Thursday, August 28, 2008

Emotional happiness

Here are some motivation tips for achieving emotional happiness by focusing on the words we use to describe happy feelings. Look for your favorite feelings in this list.

Although many happy emotions arise spontaneously, part of the experience is the realization that we feel them. When you are joyful, you are aware that you are joyful at that moment. Since consciousness of joy is part of the experience, it stands to reason that the more we tune in to joy in our lives, the more of it we may feel. In fact, Rhonda Byrne, in her book, The Secret, says that we can attract things into our lives just by focusing on them.

Although we have plenty of words to describe happy emotions, our adult brains tend to spend more time thinking about problems and negative states than positive ones. We need to find the problem and fix it. How often have you heard that admitting the problem is half the solution?

We human beings are creatures of habit. Once we think in certain ways over and over again, our brains develop special pathways that make it easier to think that way again. When we spend a lot of time looking for problems, the brain pathways that look for emotional happiness get rusty and harder to navigate.

When I heard, as a child, that our brain cells died if we didn’t think about something for a long time, I resolved to protect myself by periodically thinking about something I didn’t usually pay much attention to. To this day, the thought of slimy frogs still comes to mind once in a while- just to keep the slimy frog neural net alive.

Here are five motivational tips for using these words to increase your emotional happiness:

1. Pick one word and spend a whole day looking for that emotion in yourself and others. Notice who has it, who doesn’t or where you see more or less of it that day.

2.Spend some time brainstorming more happy words and add to the list. I have found that most people feel happier just by reading the list of happy words.

3. Pick your top ten words. Again, the time you spend thinking about and evaluating happy words will tend to focus your attention on the happiness around you.

4.Write one or two of the words on a piece of paper, or make a poster. Post it somewhere you see frequently like the bathroom mirror, your computer monitor, or the dashboard of your car.

5. Write each word on a card and pull one at random when you need a little boost. Then spend a moment thinking about whether that emotion applies to you now or could apply to you now.

http://www.happylifeu.com/emotional-happiness.html

No comments: