Mindset and Happiness
Photo by Olivia van Dyke
Your mindset sets the stage for your happiness to flourish or remain elusive. Like the scaffolding of a building, the blueprint of a design or the tilled earth for your garden, your mindset sets up a structure for the experience of your day to unfold.
Your mindset allows for specific moods to flourish or be extinguished. So how do you shift your mindset? One key step is to truly listen.
Summary
In this article, you’ll discover how to shift your mindset for greater happiness.
understand how your mindset impacts your daily life
learn the neuroscience behind your mindset
discover how to listen to your mindset
read about a practice to shift your mindset for greater happiness
A Day in the Life
Have you ever had one of those days where, overall, things are going well but happiness remains elusive? You might have achieved many successes in life, yet somehow, you feel lacklustre. You might feel restless, like something isn’t quite right. You might proceed through the day and get a lot of things done, yet still feel this vague feeling of discontent that keeps rolling over and over in the back of your mind.
Maybe you are spending time with family and friends, but don’t feel very present. Your partner might say you are worrying yet, logically, you might not feel that there is that much to worry about. However, you might feel tired, fatigued or a little lost on some level, even though you have good nutrition, sleep and exercise.
You may be frustrated by a lack of capacity to enjoy the life that you have built for yourself. Or, you might feel that objectively your life is good, but on some level you feel an exhaustion, overtired or overworked, or simply scattered and unclear how to find that spark of happiness and joy within.
As an intelligent person, you might have read about happiness and burnout and know that you might be feeling just a little burnt out. You might understand that there is something not quite there, as you have read that happiness is a natural and innate part of the human experience. But somehow, for you, it remains elusive.
Your Mindset
Your mindset is a set of attitudes that you hold, that shapes how to interpret and respond to the world around you. Your attitudes exist both within your conscious awareness, and also within a more subconscious, or hidden aspect, of your awareness. These attitudes form both your unique way of thinking and contribute to your opinions. Another way to think about mindset is to see your mindset as a set of core beliefs that operate very quickly on a subconscious level to shape how you make sense of the world and your self.
You can read more about different kinds of mindsets in the popular literature. A colleague of mine has been enjoying reading a book called “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success” where Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck explains the difference between a fixed and a growth mindset. Other books have been written on how mindset can change how you fulfill your potential, how to use an understanding of mindset to shift your habits and how tenacity alone, an attitude to build in your mindset, can create success.
In this article, you’ll learn more about listening to the more hidden aspects of your mindset.
How Your Mindset Runs the Day
Have you ever heard the quote “Either your run the day, or the day runs you,” by Jim Rohn? Jim was an American authour and motivational speaker. When you set your day up, you are setting up your mindset for the day. When you don’t set the day up, then you allow your conscious and hidden attitudes to react more to the events of the day.
When you live your day in a reactive mode, you can open yourself up for unpleasant surprises. You might say or do things that you later regret. You might say or do things that don’t align with your actual values and what you actually want to create. You allow for your brain and nervous system to be more exposed to little events that can trigger them to become irritated, annoyed, frustrated, despairing, overwhelmed, saddened and exhausted. These feelings obstruct the capacity for happiness to flourish, and can lead to you feeling out of control, or confused.
For example, you might have the attitude that there is never enough time in the day. You might be trying to be more patient, to feel that you have a lot of time and you might spend your evenings preparing for the next day so that you have done a whole set of things to create more time in the day. You might listen to motivational podcasts and read books on effective time management. However, despite all the hard work you are putting into feeling there is more time in the day, you end the day tired, feeling you have been pulled off balance and back to feeling that there is not enough time in the day. So, despite all that you have done, your attitude continues and in this way, your mindset is still running the day.
The Neuroscience of your Mindset
With the example attitude of “not enough time in the day,” we can start to look at the neuroscience behind an attitude. When you are born, you have many many neurons in your brain. As you grow and develop, a “pruning” of these neurons occurs. You set up connections between certain neurons, and cut off connections between other neurons.
A group of neurons that is connected creates one little network, like a little village or town. This “town” then has a delegated “control tower” that sends out a signal to other networks to summarize what is happening and communicate with a larger network.
In your brain, you have groups upon groups, and networks upon networks. These groups or networks form what we refer to in psychotherapy as “schema.” A schema is a filter that you put on reality. You have many schemas, and these decide what is important to recognize in the reality that you are experience. From what you decide is important, or salient, information, you then have an attitude, and then a response, that is unique to that schema.
The attitude formed by your schema then can work very quickly to impact your decision-making. Your decision-making then determines even what thoughts you think, and from these thoughts, then the actions you take. Your schema thus allows for happiness to flourish or to have little opportunity to exist.
Your attitude also influences how much an area of the brain called the amygdala will fire, and if it will fire with positive or negative emotion. If the amygdala fires a lot, this can occlude clear thinking. An amygdala firing a lot, either positively or negatively, can create a kind of noise that doesn’t allow for you to experience a calm happiness in the present moment.
So, how do you begin to manage your mindset?
First, you need to develop the capacity to see the more hidden aspects of your mindset. The key to seeing your mindset, is to listen.
Listening to your Mindset
The photo above was taken on a gorgeous day in Tofino, British Columbia. I needed to have a new headshot for an international group of people interested in changing the world through positive psychology. As I worked with Olivia, we talked about beauty, gentleness and a softness that happens when I am listening to my clients.
I love the giant seashell that I am holding in the photo. The sea shell is that of a giant sea conch, and putting our ears to a sea shell like this creates an experience of almost hearing the roar of the sea, a beautiful and fanciful way of the sound of the sea shell’s home seemingly existing within the shell. When we pause to listen to this beautiful object, we shift our state. We shift into more of a being state, and less of a doing state.
In the pause that occurs when we listen, often we soften. The sympathetic nervous system tones, and relaxes. With practice, the mind can quiet with brainwaves shifting from beta brainwaves to alpha brainwaves. In the space of the quieter mind, we can begin to view our mindsets.
Shifting your Mindset for Greater Happiness
In order to shift something, you need to first observe and know that thing. If you wanted to change the way a deck is built, you would first have to observe the current structure and then, from there, determine how to change the structure. If you wanted to transform how a team is working together, you would first need to observe how the team currently works in order to then introduce changes to the pattern of interaction. It’s the same with your mind - you first need to observe the mindset in order to shift the mindset.
First, you need to quiet the mind. Meditation, exercise, a warm sauna or bath or shower, listening to music and simply sitting and looking at a landscape or nature are all ways that you can quiet your mind. In my experience, a guided meditation with a specific way of using the breath can be useful in quietening the mind in a relatively short period of time.
Once the mind is quiet, you then need to shift into a listening state. So, instead of doing things with the mind - like reviewing the day, or planning for the next day, or problem-solving - you need to shift into a listening state. You might think of being on a beach, and simply allowing the crash of the waves to be what you listen to. You might start to pay attention to the different sounds in the environment, allowing these sounds to be neither wrong nor right, bad nor good, true nor false and thus starting to feel neutral as you listen. You might think of dropping your focus out of the mind and into the heart. You might think of sinking into a deeper and deeper calm state.
Once the mind is quiet, and you are ready to listen, then you might need to relax even further. You might use a body scan, progressive muscle relaxation, specific breathing patterns, a specific scent or another technique to deepen relaxation. The more you relax, the more you will be able to listen.
Then, ask yourself what kind of mindset within you creates happiness. You may have read the scientific literature on happiness that speaks to how happiness is an innate state within us, a birthright if you will, that allows us to tap into a sweet bliss within the very structure of our cells that allows us to experience happiness. Notice what images, words and other impressions come to mind when you consider the innate capacity within the very cells of your body to experience happiness. Perhaps notice anything in your mindset - any attitude - that obstructs happiness. Maybe allow the thing that obstructs happiness to become less interesting, and dissolve. Then, again, notice what impressions come to mind that expand happiness.
In Summary
So, your mindset is a set of attitudes. Attitudes that are both readily apparent, and attitudes that are more hidden from your day to day consciousness. Your mindset impacts your capacity for happiness, and is related to a schema, or neural network, that filters reality. By taking the time to listen to your mindset, and observe, your attitudes about happiness, you can enter a state of being where you learn how to make space for your happiness to flourish.
Shifting your mindset is not always easy to do on your own. Helping people to shift their mindsets is what I love to do. I combine years of study on the brain, nervous system and your psyche - which includes your mindset - to bring you into greater understanding of how your mind is working, and how to shift this for greater success and happiness. I love this work, as I love travelling with you into these more hidden aspects of self to discover where the obstacles are, and where the beautiful states of being are, in you.
Use my contact form to contact me if you would like to work with me,
Wishing you the best, always,
Maia Love MD