Book Freak 132: Hardwiring Happiness
Ancient Instincts and Modern Strategies for Positive Experiences
Book Freak is a newsletter with mental tools you can use to improve the quality of your life and the lives of others. In this issue: four pieces of advice from Hardwiring Happiness by Rick Hanson, Ph.D.
Understand your ancestral survival instincts
“Our ancestors could make two kinds of mistakes: (1) thinking there was a tiger in the bushes when there wasn’t one, and (2) thinking there was no tiger in the bushes when there actually was one. The cost of the first mistake was needless anxiety, while the cost of the second one was death. Consequently, we evolved to make the first mistake a thousand times to avoid making the second mistake even once.”
Cultivate and savor positive experiences
“Stay with the positive experience for five to ten seconds or longer. Open to the feelings in it and try to sense it in your body; let it fill your mind. Enjoy it. Gently encourage the experience to be more intense. Find something fresh or novel about it. Recognize how it’s personally relevant, how it could nourish or help you, or make a difference in your life.”
Use the healing power of simple pleasures
“Enjoying the taste of toasted raisin bread or the humor in a cartoon may not seem like much, but simple pleasures like these ease emotional upsets, lift your mood, and enrich your life. They also provide health benefits, by releasing endorphins and natural opioids that shift you out of stressful, draining reactive states and into happier responsive ones. As a bonus, some pleasures — such as dancing, sex, your team winning a game of pick-up basketball, or laughing with friends — come with energizing feelings of vitality or passion that enhance long-term health. Opportunities for pleasure are all around you, especially if you include things like the rainbow glitter of the tiny grains of sand in a sidewalk, the sound of water falling into a tub, the sense of connection in talking with a friend, or the reassurance that comes from the stove working when you need to make dinner.”
Strategies for noticing and creating positive experiences in daily life
“Notice a positive experience that's already present
1. in the foreground of awareness
2. in the background of awareness
Create a positive experience by
3. finding good facts in your current setting
4. finding good facts in recent events
5. finding good facts in ongoing conditions
6. finding good facts in your personal qualities
7. finding good facts in the past
8. anticipating good facts in the future
9. sharing the good with others
10. finding the good in the bad
11. caring about others
12. seeing good in the lives of others
13. imagining good facts
14. producing good facts
15. directly evoking a positive experience
16. seeing life as opportunity”
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