posted 4 days ago
My wife and I have a daily practice which we normally do right after breakfast: "positivity and serenity."
Every day we take time to list all the things we are happy about that come to mind. After the ideas stop coming we next list reasons that things in our lives "are globally going well." Not to say that everything is perfect, just to get us to keep perspective on things globally and not get lost in one negative event.
If there is a certain thing that we have very unsatisfied emotional needs about, we do a process we created that we call "pacification". It can be done alone, in a couple, or with more than 2 people. It is a little longer to explain that what I think most are ready to read here, but we basically start by expressing understanding for what we feel, followed by compassion and benevolence for the person with unsatisfied needs, then we express esteem for the person being pacified, and finally if we are in a loving relationship with them (or ourselves) we express our love for them. When done as our process describes, with sufficient psychological knowledge and connection to our own needs and feelings, it systematically creates a feeling of being pacified, no matter the subject.
Another technique that we use we call "find the positive side of what displeases us." Basically we dig, and sometimes very, very deep, to find the positive side of things often out of our control, but not necessarily, which deeply displease us. The psychological mechanism is that perception drives the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of needs, and the needs create our emotions. Positive emotions are felt for satisfied needs, negative emotions for unsatisfied needs. When we change our perspective, it changes the chain reaction of perception->needs->emotions and with a positive perspective brings us back to a positive mindset. For example, one day in my "past life" as an IT engineer, a sales engineer from a network equipment provider came to show me their product which we were interested in buying. I had a busy schedule every day, but I set aside about an hour for this meeting. He arrived and started setting up his computer for the product presentation, but he was struggling with problem after problem. After about 20 minutes he was still not ready to present their product and I started feeling restless and less patient. Thoughts about "wasting my time" started coming to mind. Then, I used this technique to find the positive side of the situation. I found that a part of me appreciated the break from my other work, it was an unanticipated pause in my workday. In fact, it was a welcome pause. In fact, I'm glad to have this down time after all. That switched my perspective, and I now felt calm, happy, content, thankful, benevolent and compassionate for the struggling sales engineer.
Anytime my wife or I have something really bothering us (geopolitics, climate, societal problems, whatever) we use this technique, and it contributes greatly to our overall stable, happy and motivated mindset.
We also very selectively keep ourselves informed about world events that actually matter to us. We keep in mind that the mass media makes the most money by captivating their audience, having a large captive audience, which raises the price they charge for advertising slots, which makes them more money. They use our brain's innate "negative bias" we have evolved to have, where the brain pays the most attention to what seems threatening or dangerous. This helps us survive better, but when we are bombarded with dramatic sensationalist negative news we have pretty much no control over, it sure doesn't make us happy. This evolutionary trait (the negative bias) is helpful when we have the power to act to stop the threat or danger. But when we have no power over it, it can just create psychological distress which goes beyond the helpful threshold. Distress motivates action, and as long as our action can mitigate the situation, that is useful. But distress with no way to change the situation doesn't have this useful effect. My wife and I try every day to "be the change we wish to see in the world", very literally and in every detail. We use our above psychological techniques to keep us happy, emotionally stable and motivated which is the solid foundation which underlies our life-long project: La Forêt Jardinée.
La Forêt Jardinée - www.laforetjardinee.com
Rusticity zone 8b
Mediterranean climate
Annual average precipitation: 900mm (35.4 in)
Altitude: 265 meters
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