Tips to Helping Happiness Bloom, Keeping Your Thoughts and Mind Clean
In our own search for happiness, many forget to attend to the one place where both happiness and unhappiness is born: The Mind. Those that have fully grasped the power of our mental mechanisms to promote peace within ourselves understand that consciously re-organizing our thoughts is the first and only place to begin.
Like a garden, our thoughts grow weeds. If left unattended, our minds become overgrown with negativity. In fact, according to CBS News, a British study found that our brains are more likely to register words such as “agony,” “murder” and “despair,” than words with positive emotional associations like “peace,” “flower” and “cheerful”. The findings of this research suggest why so many in our current generation struggle. We are bombarded by negative messages of ‘lack’ to promote consumerism and constant doom-and-gloom messaging of the million ‘ills’ of our modern day world. This research proves that we can no longer passively assume a natural state of positivity. Rather, we must work three times as hard to overcome negative thoughts to achieve the peace and happiness we crave.
Like all training programs the process of re-organizing your mind necessitates awareness first and committed action to follow.
Increase Your Awareness
First, become aware of the negative thoughts that you harbor in your own mind. Write them down if the process helps and if you’re truly committed to the journey, look at what you’ve written and find a way to re-think the negative to the positive. Take your old list of ‘negatives’ and ceremoniously burn them or crumble them up and toss them in the trash. They do not serve you in this journey, so it is high time you let them go.
Decrease Your Exposure
Secondly, look around at your daily habits and recognize where negative thoughts surround you. It may be in the television programing you watch or the people with whom you surround yourself. Find secondary options to limit these negativities, like replacing the entertainment from these television programs with happy music or inspirational books. Excuse yourself from conversations with people whose thoughts are turned towards negativity or criticism and if the situation prohibits you from getting away, simply tune-out the negative ideas and take that moment to day-dream of something that brings you joy.
Replace the Bad with the Good
Many report achieving success with this mental re-programming by wearing a rubber band around their wrist that reminds them to stop new negative thoughts in their track. Try to challenge yourself to snap the band when a negative thought occurs and replace it with a new, more positive one. To further the growth of positivity in your brain, you can also spend time in quiet reflection of all the wonderful things in your world for which you are grateful. Wake each morning and greet the day in silent observation of that gratitude, for your bed, for your breakfast, for every article of clothing that you wear. Remind yourself throughout the day of all these little and big things that are wonderful be it a loved one in your life or the kind smile of a stranger. By soaking in each of these positive elements, you are helping to re-wire your brain, weed your garden, and plant new flowers to grow.
Our evolutionary protections appeared to have hard-wire us to absorb these daily negativities much more vigorously than the positive thoughts that give us the peace and happiness we seek. However, our evolutionary mind has also granted us the unique human ability to manually re-adjust our mental processes to better our human experience. Recognizing our personal power to weed out negative thoughts and consciously instill more positive ones, rightfully assures us that we are indeed, the true gardeners of our being.
For more information on how to tend to the Garden of your own blossoming life,
Contact: Andrea Vielma, MA LMFT 541-350-2200
Andrea Vielma, MA LMFT is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in transformational therapy services that help identify and remove personal blocks to fulfillment, happiness and joy.
