How to rewire your brain to focus on the good
Fact: We pay more attention to negative elements in our environment than positive ones.
There’s a good reason for this. The negativity bias evolved to help us survive in harsh conditions. We had to be able to scan our environment for dangerous cues, so that we act accordingly, get out of the way, and ensure our survival. Unfortunately, in today’s world, our overemphasis and heightened focus on negative information increases cortisol, the stress hormone that in large and sustained quantities, negatively affects our health and cognitive wellbeing.
Fortunately, we can take advantage of the brain’s neuroplasticity - or ability to change in both structure and function - and deliberately shift the focus.
One way to do this is by using the H.E.A.L. technique, developed by Dr. Rick Hanson. Here’s how you do it:
H - Have a positive experience and notice it as it’s occurring
E - Enrich the experience by holding onto the feelings it elicits for at least a breath or two.
A - Absorb it. Sense the experience sinking into you and focus on the pleasurable aspects. Pay attention to how and where you feel the good vibes in your body.
L - Link positive and negative material. Keep the positive experience at the forefront of your mind and bring to mind something somewhat painful, but keep it in the background. If your mind is drawn to the negative object, then actively drop it, bringing your awareness back to the positive object in the foreground. Note: This final step is the hardest. Dr. Hanson offers it as optional, but I think that this element of the training is critical for re-establishing a more positive neural pathway in the brain.
What I love about the HEAL technique is that it’s based on neuroscience. The “E”, or enriching step, increases the chances of this particular experience - and the positive feelings associated with it - moving from working memory to long-term memory. By feeling the sensations in your body, you’re stimulating the amygdala (the “emotion center”) and the hippocampus (the “memory center”), which respond best to somatically and emotionally rich experiences. As you focus on the most pleasurable aspects of this experience and why it’s meaningful to you, you are activating the release of dopamine and norepinephrine, which helps the brain prioritize this experience and usher it into long-term storage, for your benefit later.
Over time, this practice conditions your brain to focus on the more positive mental states we all want to cultivate (e.g. inner peace, compassion, love, joy) and makes it more sensitive to these states so that they are easier to experience later. You’re essentially training your brain to respond more readily to enriching, fulfilling, and beneficial states of mind.
By practicing this technique, you are exercising control over your brain’s capacity to change. How empowering is that?!