(2019-02-24) Mckay How To Be Happy Rewiring Your Brain For Happiness

Brett McKay: How to Be Happy — Rewiring Your Brain for Happiness. One thing that I started doing in the last couple years that has had a particularly strong impact on alleviating my depressive moods and helping me be more consistently positive.

simple meditative practice I learned from a psychologist named Rick Hanson

For folks like us, our overactive negativity bias needs to be brought into healthy balance.

To create a more positive brain, you’ve got to flip the equation — where you’re noticing the bad less, and, more importantly, allowing the good to really stick.

HEAL is an acronym for:

• Have a positive experience
• Enrich it
• Absorb it
• Link it

Have a positive experience

oftentimes it’s simply a matter of noticing the good stuff that already happens

Think about a positive memory

try to think of aspects of character/personality that you like

Really focus on the emotions that you feel when you think of these positive gifts and experiences

Enrich it.

Once you have a positive experience, stay with it for five to ten seconds or longer. Enrich it by looking at it from different perspectives. Capture the moment in 3D.

Absorb it.

Hanson recommends picturing those positive emotions soaking into your brain like a sponge. Author Laura Vanderkam suggests another way to absorb positive vibes: imagine that you have a treasure chest in your mind and that you’re stashing the good experience inside of it.

Link positive and negative material

I don’t personally use too often. Dr. Hanson even says it’s optional

gradually imagining the positive overtaking the negative

When to Hardwire Your Brain for Happiness

the trick is to do it regularly. It’s not a one and done thing. According to Dr. Hanson, what we’re trying to do is to create new neurological connections geared towards positive emotions, and to do that, you have do this HEAL process over and over again.

There are two ways you can do this:

In dedicated meditative sessions.

Throughout the day as you have good experiences.

What Do You Want More? Not To Feel Silly or Not To Feel Miserable?