Use Your Character Strengths to Feel Better
My head feels like a ball of raw meat, aching from a beating, oozing blood from my ears. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but my brain feels like an open wound. Hyperacusis can be…unpleasant.
I haven’t had a high sensory pain day like this for months. There is no convenient day to feel brutalized by the misfiring of your own nerves, but on the first Monday of a new month, I don’t want the freedom to curl into a ball. I want the power to engage life.
Your nerves may not have turned on you today, but chances are some person, problem, or demand in your life will sap your energy before the week is out. The nature of energy is an ebb and flow at the best of times. So, instead of fearing the loss of power to engage, I’ve been learning ways to reignite my emotional energy.
The strain my sensory issues put on my nervous system make me leery of hyping myself up, or chemically zapping myself with sugar or caffeine. Like over-stressing a low voltage socket, I don’t need to force huge emotions or drive myself into a manic state. Instead, I need to hook into the tiny engines of engagement.
I remind myself… Morgan, the shortest distance between you and energy is to experience positive emotion…
But how do you feel positive emotion when you’re sick, scared, heartbroken, overwhelmed, or angry? How do you feel positive emotion when you’re drained, distracted, or disconnected from what matters to you?
Over the years I’ve had various reasons to practice finding my way back to positive emotions. In seasons of depression, bereavement, and uncertainty positive emotions have felt out of reach. But there are lots of ways to spark them into the present moment…and small sparks are at my fingertips even now.
Today, I’m using character strengths to help myself experience positive emotion. It’s working today already, so I want you to know about it too.
What are Character Strengths
If the term character strengths is new to you, don’t worry. You know what they are even if you don’t use that term to describe them. Think of the ways of thinking or behaving that feel like they’re really important to you. Things like being socially intelligent, treating people fairly, having a learner’s heart, or appreciating the beauty of the world around you. If they are really important attributes to you, you respect and enjoy seeing the traits in others, and you feel resonance when you live into them yourselves.
The team at the VIA Institute on Character explored and defined 24 essentially human character strengths to help us in our self-discovery project. These aren’t rules of things we “should do” or ideals of who we “should be.” They’re words used to describe who we already are when we honor what is truly meaningful to us.
Even in the worst situation, we stoke our inner fire by making choices in alignment with what we find meaningful. Sometimes we think of this as honoring our values. But I find it useful to do what the researchers have, thinking of what it looks like to put our values in action.
When you put a value into action, you are making a choice, taking a perspective, or doing something in light of that strength. Like flexing the trait, our character strengthens.
The more you honor one of your values, the stronger and more flexible you become in finding ways to continue living in alignment with that value. Your character strength grows stronger.
Honoring a value — putting that value into action — sets off a positive emotional cascade. At our house we sometimes talk about “how you feel in yourself.” That sense of well-being, resonance, and positive pride. Few things contribute more strongly to that sense of feeling good in myself the way that using my character strengths does.
For example, if I have a true Love of Learning, that means choosing to learn something, or write down a fascinating quote or useful bit of information where I can draw on it later leaves me with more than data. It leaves me with a flutter of satisfaction, a warm sense of having done something worthwhile.
Why This Works With Chronic Pain
The raw meat in my skull is still throbbing. But this writing session has gone well by all standards. I got the energy to do this using the following character strengths in small ways:
- The Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence
According to the VIA Character Researchers, Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence indicates “Noticing and appreciating beauty, excellence, and/or skilled performance in various domains of life, from nature to art to mathematics to science to everyday experience.” I have learned one way to put this value into action is by arranging my writing screen to fit in the corner of a larger backdrop of some beautiful ambiance. This is today’s writing setting, filling 80 percent of my screen as I write.
Often I use rain sounds to soothe my nerves. Today, though, I have sound silenced, and I let the visual impact tug the corners of my mouth out of their grimace into a soft smile. This choice to set a visually delightful setting for my work means that when my brain wants to drift away from writing, it bumps into the pleasure of the visual image, rather than tumbling off the page and into a review of my sensory pain. Because of the competitive nature of attention, this beautiful setting steals my focus away from my pain, reducing the level of awareness I have toward my symptoms.
- Perseverance
The VIA Character Institute definition for perseverance is “Finishing what one starts; persevering in a course of action in spite of obstacles; ‘getting it out the door;’ taking pleasure in completing tasks.” I’ve started doing a childlike thing with this definition…instead of saying “persevering in the course of action in spite of obstacles” I say “persevering in spice of obstacles.” To me, the obstacles have become spices…some flavored of satisfaction, pride, and even hope. If I keep stepping in spite of the obstacle this morning, it spices my afternoon with hope that this pain isn’t stealing my life from me. If I write on a high-pain day, it spices my day with pride that I’m not a fair-weather writer — I’m writing for purposes that cannot be shrugged off and in some small way I managed to serve that purpose with honor by taking today’s step.
Of the 24 Values in Action, every single one could be used to handle today’s pain. They do it not by giving me something to live up to. As anyone with a chronic challenge will tell you, reminding ourselves what we should do never delivers the energy we need to get to doing. But here’s the thing…
Big or small, every human has some measure of perseverance. Each of us has the ability to appreciate beauty or excellence. The muscle is there. If we use the muscle it grows, and our capacity to use it increases.
But like an athlete building on genetic potential by picking a sport that matches their natural physiology and pairing it with hard work, we see the most amplification of our character strengths by putting our signature strengths into action.
Maybe another day we’ll go into signature strengths…to find out what kind of VIA Athlete you are. But for today, think about something that really matters to you. You can browse the list of 24 Values in Actions and their definitions to pick one that is important to you.
Brainstorm some ways to put that value in action today, and see what positive emotion it sparks. When you do, I’d love to hear “how you feel in yourself.”
It’s like I said in Think Wild,:
💭 Things don’t have to get better in your life for them to get better inside your head. (Think Wild, from Mental Growth Tactic 5: Reverse Your Silver Lining.)