10 Top Tips to Rewire Your Brain for Optimum Happiness

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Frances Masters/ Wake Up World

There’s a lot of research into happiness right now. You know it’s serious when even the government wants to know how happy we are!

The success of any nation can no longer be judged just on Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A lot of time, money and resources are now being focused on measuring our Gross Domestic Happiness too.

There are various ways of measuring well-being. The current one favoured in the UK asks people their rating of life satisfaction.. rating of how worthwhile the things they do are.. rating of happiness yesterday.. and rating ofanxiousness yesterday.

Last year, an international study identified mental health, meaningful work, loneliness and the physical environment as some of the key drivers of happiness or unhappiness which often get overlooked by policy-makers.

The secret of extreme wellbeing

But what if there was a direct route to happiness? What if you could ‘rewire your brain’ for optimum happiness, and the ‘secret’ of extreme wellbeing could be reduced to something like an algorithm? Might there be one ‘master-key’ which could unlock the ‘mechanism’ of happiness?

A new book by Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design suggests there is. He describes a kind of ‘black box’ theory where stimuli are constantly being received by the human brain through sight, sound, touch, smell and taste and says it’s how we pay attention to these stimuli which equate to our potential for happiness or distress.

We all watch TV, read books or newspapers, eat food, sleep, do work, hang out with other people and have aches and pains. We all have hundreds and thousands of experiences a day and are on the receiving end of billions of bits of incoming data, all jostling for our attention. But we have more choice about where we focus our attention than we realise. Simply put, if we focus on the positive, we will feel happier, so we need to learn to allocate more attention to the positive stimuli and less to the negative.

We are shaped by our surroundings as much as we also shape and influence our environment. Dolan suggests we should consciously influence our surroundings to maximise our potential for happiness. This certainly fits in with what I have observed in 30,000 hours’ work as a psychotherapist. Yes, it does require effort to make change, but small changes in your routine can make a big difference, such as scheduling a regular phone call to a special friend, making sure you take time for things you enjoy, not taking your cigarettes to work, or changing your bank password to #£saveM0ney.

These small changes have the potential to improve our perception of our own happiness, says Dolan. He has a point. Attention is a limited resource. Latest research suggests that we can only consciously process 120 ‘bytes’ of information at one time. That’s the ability to listen to two conversations simultaneously. So, if we get a bit more organised, we can learn to maximise our potential for well-being by having a daily ‘system’ for living and focusing our attention on the positives will then become our regular ‘happiness habit’

Follow these tips to rewire your brain for optimum happiness.

1. Start with flowers

Research shows that people who wake up to the sight of flowers are happier than others. Put some fresh flowers by the side of the bed, not too many as they eat up oxygen overnight. One beautiful rose is enough to raise the spirits. Try keeping the bedside area as clean and tidy as possible too, so that you wake up to a calm and clear environment; a great ‘happiness habit.’

2. Wake up slowly

Does your alarm clock shatter your happiness before you’re even fully awake? If the ear-busting shriek of your alarm clock wrestles you into consciousness with a jolt, try replacing it with a radio alarm and the sound of some gentle or cheerful music, or get one of the clocks which simulate dawn by gently increasing light.

3. Have your affirmation ready

Many people’s first thought of the day is ‘Oh no. Work again! or ‘Too much to do.’ Choose instead to say something really motivational to yourself. Have an affirmation ready that will ‘set your mind’ and positively affect your ‘mindset’ for the whole day, something like ‘This is a day of opportunity. This is the first day of the rest my life. Today is a new page and I am truly the author of my life.’

It might feel a bit strange at first, but if you keep repeating positive phrases, your subconscious mind will definitely notice. Positive thoughts drown out negative internal chatter. You can only think one thought at a time. Trying to think two opposing thoughts creates ‘cognitive dissonance’ and is the main reason positive affirmations are so powerful.

http://wakeup-world.com/2015/04/20/10-top-tips-to-rewire-your-brain-for-optimum-happiness/

Source: http://truthisscary.com/2015/04/10-top-tips-to-rewire-your-brain-for-optimum-happiness/