improving positive emotions through the practice of simple exercises that are designed to help people feel more hopeful, grateful, and happy.
We encourage you to give each of these five exercises a try – even if some seem too simple or completely unrelated to your health at first – because many people find that the exercises actually end up having a much more powerful effect than they expected. We recommend you complete one exercise per week over the next five weeks.

Exercise 1:  Gratitude for Positive Events
Exercise 2:  Personal Strengths
Exercise 3:  Gratitude Letter
Exercise 4:  Enjoyable and Meaningful Activities
Exercise Five:  Remembering Past Successes

This is Just the Beginning!

We hope that these exercises have helped to provide a boost in your positive thoughts and feelings. Feeling more positive may even be making it easier to live with a chronic illness. If the exercises have helped you to feel more proud, grateful, satisfied, or energetic, the next step is to sustain this new level of positive thoughts and feelings. You know this intimately if you’ve worked hard to make changes before but found that it’s hard to stick to those changes. We would guess that some of your other attempts might have worked, just not for long. However, by using the exercises you’ve practiced these last five weeks, you can sustain gains in positive experiences. In fact, the more you perform these activities, the more you may find that they become a natural, enjoyable part of your life.