Retraining Your Brain
It's hard to point to any one thing that prompted me to start this blog. It doesn't take much. Ask any of my friends. I have a certifiable addiction to blogging.
Hi, I'm Kait, and I'm a blog addict.
Hi, Kait.
My addiction aside, I've been thinking about the positive lately. Or rather the lack of it in modern Western society. We are constantly inundated with the negative. War. Famine. Violence. Hatred. Politics. Almost all of it is big, global stuff that we can't do anything about. And yet so many people plug in and watch the horror, in the same way we can't seem to look away from a train wreck. It drags us down.
The last time I regularly watched the news was following the September 11th terrorist attacks. I was, at that time, an international studies major who kept a finger on international politics. After the crashes, when the news was on 24/7 and I found myself weeping for no reason (I didn't know anyone directly impacted by the attacks), I called it quits and completely unplugged from the so-called news. It was all bad, I couldn't do anything about any of it, so why should I ruin my day? Naive? Maybe. But I've never regretted that decision.
I've struggled with anger and negativity since I was a teen. There were lots of "Life isn't fair!" moments. Plenty of growing experiences that I didn't walk away from gracefully. And no wonder. Of the 500+ emotion words in the English language, 62% of them are negative! (from Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath). We remember bad things about people, focus on the bad events to the exclusion of the good, and in general suffer from a serious positive-negative asymmetry. The psychologists who conducted a meta-analysis of studies looking at how people interpret and explain events across multiple domains in their lives found that WITHOUT DEVIATION, people were more likely to focus on negative events over positive ones. I have been no exception, prone to focus on and wallow in the negative in my own life, to the point that for the first half of the decade after I graduated college, I spent most of my time on the verge of a rage at work. Our entire society seems to be hard wired to focus on the negative.
Or is it?
I recently read a fascinating article by Rick Hanson about how we can literally, deliberately, change the architecture of our brains, tricking "our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind." The article itself is well worth a read, but the take home message is that when you do or think something, connections are made between neurons in your brain. The more you do or think that thing (or something like it) the stronger that connection becomes. Think of it like mental weight lifting. You can work on strengthening those neural connections in the part of the brain responsible for positive emotion using a deliberate, focused attention. So the more you focus your attention on the positive in your life (and deliberately neglect focus on the negative), the more prone you will be to strengthen those connections to NOTICE the positive and allow those connections on the negative to actually die off. Thus making for a happier you.
I find this notion incredibly empowering.
The secret to my own happiness has nothing to do with winning the lottery, attaining the perfect job, finally affording the perfect house, or any other of the external markers we may claim as a root of contentment. The secret to happiness lies in retraining my brain. This blog is my journey to doing so.
Feel free to join me on the trip.
Hi, I'm Kait, and I'm a blog addict.
Hi, Kait.
My addiction aside, I've been thinking about the positive lately. Or rather the lack of it in modern Western society. We are constantly inundated with the negative. War. Famine. Violence. Hatred. Politics. Almost all of it is big, global stuff that we can't do anything about. And yet so many people plug in and watch the horror, in the same way we can't seem to look away from a train wreck. It drags us down.
The last time I regularly watched the news was following the September 11th terrorist attacks. I was, at that time, an international studies major who kept a finger on international politics. After the crashes, when the news was on 24/7 and I found myself weeping for no reason (I didn't know anyone directly impacted by the attacks), I called it quits and completely unplugged from the so-called news. It was all bad, I couldn't do anything about any of it, so why should I ruin my day? Naive? Maybe. But I've never regretted that decision.
I've struggled with anger and negativity since I was a teen. There were lots of "Life isn't fair!" moments. Plenty of growing experiences that I didn't walk away from gracefully. And no wonder. Of the 500+ emotion words in the English language, 62% of them are negative! (from Switch by Chip Heath and Dan Heath). We remember bad things about people, focus on the bad events to the exclusion of the good, and in general suffer from a serious positive-negative asymmetry. The psychologists who conducted a meta-analysis of studies looking at how people interpret and explain events across multiple domains in their lives found that WITHOUT DEVIATION, people were more likely to focus on negative events over positive ones. I have been no exception, prone to focus on and wallow in the negative in my own life, to the point that for the first half of the decade after I graduated college, I spent most of my time on the verge of a rage at work. Our entire society seems to be hard wired to focus on the negative.
Or is it?
I recently read a fascinating article by Rick Hanson about how we can literally, deliberately, change the architecture of our brains, tricking "our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind." The article itself is well worth a read, but the take home message is that when you do or think something, connections are made between neurons in your brain. The more you do or think that thing (or something like it) the stronger that connection becomes. Think of it like mental weight lifting. You can work on strengthening those neural connections in the part of the brain responsible for positive emotion using a deliberate, focused attention. So the more you focus your attention on the positive in your life (and deliberately neglect focus on the negative), the more prone you will be to strengthen those connections to NOTICE the positive and allow those connections on the negative to actually die off. Thus making for a happier you.
I find this notion incredibly empowering.
The secret to my own happiness has nothing to do with winning the lottery, attaining the perfect job, finally affording the perfect house, or any other of the external markers we may claim as a root of contentment. The secret to happiness lies in retraining my brain. This blog is my journey to doing so.
Feel free to join me on the trip.