One basic and crucial aspect of human psychology is, “What we practice, we get master at.”
For a long time, we have trained ourselves to focus on problems, in an attempt to prevent them from happening again. Habitually, we always notice that which is lacking or limiting or faulty in every person, situation and surroundings. Example, the news tends to seek out the most negative story from all the positive things that are going on that day, which could be reported. The mass media have become specialists in ‘disaster awareness’. Basically, we are bombarded with a lot of negativity from all around us.
Every time we think, speak and do something in a certain way, our brain fires specific electrical impulses, down specific neural pathways. The more time those electrical impulses are fired down the same pathways, the stronger and more developed those pathways become.
We all know that the more we use and train a particular muscle with an exercise, the stronger it gets. Likewise, when we constantly think about everything that could go wrong, it’s like practicing and training our mind to be in a state of high alert and agitation. This reinforces the neural networks in our brain associated with fear and stress. So, it actually becomes easier for us to go into the stress response than to experience feelings of happiness and joy.
Few of the best ways to change this is to
# Begin to shift our primary orientation of our thinking from, ‘WHAT’S WRONG’ to ‘WHAT’S RIGHT’.
# Begin to notice GOODNESS, in each person, thing and situation.
# Begin to RETRAIN our brain to notice JOY and WONDER at any moment.
Just as we have got habituated to focus on what’s missing in our lives, we can also train our brain over a period of days to notice everything that is joyous and wonderful. Without a doubt, it’s damn difficult to do so. And our mind would rebel if we start retraining it. Because it fears being in an unknown territory. But we need to be patient and nonjudgmental toward it.
Our brain will start building the complementary set of neural pathways, so that it will begin to default to feelings of natural joy and relaxation. As we continually instruct our brain to pay attention to good feelings, we now notice that we feel and encounter more and more good.
If you notice something good, you must make it grow – whether it is within you or around you.
Sadhguru.