Prompt 178. Up-leveling Happiness

& Amy Nguyen on overcoming our negativity bias

View from my writing cottage

Hi friend,

A few days ago, I learned the date of my bone marrow transplant. My brother will be going in for his donation in early February, and I’ll enter the hospital a few days after that, staying for the foreseeable future.

With intensive chemo, the transplant, and three months of medical isolation looming on the horizon, it’s easy for me to spiral into fear or to sink into a low-down place. But from experience, I know spiraling and sinking only begets more spiraling, more sinking. So in these last weeks at home, I’m trying to anchor myself in tiny, beautiful delights: in the inane frippery of tabloid magazines found in the hospital waiting room, in quiet mornings in my writing cottage, in new hobbies like marbling paper with my maman, in mail deliveries and a side of homemade meatballs from my dear friend Cat. Then there are the daily constitutionals with my dad, who says to me every afternoon, “It’s time for your walk.” (Actually what he says is, “Je vais te promener”—which translates sort of hilariously as, “I will walk you”—as if I’m a dog. Which honestly is my dream.)

My first attempt at paper marbling

This week I also had enough energy to do a little writing. I have the privilege of receiving so many beautiful letters from this community, and one of the great joys of the last few months has been this new advice column I’ve been writing, Dear Susu. I’ve been obsessed with advice columns since I was a kid. As far back as elementary school, I would scan the pages of The Saratogian for the Dear Abby column. I loved getting glimpses of the adult world and the varieties of human drama, of the entangling and disentangling that lay ahead. To pen my own version for this community—to take part in a powerful call and response—has been so much fun. In the second installment of Dear Susu, “Haunted by Heartbreak,” I answered a beautiful letter from a lovely young woman named K. about moving on after lost love and alchemizing regret. I was as moved by K.’s story as I was by the stories this community shared in the comments.

And now onto today’s prompt, from another community member, the career happiness strategist and expert Amy Nguyen. It’s about overcoming our negativity bias and the different ways we can hardwire happiness in our lives. May it anchor you in the tiny, beautiful moments in the days ahead.

Contentedly paint-splattered and properly walked,

Suleika

P. S. Today from 1-2pm ET is the next meeting of the Hatch, our virtual writing hour, where we find inspiration and connection and accountability too. Carmen will be hosting—paid subscribers can find the Zoom link here!

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The Isolation Journals is my newsletter for people seeking to transform life's interruptions into creative grist. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. The best way to support my work is with a paid subscription, where you get added benefits like an archive of interviews with amazing artists, behind-the-scenes tidbits from me, a book club, and other opportunities for creative community.

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178. Hardwiring Happiness by Amy Nguyen

Five years ago, as the Head of Employee Happiness for a unicorn company, I thought I had everything. However, when I returned to work after giving birth to my second child, I worked long hours and through the weekend, and at some point, I realized the happy me was gone. So I embarked on a quest to revamp my happiness index by befriending science, including the work of psychologist Rick Hanson, and using that lens to decode the origin of my youthful positivity despite a difficult childhood.

I was born in a poor country, in a neighborhood rampant with drug use and fighting, in a broken family. My father was an “exported laborer” (a term coined during the Doi Moi period, when Vietnam had just opened up to the world) in Germany and had abandoned my mother, sister, and me for his new family there. We lived in a small house with a roof of dried palm leaves so wobbly that rain could easily leak through. Yet I never felt a lot of pity for myself—in fact, most of the time, I felt grateful and full of zest. A second-hand shirt from a wealthy cousin brought me endless joy. An ice cream my mum brought home made me feel like I was being treated to a sumptuous meal.

In the end, I learned that a key ingredient to cultivating authentic happiness was the brain’s ability to hardwire positivity into its structure. The human brain is pre-programmed with a negativity bias, a legacy of the survival instinct from our ancestors millions of years ago. It scans the environment for dangers, and because our mental resources are limited, the brain tends to let positivity slip through. Often when it notices positive facts, it doesn’t hold onto them long and deeply enough so they can be “installed” into our neural structure. With this in mind, I realized there were certain behaviors that had already predisposed me for happiness, like the following:

1. Reliving a beautiful moment. Sometimes, I recall a memory from childhood, like a sunlit window in my aunt’s French-styled apartment in the old quarter of Hanoi, or a memory of my beloved grandma who passed away a few years ago.

2. Delighting in small happy things. I tend to notice these and sink into them: a little pumpkin in my summer garden, a piece of dark chocolate, the smell of the dried lavender on my desk. 

3. Creating opportunities for joy. It could be as simple as spending a day as a local traveler in my neighborhood or cooking something I’ve never attempted before. Whatever it is, I try to experience it with all five senses. 

4. Connecting with a positive vision. While indulging in beautiful things present and past, I also visualize my future as if it were real and feel excited about it. 

I’ve been up-leveling my happiness ever since—by hardwiring positivity and joy from the little things to the big things. When I do, magic comes.

Your prompt for the week:

Reliving beautiful moments, delighting in small happy things, creating opportunities for joy, and visualizing an exciting future are great ways to hardwire happiness. Choose one that is calling to you, and write about it. Make it a habit and watch the wonders unfold.

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If you’d like, you can post your response in the comments below, in our Facebook group, or on Instagram by tagging @theisolationjournals.

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Today’s Contributor

Amy Nguyen is a career happiness strategist, brain-based happiness expert, and speaker. She was named to Business Insider's premier list of the most innovative career coaches in 2020. The author of the weekly Happier YOU newsletter, her work has appeared in Forbes, Business Insider, NBC, Thrive Global. She lives in Upstate New York with her husband and two children and is writing a book on how she rewired her mom brain for authentic happiness and success—from career to marriage to parenting.

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In Case You Missed It…

Dear Susu #2: Haunted by Heartbreak

Dear Susu,

My past love once told me that he was convinced he would die laughing, and I remember thinking how beautifully that embodied who he is: full of life and relentless joy. It has been four years since we bid farewell to each other at an airport gate after our "grand finale" New Orleans trip. We had grown so used to living our lives apart during years of long distance that seeing him walk to board his flight to New York as I sat in front of my gate to Maine did not seem like an end at the time, but it has become one.

We fell in love toward the end of college and dated in the years that followed. My love for him was beyond words, full of admiration for the person he was and was destined to become. We talked about a future together full of travels and board games and weirdness. But he was set on NYC and I went off to Alaska in my first year out of college to be a reporter. I bounced around from place to place on the fruitless and cliche search to "find myself." I eventually tried NYC with him and felt entirely overwhelmed within the world he had built in my absence. We loved each other, but couldn't make it work and I still can't shake the feeling that the end was all my fault, all driven by a selfish need to explore and see what was out there.

In the past four years I have built my own life and am generally happy, but I still think of him each and every day and worry I'll never find a soul like him. He has moved on, accomplishing all the dreams he planted the seeds of when we were together. But he is living out those dreams with someone else now. I feel so stuck on him, so regretful and so paralyzed by all of this. I can't help but compare every person I date to him. I can't help but wonder if he would be proud of me and the life I've built. And I can't seem to find the me he fell in love with, a version that was so thrilled by the uncertainty and excitement of life rather than overwhelmed by it.

This, perhaps, is what frightens me the most. That I haven't just lost him, but have lost sight of myself in the process, unable to be fully present in my life and relationships and open to the joys that once came so effortlessly. As you wrote, I cannot seem to "build a barricade between [my]self and [my] past" as he has and I'm not sure I want to. How can I hold the past in a way that is not so burdening? How can I hold this person as a part of me without becoming entangled in him? I suppose I'm asking how to break free from a love story or at least rewrite it and leave room for more pages.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. Sending you light and love. 

K.

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Dearest K., 

When I was twenty-two years old, I believed with everything in me, beyond any doubt, that the man I’d just fallen in love with was the person I’d be with forever. When I was first diagnosed with leukemia, and over and over again during that first grueling year of treatment, I was certain that if I survived, there was nothing that could break us. We were already going through the hardest, most unimaginable thing. Cut to three-plus years later: me on my kitchen floor in the apartment we had shared but no longer, still wearing my hospital bracelet, lighting up a cigarette.

The grief felt obliterating. I was sure I would never find that kind of love again…