“You are positive, though,” a friend says as I explain that I’m trying to make myself into a sunnier person. “Actually,” she pauses for a minute, “you’re kind of both upbeat and miserable.”

It’s true. On the grey side, I’m the guy whose university professor described him as “radiating gloom”; my favourite show is the mope fest My So-Called Life; I listen to teutonic, doom-mongering Nico albums for fun; and, more seriously, can slip into days of self-doubt and negativity. But I hide this attitude behind a smile, so few people have noticed; I’m usually the first to crack some (black) humour. Sometimes too black: my nickname is Bitchy Dave. Can I change my attitude?

I download two apps: Pozify and The Gratitude Journal, undeterred by the fact that these sound, respectively, like a trance music festival in Ukraine and Episode 4, Season 7 of Dawson’s Creek. Pozify works by awarding you points for all the positive things you do on the app, which seems to boil down to adding random “friends” and scoring their posts out of 10. These posts are a mix of heartbreakingly personal status updates (“I still have my husband in my heart, even though he’s in heaven”), perky self-help homilies written in comic sans font and, with some inevitability, photos of cute animals acting sassily.

It isn’t the easiest time to decide to become a positive person; I get my first Pozify friend request on the day of the US presidential election. “Susan”, whom I’ve given an 8/10 for a post about praying for an ill relative, has posted a photograph of herself in a pro-Trump T-shirt. I deny her request. Have I fallen at the first hurdle?

The Gratitude Journal asks me to write down everything I’m grateful for. I can think of only the same three things

As the president-elect dominates the news, I fall into a pit of existential angst. I need some serious help. “Ask, ‘What can I do about this?’” says Anne Jones, self-help author. “In the case of Trump, there’s nothing you can do, so you have to let it go.” She explains how: imagine I have a cord attached both to my body and to the source of anxiety, then cut the cord. I go into a toilet cubicle at work and mime the action.

The Gratitude Journal asks me to write down everything I’m grateful for. The thing is, I can think of only the same three things (my son, my wife, music) and typing it into my phone doesn’t lift the feeling that we’re on the cusp of an apocalypse. I’m back to feeling a general sense of unease.

I try doing one of Jones’s more bizarre rituals every day. I raise my hands to my forehead in a prayer-like position, then open them out, like the doors of a cuckoo clock. I do the same by my heart. “You’re taking control of your own negative space, and you are doing something positive for yourself,” Jones tells me. It feels like a very bad imitation of Madonna’s Vogue video, but I have to admit it’s surprisingly comforting. And it’s not much to remember to do each day: merely in creating a routine, I give myself a reminder that I want to be less negative. Maybe that’s all I need.

Have I changed? A few weeks after the trial period, I stop doing Pozify. A few weeks after that, I realise I’ve done The Gratitude Journal less. But the daily prayer ritual sticks, and the ideas that I’ve been practising stay with me. After a night in the pub, I get a text from my friend: “WHO R U! Unbitchy Dave?”