The Positive Habit

Six steps for transforming negative thoughts into positive emotions

Fiona Brennan

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780717183302
• eBook ISBN: 9780717183296
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology

Love, calmness, confidence, gratitude, hope and happiness: the six emotions that tip the balance of our mindset in favour of a positive outlook rather than a negative one. Wouldn't it be great to feel more of these positive emotions? Now you can with Fiona Brennan's ultimate manual for the mind.With a chapter on each emotion, and practical steps on how to cultivate them, the plan utilises mindfulness, habit loops, positive psychology and neuroscience to help soothe anxiety and stress. It will show you how to train your brain to embrace negative thoughts with courage and love before transforming them into positive ones.Accompanied by audio-hypnotherapy meditations that take just a few minutes a day, split between morning and evening, it will transform your mental health as you doze off peacefully to the sleep-time audio and start the day happy with the seven-minute morning ritual. Take control of your emotional health and build your ladder to happiness so that you flourish as you develop The Positive Habit.'Life-changing! Manifest the habit of happiness and success.' Jack Canfield, author of Chicken Soup for the Soul

HOW TO CULTIVATE A POSITIVE MINDSET

‘If we are what we repeatedly do, excellence is then not an act but a habit.’

ARISTOTLE

ARISTOTLE TAUGHT US that virtues are indeed habits; his hypothesis is that the mind is a tabula rasa, or blank slate, when we are born and our living and social conditions shape our characters for better or worse. This theory remained buried for many years, until John Locke, the seventeenth-century philosopher and enlightened thinker known as the ‘father of liberalism’, revived it. Since then, the idea has met with much opposition and to this day the ‘nature versus nurture’ debate rages on. However, there is growing empirical evidence to suggest that the mind is indeed largely shaped by our environment and most positive psychology scientists take the view that we have 40 per cent control over our own happiness, with 50 per cent the result of genetics over which we have little control, and the remaining 10 per cent coming from the life circumstances you were born into.¹¹ The empowering news is that habits are malleable and once learned they become automatic and reliable. This is something that is highly evident to positive people.

In this chapter, we will examine the science of neuroplasticity (the flexible, plastic nature of the brain) and also the three components of habit which will allow you to identify your own habit loops. You will create your very own personal trigger list to help dispel old, negative habits of behaviour.

Every habit has a beginning – the first time we felt anxious, the first cigarette we smoked, the first time we felt we were not worthy. Knowing why the habit formed in the first place is integral to changing it because this helps to disempower the trigger feeling at its root. For example, if you started smoking as a teenager in order to be ‘cool’, you can very quickly see that this is no longer a valid reason to continue smoking – the reverse has become true as many smokers now carry social shame for smoking rather than kudos.

Much of our thinking, as well as our emotional and mental habits, stems from early conditioned belief systems and very often these are out of date, negative and need to be changed.

Developing the six positive habits explained in Part II as your default state does not mean denying the negative; in fact the opposite is true. If you are able to identify negative emotional habits and thought processes, thereby embracing your full emotional range, you will know which thoughts are helpful and which you can and should discard.

The six emotional habits explored in this book have been carefully selected and put in a specific order. We cannot fast-forward to happiness without taking the time to climb each step and generate each of the positive emotions that must precede it. Positive emotions are often subtle and can slip through your brain like flour through a sieve, so listening to your morning and sleep time audios every day reinforces the development of the habit and embeds the six emotions into your mind effortlessly.

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Why Do We Have Positive Emotions?

BARBARA FREDRICKSON, a professor at the University of North Carolina, is the author of Positivity and a leader in the science of happiness. She developed the ‘broaden and build’ theory in 1998. It has since become a key component in explaining why we have positive emotions.¹² Negative emotions and positive emotions both play a significant role in keeping us alive; when we feel positive we expand our awareness and this gives us the opportunity to find solutions to problems we can’t see if we are steeped in negativity. As you have probably experienced, trying to solve a problem at work when you are feeling anxious is difficult and frustrating to say the least whereas when you are feeling more positive such problems are often solved more quickly and more importantly without the accompanying discontent.

Positive emotions also help us recover faster from negative ones; you may remember a time when you found something funny in the middle of a heated argument with the result that the tension immediately evaporated. It would appear that a generous dose of positive emotions broadens our awareness of risks, allows us to excel socially and to creatively solve problems in addition to making life worth living.

Fredrickson has conducted hundreds of randomised, controlled studies to illustrate her ‘broaden and build’ theory. ‘When you inject people with positivity, their outlook expands. They see the big picture. When we inject them with negativity or neutrality, their peripheral vision shrinks. There are no dots to connect.’ Negativity keeps us small, hence the phrase ‘narrow-minded’.

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Positive Neuroplasticity – Your Flexible Brain

THERE IS A STORY of an old Native American chief who was walking beside a river with his young grandson. Wishing to impart some wisdom to the young boy he looked at the river for inspiration and compared the river to his mind, ever flowing, but with different currents. Turning to his grandson he said, ‘I have two wolves in my heart, one that is full of love and peace and which sees the best in me and everyone else, and another which is full of anger and jealousy so that it is often sad, irritable and lonely.’ ‘Really? Which wolf will win?’ asked the boy. ‘The one that I feed,’ said the sage old chief.

The old chief on the riverbank did not realise that he was practising self-directed neuroplasticity, but that is exactly what he was doing. This long word refers to the fact that the brain is plastic and malleable, proved by incredible research over the last 40 years or so. This malleability is also called cortical remapping.¹³

Neurons that fire together, wire together – our thoughts create synaptic transmissions that mesh together through a neurochemical that is released from one brain cell and absorbed by another.

Think of this as similar to a spider weaving a web, delicately connecting threads together. Neuroscientists have identified two areas in the adult brain where neurogenesis – the birth of new neurons – occurs: the hippocampus, located in the emotional brain, is the home of long-term memory; and the cerebrum, which is responsible for coordination and muscle memory.¹⁴ The brain is like a muscle: it grows and becomes stronger when actively engaged. The ‘old’ model of the brain was based on the belief that after childhood the brain was largely set and unchangeable and crucially this included negative behavioural patterns such as worry, anxiety and depression. Advances in neuroscience have now proved this is not true and that, in fact, our brains can be rewired.

You can ‘shape’ your brain according to your desires, a process that MRI scans now conclusively demonstrate.

When I give a workshop, I will often ask for a show of hands to see how many people have heard the term, ‘neuroplasticity’ and it is usually fewer than 5 per cent of the group. On this widespread lack of awareness, Ruby Wax, author of How to Be Human, says ‘It’s like we have this Ferrari on top of our head but no one gave us the keys. It’s amazing to me this information isn’t shouted from the rooftops and on every headline of all newspapers.’¹⁵ If we can change our brains why don’t more people know about it? Perhaps you are already aware of neuroplasticity, but being aware is one thing and choosing to train your brain for positivity is quite another. It’s a bit like being a member of a gym that you never use or having a beautiful singing voice but being too self-conscious to sing. It’s a waste of your potential and a missed opportunity.

Michael Merzenich, Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at the University of California, is the world’s leading researcher on brain plasticity. He writes, ‘Your brain, every brain is a work in progress. It is "plastic" from the day we’re born to the day we die, it revises and remodels, improving or slowly declining as a function of how we use it.’¹⁶

Merzenich has identified two critical periods of plasticity:

+ The first is when we are children and the brain wires itself for the first time. This is the period when the brain’s plasticity is at its highest.

+ The second is when we are adults and the brain has the continuing capacity to rewire itself with new stimuli.

IMAGINEERING

Imagine a farmer walking down a path to feed his cattle. Every day he opens the gate and walks down the same path to the field. This action becomes an automatic and well-established habit. Imagine that this path represents negative or limited thinking. One day, the farmer decides to walk a different route – let‘s imagine the new path represents positive or open thinking. When he first starts walking on the new path he will have to remind himself each time he does this of his decision. After some time and a lot of determination, though, the new path will become his automatic route.

Your neural paths are no different from the farmer’s pathways and the more often you choose to think in a positive way, the easier it becomes to establish the neural connections that make the new path an automatic habit. A key component of neuroplastic success is based on repetition, a little like when you first learned your times-tables, which is why I strongly recommend the daily practice of your seven-minute morning ritual and sleep time hypnotherapy audio, the affirmational tooth brushing and the other mindful visualisations you will find throughout the course of this book. You employ the mind to change your brain – literally.

Neuroplasticity, in combination with neurogenesis, means that you can literally change and grow your brain. This is the catalyst for positive change in your life now, not tomorrow or next week. From this moment y...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Conclusion How to Sustain Your Six Positive Habits
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill Books