✨ Three Good Things
Trauma biases the brain toward threat. The survival systems we have been learning about are designed to prioritise danger — to find it, remember it, and prepare for its recurrence. This is adaptive for survival. It is maladaptive for a life worth living.
Three Good Things is a daily practice that directly counteracts this bias.
The Practice
Each evening, write down three specific things that went well today — or three things you noticed that were positive, pleasant, or simply okay. They do not need to be significant. “The coffee was good.” “Someone smiled at me.” “I managed to get out for a walk.”
For each one, write one sentence about why it happened or what it meant.
The writing matters. It is not enough to think about it. Writing forces specificity and engages the cortex in a way that thinking alone does not. It also creates a record — a growing archive of positive experience that counterbalances the threat archive the amygdala maintains.
Why It Works
The brain changes in response to what it repeatedly attends to. A nervous system that habitually scans for threat becomes increasingly good at detecting threat. A nervous system that is also trained to notice positive experience builds new neural pathways — not replacing the threat-detection system, but adding balance.
This is not toxic positivity or forced optimism. It is neural re-training, backed by research. Martin Seligman’s group at Penn found that this practice, done daily for one week, produced measurable increases in wellbeing that persisted for months in many participants.
Do this every day for the duration of this program.