By taking just a few extra seconds to stay with a positive experience—even the comfort in a single breath, you’ll help turn a passing mental state into lasting neural structure.
Dr. Rick Hanson
When it comes to mental health goals, experiencing more positivity and less negativity might be at the top of most people’s list. The strategy I want to talk about today, drawn from work by Dr. Rick Hanson, is effective in accomplishing this goal while requiring just a few small, but important changes to the way we interact with our experiences. It harnesses our natural neuroplasticity (the ability to make structural changes in our own brains) to encourage changes in our patterns of thinking about and experiencing the world around us.
The essence of this strategy can be boiled down to one simple recommendation: when you have a positive experience, sit with it.
Because of the temporary nature of experiences, we often disengage with them as soon as they are finished, only returning to them in memory. By disengaging with them so quickly, we miss out on some of the power these positive experiences have for rewiring the brain.
Another thing we are working against us here is our natural negativity bias (detailed in a previous blog post). This bias means that we naturally sit with and remember negative experiences more than positive ones.
The core of this new strategy is the knowledge that “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Simply put, our thoughts and feelings are just electrical impulses traveling down physical pathways (neurons) in our brains. As an impulse “fires” down the same path repeatedly, it “wires” that path together, funneling future thoughts and feelings down that pathway. This knowledge allows us to harness how we fire our neurons in service of a more positive outlook.
Dr. Rick Hanson teaches entire courses on how to do this and if you are interested in this, I would encourage you to look into this concept. However, the process of “taking in the good” essentially has 3 main steps:
- Notice: Be mindful of when you are having a positive experience. The first sip of morning coffee, a compliment from a friend, watching the beauty of a snowfall. These are all positive experiences we so often gloss over, barely noticing them. The first step is just building a habit of being aware that we are having a good experience.
- Savour: The easiest way to do this is just to be present with your pleasure. Explore the feeling of positivity you are having. If it is a sensory experience, focus on how it feels. If it is emotional, let that warm fuzzy feeling hold you for a few seconds. You can even enhance this experience using your memory of related positive experiences or challenges you overcame to get to this one.
- Absorb: This step is the most abstract. It involves letting the positivity of that experience sink in. Taking just a few seconds after this experience to notice and welcome the positive experience you just had.
Though it may sound like a lot, this whole process can be as short as 5 seconds, or as long as a few minutes. The strength of the experience and how much time you have can dictate how long this should take. If we can make a habit of sitting with the positive, we can make long lasting structural changes in our brain that have the potential to increase our happiness and resilience as we move through life.
David
Simply Counselling Services