Most Americans struggle with happiness. According to Gallup’s 2025 Mood of the Nation poll, only 44% reported being “very satisfied” with their personal lives.
Since 1979, Gallup has been asking Americans the same question—and this was an all-time low. While many factors contribute to overall happiness, one simple lifestyle habit could help improve it.
Rob Stanley, a registered psychotherapist in Ontario, Canada, shared his best research-based lifestyle habit with his TikTok followers. He says he has seen firsthand that it has truly helped his clients who are struggling with happiness and contentment.
The lifestyle habit for happiness
In the video, Stanley’s daughter interviews him and asks what lifestyle habit he thinks everyone should adopt to increase happiness. He responds with one easy, research-based method:
“I try to teach people the art of ‘positive anticipation’,” he says. “What I mean by that is, our brain reacts incredibly well when we begin to look forward to things. We can actually train our brain, in a sense, by the habit of positively anticipating things. Looking forward to big things, small things, daily things.”
He adds that, in his psychotherapy practice, “a lot of people who struggle with happiness or contentment…they often struggle with looking forward to things.”
What research says about positive anticipation
Stanley notes that positive anticipation is backed by research. Specifically, a 2018 study published in Frontiers in Psychology supports it.
In the study, researchers had 40 study participants scanned in an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machine while “performing an emotion anticipation task, in which they were instructed to anticipate the positive or neutral events.”
What they found supports the power of positive anticipation. In participants’ brains, bilateral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) activation was observed, which researchers noted as “proof associated with [a] higher level of well-being.”
This is because activation in this part of the brain is also associated with “seeking new and potential pleasures.” Researchers also cited previous neural research showing that this brain activation was linked to goal-setting and that “having and progressing goals” also led to well-being.
How to use positive anticipation
Stanley explains how he uses positive anticipation in his work with clients:
“We will often break this down into the lifestyle habit of: if you wake up tomorrow, what’s one thing you would look forward to?” he explains. “And people will look at me and go, ‘Not a damn thing.’ And I’ll say, ‘Okay, you’re proving your mindset to me with your answer, and I completely understand what you mean. Let’s chip away at that.’”
From there, Stanley dives deeper to pull an answer from his client.
“We’ll work towards, ‘Would you look forward to a latte before you got on the subway?’”
If his client responds, “Maybe, I don’t know,” he works from there. “‘Would you?’”
Stanley then explains, “And we try to train ourselves just to start with a leaning in mindset towards that notion of happiness and anticipation. And it’s a simplistic—I don’t want to call it simple—but it’s a direct thing we can all start doing just to start lifting our mood and our sense of happiness.”
