Your experiences matter
- Not just for how they feel in the moment but for the lasting traces they leave on the brain
- Your experiences of happiness, love, or anxiety
Your attention is like a combination of spotlight and vacuum cleaner. It highlights what it lands on and then sucks it into your brain, for better or worse
- If you keep focusing on self-criticism, worries, hurts, and stress, then your brain will be shaped into greater reactivity, vulnerability to anxiety and depressed mood
- Narrow your focus on threats and losses, and inclinations toward anger, sadness and guilt.
Keep resting your mind on good events and conditions…
- pleasant feelings (Someone who was nice to you, roof over your head, etc.)
- Your brain will take a different shape of strength and resilience hardwired into it
Have a realistically optimistic outlook with a positive mood and a sense of worth
Re-source: Reprogram
- Be with your experience
- Observe and accept it for what it is (even if it’s painful)
- When it feels right, begin letting go of what is negative
- Relax your body to reduce tension
- When it feels right, replace it with something positive
- Ex., Remember what it’s like to be with someone who appreciates you.
- Stay with this experience for 10-20 seconds
- When you take in positive experiences, you’re not only growing flowers in your garden, you are hard-wiring happiness.
craving and resource from “Hardwiring Happiness” by: Rick Hanson