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“I am a wellbeing researcher & good-life storyteller“

Dr Jolanta Burke is a Chartered Psychologist and a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Positive Psychology and Health, RCSI University of Medicine and Health Sciences. An author of 8 books, she specialises in positive psychology and was acknowledged by the Irish Times as one of 30 people in Ireland who make it a better place.

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Attention medical professionals, health coaches, and educators interested in Positive Health. Accomplishments are not always good for us. Not all relationship problems can be resolved. A stress-is-debilitating mindset means that you dread stressful situations and think stress is bad for you. When it happens, your behaviour stops you from coping with stress effectively. Here is what you tend to do: "Forgiveness is one of the most misunderstood concepts in psychology. Often, when people say they do not want to forgive, what they mean is that they condemn what has happened to them and do not want to offer a pardon to the person who did them wrong. However, forgiveness is not about the perpetrator, it is about the self; the perpetrator is irrelevant. You can experience forgiveness at two distinct levels: "When everything else fails, hope prevails. Without hope, we cannot get up, dust ourselves off, and keep going. Hope is an essential ingredient for coping. The difference between optimism and hope is significant. Optimism gives us the expectation that everything will work out well. Hope, however, gives us the will and the way to keep going in a specific direction. It is a mixture of agency thinking and clear pathway thinking that helps us get there (Snyder, 1994). Agency thinking is about maintaining the energy to pursue our dreams and goals and keep the motivation going. It is about saying to ourselves that we can do it, we have all it takes to do it, and firmly believing that we can keep going, even when we face obstacles. Pathway thinking relates to developing a clear route towards accomplishing our goals. For example, it is not enough to say that you want to become a famous singer. Instead, to create a pathway, we need to develop a route for getting there: attending voice classes, practising daily, signing up to a choir, and similar activities. When we have the goal and the pathway towards it developed and then have the agency thinking clarified, we will experience hope. Thus, hope is far from wishful thinking. It is, in fact, the opposite. It is a plan and a belief that we have what it takes to sustain the energy to keep going and ultimately reach it." "We practice various types of kindness: "For years, psychologists believed that how couples argue best predicted their happiness and relationship longevity (e.g. Gottman & Silver, 2000). However, they increasingly claim that it is how we respond to each other’s good news every day that matters more in the context of enhancing our relationships (Gable et al., 2004). Good news occurs more frequently than arguments; hence we have more opportunities every day of improving our relationships by capitalising. Capitalisation response refers to reacting to other people’s good news with genuine interest and enthusiasm (active-constructive), as opposed to ignoring it (passive-destructive), searching for downside to the good news (active-destructive), or half-heartedly (passive-constructive) acknowledging other people’s success (Gable & Reis, 2010). Capitalisation is fuelled by positive emotions (Kaczmarek et al., 2021). While we have good evidence showing the positive impact on those who choose to share their news, we also have growing benefits for those who choose to respond in an active-constructive way (Peters et al., 2018). Therefore, the two people involved in a positive exchange gain a lot from it, as they feel closer to their partner and their relationship flourishes (Woods et al., 2015)." "Although many believe that meditation is about stopping thinking to achieve an empty mind (a state when you do not think about anything), the reality remains that it is not possible to eradicate these mental and physical processes. Instead, many meditation practices are concerned with disengaging from thoughts, memories, emotions, and sensations on a moment-by-moment basis and in a non-judgemental way. The simple but powerful practice of sitting still and upright with eyes closed for minutes at a time can exert enormous benefits on our psychosocial and physical health, benefits that have been documented by research scientists across the world (Gawrylewski, 2018)."

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