I believe that one of the most powerful tools we can use to combat nerves, anxiety and stress is to learn to reframe those emotions and make them empowering instead of debilitating. In this article, Drake Baer explains how:-
DON'T KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. INSTEAD OF FIGHTING YOUR BODY'S NATURAL REACTION TO ANXIETY, EMBRACE YOUR AMPED-UP STATE, AND REFRAME YOUR ANXIETY AS EXCITEMENT. HERE'S HOW.
A strange sign has found its way to walls across our country: Keep Calm And Carry On, a World War II-era Britishism that's become a brightly colored, boldly fonted, and mostly misguided placard of staying cool under pressure. Mainly because it totally misses the way emotions work.
"People seem to have this very strong intuition when they feel anxious to try and 'calm down,'" says Alison Wood Brooks, a professor of business administration at Harvard. "But it's actually very, very difficult to do successfully, particularly when leading up to very anxiety-inducing tasks, [like public speaking, a job interview, or singing in front of people]."
Instead of trying to force ourselves to be calm, she says, we should be getting excited--due to a psychological something called arousal congruence.
While keeping calm might seem like a simple enough instruction, it actually conceals two steps, for every emotion has both an arousal and a valance component--and you need to regulate each in order to change the emotion.
Arousal is physical: in the case of anxiety, you have an increased heart rate, a spike of stress hormones like cortisol, and a sudden appearance of sweat. Arousal is also automatic: it's a function of the parasympathetic nervous system, which is always looking out for danger. Since arousal is so automatic, it's hard to control.
Valence is cognitive: it's the way you interpret all that physiological stuff happening inside you--how you feel about your feelings. So if you're trying to "keep calm" while you're anxious, you have to shift your perception of your emotion.
Alison Wood Brooks
When you tell yourself to "calm down" you have to make two hidden steps, moving both arousal and valence. But moving from anxiety to excitement is easier: your body can stay in an amped-up physiological state, but you re-appraise your anxiety as excitement.
"That it's a two-step process is not intuitive," Brooks says, "and understanding that you're trying to do two different things makes people more emotionally literate."
It can also make people better performers.
Here's how to practice reframing your anxiety as excitement.
Brooks recruited a group of volunteers. They were asked to take part in three kinds of experiments: tackling public speaking, math, or singing in front of people.
The subjects were primed differently in each of these cases. Before making their speech, diving into their problem sets, or launching into "Don't Stop Believing," they were asked to make one of three kinds of statements to themselves:
To keep calm
To get excited
Or nothing
In each of three cases, the anxious folks that told themselves a variant of "get excited" performed better: they gave more persuasive, competent, and persistent speeches; notched hire math scores, and belted out Journey with greater accuracy.
Oscar Wilde, once quipped that "worry is misspent imagination": turns out that the dude was right. As Brooks explained to us, when we get worried, we're making poor investments with our attention: instead of thinking of the ways that big presentation will go right, we're spending our finite attention on what will go wrong, what's wrong with us, and what our parents did to make us inherit that behavior.
"Anxiety precludes you from exploring real solutions and real thought patterns that will come up with solutions," she says. "When you're in a positive valence, it primes an opportunity mindset, so you think of all of the good things that can happen. You're more likely to make decisions and take actions that will make that world likely to occur."
As the karaoke outcomes attest, we can actually prime that opportunity-oriented mindset.
Take, for instance, if you're about to go onstage: when someone asks you "how do you feel," tell them that you're excited. If you get in the habit of that, Brooks says, it could really improve your performance. If you're a manager, emphasize excitement rather than calmness. And if you're all by your lonesome, staring at a blank document and feeling anxiety creeping up your neck, tell yourself that you're excited to even put a paragraph on the page.
Bottom Line:
"A lot of times, anxiety is most debilitating when it leads to inaction, like you just don't know where to start," Brooks says, noting that the most productive people she knows are highly skilled at just doing a small piece of a larger project.
"Just do something and constantly work on it and revise it and hone it into a product or a performance that turns into something wonderful. I think this idea of reappraising anxiety as excitement can help inspire simple actions--to just get excited and do something."
If you`ve ever struggled with getting things done and ended up making endless lists, this article by Belle Beth Cooper will throw some light on why we feel compelled to write "to do lists" and how to do them effectively:-
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco is a big fan of lists and has some fascinating ideas about why they’re so important to humans:
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible… And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists…
Umberto Eco
Umberto explained in an interview that lists are often seen as relics of primitive cultures--simplistic devices that don’t belong in our modern day and age. However, the simple form of the list prevails again and again over time, because, as Umberto says, it has “an irresistible magic.”
When we struggle to express ourselves, we use lists. Like Umberto says, lists help us to make sense of the world around us. We create lists of the sights we see on vacation, the places we want to visit, the food we need to buy at the grocery store, and the tasks we need to get done. It’s a simple habit of increasing our day to day productivity.
Not only that, but we also form and challenge definitions of the things around us by making lists of their characteristics. For instance, if we were to describe an animal to a child, we would do so by listing characteristics like color, size, diet and habitat. Regardless of whether this matches the scientific definition of the animal or not, that’s how we make sense of it.
The list is the mark of a highly advanced, cultivated society because a list allows us to question the essential definitions. The essential definition is primitive compared with the list.
Benjamin Franklin is a great example of someone known for using lists to encourage his own self-improvement. He famously detailed a thirteen-week plan to practice important virtues such as cleanliness, temperance, etc. Each day he tracked his progress on a chart.
Benjamin also set himself a strict daily routine, which included time for sleeping, meals and working, all set for specific times of the day. Unfortuantely, the demands of his printing business made it difficult for him to always stick to his routine, but this image shows how he aimed to spend his time:
The to-do list in particular is one that we spend a lot of time and energy on perfecting. Somehow, we don’t seem to struggle when it comes to making a shopping list and buying everything on it, but getting the tasks on our to-do list done is a whole other ball game.
Looking at the history of lists and how they’re used, we can glean some insights about how to create a to-do list we can actually complete.
1. Break projects into tasks, don’t succumb to the Zeigarnik effect
We kind of have a reminder system built-in to our minds that nags us about unfinished tasks, called the Zeigarnik effect. It sounds pretty cool that we already have this, but it’s actually not that reliable or healthy for us.
What really happens is that there’s a disconnect between our conscious and unconscious minds--the unconscious mind can’t plan how to finish the task, but it gets annoyed with the feeling of it being unfinished. To shake off that feeling, it nags the conscious mind with reminders about the task--not to finish it, but simply to encourage us to make a plan.
If you’ve heard of David Allen’s GTD method, you’ll be familiar with his concept of “next steps,” which is pretty much the same thing. It’s the process of breaking down a project or task into smaller tasks, and planning which one will be the next step towards completing the whole thing.
This abates the nagging of the unconscious brain, as it’s satisfied that at some point we’ll get onto that task, and we know exactly how we’ll do it.
Maria Popova at Brain Pickings says the essentials of creating these do-able next steps are to make “a few very specific, aactionalbe, non-conflicting items.”
2. Prioritize ruthlessly
Maria’s post on the history of the to-do list also describes the story of a psychologist who gave a talk at the Pentagon about managing time and resources. Before the talk began, the psychologist asked everyone in the group to write a summary of their strategic approach in 25 words.
Apparently, 25 words was too little for the men to express their strategies, and the only response came from the single woman in the group, whose summary read as follows:
First I make a list of priorities: one, two, three, and so on. Then I cross out everything from three down.
I’ve heard this approach suggested before in various places, and it always reminds me of the CEO I worked with at my previous company, who had a Post-It on his desk that read, “prioritize until it hurts.” in other words, learning the powerful skill of saying no. I’m not sure if he ever managed to do that, but I liked the approach.
To-do lists invariably crop up when we have so many things to do that we can’t keep track of them all in our heads (Aha! We’re back to Umberto’s thoughts on how lists help us to create order from the chaos of our lives!). Which means that we end up with lists far too long for us to complete.
Prioritizing ruthlessly seems to be the only way to actually get done what’s most important in the little time that we have.
3. “Plan ahead”--advice for which Charles Schwab paid $25,000
Here’s another cool story of how to-do lists evolved in the workplace:
Almost 100 years ago, the president of the Bethlehem Steel company in the USA was Charles M. Schwab. His company was struggling with inefficiency and Schwab didn’t know how to improve it, so he called in Ivy Lee, a well-known efficiency expert at the time.
Lee agreed to help the company, with his fee being whatever Schwab felt the results were worth after three months.
Lee’s advice to each member of the company’s management team was to write a to-do list at the end of each day, which consisted of the six most important tasks to be done the following day. Then they were told to organize the list based on the highest priority tasks.
The next day, the employes worked through the list from top to bottom, focusing on a single task at a time. At the end of the day, anything left on the list would get added to the top of tomorrow’s list when the employees once again planned for the following day.
In your own planning, you can take Lee’s advice for free and use the night before to plan your workday. Setting out the most important tasks you want to complete the following day will help you to avoid time-wasters and distractions by knowing what to work on immediately.
4. Be realistic in your planning
Sometimes it’s nice to know that even our great heroes are fallible. This story about Benjamin Franklin’s struggles to keep up with his daily to-do list shows how important it is to be realistic about how much time we have and what our priorities are.
Franklin was known to be a meticulous tracker of his daily routine and his work towards the virtues he prioritized.
Unfortunately, the demands of his business meant that he didn’t always keep up with his ideal daily routine. He often got interrupted by clients and had to ignore his schedule to meet with them.
He also noticed that some of the virtues he aspired to practice, such as frugality--not wasting anything--took up too much time for him to live life as he wanted to. Preparing his own meals and mending his own clothes all the time, for instance, meant that he didn’t have enough time for business or his side projects.
The result of these conflicting priorities was unhappiness over not completing the tasks he set for himself. As a result, he had to re-prioritize, which is something we should keep in mind.
If we’re struggling to complete our to-do lists on a regular basis (we’ve all been there at some point!), we need to make a change to the list--make it more realistic.
Although a to-do list can be infinite, our time is not. We need to match the tasks we require of ourselves to how much time and energy we can afford to spend on them. This is where prioritizing can really come in handy, as well.
Starting to develop your own, personal daily routine is one of the most powerful ways to become a great list maker. You might find some inspiration from these seven famous entrepreneurs and their routines.
Find a way that works for you
As with pretty much any kind of lifehacking or productivity topic I write about, individual mileage will vary. We all need to take into account our unique situation when experimenting with advice like this. For me, prioritizing and planning the night before has really helped. For you, being realistic might be more useful.
As a last example, I found a to-do list from Johnny Cash. This wouldn’t necessarily be one we’d advocate to help you become more efficient. But then again, we can’t argue with Johnny Cash’s success, can we?
If you`ve ever wondered whether self talk actually works and if so how it works, you`ll find the following article by Oliver Burkeman fascinating:-
Few topics have been more mangled and misunderstood in the world of popular psychology than that of "self-talk", the chuntering monologue most of us conduct through the day in our heads, or out loud when we're alone. (Don't pretend you don't.) Contrary to self-help lore, there's little evidence that positive self-talk works like magic. Telling yourself you're beautiful, a confident public speaker or a future billionaire won't make you any of those things; if anything, it's liable to have the reverse effect. The true impact of self-talk is more subtle. For example, it's been shown that if you want to accomplish a challenging task, you're better off phrasing it as a question ("Will I talk to my boss about that promotion?") than simply declaring it ("I will talk to my boss about that promotion!"). The declaration sounds better, but it's the question that generates more "intrinsic motivation", calling to mind your deeply held reasons for wanting to act. And a similarly tiny linguistic tweak, it emerged recently, could make the difference between resisting temptation and succumbing to it.
Researchers at two US business schools wanted to examine the effects of self-talk employing the phrase "I can't" versus the phrase "I don't", in the context of personal health goals. Suppose it's time for your weekly kick-boxing class, but the sofa looks inviting, so you try to talk yourself into action. Does it really matter if you say, "I can't miss my weekly class", or, "I don't miss my weekly class"? You wouldn't have thought so, but according to the experiments, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, it does. In one, students seeking to eat more healthily were instructed to use either "I can't" or "I don't" each time they confronted a temptation. Upon leaving, they were offered a token of appreciation for taking part: a chocolate bar or a granola bar. Of those instructed to resist temptation using "I can't", 39% went for the healthier choice; of those using "I don't", the figure was 64%.
Try repeating each of those to yourself, perhaps with a more personally relevant example – in my case, "I can't/don't check Twitter when I'm meant to be working." Monitor your immediate emotional reactions and you'll probably see what's going on. The "can't" framing implies an external restraint, which feels disempowering (even if you imposed the restraint on yourself). You might even be tempted to disobey solely to assert your independence. To say that you "don't" do something, by contrast, suggests autonomy, as well as long-term commitment. Who wouldn't rather be the self-directed, principled type who doesn't have more than one beer, or check email after 9pm, et cetera, than the rule-oppressed drudge who can't?
That's worth remembering when you're talking to others, too. It's often easiest to refuse some onerous request by claiming that you "can't"; sometimes, it might even be true. The trouble is that when you tell your overly demanding colleague/friend/spouse that you "can't", there's someone else listening: you. According to cliche, learning to say "no" is the key to seizing control of life. But how you say no matters, too: the subliminal result of all those "I can'ts" could just be to leave you feeling more powerless and put‑upon. The phrase you're looking for is "I don't". Don't doubt it.
Most people at some time fall prey to this damaging "disease". In fact it is almost endemic in our culture. Corrie ten Boom once said, "Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength."
The problem with worrying is that it becomes a cycle of self-perpetuating negative thoughts. In a new review, University of Surrey researchers described worry as "a chain of thoughts and images that are affectively negative and relatively uncontrollable."
So what's the best way to stop the cycle? We rounded up some research-backed ways:
Set aside a designated "worry time." Instead of worrying all day, every day, designate a 30-minute period of time where you can think about your problems. Penn State researchers found in a 2011 study that a four-step stimulus control program could help seriously stressed people take control of their anxieties, LiveScience reported. Step one: Identify the object of worry. Step two: Come up with a time and place to think about said worry. Step three: If you catch yourself worrying at a time other than your designated worry time, you must make a point to think of something else. Step four: Use your "worry time" productively by thinking of solutions to the worries.
Kick your online addiction. All that time you spend perusing your Facebook newsfeed probably isn't doing your mental health any favors. A recent study from Anxiety UK showed that nearly half of people feel "worried or uncomfortable" being away from email or Facebook. "These findings suggest that some may need to re-establish control over the technology they use, rather than being controlled by it,” Anxiety UK CEO Nicky Lidbetter said in a statement. Need some ideas for things to do away from your computer or cell phone? We've got you covered.
Be mindful. The most effective strategies to stop worrying and rumination may be ones based in mindfulness, which involves nonjudgmental awareness of present thoughts and emotions, as well as cognitive behavioral therapy strategies, according to the University of Surrey review of 19 studies. Particularly, the review noted that "treatments in which participants are encouraged to change their thinking style, or to disengage from emotional response to rumination or worry," as well as "treatments which enable participants to adopt more concrete and specific thinking or which cognitively restructure thinking in a more positive and constructive way" seem especially effective.
Accept the worry -- and then move on. Worrying about worrying is a dangerous cycle to fall into. A 2005 study in the journal Behaviour Research and Therapy showed that people who naturally try to suppress their unwanted thoughts end up being more distressed by said thoughts. Meanwhile, "those who are naturally more accepting of their intrusive thoughts are less obsessional, have lower levels of depression, and are less anxious," the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers wrote. Therefore, people who get caught up in worry when they try to force themselves to stop worrying may want to try a different strategy -- acceptance.
Write your worries down. Letting all your emotions out on paper before a big exam could help decrease test-taking worry, according to a 2011 study in Science. "It might be counterintuitive, but it's almost as if you empty the fears out of your mind," study researcher Sian Beilock, an associate professor in psychology at the University of Chicago, told U.S. News. "You reassess that situation so that you're not as likely to worry about those situations because you've slain that beast." While exams are no longer a threat to many of us, Beilock noted that the approach could work for people facing anxieties for other things.
Cut yourself some slack. Dr. Susan M. Love, a professor at the David Geffen School of medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, told The New York Times that the perceived need to follow all the rules when it comes to health can be a source of stress and worry in itself. Love, who wrote the book "Live a Little! Breaking the Rules Won't Break Your Health" told The Times that at the end of the day, it's impossible to have perfect health, and you're probably a lot healthier than you realize. "Is the goal to live forever?” she said to The Times. “I would contend it’s not. It’s really to live as long as you can with the best quality of life you can. The problem was all of these women I kept meeting who were scared to death if they didn’t eat a cup of blueberries a day they would drop dead.”
Keep your hands busy. Engaging in activities that keep your hands busy and mind distracted could help prevent flashbacks from traumatic experiences, according to research from the Medical Research Council in England. While the study didn't examine how this strategy impacts everyday worry, the American Association for the Advancement of Science's Bob Hirshon pointed out that "keeping your hands and mind busy interferes with storing and encoding visual images."
Make time for meditation. Taking some time to find some zen can really help anxiety in your brain -- even brain scans say so. A study published earlier this year in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience showed that meditation training not only lower anxiety levels in people, but it also had effects on the anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex brain regions (the former region controls emotions and thinking, the latter controls worrying).
Get your heart pumping. Exercise may be a predictable way to beat stress, but it's only predictable because it's so effective. Research in animals, for instance, shows that exercise can affect brain activity of serotonin (a so-called "happy" brain chemical) as well as reduce the effects of oxidative stress, The New York Times reported. And Well and Good points out studies showing that exercise interventions can result in lower anxiety levels than people who stay tied to the couch. “Several studies have found the effects of aerobic exercise to be initially similar to those of medication,” Jeff Dolgan, an exercise physiologist at Canyon Ranch Hotel & Spa in Miami Beach, told Well and Good. “However, in the long term, exercise seems to work better.”
Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction......
If you ever feel down and depressed because you feel life has dealt you a bad hand. If you ever ask the question, "Why me?" If you ever feel sorry for yourself and continue to focus on the perceived negative around you. Then watch this powerful, short video of an object lesson in changing your perspective and changing your results.
Better quality friendships, marital satisfaction, higher incomes, better physical health and even greater longevity? Can all this really be achieved through positive thinking? Check out this fascinating article by James Clear and and then decide......
"Positive thinking sounds useful on the surface. (Most of us would prefer to be positive rather than negative.) But "positive thinking" is also a soft and fluffy term that is easy to dismiss. In the real world, it rarely carries the same weight as words like "work ethic" or "persistence."
But those views may be changing.
Research is beginning to reveal that positive thinking is about much more than just being happy or displaying an upbeat attitude. Positive thoughts can actually create real value in your life and help you build skills that last much longer than a smile.
The impact of positive thinking on your work, your health, and your life is being studied by people who are much smarter than me. One of these people is Barbara Fredrickson.
Fredrickson is a positive psychology researcher at the University of North Carolina, and she published a landmark paper that provides surprising insights about positive thinking and its impact on your skills. Her work is among the most referenced and cited in her field, and it is surprisingly useful in everyday life.
Let's talk about Fredrickson's discovery and what it means for you...
What Negative Thoughts Do to Your Brain
Play along with me for a moment.
Let's say that you're walking through the forest and suddenly a tiger steps onto the path ahead of you. When this happens, your brain registers a negative emotion -- in this case, fear.
Researchers have long known that negative emotions program your brain to do a specific action. When that tiger crosses your path, for example, you run. The rest of the world doesn't matter. You are focused entirely on the tiger, the fear it creates, and how you can get away from it.
In other words, negative emotions narrow your mind and focus your thoughts. At that same moment, you might have the option to climb a tree, pick up a leaf, or grab a stick -- but your brain ignores all of those options because they seem irrelevant when a tiger is standing in front of you.
This is a useful instinct if you're trying to save life and limb, but in our modern society we don't have to worry about stumbling across tigers in the wilderness. The problem is that your brain is still programmed to respond to negative emotions in the same way -- by shutting off the outside world and limiting the options you see around you.
For example, when you're in a fight with someone, your anger and emotion might consume you to the point where you can't think about anything else. Or, when you are stressed out about everything you have to get done today, you may find it hard to actual start anything because you're paralyzed by how long your to-do list has become. Or, if you feel bad about not exercising or not eating healthy, all you think about is how little willpower you have, how you're lazy, and how you don't have any motivation.
In each case, your brain closes off from the outside world and focuses on the negative emotions of fear, anger, and stress -- just like it did with the tiger. Negative emotions prevent your brain from seeing the other options and choices that surround you. It's your survival instinct.
Now, let's compare this to what positive emotions do to your brain. This is where Barbara Fredrickson returns to the story.
What Positive Thoughts Do to Your Brain
Fredrickson tested the impact of positive emotions on the brain by setting up a little experiment. During this experiment, she divided her research subjects into five groups and showed each group different film clips.
The first two groups were shown clips that created positive emotions. Group 1 saw images that created feelings of joy. Group 2 saw images that created feelings of contentment.
Group 3 was the control group. They saw images that were neutral and produced no significant emotion.
The last two groups were shown clips that created negative emotions. Group 4 saw images that created feelings of fear. Group 5 saw images that created feelings of anger.
Afterward, each participant was asked to imagine themselves in a situation where similar feelings would arise and to write down what they would do. Each participant was handed a piece of paper with 20 blank lines that started with the phrase, "I would like to..."
Participants who saw images of fear and anger wrote down the fewest responses. Meanwhile, the participants who saw images of joy and contentment, wrote down a significantly higher number of actions that they would take, even when compared to the neutral group.
In other words, when you are experiencing positive emotions like joy, contentment, and love, you will see more possibilities in your life. These findings were among the first that suggested positive emotions broaden your sense of possibility and open your mind up to more options.
But that was just the beginning. The really interesting impact of positive thinking happens later...
How Positive Thinking Builds Your Skill Set
The benefits of positive emotions don't stop after a few minutes of good feelings subside. In fact, the biggest benefit that positive emotions provide is an enhanced ability to build skills and develop resources for use later in life.
Let's consider a real-world example.
A child who runs around outside, swinging on branches and playing with friends, develops the ability to move athletically (physical skills), the ability to play with others and communicate with a team (social skills), and the ability to explore and examine the world around them (creative skills). In this way, the positive emotions of play and joy prompt the child to build skills that are useful and valuable in everyday life.
These skills last much longer than the emotions that initiated them. Years later, that foundation of athletic movement might develop into a scholarship as a college athlete or the communication skills may blossom into a job offer as a business manager. The happiness that promoted the exploration and creation of new skills has long since ended, but the skills themselves live on.
Fredrickson refers to this as the "broaden and build" theory because positive emotions broaden your sense of possibilities and open your mind, which in turn allows you to build new skills and resources that can provide value in other areas of your life.
As we discussed earlier, negative emotions do the opposite. Why? Because building skills for future use is irrelevant when there is immediate threat or danger (like the tiger on the path).
All of this research begs the most important question of all: If positive thinking is so useful for developing valuable skills and appreciating the big picture of life, how do you actually get yourself to be positive?
How to Increase Positive Thinking in Your Life
What you can do to increase positive emotions and take advantage of the "broaden and build" theory in your life?
Well, anything that sparks feelings of joy, contentment, and love will do the trick. You probably know what things work well for you. Maybe it's playing the guitar. Maybe it's spending time with a certain person. Maybe it's carving tiny wooden lawn gnomes.
That said, here are three ideas for you to consider...
1. Meditation -- Recent research by Fredrickson and her colleagues has revealed that people who meditate daily display more positive emotions that those who do not. As expected, people who meditated also built valuable long-term skills. For example, three months after the experiment was over, the people who meditated daily continued to display increased mindfulness, purpose in life, social support, and decreased illness symptoms.
Note: If you're looking for an easy way to start meditation, here is a 10-minute guided meditation that was recently sent to me. Just close your eyes, breathe, and follow along.
2. Writing -- This study, published in the Journal of Research in Personality, examined a group of 90 undergraduate students who were split into two groups. The first group wrote about an intensely positive experience each day for three consecutive days. The second group wrote about a control topic.
Three months later, the students who wrote about positive experiences had better mood levels, fewer visits to the health center, and experienced fewer illnesses. (This blew me away. Better health after just three days of writing about positive things!)
Note: I used to be very erratic in my writing, but now I publish a new blog every Monday and Thursday. I've written more about my writing process and how you can stick to your goals in this blog and this blog.
3. Play -- Schedule time to play into your life. We schedule meetings, conference calls, weekly events, and other responsibilities into our daily calendars... why not schedule time to play?
When was the last time you blocked out an hour on your calendar just to explore and experiment? When was the last time you intentionally carved out time to have fun? You can't tell me that being happy is less important than your Wednesday meeting, and yet, we act like it is because we never give it a time and space to live on our calendars.
Give yourself permission to smile and enjoy the benefits of positive emotion. Schedule time for play and adventure so that you can experience contentment and joy, and explore and build new skills.
Happiness vs. Success (Which Comes First?)
There's no doubt that happiness is the result of achievement. Winning a championship, landing a better job, finding someone you love -- these things will bring joy and contentment to your life. But so often, we wrongly assume that this means happiness always follows success.
How often have you thought, "If I just get ___, then I'll be set."
Or, "Once I achieve ___, I'll be satisfied."
I know I'm guilty of putting off happiness until I achieve some arbitrary goal. But as Fredrickson's "broaden and build" theory proves, happiness is essential to building the skills that allow for success.
In other words, happiness is both the precursor to success and the result of it.
In fact, researchers have often noticed a compounding effect or an "upward spiral" that occurs with happy people. They are happy, so they develop new skills, those skills lead to new success, which results in more happiness, and the process repeats itself.
Where to Go From Here
Positive thinking isn't just a soft and fluffy feel-good term. Yes, it's great to simply "be happy," but those moments of happiness are also critical for opening your mind to explore and build the skills that become so valuable in other areas of your life.
Finding ways to build happiness and positive emotions into your life -- whether it is through meditation, writing, playing a pickup basketball game, or anything else -- provides more than just a momentary decrease in stress and a few smiles.
Periods of positive emotion and unhindered exploration are when you see the possibilities for how your past experiences fit into your future life, when you begin to develop skills that blossom into useful talents later on, and when you spark the urge for further exploration and adventure.
To put it simply: Seek joy, play often, and pursue adventure. Your brain will do the rest."
If you want some practical tips on developing the right kind of thinking watch this.......
