Bright

Listen to me

Watch me

Life is such a changing thing at the moment and for all of us, we are trying to find what our new normal will be and how we are going to live in this new way. In times like this when things are unstable, it’s important to keep our moods and our attitude as bright as possible. If we go off into the world of “What If” then we are just going to end up doing our heads in and causing lots of anxiety. What we need to do is be bright and optimistic we can choose to enhance how we feel instead of worry ourselves into our own horror movie. Sometimes it is just the simple things that can make us feel happy, watching the children play, hearing a funny story from a friend, watching the sunset or just taking a moment to just relax. These moments in life are precious and we need to let our minds soak more of these lovely feelings that come from just enjoy the simple things in life.  Often with life, we are too busy moving onto the next thing, that these moments can be lost, or we pass them by and head onto the “what if” and continue creating our inner horror movie.

Now it’s the time to expand on these positive things and let the power of those happy, positive, bright, feelings get more enhanced within us. A good way to do this is to not just pass these by but to dwell on them, take the time to rethink through those moments of happiness. While you’re doing this remember what it felt like when you first experienced it, the laugh, the brightness the positively and spend some time connecting to those feelings.  We can write them down, create a photo album on our phones where we add in those memories or we can just keep searching for those great times and remembering them what every works best for you.  Our minds are always listening, they never switch off, as you think and feel these things again your mind is reabsorbing that feeling. As your mind reabsorbs it, it doesn’t just remember and re-feel that feeling again, it actually adds it again to your mind.  Even more amazing than that, each time you do this your mind continues to create another new positive memory with all those lovely feeling getting stored in your mind and your body.

This is like fuelling our minds with top quality brightness and happiness, this can then make us feel much better and more positive. We all know that when we worry, we get more and more anxious and this is the opposite of this. The more we absorb the positives the better we feel inside and one of the great things is we don’t need anything but our minds and memories to create this.  Being bright and positive is a great way to feel and with our minds being one of the biggest muscles in our body then practice makes perfect. The more we do this the happier we will feel, each day try and find one or two things that make you smile and then think about each one for 5 or 10 minutes. If you have more time on your hands then the more you do the better it will be, as you are flooding your minds with these lovely feelings. When you smile, your brain releases tiny molecules called neuropeptides to help fight off stress. Then other neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin and endorphins come into play too. The endorphins act as a mild pain reliever, whereas the serotonin is an antidepressant and the other are stress busters.

Few things can brighten someone’s dreary day like a well-placed smile and as you are the one that’s making yourself smile this is now an unlimited thing you can enjoy in any moment of your day. As well as this you are the one pumping all these great stress-busting endorphins into your bodies too. Whether it’s just a small thing or a massively positive experience it doesn’t matter to your mind it doesn’t measure things on size. Even better still these neurotransmitters are associated with lowering your anxiety and increasing feelings of happiness. In fact, serotonin is often the chemical that anti-depressant medications attempt to regulate. This natural, feel-good chemical cocktail that your brain serves up helps you feel happier and more relaxed, and it can even lower your heart rate and blood pressure. If that wasn’t enough, how would you like to be more attractive? As positive and smiling people in a study by Scotland University found that those who smiled and made eye contact were consistently rated higher on the attractiveness scale than those who didn’t.

Regardless of how you’re feeling today, try putting on a smile by finding those happy memories and experiences, then just start to see how it affects how you are feeling. You might be pleasantly surprised, how much happier you are beginning to feel. Now it is time to expand this by committing to do this every day for a month, you can do it while showering, or when you are falling asleep or cleaning your teeth or driving to work. The great thing about just thinking about these things is that you don’t need anything else or any extra time to do this. It is good though to have that happy journal or the photo album which you can add to every day if you can. As they say, a picture paints a thousand words so a quick photo here and there will be all your need and for many of us, we are doing this already.  

Next week we will be looking at how you can expand of this by using an NLP technique which will help you to change the negative what-ifs to these bright positive thoughts and feelings to beat those worry habits away.

Thanks for dropping by Sara x