Cultivating Happiness
“When you focus on the good, the good gets better.”
~ Esther Hicks
I’m drawn to the field of positive psychology because of the hopeful outlook it offers us, along with genuinely helpful strategies for solving life’s problems based on scientific research. My interest must be rubbing off on my kids, because a couple of weeks ago, my son sent me an intriguing article about the relationship between anxiety and creativity.
The idea is that anxiety and creativity, which arise in different parts of the brain, cannot coexist. One of the best tips for managing anxiety, then, is intentionally doing an activity that engages the right side of our brains, the center of our creativity. My son said the concept helped him understand why his music calms him, and I replied that it’s the same for my writing. It explains why so many of us are drawn to activities like painting, crafting, woodworking, and gardening.
I forwarded the article to two friends who I thought would find it interesting. One noted that however inconvenient it is, we all have anxiety at times. She said that, unfortunately, “our minds are like Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive” referencing a line from a book she had read called Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
With a title like that, I had to order the book right away. I started reading it as soon as it was delivered. The first line of the description on the back cover quickly got my attention: “Why is it easier to ruminate over hurt feelings than it is to bask in the warmth of being appreciated?
The description goes on to explain our behavior: “Because your brain evolved to learn quickly from bad experiences but slowly from the good ones.”
And then, the salient point: “But you can change this.”
In other words, we can have some agency even over our evolutionary tendencies.
In Hardwiring Happiness, author and brain scholar Rick Hanson explains that fear, and our tendency to focus on the negative—what psychologists call our negativity bias—are survival mechanisms that developed in humans long ago to protect us from danger. In modern times, for the most part, we encounter everyday stress as opposed to serious physical dangers requiring us to fight or flee. Still, the elevated hormones that were necessary for the survival of ancient humans flood our bodies every time we get upset, causing more harm than good.
By contrast, when good things happen, rather than embrace them, too often we only give them a cursory thought before we return to our worry about the next bad thing that might happen.
Fortunately, there is something we can do to counteract this tendency towards anxiety. Neuropsychologists have suggested since the 1940s that our brains are malleable, and many subsequent studies have confirmed it. This concept, called neuroplasticity , has intrigued me since I first heard about it more than a decade ago.
Just by changing our thought patterns, we can literally affect not only the functioning of our minds, but the structures of our physical brains.
Dr. Hanson’s assertion is that the best way to compensate for our brain’s natural inclination to focus on our fears is to regularly “take in the good,” as he calls it. To go beyond simply noticing—to lean into pleasure and really soak it in—so that the experience becomes implanted in our memory.
Brain imaging studies have shown that thinking about happy times causes the positive emotion centers of our brain to light up. Intentionally concentrating on them for a few minutes longer than we’re used to activates those areas of our brain even more, especially with repeated exposure over time. Doing so on a regular basis helps us feel calmer and more connected, no matter what happens to us.
This can lead to increased resiliency in the face of adversity.
This method appears to be yet another extension of mindfulness similar to the one I wrote about in this post, which encourages us to stay in the present moment as much as possible. The twist Dr. Hanson adds is that we need to not just notice but specifically focus on the positive and stay with it for as long as possible.
Intentionally enriching happy and fun times and absorbing them in this way creates new neural pathways that counterbalance our tendency to pay attention to the negative.
As our positive emotions expand, they take up more space in our conscious thought. Dr. Hanson envisions it this way: “As your mental garden fills with flowers, there’s less room for weeds to grow.”
Isn’t that a happy thought?
Anyone ready to start gardening?
Affectionately,
Elaine
P.S. If you’re in a wintering state of mind right now, you may want to just glance through the “Taking It In” summaries at the end of each chapter of Hardwiring Happiness. In a few months, when you’re feeling more alert, you can always go back and read the whole book.