Like it Or Not, Emotions Will Drive the Decisions You Make Today
Your emotions will drive the decisions you make today, and your success may depend upon your ability to understand and interpret them. When an emotion is triggered in your brain, your nervous systems responds by creating feelings in your body (what many people refer to as a "gut feeling") and certain thoughts in your mind. A great deal of your decisions are informed by your emotional responses because that is what emotions are designed to do: to appraise and summarize an experience and inform your actions. But if an emotion is triggered, just how much should you pay attention to your visceral response and the thoughts it creates? Emotions are not particularly sophisticated or precise, but their speed and utility make up for what they lack in sophistication and precision. Emotions, when they are not disordered, provide information about your circumstances in a simple, quick way that does not involve a lot of cognition (thinking about it). Emotions have tremendous action potential.
Use This Simple Daily Habit to Add More Gratitude to Your Life
I have a simple gratitude habit that I have been following nearly every day for three years. I want to share it with you here. First, let me set the stage. The Minor Tragedy The other day I ordered takeout from one of my favorite Indian restaurants for dinner. We picked up the food and drove home, but when we opened the bag we realized that the restaurant had forgotten to include one of the main dishes from our order. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal. I wasn’t going anywhere later that night, so I volunteered to drive back to the restuarant and pick up the missing food while everyone else packed their bags for their trip. So, this was the mood in the room–frustrated, rushed, and stressed–when our simple gratitude habit came to the rescue. The Daily Gratitude Habit The habit is super simple. When I sit down to eat dinner, I say one thing that I am grateful for happening today. Everyone else contributed their own grateful moment from the day. Why It Works Practicing Gratitude
3 Ways Your Mind Can Give You A Healthier Heart
Healthier hearts aren’t just about diet and exercise, the mind can help too. Being grateful helps patients recover from heart failure, a new study finds. On top, two previous studies have found that optimistic people have healthier hearts and that a strong sense of purpose may lower heart disease risk. In the new study, Dr Paul J. Mills and colleagues studied how gratefulness affected people suffering from asymptomatic heart failure. He said: “We found that more gratitude in these patients was associated with better mood, better sleep, less fatigue and lower levels of inflammatory biomarkers related to cardiac health.” The study looked at people who had developed a heart problem — like having a heart attack — but who did not have other typical symptoms (shortness of breath or fatigue). The researchers wanted to see what could help them avoid getting worse. Once heart disease develops symptoms, the chances of death are five times higher. Dr Mills said: Dr Mills explained the results:
Emotional Wiring Different in Men and Women
Men and women are actually from the same planet, but scientists now have the first strong evidence that the emotional wiring of the sexes is fundamentally different. An almond-shaped cluster of neurons that processes experiences such as fear and aggression hooks up to contrasting brain functions in men and women at rest, the new research shows. For men, the cluster "talks with" brain regions that help them respond to sensors for what's going on outside the body, such as the visual cortex and an area that coordinates motor actions. For women, the cluster communicates with brain regions that help them respond to sensors inside the body, such as the insular cortex and hypothalamus. These areas tune in to and regulate women's hormones, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion and respiration. Cahill and his co-author Lisa Kilpatrick, scanned the brains of 36 healthy men and 36 healthy women. Scientists still have to find out if one's sex also affects the wiring of other regions of the brain.
Authentic Happiness | Authentic Happiness
Give a Power Boost to Your Gratitude Practice
In Uncovering Happiness I talk about how the #1 bad habit that most people have can be surprising – our thinking. Before we fall into procrastination, stress eating, isolating, habitually engaging our Smartphones or any other addictive behavior there’s a thought. The thought is something like, I need to get away from something uncomfortable that’s here or at times, I want to elate the good feeling that’s here. One of the most powerful ways I have found to change the atmosphere of the mind is a very simple gratitude practice (but with a power boost). Now, before your eyes roll you need to know this, thoughts may be arising in your mind right now such as, “not this gratitude stuff again, I’ve read this in a thousand places.” The answer is most likely that it inclines you away from it. If we all know it’s a supportive practice, why does the mind do this? We need to break free from this mind trap and engage bottom-up processing, seeing this gratitude practice with fresh eyes. Warmly,
The Neuroscience of Self-Esteem, Self-Criticism and Self-Compassion
All the emphasis on self-esteem building in recent decades has done little to instruct people on what to do when they hit a bump in the road. Most of us, research shows, unleash our inner critic – even if the hardship is brought on by age, illness or another inevitable part of life. Recently, scientists such as Paul Gilbert of Kingsway Hospital in the United Kingdom and Kristin Neff of the University of Texas at Austin, have suggested being self-compassionate, rather than self-critical, especially in rough times, is more likely to help us rebound and may lead to greater success and happiness in the long run. This is not just semantics or new-age feel-good fluff. Gilbert associates self-esteem, self-criticism and self-compassion with three interacting emotional systems in the brain, each with their own evolutionary purpose and mediating neurotransmitters. The "drive" system The threat-protection system For many of us, these first two systems dominate. The mammalian care-giving system
Don’t Quarrel | Dr. Rick Hanson - Author of Buddha's Brain and Just One Thing
posted on: November 30th, 2012 Who do you argue with?The Practice:Don’t quarrel.Why? It’s one thing to stick up for yourself and others. But it’s a different matter to get caught up in wrangles, contentiousness, squabbles . . . in a word: quarrels. Similarly, it’s one thing to disagree with someone, even to the point of arguing – but it’s a different matter to get so caught up in your position that you lose sight of the bigger picture, including your relationship with the other person. You know you’re quarreling when you find yourself getting irritated, especially with that sticky feeling that you’re just not gonna quit until you’ve won. Quarrels happen both out in the open, between people, and inside the mind, like when you make a case in your head about another person or keep revisiting an argument to make your point more forcefully. Plus it eats away like acid on a relationship. This week, try not to quarrel with anyone or anything. How?
The Place Where You Are
By Leo Babauta We rush through our days with so much to do, so much we should be doing, so much we’re missing out on … but how often do we stop to appreciate the place where we are right now? I don’t mean to focus on the journey, because that’s many different places … but instead to focus on where you are at this particular time. Pause for a moment, right now, to notice where you are. What is it like? Find something to be grateful about where you are: if you’re around someone you love, enjoy that. What if you don’t like where you are? Then think about all the things you aren’t suffering from: If you aren’t in a war-torn area of the world, give thanks to the stars.
