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103 - How to Be Happier

Hello there, Kevin here. And welcome to another episode of the Feel Good English podcaaaaaast.

The only podcast on the entire internet made for English learners, that’s based on personal development and business management skills.

Welcome to another episode, I’m glad you’re here.

Today we are going to talk about happiness. We all like feeling happy, right? Well, if you don’t like feeling happy, well then you either need some professional help, which I hope you get, or you’re a freak! (a freak is a very strange person or someone who does things differently than most people)

So I have some questions for you.

Why do we always dwell on negative experiences, and not positive ones?

to dwell means to think too much about something that makes us sad.

Some synonyms are “linger over,” or to “mull over” “overthink”.

But why do we always focus on the negative? Well, our brains evolved this way. It’s an ancient survival mechanism, actually. We needed to learn quickly from bad experiences.

This obsession with the negative continues even until today. But we don’t need this as a survival mechanism anymore. In the book, “Hardwiring Happiness” by Rick Hanson, we learn why we are prone to, prone to is having the tendency to, inclined to, why we are prone to worry(ing) about the past, focus on fears and past hurts, and quite often, ignore positive experiences.

We also learn how to start using positive experiences to bring more happiness into our lives.

I really, really like this book because it gives you practical techniques that you can do in just a few minutes a day, to start creating a tendency to focus on the good things that happen to us, and not the bad.

And I think we all could use a little more good, yes?

Before I get into the lesson, just want to remind you that I send out a weekly email, where I share thoughts on life, English tips, and occasional top-secret information. If you want to join that list, just go to my website, www.feelgoodenglish.com, and look for the bear. The bear is there to help you join the list.

Now, let’s learn how to start Hardwiring Happiness into our brains, how to stop focusing on the bad stuff, and a little bit of advanced English too.

There is a part of your brain that can make you either a happy-focused person, or a sad-focused person.

There is a certain structure in the brain called the amygdala. This area in the brain controls your emotional response to situations. Emotions are created in the brain! Don’t forget that! You emotional person you.

It’s science!

If you tend to, if you are prone to, reacting to situations with fear and worry, you are actually in the majority. (in the majority means that you are a part of the bigger group, the majority of people) In the book, this is called a “sad-amygdala”. A sad amygdala is fear based, and the reason we as humans tend to focus on negative experiences is based on our lifestyles thousands of years ago.

Think about it: If you were walking in a dark forest, it’d be better to assume that there were dangerous animals around, than to think you were 100% safe. If you were wrong about it being dangerous, you’d still be alive, just stressed out.

If you assumed you were safe, and a scary creature appeared and ate your head off your body, well, you wouldn’t have a head. And heads are important to survival.

I have talked about the impact of evolution on our behavior before, especially in an episode based on the book “Sapiens”, that’s episode, #95. Go check that out if this topic interests you.

But anyway, guess what? There is also the chance of having a happyamygdala! Yay!!!!

If you have a happy amygdala, remember, the amygdala controls emotions, you will tend to be optimistic, focusing on opportunities rather than difficulties. And these positive experiences will make your brain happy, which in turn will create more tendency to focus on positive experiences.

But if the majority of us have a sad-amygdala, how do we get a happy one?

Well, you can find happy amygdala’s online for around $1000 dollars.

Sorry, bad joke.

A happy amygdala, for those that don’t have one, can be created through small, daily practices.

And Rick Hanson tells you exactly how to do this in the book.

I’m going to get into these techniques now, but first, here’s a 1-minute English lesson:

Using the phrase, in turn.

In turn, two words, is used to talk about something that happens sequentially, one after the other, successively. There are a couple other definitions slightly different, like doing things in order, “we will give our presentations in turn”, but this one here is the most common.

So above, when I say, “these positive experiences, will, in turn, create a tendency to focus on positive experiences,” it means one thing happens after, or because of, the other.

Some other examples:

“My car was hit by a truck, which in turn, was hit by the van.”

“You will be meeting with the vice-president next week, which in turn, will give you a lot of attention from your colleagues, you lucky guy you.”

Make sense?

This if more of a formal usage, but important to know. Because if you learn how to use certain phrases, such as this one, you will, in turn, become a super smart English speaker.

This book brings some great news to those of you out there, who find yourself often stressed, worried, scared, depressed, etc..

We can change our brain’s tendency to focus on negative experiences into focusing more on the good things that happen.

And it’s not hard. This is where we are going to hardwire, hardwire means to connect separate things through circuits or wires, kind of permanently) happy processes into our brains.

Have you ever found yourself enjoying a rare moment of happiness and noticing things you hadn’t before? Let’s say you’re walking in the park and you see a squirrel eating a nut. There’s a great word for ya! Let me hear you say, “squirrel” It’s a simple thing, but it brings a sense of calm to the moment, and makes you feel, well happy!

That’s what we are going to try to emulate more often. To emulate means to try to copy, do the same thing.

Think of something that happened today, or in the last few days that made you happy. No really, think of that now.

I’ll wait….

Now stay with those good feelings a few seconds. Let your mind hold on to how that makes your body feel. Good, right?

Well, keep doing that throughout the day. That’s how we hardwire happiness!

It almost seems too easy. But it also makes sense. Instead of being in the habit of focusing on the negative, out of fear of having our heads taken off by a scary creature in the forest, we should start intentionally staying with positive emotions for a minute or two.

Bringing positive input into your everyday life can actually be done quickly, and with ease. With ease is the same as “easily”

For example, when you complete a task, even a small one like answering an e-mail, don’t just move onto the next thing. Stop for a moment and recognize that you’ve accomplished a goal and let yourself feel good about it.

You could’ve not sent that email, or you could’ve not even been physically able to type an email, but you did.

Pay attention to the happiness you have access to in the small, everyday little actions.

At first, you might need some reminders to help you recognize positive input. How about putting a rubber band on your wrist? A rubber band, those little pieces of elastic used to hold newspapers together, or used to shoot little pieces of paper at your teacher while she’s writing on the board back in the day! Rubber bands!

So put a rubber band on your wrist, do something to remind you that you should be looking for these little positive experiences and not ignoring them. The little daily tasks that we do. They should call your attention throughout the day. We’re going to start paying attention to them with, intention.

The book also teaches you a 4-step technique to use, which form the acronym HEAL. H-E-A-L.

Let’s learn about the HEAL method, right after this quick English grammar tip:

A minute ago you heard me say “You could’ve not sent that email, or you could’ve not even been physically able to type an email, but you were.”

When we want to talk about the past in a hypothetical way, meaning if something was different or went differently than it actually did, all we have to do is add a “have” to the verb, and change the verb to the participle tense (I hate that word participle tense, very formal) but we also refer to as the third column. go-gone, do-done, see-seen is the participle or the third column, for example.

So, you sent the email, but you could have, could’ve, not sent it.

-You saw that hot Brazilian girl yesterday, but you could not have seen her if you weren’t there at that time.

-You could have gone to the concert yesterday, but you were in jail.

-You couldn’t have bought a ring for your girlfriend when you were younger because you didn’t have a job.

So practice real quick, answer me this…

What could you have done yesterday to make yourself happy, even just for a minute… What could you have done yesterday to make yourself happy?

Speak you answer now…

Great, so do that thing that’ll make you happy, today!

When you experience something good, like writing an important email, do this practice, which only takes half a minute or so.

And this is based on the acronym H.E.A.L.

the H- HAVE - focus on the pleasant sensation you are having in the background of your awareness. It might be subtle, light, hard to feel, but look for it. Maybe your breath has slowed down, you feel warm, or you get a quick boost of energy. Focus on that feeling and move on to the next step which is…

the E- ENRICH - to enrich is to make richer. to enhance. So now we are going to take the feeling we are having and enrich it. You do this by staying with the emotion, Investigate it. How does it feel? What does it do to you? Enjoy it!

the A - ABSORB - now let that feeling absorb into your deeper self.

Intentionally let that feeling sink in you, go deep down into you, into your body… that’s pretty graphic, but, absurd the feeling, let it take over your body.

the L - LINK - is a bit more complicated and I’m not going to go into that here. But with linking, the 4th step, you are going to link this positive emotion with a negative experience in the past. The author says it’s not necessary, so I’m going to skip it in this lesson.

But if you’d like to read more about it, this last step, or any of this, I’d highly recommend reading this book, or listening to the audio book.

You can find both those links on my website at

www.feelgoodenglish.com/hardwi…

So as you can see the process of changing our brains from a sad one to a happy one, involves paying more attention to the good and not dwelling on the bad.

Some might say this will make you delusional or selfish only thinking about your own feelings all the time in ignoring reality but, I’m going to share a quote from the book about this, and here is that quote, “ if you take in a lot of good you might do it five to ten times a day, ten to thirty seconds at a time , five minutes at most, it won’t take over your life you won’t become self-absorbed or overly positive. You’ll still recognize challenges, you’ll still feel bad sometimes, you won’t ignore health problems financial trouble, mistreatment from others, or emotional pain.

You won’t forget that here in and around the world terrible things happen every day to millions of people, and might happen to any one of us. But just as good facts don’t cancel bad ones, bad facts don’t cancel good ones.

So there you go, there’s the quote. Something to think about, “don’t let the bad facts cancel out the good ones”

I’m going to leave you with an action step, and here it is.

Tomorrow when you are getting out of bed, first thing in the morning, I want you to find something around you, or think of something, that can make you happy. And I want you to spend, anywhere from ten to thirty seconds focusing on that one thing.

Let the feeling of being happy or whatever positive feelings it brings you, let that sink into your body, stay with those feelings. Let yourself be happy about them. Try not to get distracted by whatever’s around you, but finding thirty seconds to do this shouldn’t be too hard.

First thing tomorrow morning when you wake up, if you need to set a reminder somewhere, do that, find something, or think of something to be happy about, let yourself feel those emotions, think about it for thirty seconds, and start your day when a positive note, that’s it easy. I’ll be joining, you so let’s do that together.

That’s it for today’s episode, thanks for listening to another episode of the Feel Good English podcast, trying to help you become more fluent in English, with some advanced grammar and English phrases, but also helping you become more fluent in life.

Great book, this one, I do recommend going deeper with it, like I said you can find more info about this book on my website www.feelgoodEnglish.com/hardwi…

If you want to transcript to this episode you can also find it on my website, I offer transcripts to this in all of the episodes that I have done and will do, if you want to find out how to get access to transcripts, just go to my website

Before I leave you I am going to leave you with a joke which you probably won’t get, you won’t understand, you won’t laugh, but I will. If you want to find out why it could be funny I’ll post a little explanation on my website as well.

“So I asked my wife what she wanted for her birthday and she told me, ‘nothing would make me happier than a diamond necklace’ so I bought her nothing.”

I think you might have understood that one!

Anyway have a happy day don’t focus on the bad, focus on the good!

Until next time, bye bye.