Does Sunshine Make You Feel Happy?

Did you see someone helping someone else with their shopping or any other act of kindness? Busy regions also begin to stitch together to create newer pathways and networks which, if you think about it, might as well be positive and beneficial to you! Now think about the kinds of words we might use to describe each of these three versions of you. Which one would you choose to be all of the time if someone gave you the choice? Not you, not me, and not the most perfect person on the planet. As we mature and start to compare ourselves and our achievements against those of others, the Dreaded Self starts to play a bigger role and can even overshadow both the Real Self and the Ideal Self. We may start to worry that the Dreaded Self is who we are destined to become, and that once that happens, nobody will want to be around us, let alone love us. The truth is you are neither your Ideal nor your Dreaded Self. These are both just thoughts and fears you are projecting onto yourself. A person who does not have to be or become perfect for others to value. A person who does not have to be or become perfect for them to love and value themselves. This can be a leisure day at home, or a hardworking day at work, or college, or even school. So, nine of these 10 things are really positive. They make you feel good about yourself. They leave you feeling happy.

Trying So Hard To Forget

But one of these comments is negative. It may be about your appearance, or something you said or misunderstood, or relate to your performance during a particular task. Or it may be a group of friends forgot to tell you they were meeting for lunch, leaving you feeling left out and hurt. And not only which one do you remember but how long do you obsess over it for? Brain scientists now know the brain has what they call a negativity bias. In other words, your biology will favor you remembering the one negative thing that happened. If your brain was simply an app on your smartphone, then this negativity bias would simply be an annoying bug that the developers would eventually get around to fixing. Most positive and beneficial experiences simply wash through our brains, like water through a sieve. According to Rick, the primary way to grow as a person is to gather all the good experiences we can in order to store them in the brain and change its neural structure for good to give us the internal resources we will need to enjoy a happy life. They don’t, he says, make you psychologically stronger or help you grow as a person unless you find a way to change the brain so they can be stored as positive resources for you to draw on. It all sounds great, but how do we do that? And then, as the mind changes, the brain changes as well, both in temporary and more lasting ways. This is called the left prefrontal cortex and it is this part of the brain that mind researchers have discovered plays a key role in controlling negative emotions. This isn’t a case of wishful thinking and wouldn’t that be great.

Lay Your Burden Down

Researchers have monitored the brains of people meditating on gratitude, for example, and this is what they find. But how do these changes become lasting? We can achieve lasting changes because the information that flows into the brain will set off patterns of neural firing. What people like Rick and other researchers mean when they say neurons that fire together wire together’ is that it is these patterns that create the changes to neural structure that will be lasting changes. You have already experienced this for yourself. Think of something, some activity, that you know you are good at. It could be a specific sport, or art, or music, or anything that you enjoy and engage in on a regular basis. You learned the skills and then, over time, honed them so that now you are competent and maybe even brilliant at it. This is because what was happening as you practised and honed these skills is that you created new neural pathways in your brain which you reinforced every time you practised and which became a lasting part of your own neural networks. Busy regions of the brain get stronger. They get more receptive. They start building more synapses so that new neurons can all reach each other to create new networks. If this all sounds ingenious, then that is because it is.

Grown Up Wrong

In a study of the brains of London taxi drivers, brain researchers discovered that the part of the brain involved in memory and spatial awareness has become visibly thicker after the drivers complete their training, which includes memorizing the maze and network of London streets so they don’t have to rely on sat nav or even an old fashioned map. They know their way around and the short cuts they can take if there are roadblocks or delays caused by an accident because they have spent hours training the brain to memorize all the routes and all the alternatives. In other words, we can only direct these brain changes if we focus and concentrate on paying attention to the information that will flow into the mind to help us achieve them. Imagine that every day when you wake up, you wake up with a big bright light beaming from the middle of your forehead onto whatever you choose to look at or notice during that day. In this imaginary scene, the bright light represents your attention. The next time you step out of your home, imagine you are turning this bright light on so you can really see anything you shine it on. You are going to spend the whole day noticing positive things Is the sun shining? Does sunshine make you feel happy?