Archive for the ‘Positive Psychology’ Category
As I stated in my first post, I have begun a Life Experiment involving a focus on positive outcomes.
For well over a week I’ve taken time before the majority of my day’s major activities and focused on what I wanted to do, what I wanted to get done, and how I wanted to experience and move through the activity or event itself.
Some of the times I felt as though I was wasting my own time (part of my mind was saying “let me just DO things, come on!”), while other times I felt as though I had benefitted myself through the habit.
After a short while of practice and reflection, I think I’ve come to understand visualization and imagining positive outcomes a little bit better, and here’s the breakdown:
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Reticular Activator System:
Before getting into this project, I was already aware of positive visualization (imagining ideal scenes, imaging ideal outcomes, etc…) as a tool that would gear our mind towards that which we desired most.
The portion of the brain called the reticular activator system is generally thought to be the place in our minds that determines what we pay attention at any given time. If we focus on hair styles and think of nothing but styling hair, we will notice hair styles everywhere, we will pick up on details about the styles of hair that we see on anyone we meet or even everyone we see. That’s what we focus on, and so our reticular activator system shows us that information in as many ways as possible.
The idea is, if you focus on failure, your mind will only notice the millions of ways to fail and will not open your mind to methods of success. It will keep you trapped in behaviors and thoughts which bring about what you think about – failure.
Hence, if you think success and your mind is geared towards what you actually want in your life, your filters will align to let you see all those factors which will lead to your success – it will bring you to manifest behaviors and notice new perspectives that will further your objectives.
That’s the premise.
The Value of Visualization:
During my personal experimentation, I noticed that positive visualization is useless unless it serves one of two functions:
- Enhances the experience you feel (brings about happiness or charisma or compassion, or whatever emotional resource you deem to be best)
For instance, sometimes my visualization was not very specific or even particularly sharp, but I only thought of positive outcomes while listening to some fun music. This might not give me a clue as to what I should actually do during the event or activity, but it would bring me into an energetic and outgoing emotional state, which I would experience along with my visualization of the event – and also with the event itself.
Essentially, this is about involving feeling into the visualization process. Wether that involves getting pumped about an outcome you really want, or moving around energetically, or listening to some good music tracks.
- Enhances your meaningful objectives (clarifies what needs to actually get done, brings you to follow through on actions towards your goals)
For instance, a few times I barely visualized at all but wrote down different tasks to accomplish in a certain context or during a certain activity. This by itself was able to structure my experience of the event and make it more enjoyable and more geared towards my purpose.
I find that a simple check involving the question “what is my purpose?” will often yield steps towards that purpose. I did this at meetings, before teaching Jiu Jitsu class, or before going to the beach – all to just make note of exactly why I was going there and what I could do there in terms of my highest aims. This might be talking to someone in private, or asking a specific question, or buying something at the store, or dropping something off to someone I thought I was going to see.
The Habit of Success-Thinking:
Additional future value of positive visualization is the fact that it aids in developing the habit of thinking about positive outcomes.
If we are able to gear our minds towards imagining absolute success in terms of any activity or event, we are on the track of getting towards those desired outcomes. We will help to gear our senses, our emotions, and our intellect towards what is best for the achievement of our ideal future.
We are what we think. We bring what we think into the world in far more ways than we are consciously aware of. Imagine if that entire process worked FOR us!
However, visualization needn’t be done during a pause before an activity in the way I did during this activity. It can be done far ahead of the activity, and most importantly during the event or activity. For this reason, my experiment (which I will provide the result for in a different post) isn’t an accurate measure of how much I “positively visualized” about a particular situation.
This brings us too:
An Ever-Present Function:
So long as we alive, our mind filters information to some degree. Wether we are walking on the beach, working on the job, or going to a social event, we are almost always thinking – at least to a slight degree, but often to a very noticeable one.
If these thoughts swirl around failure, it will be difficult for us to achieve success (and if we do achieve it, it will be harder to notice).
For example:
You plan to attend a social event with the goal of having fun and sharing stories and adventures with new people.
Before even leaving your house you think of how awkward you will feel trying to have fun with new people. You think about how people might react to you, you think about how that might feel. Your mind flashes with mental pictures of you off in a corner by yourself.
When you enter the party, you remind yourself that you are here to meet fun new people and have a blast with them, but you can’t seem to achieve that end.
We might not consider what happened here to be formal “visualization,” but nonetheless, the reticular activator system was responding constantly to your thoughts.
Since the inner pictures and dialogue were about failure in the given situation, you would have worked against yourself in two separate ways:
- You would have brought your mind to notice mostly the information that would be related to your thoughts – and since your thoughts were about social “failure,” your lenses of perception would be likely to let through just that information to bring you to social “failure.”
- You would have associated socializing – or that social scene in particular – with “failure,” with “rejection,” with pain. Doing this continually will bring you to generally fear these experiences in those given context, hence permanently keeping you from the attainment of your ideals in that realm.
Now let us imagine you think and feel a bit differently:
You plan to attend a social event with the goal of having fun and sharing stories and adventures with new people.
Before you even walk into the event, your mind spins with excitement around who you will meet there and all the fun you’ll have. You see yourself walking around and talking to everyone, spreading the party out and having a blast.
When you’re at the party itself, you feelings and thoughts are 100% aligned with your objective to have fun and meet new exciting people. You’re living your ideals because your mind contains no thoughts that aren’t congruent to the ideals themselves.
We might not consider this to be formal “visualization,” either, but the fact of the matter is that our emotional state and perception lenses were completely on “success,” and so we found it effortlessly.
Here you are aligning our thoughts with our ideals and so living out our ideals as an extension of your mental activity (which in this case is an excited, charismatic expression). You are also coming to associate social scenarios with pleasure, since that is the emotion that swirls in your body as our mind swirls with pleasurable thoughts.
To conclude, I have decided to slightly alter my Life Experiment to adjust for the details of how I believe the reticular activator system to genuinely function.
In my opinion, the most important thing about “visualization” is its effect on our perceptual lenses – which in turn affect our intellect, thought, and action. The subtle stream of thought before, during, and after an activity is likely to be far more important a determiner of our experience than a few minutes of visualization beforehand.
Hence, in addition to recording the duration and intensity of my visualization before an activity, followed by a rundown of my experience of the activity itself – I will do something different.
For at least one activity a day, I will also record something about the state of my mind during the activity. I will write about my focus during the activity, the inner dialogue I experience, and how I take control (or don’t take control) of it.
This might be a challenging task, since I will intentionally getting in my own head – which might bring about negative consequences since the most positive “flow” states (from my experience and from evidence in my psychology research) involve a certain letting go of self-awareness, a certain out-of-your-head-ness.
This experiment will be longer than expected, but I’m sure it will be worth it in terms of insight and experience. I’m excited to dive into the understanding of the reticular activator and gain a better understanding of how we can come to control our perception and our experience!
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Continuing our application of positive psychology to the study of time, let us now turn to the future.
Like the past, the future has the capacity to occupy the majority of our conscious space. Daydreaming, worrying, and wishing might be said to be too prevalent in the minds of today. However, the ideas we have of the future might also serve a more beneficial purpose.
The Future:
Practical Purpose:
It is no surprise that our ideas on the future serve an integral part in our daily activity. For instance, I only go to school because I believe that when I get there I will learn valuable information. I only read a certain book because I have a compelling vision of my own future that involves ideas that I hope to find in this book. I only put milk in my cereal because I think it will taste better than orange juice (most of the time).
Here we see the logistical purpose of the imagined future – we use it to anticipate the results of our actions and the experiences we will have. This information is useful for planning, but it is also useful for more mundane actions like those listed above.
Beyond a Practical Purpose:
What else could we possibly use the future for? We cannot experience “future happiness,” only happiness in the present. Why not simply make our plans and return to the NOW?
This might be a good way to deal with the imagined future, but what if our imagined future could serve to heighten our positive emotions in the present, and also compel us towards a future we dream about?
One mindset we may want to cultivate is optimism. Optimism implies a positive outlook about the future and its possibilities. For instance, when leaving late to go to an event, we might have self-talk that brings about anxiety, or self-talk that keeps us in good spirits.
“Oh no, I won’t make it on time now! I was late last time, too… my friends might not forgive me!” might bring about a state of panic, and certainly won’t help the situation.
“Alright, lets see if we can make it in time, I’m sure my friends won’t take this personally.” might bring about a more calm state. It could be argued that having this mind frame also wouldn’t directly benefit the situation either.
I would disagree, I believe that optimism generally does help the situation in this case and in most similar cases.
First and foremost, if nothing else, we experience calm in the present moment instead of pain and anxiety.
Second, irrational anxiety might compel us to irrational behavior – such as speeding profusely – which could certainly be dangerous.
In addition, we can take into account our effect upon others. If we emanate anxiety in our house before rushing out the door, whoever we interact will feel that. If we arrive late and apologize in distress because we believe we may loose our friends’ approval, this can be felt as well.
So who is benefiting from pessimism?
Another useful future-related skill to cultivate might be visualization. We might argue that visualization in and of itself neutral. Certainly some people visualize in detrimental ways (related to pessimism) while others visualize ways that motivate and inspire them.
The latter is what I refer to here – though it ties in with many other psychology ideas and concepts.
The power and efficacy of visualizing positive and desirable outcomes has been popularized by Olympic athletes and movies like “The Secret.” The very basic premise is this:
Your mind will bring itself towards what you focus upon.
you focus on victory, you’re mind will try to find ways to attain it. You focus on food, your mouth will water and your stomach might ache. You focus on a compelling and innovative book, your brain will mobilize to help you write it. But if you focus on fear, you will only get more of it.
This should be nothing new to most people even remotely acquainted with self development. However, it does seem to fly in the face (to a degree) with the idea that remaining “present” is the ideal outside of logistical purposes.
Lets be Realistic:
Optimism must be used with common sense, and the same goes for visualization. Obviously simply visualizing a new career or home and being optimistic about its arrival is not enough to bring those dreams into reality.
Optimism does have the potential to have detrimental effects on our lives, but only if it is used in blatant disregard of reality. Being optimistic about spending all your money because you believe you’ll win the lottery isn’t likely to be an ideal path to wealth.
Like the past, I think : “If our minds need to occasionally go there anyway, why not make it an enriching experience that empowers us in the present?…”
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I’m finding that TIME is becoming a more an more talked-about topic. Even my friends who aren’t directly into personal development are claiming the profundity of “the present is all we have.”
Authors like Eckhart Tolle preach that we must honor “the Now” and leave other imagined “times” which exist in our minds. If the present is all that we have, then what value aught we place in our ideas of the imagined past and future?
In this series, I will discuss the potential place and purpose of “time” in our lives, and I’ll bring to the table some ideas of positive psychology than may allow our experiences and imaginations of time to be enriching forces in our lives. This first installment will focus on the past.
The Past
Practical Purpose:
So what value does the past have in our lives? We often hear phrases like “forget the past,” or “the past does not equal the future,” and in the right context I think these phrases can be useful.
But obviously I need to be able to have some mental conception of the past in order to do some very basic things – including fun ones like: finding my keys, remembering my friends’ names, remembering how to type blog posts so you guys can read my stuff, etc…
So, we might say that the past serves us in the regard that we have experience to draw from – including our deeper conditioning (such as how to respond to certain things – like fire), as well as memory to use and to learn from (such as where I left my cell phone or what elementary school I went to).
These practical applications are certainly useful – and the past is undoubtably a huge contributer to our learning. Drawing on memories of past events (such as relationships, work-related events, etc…) allows us the opportunity to break them down and gain the practical wisdom from them that is required to make even better choices in the future.
Beyond a Practical Purpose:
The past, however, might also be used to compel us to action, or to enhance our experience in a positive way.
One example of this kind of experience is that of gratitude. Gratitude implies a kind of thankfulness and appreciation for that which has occurred. For instance, we might be thankful for the kind of care our parents provided for us, or we might be grateful for the fact that we were able to buy our car for a good price.
However, we needn’t even find distinct events or things in our lives to feel grateful for. We could be grateful for the fact that we are alive, for the fact that we have the ability to pursue certain dreams, etc…
Its important to note that thinking about what you appreciate in your past isn’t necessarily enriching in and of itself. It is enriching because it brings our focus to the good which we have experienced, and possibly how that good has brought us to learn and grow in our own lives. In this way, we frame the past in a positive light and focus upon those experiences which we are grateful for.
This gives us access to empowering resources within us – and hence we may feel better and have a more adaptive mind-frame when actively engaged in the present.
I think about it this way: If we’re going to refer to the past to draw upon information and to apply that information to better ourselves now, why not at the same time draw upon a positive state? Why would we frame things any other way?
Another important way to utilize our past in a positive fashion is by benefit finding. In this process, we determine ways in which certain events or situations – be they traumatic or otherwise – have brought about some kind of beneficial effect i our lives.
For instance: A stolen wallet may bring about new habits for keeping one’s property safe. Stress might provide insight into how our thought processes affect us.
Our experience will be mostly determined by our focus. Any event might have a thousand negative or a thousand positive consequences. We tend to focus on one or the other. I believe that we can understand the ramifications of the event, yet at the same time accept these ramifications and find something about the event we chose to hone in on – something that will bring about those higher resources.
Lets be Realistic:
I do not believe that self-deceit is healthy or adaptive, and in terms of the non-practical benefits of the past, self-deceit aught not be needed.
We can look at the past honestly – taking into account painful situations and events that we deemed to be undesirable around the time of their occurrence.
However, the entirety of these past events can be viewed in the practical light – with big, Coke bottle “learning-lenses” on. It might be very important to learn from these experiences and use the insight that we acquire to better our lives now.
For example, if I was hit by a drunk driver on the way home from school, and my car was totaled, I certainly would not aim to take all the potentially “negative” ramifications of this event and “sweep them under the rug.” I would, however, strive to accept my new condition and find some empowering, exciting area to focus on.
Looking back on the hypothetical accident, and maybe on time I spent in the hospital – I could seek to realize what I gained from the experience as a person. Maybe I was able to do a lot more reading, maybe my time in bed rest provided me with some reflection that I may not have done otherwise.
I don’t think that I need to say “I’m glad that this event happened” in order to realize the benefits, but I certainly must view it in a way that empowers me and propels me to joy and even enthusiasm in the present.
The point here is that we make these reflections not only growth-oriented, but enjoyment-oriented – by framing them properly and bringing about empowering states within us.
Some people might point out that mental time travel for the sake of positive emotional experiences might not be a healthy practice in principal. There is certainly an extent to which I would not condone such reflection. I believe that it is best to spend the majority of my mental focus on the present (and so channel my faculties into what I’m actually doing).
I obviously don’t believe that we aught to rely on memories for positive states, but if we recollect at all – it might as well be a positive force on our emotional state (rather than a negative or neutral one)!