Harness the Power of Positivity Bias Training to Be Happier

[Excerpted from You, Happier: The 7 Neuroscience Secrets of Feeling Good Based on Your Brain Type by Daniel G. Amen, MD]

You, Happier: The 7 Neuroscience Secrets of Feeling Good Based on Your Brain Type is written by psychiatrist, neuroscientist, and brain health expert Daniel G. Amen, MD. In this book, he reveals how to discover your brain type and tailor happiness strategies best suited to your brain type. This book also shows how to improve your overall brain health to consistently enhance your mood, protect your happiness by distancing yourself from the “noise” in your head, and make 7 simple decisions and ask 7 daily questions to boost your happiness.

I’ll never forget the morning of May 5, 2020, the day my father died. I was getting ready to leave the house when Mom called me on my cell. She was in a panic.

“He’s stopped breathing!” she cried out.

“Stay on the line. I’ll call 911!” I replied.

That was the start of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, which went by in a blur. That evening, after a long, emotional day of dealing with the mortuary and then watching my father’s body being taken away on a gurney, I showered and got ready for bed.

For the last three or four years, I had a ritual of putting myself to sleep by saying a prayer and then asking myself, What went well today? This was the bookend to how I started every day by saying to myself, as soon as my feet hit the floor in the morning, “Today is going to be a great day.” I had embraced these twin measures of positivity bias training because I had programmed my mind to look for what is right more than what is wrong. I want to focus on why it will be a great day each morning and what went well when my head hits the pillow. Training my brain to search for the good things that happened during the day was kind of like making my own highlight show. It’s my habit, ritual, and routine. It is what I do.

When it was time to fall asleep that night, I said a prayer, and then my mind went to What went well today? Then, all of sudden, my mind objected: Seriously, you are going to do that tonight, on the worst day of your life in 38 years? The worst day since you lost your grandfather in 1982? If you loved your father, isn’t that disrespectful?

Yet, because it was my habit, I thought about the dozens of texts I got that day from my friends and my father’s friends. Both he and I were loved. Even with the tragedy, I slept well that night because I had been training my mind for years.

In a world of negativity, it’s good to have positivity bias training. In my book, You, Happier, I introduce you to 9 positivity bias training exercises that can help eliminate or suck the energy our of bad moments and bad memories.

For example:

Start each morning by saying, “Today is going to be a great day.” As I’ve said, where you bring your attention determines how you feel. If you want to feel happier, start the day by directing your attention to what you are excited about, what you like, what you want, what you hope for, and what makes you happy, rather than the negative. I recommend families do it together as they are waking up their kids or at the breakfast table in the morning. I love this exercise so much that it’s at the top of my to-do list that I look at every day, just in case I miss saying it.

Another reason I recommend this practice is because it plants seeds of optimism into the soil of everyday life. Happy individuals look for the good that can come out of a situation, not what can go wrong. One of my favorite sayings is: “A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

Optimists and pessimists approach problems differently. Optimists generally proceed with a positive outlook, while pessimists expect the sky to fall. Optimists know that things don’t always go their way, so when life knocks them down, they get back up and try again. A sense of optimism lifts the immune system, helps prevent chronic disease, and gives you a better chance of coping with bad news, such as when my father passed away.

In the book, you’ll find 8 more positivity bias training exercises that can help you be happier and overcome negative feelings.

If you want to join the tens of thousands of people who have already learned how to have a happier brain and a happier life at Amen Clinics, speak to a specialist today at 888-288-9834 or visit our contact page here.