Professor Jonathan Evans

Rather than fixing what is wrong, make the most of what is strong

We decided to set up The Brain Place in Kim’s kitchen.  We were both on maternity leave with our second children, and spent much of our time together reflecting on our parenting.  Early on in our parenting journeys we may have dwelled on our short comings, tried to change ourselves with the aim of becoming better parents. Towards the end of maternity leave we had both arrived at a place where we felt happier doing more of what we were good at. Allowing our shortcomings to just be.

Perhaps it was this shared experience that instantly connected us with the positive neuropsychology approach as the foundation of The Brain Place. Rather than fixing what was wrong, we wanted to make the most of what is strong in the people we work with.

To find out more we have been fortunate enough to interview one of our inspirations, Professor Jonathan Evans.  In our video you can listen to us talking about positive neuropsychology and why we agree with Jonathan that it is full of value for the work we are doing.  Watch our 18 minute video or scroll to an easy to read summary below.

Summary

What are the guiding influences throughout your career?

• Work with people
• Applying theory to real world problems
• Integrating cognitive understanding and thinking with psychological emotions

 What draws you to positive neuropsychology?

• How we can make best use of goal setting as part of the rehabilitation process and why is that motivating
• The concepts of flow and engagement. You need to have goals and you need to be working towards those, and you need to have feedback to understand whether your meeting them or not.
• Using goals and rehabilitation to enhance well being

What is positive neuropsychology?

• Application of positive psychology to people with neurological conditions
• Three elements:
  • Understanding what gives you a sense of well-being in your lives, do we understand what makes people feel satisfied and happy in their lives, that sense of well-being
  • Can we measure that? Measuring what we do so we have some ideas about what things give a sense of well-being
  • Knowing about these things and can we improve it

What does positive neuropsychology add to traditional rehabilitation?

• The very best neuropsychological rehabilitation is very consistent with what positive neuropsychology is promoting, there are some things we could focus on more and more techniques we could use
• Focused on goals, adjustment, re-establishing identity
• Thinking about where positive psychotherapy came from or the interest came from. People like Martin Seligman who developed this field. Arguing we’ve been very focused on psychological ill health, conditions like depression and anxiety, and focus in therapy is focused on taking away anxiety and depression, and that is good. But we haven’t attended much to what is, can we move towards, good mental health, even better mental health, and if you do that does that shift a little bit of what you do, what you think about doing, or how you approach a task. So, I felt could we equally apply in the context of neuropsychological rehabilitation. So similarly, we often work with people who are depressed or anxious or worried or not coping, and particularly trying to find a new self, new identity, a new way of being.
• One of things, another specific thing I was interested in, is value based goal setting. Saying to somebody what is important to you. What are the most important things to you in your life. People living consistent with their values. The things that give them a sense of well-being. Many of those are not feasible anymore and that’s a struggle, but it doesn’t mean we have to abandon those ways of being. So, we use the idea of character strengths, so your values, in a new way which is giving them the opportunity to live the life they want to live.
• It does not diminish the challenge of coping with brain injury in any way, its saying most of all I want people to feel ok, feel content, to feel comfortable in themselves, that’s the number one. So, the question is what’s the best way of doing that.
• It’s hard to convey this is not about saying well ignore the negative, people have be happy in the context of terrible things that are happening, but the point is in amongst things that are a struggle and people are actively coping with there are things which give people a sense of, even if it’s a sense of fight and battling that still a good thing. Even if your struggling with something that’s hard the fact your working to something, you are doing something, your trying to help somebody else, all of those things are good things if you like, even In the context of times that are difficult

What is the evidence for positive psychology?

• We don’t have much so far!
• We have to be cautious and say this is what we think about what might work and why this might be helpful, we have to say the evidence so far is limited.
• Look at positive psychotherapy intervention outside of neurological conditions. For depression there is enough research now to do systematic reviews and meta-analysis and this seems to be producing modest gains, which is standard for psychotherapy trials.
• Emerging evidence base outside of neurological conditions but we need more in the context of neurological conditions

What should we be aiming for in rehabilitation?

• It’s a debate. Is our job or the job of rehabilitation to enable people to do activities of daily living independently, and just that, or to go back to work? I’m not saying that those are easy things, those are important things, but maybe we say that’s all we can do so we just do those, and actually we don’t have to be concerned about people’s wellbeing. But to me, I suppose, what would I want for somebody who was recovering from a brain injury. What would I want for them. I would want them to have a sense of well-being, and so feel ok, feel content, satisfied, feel comfortable, so if that’s what we want from rehabilitation, if that’s what we’re trying to achieve we should be measuring it.
• The problem is it’s a bit like most of the people we are working with in a rehabilitation context are not going to get rid of, we’re not going to simply make that person back to physically how they were before, so in a sense we are dealing with people with chronic health conditions. Well if we are then in that situation we have accepted that our task is to sort of maximize that person, for years we’ve talked about quality of life, so psychological quality of life, and trying to foster that.
• We could say well our task is to take away depression, take away anxiety, and that’s it. Its stops there. But we could do something different, in terms of enhancing psychological wellbeing. Also, for some people actually what you do is make it more likely that you’re going to take away the depression. What we see of depression is people struggling to deal with how things have changed since that, what is struggling, those sources of meaning, of pleasure, of engagement have been taken away, so that’s why they are struggling to copy. So if that is the source of the struggle, if we’re helping people to be have things to do, to have good relationships, to do things which they personally consider meaningful, to have things that are pleasurable in their life and you know if they have those things then it’s likely that people will feel less depressed, less anxious.
• Talking about values is giving focus, let’s start from what do you value, what is important to you, it sort of frees you up, let’s start from the perspective of what we want to work towards, part of that might be that we have to address the problem

Where would you like to see positive psychology going in the future?

• It’s the research, we need more people doing more studies, just to show how to use it in different ways, there are different ways as well, we’ve done it as a sort of one-to-one therapy, and also something that even we thought could be added on to more traditional therapy CBT or done separately, some people have run a group intervention. There are different ways of exploring how and a sense of refining.
• The good thing about it is there are a number of particular techniques, three good things journal, value in action, using character strengths in a new way, focus on kindness and gratitude. A range of things and there’s evidence that they are useful in other contexts, but we haven’t yet demonstrated clearly and exploring those interventions. We have some sense that they are acceptable, but I think more of that would be good, that’s the priority, get that research done, that can be done in different ways.

Can you tell us about the three good things journal

• The basic idea is usually each evening, once a day, is to write down three good things that have happened that day and why they have happened. It’s partly about recognising and having that opportunity to focus on the things that have gone well, but there’s also parts about asking the question of why did that go well. You might visit a friend, that was really nice, have a cup of tea or something, and you might say I really enjoyed that but also why did that happen because I made the effort to make the phone call to go along. So it’s getting people thinking about well what is it that I’m doing and its often if there’s not many things happening it’s because people aren’t sort of making them happen if you like, so it’s partly about why did it happen and reflecting again on what’s good, so I think that’s good

Tell us about kindness and gratitude

Taking the opportunity to be kind whenever you can is like an easy win, its like a, it makes you feel good it makes other people feel good, it’s like free well being