Mike
Carruthers:
Being happy isn't always easy.
Marci
Shimoff:
The psychologists call it our negativity bias and it's
from our ancient caveman days when we had to pay more attention to the negative
than the positive in order to survive. Marci
Shimoff, author of the book Happy
for No Reason… The
same is not true today. And now we have these overactive alarm systems that cause
us to overreact to situations. We have what's called "Velcro for negativity"
and "Teflon for positivity." We remember all the negatives but we don't
remember the positives. If you've gotten ten compliments in a day and one criticism,
what do you remember? What I found is that people who are happy for no reason
have reversed that Velcro/Teflon ratio. Happy
people have habits that anyone can adopt. For
example, people who are happy for no reason are consistently grateful. They consistently
look for the lesson and the gift in things. So at the end of the day they think
about "What are the good things that happened to me today, what are wins
in my life?" rather than, "What are all the things that happened that
were bad."
Understand, says Marci, what real happiness is and isn't.
It's
not that you're happy all the time and you walk around with a silly grin on your
face 24/7. You have sadness, you experience anger but in the midst all of that
you have a backdrop of inner peace and well-being. At
somethingyoushouldknow.net I'm
Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know. | 
