Should We Chase the Good—or Worry Less About the Bad?
For decades, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) has been considered the gold standard for treating depression and anxiety—conditions that will affect around one in five people during their lifetime. CBT has strong evidence behind it and, for many, it reduces distressing symptoms such as low mood, fear, and catastrophic thinking.
Yet there is a growing recognition within scientific circles that CBT does not work for everyone. Research shows that only about half of patients benefit, and only half of those experience lasting improvement. Crucially, while CBT often helps reduce negative emotions, it does not reliably restore positive ones—such as happiness, excitement, or a sense of aliveness.
Psychologists had always assumed that by reducing negative emotions—anger, fear, anxiety, sadness—the natural consequence would be for positive emotions to rise on their own. But…they don’t.. not reliably.
This insight has prompted a quiet but profound shift in therapeutic thinking.
Turning Therapy on Its Head
Rather than focusing primarily on correcting distorted thoughts or dampening distress, researchers like Michelle Craske at the University of California, Los Angeles are exploring therapies that actively cultivate positive emotional states—even when those states are fleeting, subtle, or initially uncomfortable.
These approaches borrow tools from CBT but reorient the goal: not merely reducing suffering, butstrengthening the nervous system’s capacity for pleasure, connection, and reward. Large-scale clinical trials in the U.S. and U.K. suggest this shift may be especially powerful for people who experience anhedonia—the blunting or loss of positive emotion that often accompanies depression and anxiety.
One of the most researched of these approaches is Positive Affect Treatment (PAT), developed by Craske and Alicia Meuret of Southern Methodist University. PAT has now been tested in multiple National Institutes of Health–funded trials, comparing it with a CBT-style approach called Negative Affect Treatment (NAT).
Participants in these studies all lived with depression and/or anxiety, and many struggled to feel pleasure at all. Results showed that PAT was significantly more effective than NAT for people with moderate to severe symptoms and pronounced anhedonia.
Reawakening the Brain’s Reward System
PAT is grounded in decades of research showing that people who struggle to feel pleasure are more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. Brain imaging studies reveal that, in many of these individuals, neural circuits involved in reward processing are underactive.
Craske and her colleagues focused on strengthening this system through three key stages of reward:
- Anticipation (wanting)
- Consumption (enjoying)
- Learning (remembering and integrating)
In simple terms: learning to look forward to, fully experience, and mentally store positive moments.
Imagine a teenage girl who hears Taylor Swift is coming to town and eagerly offers to clean the house for a month if her parents buy tickets. That’s anticipation. At the concert, she feels euphoric—that’s enjoyment. Later, she realises the cheaper seats were still great, making future concerts feel more accessible. That’s learning.
For someone with depression or anxiety, any one of these steps may be blocked.
From Correcting Thoughts to Savoring Experience
Consider a woman who tells her therapist she used to love having lunch with a friend, but now feels numb during the meal and worse afterward. After a recent lunch, she spirals into self-criticism—convinced she was boring, that her friend left early because of her, and that she’ll eventually be alone.
In traditional CBT, therapy would focus on challenging these beliefs, examining evidence, and calming the body’s fear response.
In PAT, the therapist takes a different route.
The woman is gently asked to identify anything enjoyable about the lunch—however small. Perhaps the aroma of food made her hungry. Perhaps her friend laughed at a story. Perhaps there was a warm hug at the end. She is then guided to linger with these moments, sensing them fully and imagining their return.
This deliberate savouring—combined with practices such as gratitude and generosity—helps retrain the brain to register and retain positive experiences, much like energy healing practices that attune awareness to subtle but life-giving sensations.
Beyond Positivity: A Practical Balance
Another emerging approach, Augmented Depression Therapy (ADepT), overlaps with PAT but goes further. Developed by Barney Dunn at the University of Exeter in England, ADepT works pragmatically with both positive and negative emotions.
Rather than asking whether a thought is “true” (as CBT does), ADepT asks whether it is useful. If someone about to give a talk feels like an imposter, CBT might challenge the belief. ADepT might instead offer a stabilising alternative: “I know enough about this topic, and I will do an okay job.”
Clinical trials show that ADepT outperforms CBT not only in reducing symptoms, but in improving overall well-being. Eighty percent of participants improved, compared with sixty percent in CBT—and more importantly, they were more likely to stay well a year later.
This translates into: choosing to turn toward the positive helps get more people better, and helps them to stay better for longer.
Why Happiness Can Feel Unsafe
One challenge with positivity-focused therapies is that many people are deeply afraid of happiness. Some believe joy is fleeting and will be followed by disaster. Others feel undeserving. Many unconsciously suppress pleasure because it feels unfamiliar or unsafe. People with depression often employ a whole set of behaviours to snuff out the joy because it feels uncomfortable.
Anxiety adds another layer. Many anxious individuals believe that worrying protects them—that expecting the worst prevents emotional devastation. This phenomenon, known as contrast avoidance, causes people to dampen joy before it can fully arise.
To address this, researchers have developed tools like SkillJoy, an experimental phone app created by Lucas LaFreniere and Michelle Newman. The app encourages users to notice and remain with positive feelings—even when discomfort arises. Early trials show it significantly reduces contrast avoidance.
A New Gold Standard?
Other “positive therapies” are emerging, including amplification of positivity treatment (designed to improve social connection) and behavioural activation therapy, which has long been used to treat anhedonia.
Rather than replacing CBT, these approaches may become part of a hybrid future—one that recognises 
that some people need first to calm fear, while others long most deeply to feel joy, meaning, and vitality again.
As Craske notes, therapy should be tailored. Someone overwhelmed by panic may benefit most from CBT. Someone who feels empty, flat, or disconnected may need help turning gently toward pleasure. For patients, capturing these moments and building on them can be transformative.
As the year closes and a new one opens, perhaps healing is not only about releasing what hurts—but about learning, patiently and courageously, to let the good in.
REFERENCES
Craske, M. G. et al. (2023). Positive affect treatment targets reward sensitivity: A randomized controlled trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 91(6), 350–366. https://doi.org/10.1037/ccp0000805
Dunn, Barnaby D. et al. (2023) Preliminary clinical and cost effectiveness of augmented depression therapy versus cognitive behavioural therapy for the treatment of anhedonic depression (ADepT): a single-centre, open-label, parallel-group, pilot, randomised, controlled trial. eClinicalMedicine, Volume 61, 102084. DOI: 10.1016/j.eclinm.2023.102084
LaFreniere LS, Newman MG (2023). Reducing contrast avoidance in GAD by savoring positive emotions: Outcome and mediation in a randomized controlled trial. J Anxiety Disord. Jan;93:102659.doi: 10.1016/j.janxdis.2022.102659
Taylor, C. T. et al (2024). Amplification of Positivity Treatment for Anxiety and Depression: A Randomized Experimental Therapeutics Trial Targeting Social Reward Sensitivity to Enhance Social Connectedness. Biological Psychiatry,Volume 95, Issue 5, Pages 434-443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2023.07.024
Cernasov, P. M. et al. (2024). A parallel-arm, randomized trial of Behavioral Activation Therapy for anhedonia versus mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for adults with anhedonia. Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 182, 104620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2024.104620
Craske, M.G. et al. Positive affect and reward processing in the treatment of depression, anxiety and trauma. Nat Rev Psychol 3, 665–685 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44159-024-00355-4
Early childhood friends also played a strong role in predicting how participants approached their future close friendships—and their romantic connections. Those first friendships at school help us practice give-and-take dynamics. Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.
Between 2018 and 2022, 705 of the original participants, who by then were 26 to 31 years old, agreed to a follow-up study to collect information about their current relationships with their parents, best friends and romantic partners. For those 705 participants, Dugan and her colleagues analysed associations between the quality of early relationships and later attachment styles in adulthood. They found several notable patterns. First, a person’s relationship with their mother tended to set the stage for their later attachment style in general, as well as for their specific approaches to individual relationships with friends, romantic partners and fathers. For instance, people who had more conflict with their mothers, were less close to their mothers or had mothers who were reportedly harsher and showed less warmth during childhood and adolescence tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships.
This research began as a spin-off from a film called Mission: Joy—Finding Happiness in Troubled Times (see 
It took surprisingly little time and effort for people to feel better. Although many well-being programs span eight weeks or more, the Big Joy project yielded meaningful changes after just one week. And the more of the micro acts people completed, the more their happiness improved.
In a world grappling with loneliness, burnout and ideological division, small reminders of inspiration, kindness and connection can be powerful. When people experience more joy in their lives, they also tend to be more generous with their time and resources. And when people want to give more to one another, everyone benefits.
Perhaps that’s what makes the project so powerful. People mired in busyness wait impatiently for a promotion, holiday, new car/house/handbag or entertaining event, expecting to finally feel good. But this project teaches a different lesson. Simple, daily micro acts can ratchet up happiness in a more empowering way. Deliberately finding gratitude, offering kindness or giving ourselves moments to experience awe are not passive acts. They are courageous and effective ways of gently steering your own ship, even through stormy times.
The biological underpinnings of the “Monday effect” have long been unclear, however. Is the stress and anxiety experienced on Monday biologically distinct? And could this be leaving a mark on people’s body even after they stop working?
The results were striking. Older adults who reported feeling anxious on Mondays had, on average, 23 percent higher levels of cortisol in their hair samples collected up to two months later, compared with those who felt anxious on other days. This association was strongest among those with the highest cortisol levels—a group at particular risk for health problems associated with chronic stress.
Why might Mondays, in particular, exert a powerful effect on the body? One possibility is that the transition from the weekend to the structured demands of the week is inherently stressful, and some people adapt to it better than others. Another is that Mondays present a higher level of uncertainty. Previous research from Becker has indicated that anticipation and uncertainty represent key drivers of stress and anxiety. For those who don’t adapt to the weekly cycle, the repeated stress of Mondays may accumulate over the course of a lifetime, eventually leading to long-term problems in the body’s ability to regulate the stress system, which in turn can increase the risk of disease.
In addition, interventions aimed at helping people adapt to the start of the week might have long-term health benefits. The brain’s stress response is plastic, meaning that it can change. Practices that support emotion regulation, including meditation, mindfulness, regular physical activity or good sleep hygiene may help recondition the brain’s weekly cycle and attenuate stress-related health risks.
Let’s start with a bit of winter warmth. In Spain and other Mediterranean places, as well as Latin America and some places in Asia, it’s common practice to take an after-lunch nap, called a “siesta” in Spanish. This afternoon nap time is not just for kids—adults do it too! It’s taken so seriously that museums, shops, and churches usually close for a couple of hours, and everything shuts down.
In 2016, Denmark ranked as the happiest nation in the world in the World Happiness Report. Then, Finland became number one for the next three years, with Norway and Sweden never far behind. Did you ever wonder at the fact that the five happiest countries in the world are almost always cold, Nordic countries. How do they do it?
The Danish believe in hygge (pronounced “hoo-gah”), which loosely translates to “coziness” and sounds to me a lot like ‘hug’! The word originated from an Old Norwegian word meaning “well-being,” and it captures all that is cozy, warm, and enjoyable. Curling up under a soft blanket while holding a warm mug of cocoa is hygge. Chatting with friends and family around a fire is hygge. And simply enjoying the glow of a candle is hygge.
On the subject of being with the environment, we’ll ‘travel’ now eastwards to Japan, to take a dip in the woods. Not an actual swim, but rather, an immersion in nature called “shinrin-yoku,” loosely translated to “forest bathing.”
Who doesn’t enjoy a good belly laugh? But have you ever done it on purpose? The idea of (Indian) laughter yoga is that we don’t have to wait for something funny to happen in order to laugh. Instead, laughter can and should be practiced for its own sake.
The word Ubuntu can be translated as ‘humanity towards others,’ and is part of a phrase that means ‘a person is a person through other people.’
Research has found that Sabbath-keeping is beneficial for physical and mental health. This is unsurprising, given that much research has established the benefits of rest, spirituality, and even simply eating meals together as a family. So even if you’re not religious, you can practice a secular version of Shabbat and let this weekly time out give you the chance to rest and connect with others. And if you manage to turn off your mobile phone for a day too then you’re really doing well!
So what, if anything, can be good about gossip? Whenever someone confides something to you about someone you both know—whether the information is positive, negative or neutral—it brings the two of you closer, creating a social bond. According to one study, it even increases your liking for the spreader of the information. It helps you learn who to trust and who to avoid. It enforces group norms. For example, complaints about a co-worker who regularly leaves their lunch to rot in the fridge get back to them and let them know that doing so is not an office norm.
Gossipers have been maligned from time immemorial as rumourmongers or talebearers, yet most of what they impart is actually true, research shows. Sociologist Francesca Giardini of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and her colleagues found this to be the case in a lab experiment in which students played a series of ‘public goods’ games. In this type of game, players benefit from monetary contributions that they make to a common pool as long as people behave altruistically, but individual players can choose instead to maximize their payoff by acting in their own self-interest. In the study, four players had the opportunity to earn up to €21 from the experimenters depending on how the participants played. If they contributed to their private account, they got what they put in plus a share of the group pot. Everyone benefited more if they all contributed to that pot because its holdings were multiplied by 1.5.
However…even being friends with anyone else in the gossip triangle affects the information’s truthfulness. For example, a friend of the target may not pass on something negative. In addition, a gossiper may say something positive—but false—about a friend.
There is a common assumption that being the target of gossip is a bad thing, but this is not always the case. Psychologist Elena Martinescu, then at the University of Groningen, and her colleagues found that targets of positive gossip experienced positive emotions such as pride, but negative gossip was sometimes beneficial by inspiring efforts to repair problematic behaviour. The good side is that you may become more aware of how you’re perceived by others. You may adjust your behaviour accordingly. But, in line with popular perception, if people are bad-mouthing about you, they can harm your reputation, your career prospects and your own mental health.
One of the most beneficial results of gossip is that it helps people better understand the behaviour of others. For example, Cruz found, someone might complain about a co-worker who shows up late every day, but if they learn through gossip that the offending colleague is in the middle of a divorce or that this person’s young son has cancer, they are less likely to complain. Perhaps more important, they sympathise with the co-worker who is suffering a crisis and feel motivated to be more helpful to them. Overall, Cruz and his colleagues found in their study that most gossip in real life was neither positive nor negative, just newsy: someone became a grandparent; someone got engaged. To avoid biasing their subjects, the investigators never used the term gossip.
The source of these stinky compounds is complex, but it starts with the activity of the sebaceous glands, which secrete sebum, an oily substance that helps protect your skin and keep your hair shiny and hydrated. The glands are active just before birth and then mostly go dormant for years, but they get very active again around puberty.
However, other scientists caution that the research might be too preliminary to jump to any firm evolutionary conclusions. Bodily smells change over time, but it could be that they have no communicative purpose. For example, imagine a “new car smell.” Most people have a positive association with this scent, even though there isn’t any good evolutionary reason for it. New cars are filled with volatile chemicals that don’t smell particularly nice on their own and might even be hazardous in high concentrations. Yet many people learn to perceive this smell as “good” because it represents the exciting, high-status act of buying a new car. This association is so strong that you can purchase air fresheners designed to make your old car smell like you just drove it from the showroom/car dealer.
Similarly, it’s possible that babies aren’t hardwired to smell nice to their parents. Infants certainly don’t consciously control their body odour in order to manipulate adults into feeding and pampering them. Through repeated exposure, however, parents might come to associate their child’s smell with the dopamine rush produced by caring for them. But just because the association is below the level of conscious awareness doesn’t mean parents aren’t evolutionarily predisposed to find baby scents pleasant and teenage scents repellant. There is previous research on stickleback fish (yes, honestly) that has shown that closely related individual sticklebacks dislike one another’s smell once they reach sexual maturity. Scientists hypothesize that this helps the fish avoid inbreeding when it comes time to choose a mate. A similar mechanism may be at play in humans, with infant smells provoking a deep-seated nurturing response in parents that later turns to avoidance once puberty begins. In other words it could be the receptors of the person who’s perceiving the body odour that have changed.
A handful of researchers, mostly emergency room doctors, began collecting qualitative data about NDEs after the 1975 publication of psychiatrist and physician Raymond A. Moody’s book Life after Life, which detailed patients’ accounts of near-death experiences. Since then, only a few research teams have attempted to empirically investigate the neurobiology of NDEs. But their findings are already challenging long-held beliefs about the dying brain, including that consciousness ceases almost immediately after the heart stops beating. This discovery has important implications for current resuscitation practices. If we understand the mechanisms of death, then this could lead to new ways of saving lives.
Many people who had an NDE describe one or more of a specific set of characteristics. They may recall separating from their body and viewing it in real time from above. They may pass through tunnels and see light, encounter deceased relatives or compassionate entities, and have a sense of vastness and deep insight. People may undergo a life review and morally evaluate the choices they have made, including by experiencing the joy or pain their actions caused others. What’s intriguing is that when people die, they don’t evaluate themselves based on their own standards of morals, they evaluate themselves based on a universal standard.
Somewhat surprisingly, religious people don’t seem to be more inclined toward NDEs. There is, however, preliminary evidence of another group being more likely to have NDEs: those who are prone to REM sleep intrusion, a condition that occurs when rapid eye movement (REM) sleep intrudes into wakefulness and blends elements of dreaming and waking. During the seconds or minutes it lasts for, people may have an out-of-body experience, sense that someone or something is in the room with them, or want to move but find that they can’t. In 2019 Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at the Copenhagen University Hospital and his colleagues recruited a sample of 1,034 adults from the general population in 35 countries. Ten percent of the study participants had experienced an NDE, and of those, 47 percent also reported REM sleep intrusion—a statistically significant association. Among the people who had not had NDEs, just 14 percent reported REM sleep intrusion.
Borjigin had seen the same upwelling of activity in previous studies of the brains of healthy rats during induced cardiac arrest. In the rodents, the surge occurred across the entire brain. In humans, though, it was confined primarily to the junction of the brain’s temporal, parietal and occipital lobes, a region involved in multiple features of consciousness, including visual, auditory and motion processing. Past research has also associated the region with out-of-body sensations, as well as with altruism and empathy. Although these are all regular components of NDEs, Borjigin says, it’s impossible to know whether the two patients actually experienced an NDE because they did not live to tell about it.
A different subset of 53 patients from the study survived. Doctors collected EEG and brain-oxygen levels for too few of these people to draw a correlation between any potential memory they had of the event and their brain activity. The authors were able to interview 28 of the survivors, and six had a NDE.
Other scientists flatly disagree. Kondziella suggests that when you have an NDE, you must have a functioning brain to store the memory. And you have to survive with an intact brain so you can retrieve that memory and be able to tell about it. A functioningg brain is necessary for that, so “all those arguments that NDEs prove that there’s consciousness outside the brain are simply nonsense”.
An easier approach to studying NDEs is via safe proxies such as hypnosis, induced fainting and psychedelic drugs. None of these methods produce true NDEs, but the states they trigger may have some overlap with the dying brain. In 2018 Timmermann, Martial and their colleagues published a study comparing NDEs with the effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a mind-altering component of ayahuasca, a South American plant-derived psychedelic brew. Trace amounts of DMT also occur endogenously in humans. There’s speculation that that’s somehow underlying NDEs.
In another study currently undergoing peerreview, Martial, Timmermann and their colleagues interviewed 31 people who had experienced an NDE and had also tried a psychedelic drug—LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, DMT or mescaline—to see what they had to say about the similarities and differences between the events. Participants reported stronger sensory effects during their NDE, including the sensation of being disembodied, but stronger visual imagery during their drug trip. They reported feelings of spirituality, connectedness and deeper meaning across both.
The new research, by Audrey van der Meer and Ruud van der Weel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), builds on a foundational 2014 study. That work suggested that people taking notes by computer were typing without thinking. It appears to be very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying since it goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips. But you apparently don’t process the incoming information. But when taking notes by hand, it’s often impossible to write everything down; students have to actively pay attention to the incoming information and process it—prioritise it, consolidate it and try to relate it to things they’ve learned before. This conscious action of building onto existing knowledge can make it easier to stay engaged and grasp new concepts.
When you are typing, the same simple movement of your fingers is involved in producing every letter, whereas when you’re writing by hand, you immediately feel that the bodily feeling of producing A is entirely different from producing a B. It seems that children who have learned to read and write by tapping on a digital tablet often have difficulty distinguishing letters that look a lot like each other or that are mirror images of each other, like the b and the p.
For example, participants in a 2021 study by memorised a list of action verbs more accurately if they performed the corresponding action than if they performed an unrelated action or none at all. Drawing information and enacting information is helpful because you have to think about information and you have to produce something that’s meaningful. And by transforming the information, you pave and deepen these interconnections across the brain’s vast neural networks, making it much easier to access that information.
The new study opens up bigger questions about the way we learn, such as how brain region connections change over time and when these connections are most important in learning. These new findings don’t mean technology is a disadvantage in the classroom. Laptops, smartphones and other such devices can be more efficient for writing essays or conducting research and can offer more equitable access to educational resources. Problems occur when people rely on technology too much. People are increasingly delegating thought processes to digital devices, an act called “cognitive offloading”—using smartphones to remember tasks, taking a photo instead of memorising information or depending on a GPS to navigate. Scientists think it’s helpful, but the constant offloading means we’re not actively using those memory or motor areas in the brain,…that can lead to deterioration over time.
Van der Meer says some officials in Norway are inching toward implementing completely digital schools. She claims first grade teachers there have told her their incoming students barely know how to hold a pencil now—which suggests they weren’t colouring pictures or assembling puzzles in nursery school. Van der Meer says they’re missing out on opportunities that can help stimulate their growing brains. Scientists are discovering that there is a very strong case for engaging children in drawing and handwriting activities, especially in preschool and kindergarten when they’re first learning about letters. Engaging the fine motor system and production activities that impacts learning and is vitally important!