SUGGESTION 39: MEDITATE

Meditation is a mindful activity that helps you release beneficial brain chemicals to improve well-being. Meditation can involve a variety of different techniques such as prayerful meditation or mindfulness meditation or Transcendental Meditation.

Whatever the method used, the process and outcome is very similar. The process involves a deep, focused awareness and the outcome involves a greater sense of well-being or peacefulness.

Meditation helps you to access the alpha brain wave state which is a healing state that assists the body with managing life stresses. In addition, meditation has been shown to help reduce the sensation of pain and discomfort. The more you practice meditation techniques, the more easily it becomes to achieve this healthy state and experience the sense of well-being.

The Qi Gong videos included on this website are a type of physical meditation that can be particularly beneficial for those who have difficulty with the less active methods provided in the audios available on this website.

SUGGESTION 40: LIST THE POSITIVES

To counter-act the tendency towards negativity it is necessary to deliberately focus on creating a positive pathway in the brain. Our emotions can become associated with particular pathways in the brain that may become easily triggered the more these pathways are reinforced. Unfortunately, negative states such as stress tend to reinforce the negative pathways which then increase the experience

To counter-act this automatic pathway, it is necessary to deliberately create a positive pathway through frequent reinforcement so that the positive pathway becomes more easily triggered. You may not be able to get rid of the negative pathway, but you can make the positive pathway stronger so that it becomes automatic rather than the negative pathway.

One way of doing this is to create a list of positive experiences and aspects of yourself to help you focus on the good parts of your life. If you do the suggestions in this app, many of them are meant to create positive experiences or attitudes. Write these experiences down and reinforce them in your mind by reviewing them frequently. The Happiness Journal part of the Happy Habits app includes a way to record positive experiences.

SUGGESTION 41: USE YOUR EMOTIONS

Emotions help to navigate confusing pathways. Listen to your emotions to obtain information and to help you make decisions. Many people have problems with emotions. They are either over-controlled in their emotional responses or under-controlled. In other words, they are at the mercy of their emotional state.

However, emotions are meant to provide us information about our experience in the world. Then we take that information, evaluate, and determine what we can do about it, weigh our options, and then behave according to the decision we have made.

Research has shown that happy people are more likely to engage in this process and make use of their emotions. However, over-controlled people tend to ignore the emotional information. As a result, they have more trouble solving problems that have an emotional component. It is important for the over-controlled person to recognize emotions and listen to the information provided by emotions. In addition, the over-controlled person can be helped by learning to access positive, calming emotional states.

In a similar way, those with under-controlled emotions need to learn to use emotions accurately. They need to learn how to have more control over their emotions rather than letting emotions control them. So often people think that they have no control over the emotions they feel: "It's just how I feel!"

Although we may not have complete control especially with the emotions that are reactions to events or situations, we do have control over much of what we feel. If you consider most emotions, they are re-experienced emotions. In other words, we keep emotions present by reviewing them over and over. If someone does something you don't like, you might think of what occurred repeatedly, keeping alive the emotion of anger or irritation.

We have a great deal of control over these re-experienced emotions because we are creating them. They are not spontaneous reactions but a choiceful focus. Therefore, we can make a different choice. We can choose how we want to review a situation. For example, you can focus on the idea that the other person was inconsiderate which only keeps you in an agitated state or you can focus on the idea that the other person has been under significant stress and reacted without thinking which may help to calm you.

Learning to access different emotional states at will can benefit you by reducing the negative states. With the above example, changing the emotional state was done cognitively by changing the perspective of the situation. However, accessing different emotional states can also be done through an audio training method called Rainbow Relaxation Emotion Training that helps you pair certain colors with certain emotional states. Then, when you want to access that emotional state you can imagine the color associated with it. This is a more advanced method so you need to listen to the audio repeatedly until the association occurs. Then, you may still need to listen to the audio at times to keep the association reinforced. READ MORE: page 12