Don’t worry, be happy

Oops! My tummy aches.
© Sharon Dominick

This is huge!

Have you ever felt stressed out, that your nerves were getting the best of you, on your way to an important appointment or presentation?

Well, this post will show you the best scientifically proven edge in life I have ever experienced. No kidding.

Let’s start from the beginning, or learning how our minds work. There are a few important discoveries to consider.

I don't see that happening. Do you?
© Dawn Poland

1. Our awareness is very limited.

Our minds work like email spam filters, filtering out of our awareness the information that is not relevant to what we’re focused on. Two wonderful examples are the Pass the ball and Who dunnit awareness tests, — I get a kick out of them.








Exercise? Sure.
© Damir Spanic

2. Our brains grow like our muscles.

The more you practice an exercise, the more connections you make in your brain to facilitate resolving the problem.

We’ve all overplayed a game, after which we start to see the patterns of the game reflected in reality.

I can still recall a boy scout field trip with foreign kids, where I had to put a lot of effort to understand their language for several days. After returning home, my mind acted in a funny way, it would still make out foreign words out of regular radio conversations. After all that practice, I had rewired my brain to focus on the specific patterns of this new language.

The most common use of this effect is when we practice any sport, instrument, game, or task. We improve a specific skill by developing more connections related to what we’re practicing.

3. When facing fear, our minds focus on whether to run or fight.


Shark attack
Courtesy of Environmental Graffiti

Its always been a stressful situation, even when facing a non life threatening exam, because our minds are torn apart by the necessity to make this primal decision. As a consequence, the more we fear the exam, the less our awareness will attend to the exam’s questions. In other words, stress debilitates our performance.







Life is good!
© Olga Solovei

4. Happiness enhances our performance.

This is a recent breakthrough from positive psychology. There are numerous experiments that show that happy people perform better. Four year olds primed with happy thoughts, increased by 50% their success rate and speed at building blocks, and sophisticated doctors increased their diagnose performance up to 50%. Happy sales people sold 37% more than their colleagues.

If you’re a manager, next time you send your employees a message, you could prime them beforehand to be happy, instead of neutral, to increase their productivity.

But, let’s stop here for a moment.

You can now use this wonderful tip to improve your next stressful situation. You could recall happy thoughts before your next exam, job interview, new client presentation, etc.

You could also tell your kids about this breakthrough.

Now, what do you think would happen if we trained our minds to search for happy thoughts, or to look for the moments when we enjoyed our work? Wouldn’t this refocusing eventually push out of our awareness non productive thoughts?

In the next post, I’ll continue with some great little methods to help us rewire our minds.

In the meantime, don’t worry, be happy.