Last week we were looking at our Mood and the impact others can have on it, now it’s time to work out how to harness the good times and positive things that can impact your mood. Emotions are highly contagious and now it’s time to catch lots of amazing happy, smiling positive ones in your everyday life. You may think referring to emotions as contagious may seem a negative experience of something that can harm us but it’s not, it is more about how we can spread this through our minds and how this continues enhancing how we feel even after the event.
Being “infected” by another person’s happiness or enthusiasm can be a very good thing, in fact, a fantastic thing. Researchers have found that when subjects catch positive emotions from others, they’re more likely to be viewed by others and view themselves as more cooperative and competent. Being open to join and connect with people is a great thing to do and allowing the positive feeling to be caught by our minds is just what we need in challenging times like this. Simply put, when you hang out with happy people, you tend to feel happier, have more energy, and feel less stressed. This has been shown in lots of studies and also similar results have been found in team sports. When a team is upbeat, positive, and in an overall good mood, this spirit is transferred to individual players. Results also show that when teams are happier, the athletes on the team tend to play better so this being the case we all need to get onto the happy team. Also, in some research, it even suggests that indirect relationships, such as those created by social media, can affect your happiness. Researchers discovered that happiness spreads through social networks, much like a virus, which means that you can be infected with the happiness of someone you’ve never even met, and vice versa. Which is great news for us all, as we don’t have to feel negatively infected by the people and environment around us we can start to infecting ourselves with lots of positives to counteract those more difficult and negative experiences.
Christakis and Fowler explain: “A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon.”
They also found that happy people tend to be in the centre of their social networks and that happiness branches out as they join together with other happy people. They report that each additional happy friend increases your probability of being happy by about 9 per cent. which is such a staggering figure adding happy friends to our network is the key even if it is a virtual friend. Our virtual friend could be a comedian on YouTube, we could set up a happy Instagram account whereby we only follow positive feeds, we could have comedy shows downloaded on our tablets as well and have positive motivational podcast downloaded to listen too. On our way to and from work, we can be filling our minds and moods with these contagious happy feelings by listening to the comedians instead of the news. We could commit to watching a funny show while eating lunch or trawl through our positive Instagram page all of these things will help our mood plus, we could then end up being the one that starts to spread the happiness to others as well. Just being around positive people can be energising, motivating, and inspiring and is likely to help you work more effectively as partners or as a group.
Take the time to think of the people in your lives, your workplace and homes as now it’s time to enhance our moods with the positive people already in our lives and work to connect with them as much as possible. Also, with our new found virtual positive inputs we will over time have more connections with the positive people and more in common as our moods grow more positive. This will allow us to hopefully extend our time with these people as we will have more to talk about and hopefully lots to laugh about as well. As we fill our minds with the happy things we can then engage in conversations and situations in new, happy, positive ways. I know for some of us our work life is very serious and we can’t seem to see this happy vibe, but don’t let that stop you in own time and make sure you are doubly connected to your virtual happy connections. If this is the case for you then it’s more essential than ever to do this, no more continues new in the background or music you’re not listening to. It’s time for jokes, happy stories, fun things when you might normally be chilling at home you can now make that time more positive too. By trawling through the internet in search of all that makes you smile, laugh and feel the happy vibe to add to your growing library of happy mood-boosting resources.
Remember its input and output for our minds so if we do our best to limit the low mood things and flood our minds with the happy positive things, we will feel different and enhance how we feel. Life’s not about what we do it is about how we feel if we are can do even the most mundane things with a smile, we will feel better for it and more than likely get it done much quicker. Make the most of this amazing technology we have at our fingertips, we can even ask Alexa for a joke! The more we have things to help us absorb the happy vibes the quicker and easier it will be for us to catch ourselves smiling or singing a happy song.
Now more than ever before, as we start to come out of the tragic pandemic, we need to catch this happy bug from those around us and with our new found happy virtual connections that you are setting up, it is contagious and one everyone should try to catch.
Thanks for dropping by Sara x
HYPNOSARA 