The Way You Approach Your Day Is So Important

The Way You Approach Your Day Is So Important

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … there’s no ONE THING that makes for happiness.

Rather, there are many contributors to happiness and a good life including … optimism and fun, play and connection, achievement and adventure.

At a micro, day to day level, one of the more significant contributors is attitude; and the way you CHOOSE to approach each and every day can make a significant difference in terms of your mood …

via Psychology Today by Stephen Sideroff

KEY POINTS

  • It’s important to experience your life as being sourced from your own choices.
  • The mindset by which you start your day determines how well you manage your stress.
  • Your attachment to lessons of childhood is counteracted by your ability to access the neuroplasticity of your brain.

How much of your day is engaged in things you’d rather not be doing? Or worse, worry or shrink from doing and procrastinate doing? For many, this doesn’t appear to be a choice. It’s just the way you are and the way you think, and perhaps the way you see the world.

Your approach to life is something learned a long time ago, during your childhood. It was learned as part of your adaptation to that environment and was a way of surviving. Those early survival lessons built out the neural networks of your brain. That was the scaffolding from which all subsequent learning has been hung. And even though that environment that you adapted to doesn’t translate very well to the world of today, you probably believe you are stuck with it.

To the extent that your childhood environment was dangerous or filled with judgments and criticism from primary caregivers (even if it wasn’t intentional or directed toward you), is the extent that you reacted, by trying to shrink from the place where you meet that difficult outside world—what is referred to as the “contact boundary.” If the environment presents any negativity or emotional pain, the natural tendency is to shy away from it. Unfortunately, as this approach to life gets reinforced and conditioned and built out in your brain circuitry, it has a number of consequences deriving from this bias and automatic reaction.

I find that most life approaches boil down to two choices—constricting and shying away from contact, as I just described, or embracing and moving into contact. We can refer to these different approaches as your “mindset.” Let’s follow these two approaches and how they shape your day’s experience.

How do you start your day?

You awaken and your mind goes to what can go wrong, what problem might arise, or how you might be judged in any of your encounters that day. This mindset will activate your stress response, releasing cortisol and adrenaline while causing muscle bracing; and ultimately greater inflammation. All this before breakfast. Your “mind/body” will want to either stay in bed, or look to distractions, or actions that are familiar. It will make it more difficult to engage in new successful behaviors, which are those that help you move into new territory in your life…

… keep reading the full & original article HERE