Tip 33: Three good things to reframe your writing day

Positive psychologist Professor Martin Seligman’s practice of ‘three good things’ helps retrain your brain to focus on what went well, making it easier to return to the page.

Have you ever finished a writing session feeling drained and convinced it went badly - even if it didn’t? If so, blame your brain.

Thanks to the negativity bias and something psychologists call the peak-end effect, we tend to remember the hard bits, especially at the end.¹

Read more: The power of noticing good things

But there’s a fix. Positive psychology pioneer Professor Martin Seligman developed a practice called three good things, shown to improve well-being and resilience over time. The idea is simple: at the end of your day, note down three things that went well. Even small things make a difference.²

Three good things: point your camera at the positive

I’ve used this for my writing, and it works. As I wrote in an earlier newsletter, “consider your memory to be like a camera it will only capture what you focus on.”

When you start pointing that camera at the positive, your writing life shifts. You might still feel tired after a session (writing is cognitively demanding), but you’ll remember the good things too.

“If we follow our brain’s natural instinct to remember the negative, then over time that’s what our memories will be made of. Consider your memory to be like a camera in that it will only capture what you focus on. The good news is that we can change that focus, it just takes a little effort.”

Read more: Tip 17: Find your writing peaks at the end of year

Noticing small wins makes it easier to come back to the page because your project is associated with positives rather than with dread and fear.

Try this

At the end of your next session, write down three good things about your writing. They can be tiny - an idea that emerged, a word or sentence that surprised you, or simply just showing up.

We can’t make writing easier, but we can change how we remember it. One good thing at a time helps us come back to the page tomorrow.

1. This effect was studied by Barbara Fredrickson and Daniel Kahneman who found that when people evaluate an experience after it has happened, they don’t average out the whole experience. Instead, their memory focuses on: the most intense point (the peak) and the end of the experience. See their paper, Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45 and also Kahneman’s book Thinking, Fast and Slow where he named it the peak-end rule.

2. Psychologist Martin Seligman tested the three good things exercise in a 2005 study, finding it boosted happiness and reduced depressive symptoms for participants; even months later. See: Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410–421. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.60.5.410 also his book Flourish: A New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing.