Do you need rewiring?

I am reading such a wonderful book at present called How to Rewire Your Brain for Happiness by Rick Hanson. Mr Hanson says that we naturally default to a negativity bias as this has been part of our hardwiring in response to danger for millions of years.

He teaches that we can indeed retrain our brain to default to a positive bias, by utilising a happy experience or creating one by using a specific methodology called HEAL. This stands for Have a positive experience, Enrich it, Absorb it and Link the positive and negative experiences.

 I am extremely interested in any strategies that will assist us on a daily basis to get through the increasing stresses and challenges we face in this age of job uncertainty and the constant battle sometimes to just keep our heads above water and persevere. We face on a daily basis increasing adverse pressures and demands. We place very high expectations on ourselves with so much of our life having to have a “goal” attached to it and increasingly we feel a sense of dissatisfaction if we don’t always achieve it.

Before I attempt to explain his method of rewiring our brain to a happy state when we choose, he also teaches a wonderful methodology for dealing with our lives and it is simply by choosing one of the three following sayings “Let It Be” Let It Go” and Let it In”. I have found this extremely helpful myself in dealing with a challenging situations and people.

How do you HEAL?  This is how to do it and Mr Hanson explains each step in great detail throughout the book.  H – Have a positive experience for example notice something good , pleasurable in your immediate vicinity/day . E- Enrich it – bring in the 5 senses to do this sight, touch, sense, smell and hear,  A -Absorb the positive experience it imagine and we do this in hypnosis as a symbol of, say liquid gold literally flooding into your body and finally, L – Link the positive and negative experiences let the positive experience in the foreground gradually dominate over the negative image/thoughts in the background. Or if you cannot have a positive experience where you are, then remember one and go through the HEAL process.

I love the fact that HEAL is a powerful strategy that we can use especially if we are having a bad minute/hour/day /mood/response – so that we can use HEAL to move us out of the bad into the feel good .

He teaches us to take in the good by noticing the “low hanging fruit” that appear in our daily lives, like a aromatic coffee, a relaxing breath, a joke with a friend. He describes this as “nibbling on these experiences by simply noticing them and letting them nourish you”.

He says when we are feeling insecure to use a brick wall to remind us that we are supported , when we are in bed that we are warm and loved and so on. His explanations are beautiful and his teachings so comforting. I am looking forward to learning more as I read through the rest of the book.

The saying “physician HEAL thyself” has never been so relevant.

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