The Yes Brain
What if the positive emotions and happiness we have day to day is something we can change? Science says yes so here is a deep dive on how to teach your brain to say yes joyfully to change.
You get a bad review, a terrible night's sleep, a horrible day because of a jerk at work…you get the idea. What can help make these bad days turn around? How can you mentally reframe what happened today? No one likes to be around a grump, a Debbie Downer, or a Negative Nancy (sorry to all those Debbies and Nancys out there).
We are all affected by negative things each day, but is there a way to train yourself to change how having a bad day or a project failure ruins your day, week, or month? Yes, because otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this post.
Here is the exciting part, the more positive emotions you have, the healthier you will be. Scientists call positive emotions '“positive affect” in research because it is fun to rename stuff we already know and make us wonder what they are talking about. However, scientists have researched how being happier affects people. It turns out your life will be longer. You will experience less physical pain than someone who has more negative thoughts. You will also be more likely to work on healthier eating and succeed.
Positive affect (emotions)=joy, serenity, contentment, humility, empathy, calm
Negative affect (emotions)=fear, anger, jealousy, anxiety
Why would being more positive make you more healthy? Your brain can run your world and help make your genes turn up, down, or maybe even turn off. When you have more positive affect (more positive emotions) like joy, serenity, contentment, and calm, you activate the front part of your brain. When you have more negative affect (negative emotions) like anger, jealousy, and anxiety, you will activate the inner part of your brain. The front of the brain operates slowly and is logical and precise, while the inner brain works fast and is dominated by emotion and impulse.
Kids often make decisions dominated by emotions and impulses because they don’t have fully developed brains. But we need to train mentally to have a glass-half-full brain with more positive emotions than negative ones. The good news is when you do, you will have an easier time saying yes to more fruits and veggies.
I have grown to love studying the brain in the past 12 years, but taking neuroscience while in grad school was as stressful as going to your parent's house with varying shades of a hickey on your neck every night for three months. The brain is a juicy nerd research topic because we are learning more and more about how we can reprogram our own brains. Connections can be re-made and changed for the good or the bad by what we think and how we think.
This boils down to this one question, how are you thinking? When a thought comes to you, do you let it pull you down the rutted road of despair or up to dance on cloud nine? When you let emotions and impulses drive your mind, it is harder to zoom out and get a bigger picture view like you would get if you were on a helicopter tour of Las Vegas vs. driving on the road to Las Vegas.
I was on a coaching call yesterday with the amazing Blake Stratton. During the call, he had us list out five benefits of experiencing a negative circumstance we were each worried about actually happening. What he had all of us on the call do was take a helicopter view of a potentially crushed hope and see what benefits there could be hidden in the wreckage like a diamond in the rough.
What Blake helped us all to do is to be mindfully integrated. Did you see what I just did there? I made up a science term! Here is what I mean by that term I completely just made up, but think is terrific.
Mindful= Being mindful is the opposite of rushing or multitasking. When you're mindful, you're taking your time. You're focusing in a relaxed, easy way.
Integrated= with various parts or aspects linked or coordinated Oxford Languages
Mindfully integrated= The ability to take a thought or outcome and flexibly adapt it to your current life situation and future life goals in a coherent and energized way
*human change science nerd mic drop*
Being mindful is looking at the whole picture instead of being trapped in the bad thing that just happened five minutes ago or five years ago. It is like looking out of a helicopter's window at 500 feet. You don’t perseverate on a random dirt road that looks like it has deep ruts. You see the city as a whole. You see the good areas and the areas that could use someone to love them again. You see the big picture. Your life is more than the dirt road with ruts, and it is more than the cute downtown area with a great coffee shop.
This big-picture look integrates all the parts of your city. It gets you out of your emotions when walking down a bad street or driving over a rutted road. There is a reason why you can do this. Mindful integration actually allows you to use the front part of your brain, known as the prefrontal cortex. Bonus points if you can drop prefrontal cortex in a conversation this week. The points count for nothing, but you will feel a sense of happiness and victory that can never be erased.
The more you use the prefrontal cortex (mindful integration hub), the easier time you will have with getting a helicopter view of all your thoughts and emotions. The more you use your mindful integration hub, the more that part of the brain will start to engage automatically. This is because the more you use the front part of the brain, the more it grows and gets beefy and strong, like Dwayne' The Rock’ Johnson. You need the Rock to beat back the negative emotions like the random evil guys in a movie because when negative emotions aren’t stopped, they come in waves and pull us down.
Scientists who research positive emotions estimate that about half of our happiness level is caused by our genetic makeup. About 10% appears to be tied to our life circumstances. If you live in a war-torn country or in poverty, you may not have the resources you need to feel calm and happy. The remaining 40% is how we choose to think day to day. If you are reading this and live in a first-world country, you have 10% happiness in the bank, as our life circumstances most likely allow for that 10% of happiness to get deposited each day. This means that you have the power to increase your positive emotions and happiness level to the 50% mark by how you think, regardless of your genetics.
If you read last week's post, you will know we are in the last 40 days of the year (31 days as of 30 Nov). I would argue that the biggest thing you can do for yourself in 2022 is change how you think about stress, failure, and what you haven’t gotten done. Can you use the tool Blake had me use to realize that even in failure, there are at least five good things that can happen? Can you take five minutes a day to do a gratitude meditation? Please give yourself the gift of that 40% of happiness for 2023. The best is yet to come.
DIG (Get Deliberate, Get Inspired, Get Going) Deep Action Steps:
Get Deliberate: Are you in the right community? Who are you doing life with? Hanging out with people that can’t see the good in life will affect your ability to see the good. Call up someone who you know sees life glass half full and ask them for coffee. Get yourself your personal positive emotion influencer.
Get Inspired: “You don’t have to see the whole staircase. Just take the next step.” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Take the first step. Write down five benefits of something ‘bad’ that has happened in the past week or month. If you need help, ask a friend, your spouse, or a counselor.
Get Going: Try a gratitude meditation right now. Don’t wait. Write down what comes to you as you do the meditation. My list from today includes four specific couples I want to spend time with and gratitude for the journey that God has brought me through with my Physical Therapy and coaching.