HERE’S TO A HAPPY YOU
THE HEADLINES CAN MAKE YOU FEEL ALL IS LOST. BUT IT’S POSSIBLE TO REWIRE YOUR BRAIN WITH THE NEW SCIENCE OF POSITIVITY AND LIGHT IT UP WITH THE MYSTIC POWER OF THE ANCIENTS TO WARD OFF GLOOM AND CYNICISM
Meet the beacons of hope who are spreading cheer and well-being in remarkable ways
Year 2018 was sad, bad and mad enough to play tug-ofwar with our collective heartstrings. Planes crashed fatally around the globe, companies gave away our personal information, cryptocurrency broke hearts, selfdriving cars killed pedestrians raising uneasy questions, while floods, landslides and tsunamis wreaked havoc. At home, bad loans, farmer suicides, gang rapes, sexual harassment, hate crimes cast dark shadows, air pollution turned our lungs sootier and the state of our national discourse reached its darkest hour. Yet, in a time of ups, downs and uncertainty, somewhere in the US, an obscure citizen hit the headlines for scattering thousands of brightly coloured Post-it notes with inspiring messages—just to lift people’s spirits. An Indian man’s experience of receiving unexpected love and hospitality in Pakistan started trending on social media. A group of Mumbai netizens welcomed the first day of 2019 with a laughter party at dawn, to laugh away their blues with the rising sun. In the UK, millions took up the Dry January challenge and reported a “new me” version of themselves.
If the news makes you feel angry and hopeless, you need to consciously seek out the good. New scientific research is starting to explore how positive attitude works to improve our mental health. Stanford University researchers have recently linked positive mindset to performance: better function of the hippocampus, an important memory centre in the brain, and more efficient engagement of the brain’s problem-solving capacities (Psychological Science, January 2018).
Need a happiness boost? Learn about, and from, people who are optimistic, positive, and look for the good in the world: the do-gooders who channelise their energies and education into making life mean-
Positive thinking isn’t just a momentary dip in stress, or a few laughs; positive emotions need to be imbibed so that they add lasting value to your life
ingful for the masses; those real-life action heroes with the magical ability to find a path when all roads seem blocked; those warriors who wage a battle in service of truth, peace and justice. Read on and find out why positive people are always one step ahead of us in their habits and why successful people are always positive.
Positive thinking isn’t just a feelgood coinage. Nor is it just a momentary dip in stress or a few laughs. Positive emotions need to be built into your life, so that they add lasting value to all its spheres. For that, your worst enemy is not the “bad news”, but your own wandering thoughts, or “monkey mind”. More than 2,500 years ago, the Buddha described the human mind as being a party of screeching, chattering, drunken monkeys, all clamouring for attention. Envy and fear being the loudest. He showed his students how to breathe, think, eat, walk and meditate—in order to calm the mind.
That Buddhist metaphor for the human mind is getting new credence and intensity. Psychologists say severe, disabling mental illnesses—characterised by feelings of anxiety, worry, negative beliefs, fear, uneasiness, dread, panic, phobia, loss of control, uncontrollable behaviour, depression—have dramatically increased. And that it has become a young person’s problem: the average age for the first onset of anxiety and depression is now between 14 and 15. So spend some time each day with yourself, in quiet meditation, focusing on your breathing or a simple mantra, to tame the monkeys.
Researchers have long known that negative emotions consume you, as your brain closes off and focuses only on your fear, anger, jealousy or stress. Experts say that we are touched the most when emotion and inspiration come into play: from beauty in nature, excellence, art, vastness, traditions or symbols, gifts, kindness, portrayal of exceptional skills, encouragement, perseverance, and triumph over setbacks. Our hearts grow warm, we get teary-eyed, and are motivated to “better ourselves”, writes positive media psychologist Sophie H. Janicke (Mass Communication and Society, January 2018). Feeling inspired impacts one’s well-being directly: how one feels about oneself, one’s life or copes with stress. Well-being, like positivity, is yet another word that is bandied about without care but, according to positive psychologists, well-being has four constituents: resilience, or how quickly one recovers from adversity; outlook, or how one relishes positive experiences; awareness, or when we really focus on what we are doing; and generosity, or the ability to empathise, express gratitude and be compassionate towards oneself and others.
In the past decade, frontier research in neuroscience has unlocked new secrets of the brain: that it is possible to form new brain cells, called neurons, even in adulthood; that the brain can reverse damage or dysfunction; that various nerve cells and parts of the brain “talk” to each other constantly. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain that controls emotional expressions, problem-solving, memory, language, judgement, along with sexual behaviours. Recent MRI scans of the left prefrontal cortex have found that neural circuits in this area light up when a person feels more positive, optimistic, empathetic, grateful or compassionate. And the more these circuits are used, the more they strengthen—a phenomenon called “neuroplasticity”, or the process by which one learns to play a musical instrument, learns a new language, recovers from stroke, injury, birth defects, improves disorders like autism or attention and learning disabilities. It is also a way to pull out of depression, anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorders, addictions, and reverse unhappiness patterns to happiness.
Check out our curated list (Being Positive) of habits of successful people and kick-start the new year with optimism, enthusiasm and a lot of learning.