Last week we talked about Shawn Achor and his ideas about using meditation to increase our happiness. This implies that our levels of happiness can be shifted and that is just what the research tells us. The research focuses on the experience of positive emotions and connects the things that might be correlated to a greater experience of positive emotions. What they have found is startling. Meditation brings on a greater experience of positive emotions and this greater experience of positive emotions increases our longevity, increases friendships, increases marital satisfaction and also correlates with increasing our income.
That's a pretty impressive list. But the researchers are not satisfied with just making correlations. They want to know why this connection might be happening. Their theories are fascinating. They are thinking now that experiencing positive emotions opens our minds to see new ideas and possibilities. Here's exactly what they say:
"positive emotions momentarily broaden people’s attention and thinking, enabling them to draw on higher-level connections and a wider-than-usual range of percepts or ideas. In turn, these broadened outlooks often help people to discover and build consequential personal resources."
So are you ready to start meditating? Now might be a good time to start.
TRY THIS
Here's a link to a page by Dr Jha, a neuro-scientist who has been studying meditation for years. She explains some ideas about attention and then offers an exercise. Give it a shot. https://chopra.com/blogs/meditation/cultivating-a-peak-mind
See you next Tuesday for another look at feeling good in a red pill world. Men are good! As are you.