Concrete Pencil: The Power of Positive Thinking

Shut your eyes and an endless slideshow of mind jpegs displays the things you aren't doing: cliffside hut, country cottage, spinning your daughter in the air on the beach, bowling a devilish yorker, barbecuing sausages, drinking pear cider, smoking fags cross-legged by the folk tent.

You know the drill. That creeping downer that seems as much a part of CW life as the DLR and queues at lunchtime.

I'm here and I don't want to be but I haven't got the money, the energy or the imagination to go anywhere else.

And the feeling has spread, at least for me, out from the Wharf on the grey and blue lines on the Tube map of my soul. Wherever I am I wish I was somewhere else, where the better times are no doubt happening.

You kind of know you should live in the moment, but how does that help you when the moment sucks?

This isn't America, we're not going to sit around being all sunny just because we're alive. This is London. We take joy in hating it here.
OK, OK. This is no way to live.

What are the alternatives? How can we lift this city of grouch?

Pastel-covered self-help books won't do, we're too city for that nonsense. And cheery GMTV good mornings leave any sane person bubbling into rage.

Our only hope, what we really need, is cold hard science. Measured with a ruler and a geiger-counter, we need to know the value of smiles and the danger of toxic downerness.

Well, strangely, there is some.

The Economist reports this week there is a new movement in American science called Positive Psychology.

It took the logical starting point that the first century of psychiatry and psychology focussed entirely on mental illness and that it was high time wellness was studied. And there were some startling findings, most interestingly that conscious deliberation of things for which to be thankful raises mood long term on any scale with which you care to measure it. 

Not everyone is going to be smiley-smiley all the time, argues the movement's founder Professor Martin Seligman, rather we each have a range of potential happiness, and by doing a few things differently you can live at the top of your range. 

Such as - taking time to list the things for which you are grateful. For which, incidentally, there is a new and popular iPhone app.

Sounds a bit culty? A bit, but the science is out there to be challenged in the normal way.

And in the meantime, where's the harm?

So, standing head-pressed looking out on the fun world, I'm going to try to look forward to being in it, being glad I'm here and that it's today.

Be still, my inner grumbler.