Cultivating the positivity habit – 4 things to start with

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Offline Jasia.bba

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Cultivating the positivity habit – 4 things to start with
« on: January 19, 2018, 12:09:47 PM »
Now that we know how beneficial positivity can be to our health and happiness, let’s look at some ways of building a habit of being positive.

1. Prepare your environment
Leo Babauta always has great advice on building habits, and this is one of my favorites. The environment we try to build new habits in (or break old ones, even) has a huge effect on how successful we are. Environment in this case includes the people we spend time with and the messages we hear or tell ourselves, as well as our physical environment.

The trick here is to ensure your environment is as conducive to you continuing your new habit as possible. Here are some of Leo’s suggestions for how to achieve this:

Hang out with people who are doing the habit you want to do.If there are people around you who don’t do the habit you want to do, talk to them about what you’re trying to do, and ask for their help. Ask them to support you, and not rag on you all the time for changing.Join a supportive community online who are doing the things you want to do.Read blogs and books that inspire you to do the habit.Have reminders all around you.Create a public challenge for yourself, to create accountability.Have a habit partner you report to each day, and make a vow never to miss.
In terms of being positive, you could find a friend or family member to do this with to keep you accountable, or set a daily reminder so you don’t forget. Filling your work space with positive sayings or images could help, and reading books that encourage positive thinking will reinforce this.

2. Start smaller than you think – The “floss only 1 tooth” – approach
Another of my favorite pieces of advice from Leo’s blog Zen Habits is to make your habit so small that you can’t say no. If you do this to start with, you can focus more on building a habit, rather than on results or how big your habit is.

Here’s Leo’s explanation of why this works:

Another common habit that too few people actually do is flossing daily. So my advice is just floss one tooth the first night.

Of course, that seems so ridiculous most people laugh. But I’m totally serious: if you start out exceedingly small, you won’t say no. You’ll feel crazy if you don’t do it. And so you’ll actually do it!

That’s the point. Actually doing the habit is much more important than how much you do.

Right now I’m just taking note of one great moment I noticed, at the end of each day. Sometimes it only takes a few words to share this, sometimes it’s two sentences. I’ve incorporated it into my daily practice of sharing what I got done with the Buffer team, so it’s easy to remember and easy to do.

Starting small has helped me to incorporate the practice into every day so it’s becoming a habit, without worrying about what a big task it is.

3. Take note of 1 positive moment every day
Noticing the positive things that happen in your everyday life has been proven to be a successful method of increasing your positive thinking. This doesn’t just happen when you’re doing the exercise: the effects can actually last much longer.

A study of 90 undergraduate students had one half of them write about positive experiences for three consecutive days. The second half wrote about control topics that didn’t affect their emotions. After three months, the study found that the students who had written about positive experiences still had better mood levels and fewer illnesses. If your best ideas and reflections of positive moments always happen in the shower like they do for me, not to worry, you can take notes there too with something like Acqua notes:

Shower paper notepad and pen

One activity that’s often said to improve positivity is to write down (or share with someone) three things you’re grateful for at the end of each day.

4. Try to Meditate – 2 minutes is enough
Meditating is beneficial for the body and mind. It not only improves mindfulness and positive thinking while you’re doing it, but it has been shown to decrease illness and improve mindfulness and feelings of purpose in life up to three months after being practiced daily for a short period.

Starting small works for meditating, as well. Leo Babauta recommends just 2 minutes to start with, which is easy to do and helpful in developing a strong habit. After establishing the habit for several weeks, you can slowly increase the length of your meditation sessions to an amount that gives you the most benefit.

Filling my head with more positive thoughts has made a huge change to how I see things. Have you experimented with any of the above before? I’d love your thoughts on building a positivity habit below. Or you can Tweet me @bellebethcooper anytime to chat.

Jasia Mustafa
Senior Lecturer,
Dept. of Business Administration
Faculty of Business & Entrepreneurship
Daffodil International University

Offline murshida

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Re: Cultivating the positivity habit – 4 things to start with
« Reply #1 on: January 21, 2018, 01:05:10 PM »
good