Module II mindfulness and gratitude, becoming mindful of your mental and emotional states logically counteracting your distortions and thinking or detaching yourself from them. All of these approaches to handling emotions will reveal two fundamental truths about the emotions. First, they are transitory, and second, the negative emotions tend to attract the most attention. It is perfectly natural to notice and even fixate on the negative, all the things in your life or in other's lives that are going badly. The positive emotions such as optimism and enthusiasm, they come and go, and frequently we take them for granted. There is a way to keep yourself oriented toward the positive however, and being positively oriented is helpful in cultivating the high arousal, high performance emotions that can be the difference between a job that is tedious and a job that is rewarding.
The secret is cultivating a sense of gratitude. What is gratitude? gratitude reading First, that in our life for which we are grateful, this feeling of gratefulness can be extended to some source and for religiously minded people, this is often the case. However, you don't have to be religious to feel gratitude. The importance in this sense is more on how you feel and how you are oriented than identifying the source of that gratitude. When we consistently focus on what is going well in our lives, it keeps our outlook positive and fosters the high performance emotion of optimism.
Gratitude journal, Oprah Winfrey once noted that the single most important thing she's ever done was to write five things that she's grateful for in a journal at the beginning of each day. And the science backs her up a psychologist from the University of California in Miami performed an experiment in 2003 that found that keeping a daily journal of what you're grateful for can increase your own sense of well being throughout your life. This is a simple step that takes only a couple of minutes each day But the effect is cumulative. It also doesn't matter how big or small The thing is when you make your list. Being grateful for a cup of coffee is just as significant as being grateful for your recovery from an illness. Because the important step here is to orient yourself to the things in your life for which you are happy.
An exercise in mindfulness and gratitude. In addition to keeping a daily gratitude journal, there are other ways to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Here are steps for a simple exercise and gratitude that also incorporate the concept of mindfulness. Think of something for which you are not grateful. Once you have this thing that you are unhappy about in mind, be at a situation person, place or something else. Now begin to focus on aspects of it that are good.
If this is a person with whom you are unhappy, you can focus on traits about that person that you do like traits that you are grateful for. If this is a situation to focus on the elements in that situation with which you are happy. If you have other areas in your life for which you are unhappy, try applying the previous two steps toward that situation. Try this exercise daily in addition to keeping a gratitude journal, forming a habit. This training course involves incorporating certain activities into a daily practice. At this point, you have been encouraged to do the following things at least once a day.
Mindfulness meditation for 10 to 20 minutes. List five things for which you are grateful in your gratitude journal. Focus on something for which you were ungrateful and note all the aspects of it for which you are grateful. Well, none of these activities are particularly difficult or time consuming, remembering to take time out of your busy day for them can be difficult. In order to do anything with regularity, we must make the activity into a habit. Here are some pointers on how to form habitual behavior.
Use a reminder, for example, after you brush your teeth at night, use this as a cue to signal that it's time to meditate or use the beginning of your workday. Before or after you clock in to act as a cue to list five things you're grateful for in a gratitude journal. Have a routine. Try to write in your gratitude journal or meditate at the same time every day. reward yourself. Although developing mindfulness or a cumulative sense of gratitude are their own rewards.
The act of setting up a specific reward helps to divide a large task into many small areas. For example, for after a week of successively meditating pick a small reward for yourself. Doing something consistently becomes automatic over time, but that time can vary between 18 and 254 days to do so. The average amount of time to make a habit automatic is around two months. If you miss a day, don't beat yourself up. Take note, however, why you missed it, as well as any strategies to counteract whatever caused you to miss it.
Be aware that a change in routine can disrupt habitual behavior and may require the development of a new reminder and routine