This month I want to discuss “taking in the good,” an easy mindfulness practice to incorporate into your lives that will produce immediate results for you. It will, over time, rewire your brain to eliminate negativity bias. Because of our DNA and historical evolution, our brains are like Velcro for bad experiences and like Teflon for good ones. To change our brains, we must create active practices to overcome this bias and get more joy out of each day.
Taking in the good as a daily practice is about cultivating and unearthing the power of using everyday positive experiences to enhance your life and give you more confidence and feelings of self-worth. Most of us roll through each day with a tight schedule and often more to do than is possible. We put inordinate pressure on ourselves. Often, even though we have numerous positive experiences during the day, we will ruminate on the one bad experience we had. That experience will be the one we pick to relive over and over.
Taking in the good is akin to the concept of savoring our experiences, which I discussed in my August 2022 column. Taking in the good is a step further than the occasional savoring of a good feeling or the process of stopping to “smell the roses.” It is the consistent practice of looking for the good experiences in your day and magnifying them. You take the time to acknowledge each as it occurs. You breathe it in and focus on it for more than a minute. You want to focus on the good so that you create new neurological paths in your brain to hold the good feelings while the bad ones recede in your mind. Eventually, these good feelings will be stored in the neurological pathways of your brain. Daily feelings of well-being, equanimity, and healthy self-love will be the norm.
In my February 2023 column I discussed Rick Hanson’s book Neurodharma: New Science, Ancient Wisdom, and Seven Practices of the Highest Happiness (Harmony, 2020). I liked that book so much that I began reading his book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence (Harmony, 2013). There, he discusses the importance of focusing on positive moments. Examples he gives include “the cozy feeling of a favorite sweater, pleasure in a cup of coffee, warmth from a friend, satisfaction after finishing a task, or love from your mate.” For me, they might be the way the son of the man who owns the gas station where I have pumped my gas since 1980 runs over to greet me when I pull in, or the way my car seat gets so hot on a cold morning, or how clean my house is on Fridays after my housekeeper comes. We each have those experiences every day that are positive. Let’s put our attention there to those and have the bad ones recede into the background.
Hanson writes at length about the scientific benefits we derive from building up this practice of taking in the good and how it develops the inner strengths we need for “well-being, coping, and success.” He demonstrates how once we really master taking in the good, we won’t “need to chase after pleasant events or struggle with unpleasant ones.” He says that we will “increasingly enjoy a sense of wellness that’s unconditional, not based on external conditions.”
He distilled the process down to four simple steps with the acronym HEAL: “Have a positive experience, Enrich it, Absorb it, then Link positive and negative material so that positive soothes and even replaces negative.”
Want a quick, easy mindfulness practice that will change your life? Try this HEAL technique for a week. At the end of each day, journal the positive things that brought you joy during the day, no matter how small. Write them down. Think about them. At the end of the week, think about how much better you feel. I hope you will continue to witness and observe your own life and take in the good and see how it will overtake the bad in no time. Meditate on the good things and what you are grateful for. Little by little, you will experience an enhanced sense of well-being and will enjoy your life more fully. I’ll have more to say on this in future columns.
Until next time . . . namaste. Please let me know if you have any tips, sources, or experiences with mindfulness you want to share at [email protected].
You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes a day, unless you’re too busy; then you should sit for an hour. —Zen proverb
