08 Mar How to Embrace Joy
Positive Psychology is not JUST about positive emotions like happiness.
That being said, positive emotions like happiness have been found to be very important for health and wellbeing, thriving and flourishing.
As such, creating and embracing happiness and joy and more is well worth the effort for those of us who’re wanting to live our best lives …
via Psychology Today by Rick Hanson
KEY POINTS
- Positive emotions are good for your mental and physical health.
- Emotions can be organized along two dimensions: intensity and valence.
- Positive feelings can be present in your mind alongside negative ones.
- Positive emotions can be a refuge, especially during hard emotional times.
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Positive emotions—such as feelings of gratitude, love, and confidence—can help strengthen the immune system, protect the heart against loss and trauma, build relationships, increase resilience, and promote success. If a drug company could patent a happiness pill, we’d likely be seeing ads for it every night on TV.
Technically, emotions can be organized along two dimensions: intensity (how strong they are) and hedonic valence (how good they feel). Tranquility, for example, has low intensity but can feel really, really good, a profound inner peace.
Low-intensity positive emotions are great. They’re the bread and butter of everyday well-being.
That said, high intensity of positive emotions has special benefits. They may actually help lengthen the lifespan. They steady the mind and improve concentration by engaging higher levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which stabilizes the contents of working memory and helps block out distractions—perhaps a reason why “bliss” is recommended in Buddhist meditation training as a factor of non-ordinary states of consciousness and awakening altogether. And they can pull us out of the numbing, blahs, and meh-ness of ordinary routines, stresses, disappointments, and frustrations—sort of like that transition in “The Wizard of Oz” from black and white to color.
Intense positive emotions include delight, passion, rapture, thrill, triumph, head over heels in love, exuberance, elation, and rejoicing. In a word, joy.
Finding and protecting joy is worth doing at any time …
… keep reading the full & original article HERE