Practical Tips: How To Train Your Brain To Be Happy
You have a million thoughts every day. Here's how to train your brain to focus on those that make you feel hap
Thousands of thoughts pass through your mind every day but you let your brain focus on a few. It’s up to you to pay attention to those that help you feel better, and achieve what you want to achieve.
This mental focus is a key to developing resilience. Everyone experiences some sadness and setbacks in life, it’s just part of being human. And nasty surprises do happen - from pandemics and recessions to fresh chicken shortages - we cannot control everything that happens.
But we can control our attitude to it. What separates winners from losers is how we deal with our problems. How do we find the strength and resilience to cope? And having a positive outlet is very helpful when it comes to finding the strength and resilience to cope. By training your brain to be happy, you are also training it to be more resilient.
Visualisation is a useful technique that helps you reach your goals and live your dreams. It works by getting your mind and body ready for what you want to happen – and, just like exercise, the more you do it, the stronger it becomes.
To make visualisation more powerful, it helps to tap into your emotions. Psychologists call this technique 'forward feeling'. Imagine a day when you need to impress someone -- a boss, a date, a colleague. If you enter the situation worried that you might mess things up, you will walk in feeling awkward. That feeling changes the way you stand, your facial expressions, and how you interact with that person.
Now imagine meeting the same person, but you start the day feeling confident and assured. Try to visualise every little detail in your mind. How do you look? How do you feel? Imagine you walk into the room feeling tall and confident. You look like someone who deserves to be listened to - and so people do. Their positive feedback increases your confidence even more. Forward feeling and visualisation help you create the mindset that helps things happen.
But forward feeling or visualisation is not magical thinking - you still need to do the work. But visualising a successful day and imagining how good you will feel when it happens keeps you going and keeps you working. Those results will help to bring about what you want.
A study from Scotland’s Glasgow Caledonian University tested how music helped people cope with pain. Fifty-four people agreed to be poked by cold metal. The first time, they listened to white noise, the second time they listened to “relaxation music,” and the third time they listened to their favourite music. Researchers found that when people were listening to their favourite tunes they tolerated the pain much longer, and said they felt more in control.
In another study, researchers in The Netherlands got people to find smiley face and sad face emojis in photos while listening to music. Once again, music made a great difference. When they were listening to happy music, the people found more smiley faces. And even when no smiley at all was shown, when they listened to happy music the subjects often thought they recognized more happy smiley faces. They saw what they were in the mood to see.
So intentionally choose music, clothes, people, and surroundings that help you feel how you want to feel. Neuroscience has found that when you spend time with people your brains start to exhibit the same patterns of brain waves. In a way, you start to think alike. So it’s good to spend time with people who have the traits you want to develop.
When it comes to music, you can go to Spotify, which has curated playlists compiled by mood. You can find playlists called things like “Music to get things done” or “Start the day feeling more creative” - and so much more.
Journaling - or writing down your thoughts regularly - is a way to discover what makes you feel happy or focused. At the end of every day, you write down your thoughts and feelings about what happened during the day, and you try to spot patterns
Try to identify five things you did that fed the feeling you are after.
When did you feel most focused? When were you feeling happy? What music was playing? What were you doing? What had you just done before that? This gives you an evidence base of things that you can draw upon in the future to repeat that result.
Lucid dreaming is when you are aware you are dreaming and you can manipulate the direction of the dream. It’s not something we naturally do, but if you can develop more control over your dreams, you can improve your life skills
A study at Bern University in Switzerland found that when people imagined practicing a skill or sport during “lucid dreaming,” they got better at it in real life. People were asked to toss coins into a coffee cup from a distance of two meters, participants who lucid dreamed that they had practiced the task did much better than people who did not lucid dream - but not quite as well as the people who actually practiced the coin toss while awake.
Some lucid dream techniques require you to wake up halfway through the night to remind yourself to lucid dream (because we tend to dream more in the second half of the night). But it’s easier to just tell yourself before you go to bed, “When I dream tonight, I will remember that I am dreaming." In one Harvard study, 50 per cent of the participants were able to tap into their lucid dreaming powers to feel more optimistic.
Bauer Syndication / ARE media. Additional reporting by Tara Barker.