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Posts Tagged ‘ways to be happy’

Positivity Bias

Posted in Holidays, tagged , , , , on November 27, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate today! Even if this isn’t your holiday, I hope you have a moment to remember the good things in your life.

The Right Attitude to Gratitude – The Atlantic

Gratitude is so effective that if you could bottle it, you’d be a billionaire. But as with so many beautiful parts of life, gratitude is not something you can market like a drug or nutritional supplement: It happens to be completely free—but not so easy to attain. Thankfulness requires neither payment nor subscription, just a commitment to stand up against your limbic system, which is lying to you with its negativity bias—saying that this lovely morning is actually pretty annoying, and that everyone is dissing you.

And if you want to learn more about overcoming your all-too human negativity bias, check out the full article. Because while evolution may be good for the species, it’s focused on survival. It doesn’t care if you have a good day.

Unlike me. Have a happy Thanksgiving!

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Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

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It’s Wacky but it Works

Posted in Other, Writing, tagged , , , , on May 10, 2021| Leave a Comment »

I have this funny thing I do where I associate certain visuals with a functional emotion. 

(By associate I mean I pull it out of the old memory bank when I run into a situation that makes me feel a certain way. And by functional I mean that this visual helps me shift to a more useful mindset.)

You know that feeling you get when you’re lying in bed worrying about that weird pain just above your right eyebrow? Or imagining fingernails on a chalkboard or what it would feel like if a sentient Matrix probed your belly button? 

That feeling? I counter it with a shimmering green shield surrounding my body like a superhero suit. Sure, no one else can see it, but it works.

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Or when it’s Monday morning and my mind is chock full of random crap, to do lists, things I should have said, things I shouldn’t have said, questions that need to be asked and answered, etc. etc. etc. ad freaking nauseam.

I do a superhero landing complete with dramatic cloud of mental chaff blasting away from the point of impact.

Not really, of course. That sort of thing is hard on the knees.

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Just the act of imagining either of these things helps defuse the mental pile-on.

Of course it’s not real. Despite decades of absorbing scifi via bio-ocular interface, I cannot actually will a force field into being. But my worries are all in my head. Why can’t the solutions be there too?

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Photo by stein egil liland on Pexels.com

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