Can you train your brain for positivity?
As a young boy, I would ride my bicycle all over my neighborhood wearing a sheet tucked into the back of my t-shirt’s collar. The sheet flowed behind me like a superhero’s cape as I cruised the neighborhood. I was Batman and I searched for citizens to save but, on one particular day, I was the one who needed saving.
The scariest dog in the world was chained to a tree in his backyard a few doors down from my home. As I drove by that day, the dog escaped his confinement and started chasing the cape which flowed behind me. I was no longer Batman in the Batmobile. I was just a pudgy 7-year-old pedaling my bike as fast as I could to escape this growling beast. I was saved by my grandmother who appeared out of our backyard wielding a broomstick to chase the dog away. Thanks, Yiayia!
I spent the rest of that summer making sure I knew where that dog was at all times. My brain was tuned to locate that miserable mutt whenever I left my house.
While I was fleeing from that dog, I imagine I felt like one of my distant ancestors running to escape a hungry saber-toothed tiger 300,000 years ago. Back then, your life depended on whether you could identify threats in the environment before they ate you. As a result, our brains evolved with a negativity bias that makes humans pay more attention to negative events and signs of danger in our environment. We are literally tuned to seek the negative aspects in most situations.
That evolutionary programming has big impact on our ability to increase or level of happiness. We might not be running from saber-toothed tigers or junkyard dogs every day, but we are wired to notice the and react to negative events more so than positive events in our daily lives. The trick to raising your inner level of happiness is your ability to notice the positive events more often. The naturally happy “2%ers” have figured this out but, how can everyone else develop some new daily habits to re-program their brains to notice more of the good things and dwell less on the bad things in your life?
If you’ve ever completed a word finder puzzle or gone on a scavenger hunt, you’ve experienced this sort of mental re-programming. Set your intention and your brain will try to find a specific word buried in a jumble of random letters.
Your brain can be trained to conduct its own daily scavenger hunt for positivity. And, with smartphones and apps, we can use technology to help us tune our brain to seek those positive moments. Here are 3 top tech tips that will help re-focus your attention away from negativity and towards the good stuff:
1) Group Gratitude: Create a group message with your immediate family or a few close friends. Each day, at a specified time, each person on the group message must send a list of two or three things for which they are grateful to the rest of the members of the group. You cannot repeat any item on another day. The group will hold every member accountable for coming up with their gratitude list every day regardless of how small the individual items may be.
2) Grat’ Streak: If you use Snapchat, you’re probably familiar with Snapchat “streaks.” These “streaks” are the number of days of uninterrupted Snapchat messages shared between two friends. Some Snapchat streaks have lasted two years or more. Start a “Grat Streak” where you exchange a positive comment or message with your Snapchat streak buddy every day. See how many months or years you can make the streak last.
3) One Second Everyday: Capture one second of video and edit it all together to create a short “highlight reel” of your year. For the past two years, I’ve capture one second of video each day. I use an app called 1SE (1 Second Everyday) to splice these ultra-short videos into a 6-minute “documentary” of my past year. I try to capture the most memorable or positive experience of the day for this mashup video. The result is I am always seeking the positive moments in my day. I have programmed my brain to continually seek happiness on a daily basis and you can as well.
Try one or more of these exercises over the next few weeks. If you can stick with these daily rituals long enough, your level of happiness will rise along with your optimism. Your relationships with family and co-worker will also improve as your brain begins seeking the good versus the bad in people.