How does a positive diary work?
Keeping a positive diary is a simple exercise that teaches you to focus your attention on positive aspects of yourself, your life and the world.
This increases your positive feelings, so that you feel better about yourself, the world and your future. That is, your mindset becomes more positive. And because of this you are able to get more out of life and become more happy and satisfied.
Enjoy the little things
Everyone is unique and has different wishes and needs. Therefore, happiness is not the same for everyone. What one person dreams of may be another’s nightmare.
But the road to a positive mindset and long-term happiness and satisfaction is the same for everyone: learning to enjoy the little things in life.
“If you take care of the small things, the big things take care of themselves.”
~ Emily Dickinson, American poet (1830-1886)
Increasing positive feelings
By enjoying the little things, you feed your positive feelings. Your positive feelings give you the mindset, confidence, courage and energy to tackle big things and achieve your dreams. And this makes you happy and satisfied.
“Positive feelings are the fuel to make your dreams come true. And a positive diary is the pump to fill your tank.”
When you are willing to learn and apply the techniques, you can change your mindset. This will give you a more positive attitude to life, making you better able to achieve your goals and realize your dreams.
A specific goal
Of course you can also use a positive diary to pursue a more specific goal.
For example, to develop parts of your mindset or certain character traits, such as self-confidence, optimism, resistance to stress, assertiveness or perseverance.
Or to work on a certain area of your life, such as work, study, sports or relationships.
All you have to do is look for the little positive things that relate to your goal. In other words, you simply apply the exercise to the trait or area of life you want to improve.
Suppose you want to increase your self-confidence. This means looking for and learning to enjoy the little positive things about yourself and the things you do.
This creates more positive feelings about yourself and what you do, which increases your self-confidence.
What do you want to achieve?
In some cases it can help to study the subject of what it is you are trying to achieve. This ensures that you can work on this in a more focused way. In other words, that you do the right things.
“If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.”
~ Albert Einstein, the most influential physicist of all time
How does it work?
A positive diary or journal helps you to develop a more positive mindset and start thinking, feeling and acting more positively. How exactly does this work?
1. Savoring enhances positive feelings
By writing down the little things that make you happy, you think about them longer. This makes you more aware of it.
You enjoy it more and it penetrates you deeper. This reinforces your positive feelings. And this will make you feel better.
Good feelings have many benefits. Scientific research shows that positive feelings cause us to have more self-confidence, success, satisfaction, happiness, energy and success.
And because the effects of positive and negative feelings are contradictory to each other, good feelings also ensure that you are better able to deal with setbacks and stress.
2. Positive feelings influence our perception
Our feelings act as a lens through which we perceive ourselves and the world around us. When you have positive feelings you perceive more positive things and when you feel bad you perceive more negative things.
That our feelings influence our perception becomes clear when we look at the effects of infatuation and depression.
Infatuation: the pink glasses
When we are in love, our brain produces different happiness chemicals that make us feel extremely happy.
However, these substances also cause us to think less rationally, quickly brush away all negative thoughts, and can only concentrate on one thing.
Depression: the black glasses
During a major depression, our brains no longer produce happiness chemicals at all, making us very gloomy and depressed.
The shortage of happiness substances causes us to have a lot of trouble thinking, become indecisive, dismiss positive thoughts, and can no longer concentrate.
During a crush or a severe depression, our feelings are very intense, so the effect of these feelings on our perception is very large.
But the same principle applies when our feelings are less intense and more subtle.
This is because our feelings determine the balance of chemicals in our brain, and these influence our thinking and our perception. That is, they influence our mindset and way of thinking.
When our positive feelings increase, we perceive more positive things. And this further reinforces our positive feelings.
In this way we can create an upward spiral, which makes us feel better and better and our mindset becomes more and more positive.
3. Positive feelings influence our behavior
When we feel good we are filled with confidence, courage and energy that makes us more inclined to do the things that are needed to realize our dreams.
Scientific research shows that happy people are more successful.
When we’re not feeling well, we’re filled with doubt and indecision, making us less likely to do the things that will bring us closer to our dreams.
Assumptions and expectation
Unless we consciously stop and think about it, we are not very aware of our mindset. The reason is that our mindset consists of assumptions and expectations that reside in our subconscious.
As the structure of our brain has adjusted and reorganized itself to our assumptions and expectations, our assumptions and expectations have become automatic.
As a result, we no longer have to pay conscious attention to it and we can focus our attention on other matters.
Developing a habit
Changing your subconscious assumptions and expectations means you have to learn a different habit. Forming a habit takes time.
You have to consciously adjust your mindset for an extended period of time, until your brain has ‘learned’ this new mindset and ‘copied’ it to your subconscious.
It is therefore important that you draw up a training schedule that you can maintain for a longer period of time. Building and maintaining motivation plays an important role in this training schedule.
This ensures that you do not give up prematurely and prevents you from falling back into your old mindset. That is why MindHacker also offers you the knowledge and tools to build the right training schedule.